PERFORMANCE
What are analogous performances?
When people are “faking it” they are engaged in analogous performances. Lip-syncing to a pre-recorded song is an analogous performance. (Most) fights in movies or other theatrical productions are analogous performances. So is any acting out of the role of a real person. These kinds of analogies are usually harmless, and often quite entertaining.
Some analogous performances however, are not harmless. Those who “go through the motions” of swearing to tell the truth, and then lie to courts or public officials, are often trying to conceal nefarious behaviour or the knowledge thereof. People who pretend to be eligible for social benefits when they are not, and who then apply for them under this pretence and actually receive the benefits, can bring the benefits program into disrepute, and waste the tax-payers money. Those who act as upright citizens by day and then break the law at night are anything but harmless.
Analogous performances of a more functional nature are those in which similar operations occur although by entirely different mechanisms. The circulation of traffic, or water, or sewage through a city, is a performance analogous to the circulation of the blood through a body, but the similarity is vague rather than exact. In the same way, the movement of water through pipes and traffic through streets is a performance analogy because the mechanisms of propulsion are distinctly different.
How are analogous performances used?
If the desire is to plan a procedure, a familiar performance analogy is often chosen as a metaphor so as to readily illustrate the objective. When explaining voltage in electrical wires, the performance analogy of “water pressure in a pipe” is often used in the hope that people from non-technical backgrounds will understand the objective of using electrical voltage in the same sense as using water pressure. When rehearsing (for a wedding, or a public function, or a complicated activity, etc.), the performance is analogous to “the real thing”, but that is perfectly acceptable because the objective is to eventually perform the actual event properly.
The drawback with using analogies that give explanations of performance is that it is all too easy to “slip into” the mistake of assuming that the similarities involved are actually substantive, and can therefore be understood and controlled by identical mechanisms or techniques. Computer memory is only a performance analogy to human memory, not a replication. One of the advantages of human memory is its capability to forget as well as to recall – but computers never forget, which creates data storage limits for them, and retrieval problems for us.
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