Tag: communication

Flow (2024)

Mentioned as an aside in an earlier post on The Lost Tower, Flow (2024, d. Gints Zilbalodis) is a delightful little film made entirely in Blender by a small team of creators from Latvia.

I caught it at our local theatre on the Sunday night of the Oscar’s, jumping at the opportunity to see something new rather than the endless parade of speeches, gowns, and jokes, all of which would be diced up into content sized chunks in the coming days. And it was the right call.

Flow is truly a delight.

It is a narrative entirely without (human) dialogue, though one that is not without communicative action (and I think this needs to be stressed and has mostly flown under the radar in online analysis), and it is thrilling and engrossing throughout it’s runtime, even when the focus is on naps in the sunshine. (Or perhaps especially when the focus is there).

So it’s through this lens that I want to take a deeper look.

Communicative action is a very human-focused view of communication developed by Jurgen Habermas (who we’ve talked about before at length in our podcast episode on the Public Sphere), where the ‘argument” (discussion) is how rational actors deliberate on what actions to take.

And when we start talking about “rationality” our anthropic bias makes us hesitant to see this in animals at all.

But as the ethologists would argue, this isn’t the case: the animals exist in their own lifeworld, and are making rational decisions based on the events and environment around them.

(And before we go too far off on a tangent, yes, that mention of lifeworld, in the Husserlian, phenomenological sense of the world was intentional).

This world, filled with life, reacting to the events around them, filled with inter- and intra-species communication, conveyed without any dialogue, solely through camera angle, sounds samples, and stunning visuals, provides a stunning panorama on which the story can be followed even by our own pets viewing the movie on a TV screen.

It’s a marvelous work.

And the vibe is good too. If you get a chance, check it out in the theatre, where the experience of total cinema can engulf you in the world. But if it’s not playing near you, check it out on whatever streaming service offers it.

And make sure your pets can join you in watching it too.

Highly recommended.

Recombinant Innovation

Was shared a link today, to a video showing off the newest Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra:

It’s fantastic technology, showing off the ability to translate (almost) live between Korean and English, functioning as a middle-man, or middleware, between the Sender and Receiver in the communication channel, reducing the overall noise in the system (in this case in the difficulty of two very different languages).

But in discussion today, we noted how simple some of the various components are: the translation, which exists already at both ends, Google translate, or any of a number of dedicated devices.

And this is the point: there are very few completely new things in the world. Most new things are combinations of existing things.

The interesting thing is how you put them together.

Hence, recombinant innovation.

The ability of these innovations to reduce friction (or appear to, at least; there can often be a dark side of it as well) can determine how well these tools get adopted. It depends on if people can see themselves using it.

And in this, the Youtube video above is very effective: we can readily picture ourselves in that situation needing to make a reservation at a restaurant, and deciding that this would work for us. And from there it’s a quick jump to see how we could use it in other areas of our lives. Talking with loved ones, or their families, and being able to speak directly (or with at most a quick pause), and share with them too.

There’s a lot of magic in our innovations. Let’s start the discussion.