Visualization versus Conceptualization

This is again an issue of competition for scarse resources in an ecosystem: visualization competes against conceptualization, and thus against management, as a way to cope with complexity.

Instead of focusing on concepts, it focuses on percepts. This can be seen (!) as a effect of the re-enchantment of the world, a reaction to the failure of modernity based on logos (reason and language). It is also a defeat of software, and thus of SCM. [The German sociologist Max Weber characterized the golden age of modernity, at the start of the XXth century, by speaking of the disenchantment of the world. Michel Maffésoli, 100 years later, coined the term re-enchantment, to account for the number of tax payers in France declaring future-telling as their primary source of revenue].

For 30 years, we have been suffering from metaphors invented by Xerox labs, and based on hardware : the desktop. Software for people assumed to hate and fear software, back into their expected security zones. It seems that we have now at last reached the end of this era. Unfortunately, it is to fall into metaphors promoted by Google, also grounded in the tangible world...

-- MarcGirod - 20 May 2009