LATER RESEARCH INTERESTS
Both these projects summarize permanent efforts - necessarily on a philosophical-ethical
base - to bridge different sub-areas of research in informatics in general and
in the department of informatics at Umeå university in particular.This
is important in order that the department in particular and the university in
general strategically develop and meet future challenges, and not be reduced
to a conglomerate of "feuds" in which feudal research-lords improvise
competition for resources in terms of student-vassals, and "university-hotel"
office floor, office equipment, and secretarial or technical systems support.
Aesthetics and ethics of multimedia research
This project studies the following hypotheses. New technologies like multimedia in computer artefacts and networks actualize a revival of the aesthetic and rhetoric dimensions of science as related to daily life. This takes place at work, at home, and in civic life. As a worker or manager, as a private person, and as a citizen, modern people have to develop and integrate personal and collective knowledge with political activity, ethical values, and emotions or feelings. Participative systems design and democratization of work in the seventies stressed political and organizational dimensions. Later diffusion of theses approaches in the USA played down the ideological contents with the expectation that participation would foster learning, creativity, consensus, productivity, and profits. In the eighties a shift of emphasis on competence and skill at work avoided the increasingly politically incorrect ideological issues by envisaging a more neutral, "technical" guarantee agains the menace of economic decline and unemployment. In the wired multimedia context of the nineties, however, skill has increasinlgy taken on aestheticist connotations of fun and playfulness. They are problematically equated with creativity in a bowdlerized political context of assumed negotiated consensus of collaborative or networked work, with scanty concern for economics, power, and basic values. The ethical content of politics and scientific projects must be integrated with aesthetics if present trends in informatics are to prevented from leading into a "postmodern" aestheticism of self-confident feelings, emotions, attitudes, and opinion surveys. This research must be integrated with graduate and undergraduate education, and with ongoing projects that deserve funding because of their possible long-run profitability. It has been remarked that the vague views, perceptions or phantasies of researchers, programmers, users, and clients concerning the capabilities and effects of computers (IT) can in themselves influence the actions of these people. The computer works as a psychological projective device that focuses the interacting cognition and emotion of affected people. This can be caused by its apparently protean (and faustian-apollinean) irreducible nature: it cannot be easily understood in terms of earlier knowledge, familiar objects or functions, while it is easy to see it in terms of analogies to humans. This project of basic research expands and qualifies these insights with the help of mainly analytical psychology (C.G. Jung et al.) by exploring the following hypotheses: (1) The computer is a physical-industrial embodyment of symbolic or mathematical logic, (2) The capabilities of this logic are related to the purposes behind its development as a tool of philosophical thought (Leibniz-Frege-Russell), (3) The computer has inbuilt (dead labour) presuppositions of symbolic logic that cannot be offset by the mediation of other logical high-level languages or visual languages and interfaces based on cartesian analytic geometry, (4) Understanding and meaningful interventions can be enhanced by an understanding of symbolic logic and associated human cognitive capabilities as related to perceptual-empirical, emotional-aesthetical, and social-ethical-religious capabilities, (5) Such insights can be rooted in empirical studies that use mother disciplines of informatics (such as mathematics, logic, psychology, economics, and statistics as it was conceived before 1900 as visualization and including sociology), reviving the polemics around logic-rhetorics-dialectics such as in romanticism, hermeneutics, and the arts.
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