Speaking From Personal Experience

Doc quotes Jon in a post about blogs, news and advertising.  Worth reading.  I'd like to comment on Doc's small riff on "experience."

Third, I gotta go public with a bristle at the E-word: "experience." It's the new "content," which in turn was the new "eyeball" in its day.

Over the last year we've been hearing more and more about the "experience" of reading, listening, and otherwise absorbing the stuff we demean by calling "content" unless there's no better word (which does happen, though less often than you'd think).

I dunno about you, but reading for me has never been an "experience." Nor has experience ever been something that's "delivered." Sometimes reading is just reading. If you call it "experience," are you talking for yourself or somebody else? Just wondering.

I think one problem here is our loose usage of the word "experience."

On one hand, we use the word this way: "I had a great experience at the basketball game last night."  Now, does that mean that the entire game was a great experience, or that the speaker bumped into an old friend and reminisced about old times for fifteen minutes?

Can't tell, can we?

We do know that the speaker is denoting "a" great experience.  So, the referent is to something in particular, something that stands out from the background.

And, the speaker could probably clarify what she meant if we asked her to.

OK, now, quick, what was your experience when the words "she" and "her" appeared in the last sentence?

Hard to pinpoint, isn't it?  But it's very possible that you had a momentary blip in your "experiential flow."  Why?  Well, that's a little hard to say, but Malcolm Gladwell's referenced it in Blink.

I think we're exploring the intersection of "experience," "awareness," and "consciousness" here. 

Thinkers have studied consciousness for a very, very long time. Wikipedia has a good summary of this area.  Take a look at this excerpt:

In a philosophical context, the word "consciousness" means something like awareness, or that a mind is directed at something. (That sounds more like a definition of that philosophical term "intentionality" often referred to with the layman's term "aboutness".) So when we perceive, we are conscious of what we perceive; when we introspect, we are conscious of our thoughts; when we remember, we are conscious of something that happened in the past, or of some piece of information that we learned; and so on.

But, as Malcolm points out, we often perceive things of which we might be "conscious," but of which we are not "aware."  Like prejudices, for example.  We many not "experience" our prejudices (in the sense that we "experience" a ride on a roller-coaster, or dining in a fine restaurant, or stubbing our toe, for example) but those prejudices are part of our perceptual experience.  In those moments, our experience is, as some philosophers would say, already presented to us as prejudiced; our "lived-experience" is one of a prejudiced world.  Experienced, but not conscious of, nor aware.

OK, back to Doc.  When he says, "reading has never been an experience," he's using the word in the "awareness" sense; reading never stands out for him against the background flow of consciousness that phenomenologists call everyday life.  And, as he says, we do not speak of these kinds of everyday experiences as being, "delivered."  They are simply part of lived-reality.

But, if someone were to ask me to describe my experience of "reading a newspaper" (the New York Times on my kitchen table, sitting on a chair with cup of coffee in hand, sunlight streaming through the patio door and windows on three sides) and "reading an e-version of the 'same' newspaper at my computer" (sitting on a stool at the island in my kitchen, looking at the screen, scrolling down every few lines to reach the next segment) I could do so. 

Those descriptions would reveal two very different kinds of reading experiences.  For me.  And, I could ask other people the same question.  If I were to do a phenomenological analysis of, "the experience of reading the New York Times" and "the experience of reading the e-version of the New York Times" I would be able to determine some "structural" aspects of the ways in which people experience (in the mostly unaware, lived, or "prereflective" sense) those two ways of reading the Times.  And those structural analyses would permit me to make certain generalizable statements about those experiences.

This knowledge would then provide some design guidelines to those who wanted to "deliver" (create) particular kinds of newspaper-reading-experiences.  After all, this is what people mean when they say they want someone to design a room that is "comfortable," or "modern," or "sexy."  What's a "user-friendly" GUI, but a way of headlining the experience that users have when using a system?  What's a "scary movie," but one that uses a set of visual, auditory and narrative devices to create and dissipate the audience's experience of tension and relief?

Doc's questioning the notion of "delivering experience."  I think it's more clearly described as, "creating conditions in which people are likely to experience" something. 

We may be unaware of the mechanisms by which experiences like "comfortable," "user-friendly," or "scary" are created.  But, when we think about it, we can usually talk about those aspects of our experience that lead us to label them in those ways. 

Other, deeper aspects of the structures that constitute our own individual experiences are more difficult to identify.  Those are the individual meanings of things that live in the hazy zone of consciousness we seldom explore.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

Thanks for the clarification, Tom. That's pretty much what I had in mind .. I do 'experience" reading some peoples' blogs, as well as *experience* other forms of reading. Some kinds of reading i prefer in cafes, some kinds in an easy chair at home, some kinds in bed (for example, currently re-reading Anna Karenina and there's only one place and way i'll read it ... for an hour or so in bed before the lights go out).

Reading some people's blogs I put myself into it more or differently than other peoples', where I just skim and zoom off to the next.

And .. I suspect .. that with more *presence* aspects / elements of blogs over the next few years, the *experience* of reading will add more dimensionality, at least for me.

[Tom Guarriello]

I think Doc was reacting to what he perceives as a new buzzword which people are using to try to make the Web more like the media they can control and use for ad channels. He's very sensitive to that line of thinking (witness the fit he has whenever anyone uses the word, "content.")