SPACE AND DISTANCE - MUSINGS

I have been reading Mamphela Ramphele’s autobiography, “Across Boundaries”. For those of you who are not acquainted with her background, Dr. Ramphele is a truly remarkable person -- Physician, Anthropologist, and anti-Apartheid Activist, who overcame prejudice against her race and gender to rise from a country girl in rural South Africa to become a Managing Director of the World Bank. The autobiography is an interesting and inspiring read.

In the book she mentions having learned that geographic space can be a very useful metaphor in many fields: psychological, social, economic, etc. She describes it as a significant insight. The terms “space” suggests dimensions, and my dabbling in multivariate statistics suggest that there may be a lot of dimensions to a space, and they need not be mutually orthogonal.

Perhaps similar to Dr. Ramphele’s was my insight many years ago in discovering that there are many kinds of distances. Even on a city map, the distance “as the crow flies” and the “city block distance” if you have to follow the grid of streets or sidewalks can be very different. To the degree that one measures space in terms of distance, then the metaphors are complementary.

One might utilize the metaphor to say, “The Internet changes the distances between people, and thus the form of the spaces in which they interact.”

I think in the Dr. Ramphele’s usage in the book, the term “space” has the context of ownership or control. Thus when one talks of psychological space or social space, I think the context is one of an individual’s or community’s area of relative freedom of action, relatively unaffected by the control of others.

I recall that there is a story of the clash of cultures, when the British took control of the what is now Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka was an irrigation culture, based on water impoundment tanks. Each villagers owned a portion of the available water. The number of acres cultivated by the village depended on how much water was available. In wet years, a lot of land would be farmed; in dry years, much less. The allocation of land to farmers changed from year to year, according to how wet or dry it was. In dry years, all the farmers shared the land close to the irrigation tank; in wet years they shared a much larger area around the tank.

This struck the English as totally unintuitive. In England people owned the land. There was none of this stuff of using different bits of land in different years. So they outlawed the traditional Sri Lanka system, and instituted land ownership. So the people who got land close to the tanks got good harvests every year, and those who got land at the margin of the irrigated area got crops only in the wet years. The distance water traveled from the tank to the farm became a gradient for wealth.

I wonder whether the traditional people of Sri Lanka would have found “water share” to be a useful metaphor in psychological, social and economic thinking?

So what is the segue from these musings to the topic of this Blog. One seg. is surely that space metaphors can be very useful in “mapping” knowledge. For example, some theorists have discussed, usefully I think, people as thinking with their minds and their surrounds. That is, thinking not only with what is in their heads, but with the means that are in the immediate space that they command. In my case, that would include this computer, and a library that I keep in my office. This metaphor clearly involves the idea of spatial access to the computer that automates some of “my thinking” and the books that store “my information”.

One can also define dimensions of knowledge in to map a knowledge space – for example a dimension that goes from popular to professional, or one that measures the credibility, or the precision. We can differentiate the space of chemical knowledge, from that of physics, from that of mathematics.

I have suggested before that it is helpful to think of knowledge as socially construed. One might then use a space metaphor to think about the space for the social construction of engineering knowledge, or legal knowledge, or bureaucratic knowledge.

The metaphor of distance might also be useful, for example in terms of the space in which legal knowledge is constructed one might think of the distance between legislators making the law, the judiciary interpreting it, officers enforcing it, and different groups of people subject to it.

How does one measure such distances? I don’t really know, but it seems reasonable that there may be very great “conceptual distance” interpreting the diversity of species through Darwinian science and those seeking to do so via Creationism, even when they are in the same room.

Space, dimension, and distance metaphors seem very common among people talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web. I suppose, I am going to chicken out, and just comment that an image is not the object it represents, and a metaphor is not the reality is seeks to illuminate. And maybe we should be looking for water resource metaphors rather than spatial ones as we talk about K4D.