Three Flavors of "Smart": Sternberg's Theory of Triarchic Intelligence

 
Do you know anyone who's really "booksmart" and did great in school but can't seem to accomplish what they want to in life?  Or how about someone who's very creative and clever but isn't living up to his or her full potential?

Prof. Robert J. Sternberg has an explanation.  His research suggests that there are really three different types of intelligence, which each person has to varying degrees.

Sternberg's three intelligences are as follows (and you can also look at this summary):

1. Analytic – good at “reasoning abstractly, acquiring knowledge, processing information, and planning and executing strategies” (Howard 54)

2. Creative – excels at “using experience, insight, and creativity to solve new problems, create new ideas, or combine unrelated facts” (Howard 54)

3. Practical – does well at “adapting to contexts; selecting or shaping one's environment” (Howard 54)

So, how are these intelligences observed?  According to Sternberg:

"The kinds of tasks people face in everyday life often require all three kinds of thinking. For example, selling a product requires one to analyze customers' needs, to invent a sales strategy, and to convince people to buy a product. Managing a business requires one to analyze market requirements, create products or services as well as a demand for them, and then to convince people of the value of dealing with the company. But the fact that many tasks require all three kinds of thinking does not mean that people…are equally adept at all three kinds of thinking" (n.p.).

I guess a good analogy to make here is that the three type of intelligence are like the three flavors in Neapolitan ice cream: they're designed to work together, and the more you have of each, the better off you are (unless you're lactose intolerant...then I just feel sorry for you).

(winter needs to end so I can have this or something like it)

(photo: found here and used in accordance with a Creative Commons license)

At any rate, these intelligences translate into different ways of learning and of seeing the world.  Because I'm interested in usability and its implications, the theory of triarchic intelligence makes me wonder if people with different levels of intelligence would disagree on what makes a website "usable."

For example, would someone with a high level of practical intelligence and lower levels of analytic and creative intelligence find a site like this (a School of Management) to be easier to use than this one (an Economics Department)?  How about this one (a Lifelong Kindergarten media lab)?  I tend to think so.

What do you think?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Works Cited:

Howard, Bruce C., Steven McGee, and Namsoo Shin. "The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence and Computer-Based Inquiry Learning." Educational Technology Research and Development 49 4 (2001): 49-69. Print.

Sternberg, Robert J. "Patterns of Giftedness: A Triarchic Analysis." Roeper Review 22 4 (2000): 231-5. Print.

Just What Is "New Media," Anyway?

 
"New Media" is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days.  But what exactly do we mean when we refer to "new media"?

Many definitions, each with a different focus, have been offered in recent years, and I'll summarize a few of them below (emphasis in all of the quotes below is mine):

EVERETT E. DENNIS & JAMES ASH
--"When the study was initiated the term was most commonly associated with New Media was 'convergence,' meaning the uniting of all forms of communication into one, as well as the integration of various media industries -- publishing, broadcasting, and telecommunication -- into a single amalgamated enterprise.  Thus New Media's definition was a blurred mix of media functions, content, and business arrangements marked by little agreement" (27).
--"When asked the most accurate way to describe their own New Media business, the executives preferred 'multi-media,' meaning a mix of cable, Internet, and broadcasting, rather than more singular users of the Internet" (28).
--"If anything, there was a reluctance to name specific individuals in a field 'where collaboration and even plagiarism is the rule,' as one respondent put it" (30).
--"Integration of useful content linked to specific audiences with great precision thanks to digitalization is a clear theme in New Media's future" (31).

KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY
--"immediate, direct, and substantive" (739)
--"More generally, however... the medium is suggestive rather than deterministic.  The virtues of the digital outlined here are more potential than realized, but this articulation demonstrates potential for a new identity, one not fully determined by medium, but possible within and through it" (753)

MARY E. HOCKS
--Interactive digital texts can blend words and visuals, talk and text, and authors and audiences in ways that are recognizably postmodern" (630).
--"help audiences take more conscious responsibility for making meaning out of the text.  Audiences can experience the pleasures of agency and an awareness of themselves as constructed identities in a heterogeneous medium.  How that agency gets played out, however, depends on the purpose and situation for the text in relation to the audience's need for linearity and other familiar forms" (633).
--"In a space where multifaceted identities can be constructed, experienced, and even performed, this experience of hybridity works to the audience's advantage by increasing the experience of pleasure through identification and multiplicity" (643).
--"The beauty of hypertext is…that it propels us from the straightened 'either/or' world that print has come to represent and into a universe where the 'and/and/and' is always possible" (653).

(will all of our desks look like this one day?  maybe so, at the rate New Media is growing.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/4braham/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

It seems, then, that there are certain values inherent in New Media and its near-ubiquitous presence in our modern lives:

-- blending of separate "traditional" media, thus blurring the lines between them

-- audience segmentation

-- new definitions of authorship and intellectual property

-- immediacy and easy access

-- hybridity and multiplicity

-- a greater awareness of our own identities

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the last one.  I think many people are less self-aware in the New Media age because they use things like the Internet to disassociate and escape from their everyday lives.  There are also reports that people are more narcissistic than they were before the effects of the Internet permeated into many aspects of our existence.

However, I don't think all hope is lost here.  New Media can, as Hocks suggests, help us to become more aware of how we construct our identities, provided that we pay close attention to how and why we choose to use New Media.  Like anything else, New Media is what you make of it.

I look forward to learning more about New Media and its psychological ramifications, both through my own experiences and by reading the theories postulated by others.

As always, feel free to share you thoughts by posting a comment.

Works Cited:

Dennis, Everett E., and James Ash. “Towards a Taxonomy of New Media: Management Views of an Evolving Industry.” International Journal on Media Management 3.1 (2001): 26-32.

Hocks, Mary E. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Visual Writing Environments.” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003): 629-656.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Postmodernism, Palimpsest, and Portfolios: Theoretical Issues in the Representation of Student Work.” College Composition and Communication 55.4 (2004): 738-761.

Are We Postmodern, or Post-Postmodern?

 
"Postmodern" is a term that most people have probably heard of, but do they truly know what it means?

Ihab Hassan, in his essay "The Culture of Postmodernism," grapples with this very issue.  He presents several ways of looking at and defining postmodernism, some of which I will quote below:

"But what better name have we to give this curious age?  The Atomic, or Space, or Television, Age?  These technological tags lack theoretical definition.  Or shall we call it the Age of Indetermanence (interdeterminancy & immanence) as I have half-antically proposed?  Or better still, shall we simply live and let others live to call us what they may?" (121)

"Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or Chinese Wall; for history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future" (121)

"Postmodernism, by invoking two divinities at once, engages a double view.  Sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be honored if we are to attend to history, apprehend (perceive, understand) change both as a spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern and unique event" (121)

"Or is it a 'theory of change' itself an oxymoron best suited to ideologies intolerant of the ambiguities of time?  Should postmodernism, then, be left -- at least for the moment -- unconceptualized, a kind of literary-historical 'difference' or 'trace'?" (122)

"Postmodernism can expand into a still larger problem: is it only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon, perhaps even a mutation in Western humanism?" (122)

(photo: found here and used in accordance with a Creative Commons license)

I do think that postmodernism is a social as well as literary phenomenon, so much so that the philosophy behind it has permeated into virtually every aspect of our culture, causing us to take many of the tenets of postmodernism for granted.  For example, the Internet blurs the boundaries of traditional media so completely that we are left with no other choice but to consider it an entirely new media onto itself, and we as a society do not challenge this idea or consider it in any way unnatural.  The Internet has also made new ways of collaborating possible.  We've become so accustomed to "news feeds" containing a stream of status updates from the people we follow on social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) that most of us don't stop and ask, "Who's intellectual property is my news feed?"

Can it be, then, that we've entered a post-postmodern era?  Feel free to weigh in on this philosophical debate by leaving a comment.

Works Cited:

Hassan, Ihab. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture, and Society 2.3 (1985): 119-131.

It's All Connected (As Are We): Communication Theory and the Internet

 
Lately, I've been doing some reading on communication theory and how the various traditions within the field help to explain the nature of human interaction.  Also striking is that some of the theories, at times, seem to contradict each other, at least at at first glance.

One such theory, sometimes referred to as the cybernetic tradition, postulates that communication is really a form of information processing.  Specifically, it explains "how all kinds of complex systems, whether living or nonliving, macro or micro, are able to function and why they often malfunction" (Craig 141).

Does this description remind you of computer systems in any way?  I know it does for me.  There's a good reason for this: the scholars in the cybernetic tradition draw a direct parallel between the way humans communicate and how computers transmit messages:

"For cybernetics, the distinction between mind and matter is only a functional distinction like that between software and hardware...Cybernetics...is also interesting and sometimes implausible for a commonsense view because it points out surprising analogies between living and nonliving systems, challenges commonplace beliefs about the significance of consciousness and emotion, and questions our usual distinctions between mind and matter, form and content, the real and the artificial" (Craig 141).

It would seem, then, that there are uncanny similarities between humans and computers.  Are these commonalities due to humans being the "Creator" of computers, thus making them in their own image, or are they due to there being no other efficient ways to transmit messages?  I'm not sure there's any definitive answer here.

(photo: found here and used in accordance with a Creative Commons license)

Just as the Internet creates a network of computers and, by association, humans, we're also connected in our communications can be broken down into the same basic elements.  However, scholars in the field of communication theory disagree on exactly what those fundamental parts are.

Competing with the cybernetic tradition is the phenomenological tradition, which describes communication as "the experience of otherness" (Craig 138).

Specifically, "Communication theorized in this way explains the interplay of identity and difference in authentic human relationships and cultivates communication practices that enable and sustain authentic relationships...In thus experiencing the other's expression toward me, I directly experience our commonality and also our difference, not only the other as other to me but myself as other to the other...It problematizes such commonsense distinctions as those between mind and body, facts and values, words and things...Only dialogue satisfies the basic human needs for 'companionship, friendship, and love,' but mass communication expresses an 'equally noble impulse' toward normative universality that often conflicts with the demands of intimacy" (Craig 138-140).

So, what are we to believe: that we're like computers or that humans are wholly separate from machines in their functioning?

I tend to believe that the answer lies somewhere in the middle.  In other words, these two traditions, in my view, should not necessarily be seen as competing views but, instead, complementary schools of thought that help to explain the complexities of human interactions.  The rise of the Internet and our relationship with it causes us to question whether we are, or are becoming, posthuman, forcing us to re-evaluate how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world.  I'm certain that new communication theories will be postulated and tested as a result, which may consist of hybrids of previously presented traditions.

Feel free to communicate any thoughts you may have on this subject by leaving a comment below. 

Works Cited:

Craig, Robert T. “Communication Theory as a Field.” Communication Theory 9.2 (1999): 119-161.