Barbie
I LOVE this Barbie.
Friday, November 29
Mental illness as social illness?
Suicide now accounts for a third of all deaths among women in the Chinese countryside. "Dr Michael Phillips, who helped lead the study, told the BBC that while 90-95% of those taking their own lives in the West suffered significant mental illness at the time of attempting suicide, around a third of those in China did not. "It appears that many of them are impulsive events following an acute fight or an argument with the husband or a parent or a mother in law," he told the World Today programme. In China, there is also a lack of social and religious taboos against taking one's own life. "In some particular villages it almost becomes normalised. If a young woman is having trouble, this is one way she'll express her displeasure," Dr Phillips said.
I've wondered if women in the West are more often diagnosed with depression than men, not because of more prevalent mental illness, but because of social statuses and situations that wear them down...
I've wondered if women in the West are more often diagnosed with depression than men, not because of more prevalent mental illness, but because of social statuses and situations that wear them down...
Quantum computing making 'tremendous progress'
The first element of a device that many believe holds the best hope for quantum information processing has been completed by Australian researchers, while an Austrian team has reported the first truly quantum calculation. The achievements go some way to dispelling the widely-held idea that doing anything useful with quantum computing is decades or even centuries away.
On Women Bloggers
Lisa Guerney, in the NY Times (requires registration), writes about the male-dominated blog world. One might balk at her characterisation of bloggers as "legions of online narcissists" but the author was more concerned with the lack of female voices. The article gets weird when this turns into a tired discussion around men in the public sphere and women in the private sphere. Then comes this killer statement: "People who track blogs hate to make generalizations, but many acknowledged that female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives. If that is the case, the Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but. So far the people who have received the most publicity (often courtesy of male journalists) appear to be the latter."
Elizabeth Lane Lawley responds to the same quote, "I think this is close to the mark, but not exactly right. The "inward focus" rings true, but the "personal diaries" does not. The women whose blogs I read seem to speak with more of a personal and recognizable voice. But what they write goes far beyond a personal diary. They write about research, about law, about information architecture, about copyright, about gender, and about blogs themselves. But they write about them with grace and style, with a voice that is unmistakably theirs, unmistakably personal. I like that." So, for her, it seems to be more a matter of voice than of gender. And Torill Mortensen examines the notion of a "high profile" blogger and the ability to decide for oneself.
My take? Almost every facet of my professional life is male-dominated and 99% of the blog-related email I get is from men. But do I consider myself a Woman Blogger? Not really. I mean, yes, I am a woman and a blogger, but that combined identity doesn't really occur to me. And neither do I read certain blogs because they are written by men or women. I too look for voices and interests that appeal to me - and my favourite blogger is a man. But part of what I like about his writing is that I can feel it - it has a distinct and personal voice. Does that make him a woman blogger? Not bloody likely. These categories are useless to me. At the same time, some email I get is quite obviously written by heterosexual men to a woman they assume is heterosexual - so being a woman online does make a difference... but probably no more than being a woman in flesh-space.
Elizabeth Lane Lawley responds to the same quote, "I think this is close to the mark, but not exactly right. The "inward focus" rings true, but the "personal diaries" does not. The women whose blogs I read seem to speak with more of a personal and recognizable voice. But what they write goes far beyond a personal diary. They write about research, about law, about information architecture, about copyright, about gender, and about blogs themselves. But they write about them with grace and style, with a voice that is unmistakably theirs, unmistakably personal. I like that." So, for her, it seems to be more a matter of voice than of gender. And Torill Mortensen examines the notion of a "high profile" blogger and the ability to decide for oneself.
My take? Almost every facet of my professional life is male-dominated and 99% of the blog-related email I get is from men. But do I consider myself a Woman Blogger? Not really. I mean, yes, I am a woman and a blogger, but that combined identity doesn't really occur to me. And neither do I read certain blogs because they are written by men or women. I too look for voices and interests that appeal to me - and my favourite blogger is a man. But part of what I like about his writing is that I can feel it - it has a distinct and personal voice. Does that make him a woman blogger? Not bloody likely. These categories are useless to me. At the same time, some email I get is quite obviously written by heterosexual men to a woman they assume is heterosexual - so being a woman online does make a difference... but probably no more than being a woman in flesh-space.
The City
Ruavista: Signs of the City. Ruavista explores city streets and urban life through all kinds of signs: street graphics, architecture, street sounds... These signs are materials to help you decipher the city and make it your own. (via v-2)
Thursday, November 28
Networks and flows
Explorations of Manuel Castells' "space of flows" (annotated bibliography)
Ulf Hannerz - Flows, boundaries and hybrids: keywords in transnational anthropology (pdf)
Felix Stalder - The Space of Flows: notes on emergence, characteristics and possible impact on physical space
The Disappearing Computer Initiative: Emerging Functionality
Geert Lovink: Dark Fiber "examines the inner workings of social networks beyond intention and rhetoric. Net criticism should not so much be defined as yet another emerging discipline with literary criticism and cultural studies as its predecessors, but rather it is described as a collaborative form to create networked discourses in which theory and practice, code and content, reflection and production, interface design and network architecture are closely intertwined." See also: A Virtual World is Possible, Autonomy Design and The New Actonomy
Ulf Hannerz - Flows, boundaries and hybrids: keywords in transnational anthropology (pdf)
Felix Stalder - The Space of Flows: notes on emergence, characteristics and possible impact on physical space
The Disappearing Computer Initiative: Emerging Functionality
Geert Lovink: Dark Fiber "examines the inner workings of social networks beyond intention and rhetoric. Net criticism should not so much be defined as yet another emerging discipline with literary criticism and cultural studies as its predecessors, but rather it is described as a collaborative form to create networked discourses in which theory and practice, code and content, reflection and production, interface design and network architecture are closely intertwined." See also: A Virtual World is Possible, Autonomy Design and The New Actonomy
Assembling the Digital Sky
"Scientists in the United States, armed with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, are building a National Virtual Observatory (NVO) that will make the world’s huge store of astronomical data available to anyone with a Web browser."
I love archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy - "The sky is the same. The constructions placed upon it vary by culture [and through time]. Ethnoastronomy seeks to explore and understand these constructions and their places within the larger cultural milieu." And I hope that they'll give us the option of engaging the cultural origins of skywatching and how different cultures identify constellations.
The highland Andean Quechua people consider the Milky Way to be a giant river, and accordingly, the surrounding constellations include animals like llamas, and different intensity star clusters form clouds. And there is no empty space: spaces without stars also become part of the celestial landscape, sort of like reverse-constellations.
I love archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy - "The sky is the same. The constructions placed upon it vary by culture [and through time]. Ethnoastronomy seeks to explore and understand these constructions and their places within the larger cultural milieu." And I hope that they'll give us the option of engaging the cultural origins of skywatching and how different cultures identify constellations.
The highland Andean Quechua people consider the Milky Way to be a giant river, and accordingly, the surrounding constellations include animals like llamas, and different intensity star clusters form clouds. And there is no empty space: spaces without stars also become part of the celestial landscape, sort of like reverse-constellations.
Immobots
"Quite unlike the metallic contraptions that march stiffly through sci-fi movies or the mindless, stripped-down devices that heft parts on our assembly lines, the new robots have more brain than brawn. Each possesses a detailed picture of its own inner workings—encoded in software-based models—that gives it the ability to respond in novel ways to events its programmers might not have anticipated. Because many of these inward-focused, self-reconfiguring machines don’t move, some computer scientists call them immobile robots, or “immobots.”
This isn't the ARPANET
"The Internet has become more vulnerable in recent years as it has become more commercialized. As the Internet has become commercialized, the major network providers have moved toward a “hub-and-spoke” model that funnels Internet connections through major hub cities. The biggest impact would be felt in the small and medium-size cities whose only or main connections to the Internet come through the major hub cities. Larger cities often have multiple connections to the Internet in and out of the city and would be harder to completely disconnect from the Internet. The actual impact of a network disruption would depend on a variety of factors, such as the cities affected by the disruption. Grubesic said the most severe impacts would occur if telecommunications equipment were destroyed in the six largest Internet hubs: Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, DC." (via ethno::log)
Wednesday, November 27
On social systems and cybernetics
Thanks to Matt Webb for a definition of social systems taken from cybernetics. But I'd just like to point out that the cybernetics (including second-order cybernetics and notions of autopoesis) definition does not overcome the critique of structuralism/functionalism in sociology.
If you're interested in this critique, continue reading - if not, bail out now ;)
Niklas Luhmann’s autopoetic systems are self-governing spheres of interaction and “autonomous in the sense that external impacts are selected by the system or transformed by the field itself" and Luhmann employs an auditory metaphor, “resonance." Modern society is characterised by highly specialised, self-sustaining and prescriptive systems which serve identifiable social functions. For Luhmann, society is nothing but reflexive, self-recursive communication. The social still constitutes a whole, but one without centre or unity, where systems sit side-by-side, differentiated by function and stabilised communications.
The definition of society elaborated by Georges Bataille combines homogeneity with the notion of heterogeneity. For Bataille, heterogeneity comprises everything that homogeneity excludes or marginalizes. As Albertsen and Diken describe, “any heterogeneous social element is defined by its intensity and the affective reactions through which it breaks the laws of homogeneity, as in the cases of excess, delirium, madness and violence. But this is not all; elements that appear to be constitutive of homogeneity can also belong to heterogeneity… [and at the same time heterogeneity] is what escapes, or what flows in and through homogeneity.”
Zygmunt Bauman reiterates the importance of heterogeneity and also emphasises ambivalence. He locates ethics at the centre of social behaviour, but an organic ethics based on facing ambiguity and making moral choices, rather than one based on an external rule-set or system. In this way, Bauman (following Levinas) replaces the notion of society with one of sociality: the interpersonal negotiation of ambivalence and heterogeneity. He is concerned not with what holds us together (society) but with the morality that emerges in social interaction.
Bauman (following Georg Simmel) also invokes the concept of habitat. Away from society, and towards sociality, habitat is a complex system; the context in which agency operates. Habitat is where sociality takes place, a territory characterised by indeterminacy and ambivalence. Simmel’s stranger “comes today and stays tomorrow… [and is] an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside and confronting it.” Bauman uses the concept of the stranger to demonstrate that sociality consists of belonging to more than one category: always ambivalent, contingent, inconsistent and indeterminate. Neither fixed nor clearly bounded, sociality is hybrid and heterogeneous. Accordingly, for Bauman, the social can only define itself against its strangers.
The sociological critique continued with Actor-Network Theory (see posts on agency below) and most recently appears in social theories of fluidity and flow. The point has been to get away from notions of SOCIETY (systems and relationships) and move towards questions of SOCIALITY (practices and performances). An un-binding, if you will.
I guess part of my research is meant to see how these critiques can be applied to the design of new technologies - but it seems to be quite difficult to shift discussions of systems and relationships to practices and performances. I fear some consider it too subtle a point, and not worthy of rigorous examination...
If you're interested in this critique, continue reading - if not, bail out now ;)
Niklas Luhmann’s autopoetic systems are self-governing spheres of interaction and “autonomous in the sense that external impacts are selected by the system or transformed by the field itself" and Luhmann employs an auditory metaphor, “resonance." Modern society is characterised by highly specialised, self-sustaining and prescriptive systems which serve identifiable social functions. For Luhmann, society is nothing but reflexive, self-recursive communication. The social still constitutes a whole, but one without centre or unity, where systems sit side-by-side, differentiated by function and stabilised communications.
The definition of society elaborated by Georges Bataille combines homogeneity with the notion of heterogeneity. For Bataille, heterogeneity comprises everything that homogeneity excludes or marginalizes. As Albertsen and Diken describe, “any heterogeneous social element is defined by its intensity and the affective reactions through which it breaks the laws of homogeneity, as in the cases of excess, delirium, madness and violence. But this is not all; elements that appear to be constitutive of homogeneity can also belong to heterogeneity… [and at the same time heterogeneity] is what escapes, or what flows in and through homogeneity.”
Zygmunt Bauman reiterates the importance of heterogeneity and also emphasises ambivalence. He locates ethics at the centre of social behaviour, but an organic ethics based on facing ambiguity and making moral choices, rather than one based on an external rule-set or system. In this way, Bauman (following Levinas) replaces the notion of society with one of sociality: the interpersonal negotiation of ambivalence and heterogeneity. He is concerned not with what holds us together (society) but with the morality that emerges in social interaction.
Bauman (following Georg Simmel) also invokes the concept of habitat. Away from society, and towards sociality, habitat is a complex system; the context in which agency operates. Habitat is where sociality takes place, a territory characterised by indeterminacy and ambivalence. Simmel’s stranger “comes today and stays tomorrow… [and is] an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside and confronting it.” Bauman uses the concept of the stranger to demonstrate that sociality consists of belonging to more than one category: always ambivalent, contingent, inconsistent and indeterminate. Neither fixed nor clearly bounded, sociality is hybrid and heterogeneous. Accordingly, for Bauman, the social can only define itself against its strangers.
The sociological critique continued with Actor-Network Theory (see posts on agency below) and most recently appears in social theories of fluidity and flow. The point has been to get away from notions of SOCIETY (systems and relationships) and move towards questions of SOCIALITY (practices and performances). An un-binding, if you will.
I guess part of my research is meant to see how these critiques can be applied to the design of new technologies - but it seems to be quite difficult to shift discussions of systems and relationships to practices and performances. I fear some consider it too subtle a point, and not worthy of rigorous examination...
A space for half-formed thoughts
Via blackbeltjones: Philip Tabor on A space for half-formed thoughts. There is much of value there, but I found it disappointing that this space is (only?) considered as a space of imagination (of cognition without sociality).
Tabor writes of psychologically charged space: constructed by the body; a physical substance, and structured by invisible forces. "In objective, scientific terms this space is a fantasy: it doesn’t describe the space in which real buildings are built. But it does reflect some psychological truth. In some ways real space differs from charged space in the same way that clock time differs from the fluid and discontinuous time we experience in our heads."
What about lived space and social space? When sociologists talk about virtual space, they are able to articulate virtualities - those pragmatic social experiences that take place. By leaving it in the space of the mind we have no way to work with what people do. Tabor describes how "forces within the organism or the building, and the forces outside it, bend and sculpt it into a shape adapted to its current location in time and space." At least some of those forces aren't invisible - they're socially manifest and can be localised in subjects and objects.
Also: more good thoughts on what has come from the Doors Conference at cityofsound.
Tabor writes of psychologically charged space: constructed by the body; a physical substance, and structured by invisible forces. "In objective, scientific terms this space is a fantasy: it doesn’t describe the space in which real buildings are built. But it does reflect some psychological truth. In some ways real space differs from charged space in the same way that clock time differs from the fluid and discontinuous time we experience in our heads."
What about lived space and social space? When sociologists talk about virtual space, they are able to articulate virtualities - those pragmatic social experiences that take place. By leaving it in the space of the mind we have no way to work with what people do. Tabor describes how "forces within the organism or the building, and the forces outside it, bend and sculpt it into a shape adapted to its current location in time and space." At least some of those forces aren't invisible - they're socially manifest and can be localised in subjects and objects.
Also: more good thoughts on what has come from the Doors Conference at cityofsound.
The Things We Build
Fascinating stuff on American concentration camps and the Japanese internment at Social Design Notes. The archaeologist in me was most taken by this essay on the actual sites.
On Designing Social Agency - Story Version
In the essay "A Collective of Humans and Non-Humans," Latour tells a brilliant story about guns and people. I'll try to condense 2 1/2 pages of his text.
"Who or what is responsible for the act of killing? Is the gun no more than a piece of mediating technology? The answer to these questions depends on what mediation means." A first sense of mediation is what [he] calls the program of action: "the series of goals and steps and intentions that an agent can describe in a story like the one about the gun and the gunman."
Latour asks: In a shooting (murder) who is the actor - the citizen or the gun? He says the actor is someone else - the citizen-gun or the gun-citizen. That we are different people with guns in our hands and that guns are different when we hold them: essence is existence and existence is action. "You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. A good citizen becomes a criminal, a bad guy becomes a worse guy; a silent gun becomes a fired gun, a new gun becomes a used gun, a sporting gun becomes a weapon. The twin mistake of the materialists and the sociologists is to start with essences, those of subjects or those of objects.. If we study the gun and the citizen as propositions, however, we realize that neither subject nor object (nor their goals) is fixed. When the propositions are articulated, they join into a new proposition."
"I could replace the gunman with a 'class of unemployed loiterers,' translating the individual agent into a collective; or I could talk of 'unconscious motives,' translating it into a sub-individual agent. I could redescribe the gun as 'what the gun lobby puts in the hands of unsuspecting children,' translating it from an object into an institution or a commercial network; or I could call it 'the action of a trigger on a cartridge through the intermediary of a spring and firing-pin, translating it into a mechanical series of causes and consequences. It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants."
Design
This conjures neither the design of information nor of experience. And I don't think it involves the same sense of (motivational) agency as applied in most Action or Game Theory I've read (although that hasn't been very much, so please correct me).
The point of Latour's story, in part, is to demonstrate that whatever intentions can be attributed to either people or guns dissolve as soon as they engage each other - and emerge again as a hybrid with new collective intentions. My first thought is that we can't design for that, or at least, that we can't really design *for* the intentions/functions of machines or users.
The social context of design is more than the relationship between consultant and client, the social complexity of any given organisation or set of information/content, or even watching users. The social context of design involves the notion that we are dealing with (and are part of) a collective hybrid in which humans and non-humans are made relevant and indispensable to each other through a process of granting consent to each other. And this process is not value-free. (As an aside - I'd like to see discussions of the ethics of ubiquitous technologies move beyond issues of privacy and control.)
This may affect how designers understand who and what they're crafting. As it stands, all variations on user-centred design take for granted that products should be made relevant to their users. And in cooperation with good marketing, it is possible to make a product indispensable. The part I see missing is the process of granting consent to each other - whereby people and objects (products/machines/interfaces) reciprocally create each other as a hybrid. In other words, allowing people and objects to engage each other in ways that allow people and machines to really perform and change together (to have agency in space and time). Of course this includes not only the design of technologies but of their (social) applications.
What types of social interaction are we designing? Should applications of technology be socially virtuous by any standard? And this makes me think of an earlier post where I thought about Adam Greenfield's notion of "safe harbours of slow time" in which we are granted respite from risk and speed to engage more fully with subjects, objects, activities and ideas. This is surely a space of performance and enrolment. We can temporarily slow the flow, engage it and negotiate it, and emerge again. A designer can build a space for this to happen.
And I should think some more about what might constitute a Temporary Autonomous Zone alongside a Temporary Occupied Zone. This could be helpful in describing the interface between people and smart fabrics, and maybe design could be described as a weaving together of these spaces...
"Who or what is responsible for the act of killing? Is the gun no more than a piece of mediating technology? The answer to these questions depends on what mediation means." A first sense of mediation is what [he] calls the program of action: "the series of goals and steps and intentions that an agent can describe in a story like the one about the gun and the gunman."
Latour asks: In a shooting (murder) who is the actor - the citizen or the gun? He says the actor is someone else - the citizen-gun or the gun-citizen. That we are different people with guns in our hands and that guns are different when we hold them: essence is existence and existence is action. "You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. A good citizen becomes a criminal, a bad guy becomes a worse guy; a silent gun becomes a fired gun, a new gun becomes a used gun, a sporting gun becomes a weapon. The twin mistake of the materialists and the sociologists is to start with essences, those of subjects or those of objects.. If we study the gun and the citizen as propositions, however, we realize that neither subject nor object (nor their goals) is fixed. When the propositions are articulated, they join into a new proposition."
"I could replace the gunman with a 'class of unemployed loiterers,' translating the individual agent into a collective; or I could talk of 'unconscious motives,' translating it into a sub-individual agent. I could redescribe the gun as 'what the gun lobby puts in the hands of unsuspecting children,' translating it from an object into an institution or a commercial network; or I could call it 'the action of a trigger on a cartridge through the intermediary of a spring and firing-pin, translating it into a mechanical series of causes and consequences. It is neither people nor guns that kill. Responsibility for action must be shared among the various actants."
Design
This conjures neither the design of information nor of experience. And I don't think it involves the same sense of (motivational) agency as applied in most Action or Game Theory I've read (although that hasn't been very much, so please correct me).
The point of Latour's story, in part, is to demonstrate that whatever intentions can be attributed to either people or guns dissolve as soon as they engage each other - and emerge again as a hybrid with new collective intentions. My first thought is that we can't design for that, or at least, that we can't really design *for* the intentions/functions of machines or users.
The social context of design is more than the relationship between consultant and client, the social complexity of any given organisation or set of information/content, or even watching users. The social context of design involves the notion that we are dealing with (and are part of) a collective hybrid in which humans and non-humans are made relevant and indispensable to each other through a process of granting consent to each other. And this process is not value-free. (As an aside - I'd like to see discussions of the ethics of ubiquitous technologies move beyond issues of privacy and control.)
This may affect how designers understand who and what they're crafting. As it stands, all variations on user-centred design take for granted that products should be made relevant to their users. And in cooperation with good marketing, it is possible to make a product indispensable. The part I see missing is the process of granting consent to each other - whereby people and objects (products/machines/interfaces) reciprocally create each other as a hybrid. In other words, allowing people and objects to engage each other in ways that allow people and machines to really perform and change together (to have agency in space and time). Of course this includes not only the design of technologies but of their (social) applications.
What types of social interaction are we designing? Should applications of technology be socially virtuous by any standard? And this makes me think of an earlier post where I thought about Adam Greenfield's notion of "safe harbours of slow time" in which we are granted respite from risk and speed to engage more fully with subjects, objects, activities and ideas. This is surely a space of performance and enrolment. We can temporarily slow the flow, engage it and negotiate it, and emerge again. A designer can build a space for this to happen.
And I should think some more about what might constitute a Temporary Autonomous Zone alongside a Temporary Occupied Zone. This could be helpful in describing the interface between people and smart fabrics, and maybe design could be described as a weaving together of these spaces...
Clone?!
"The controversial Italian doctor Severino Antinori has announced that the first human baby clone will be born in January 2003."
"Dr Harry Griffin, the deputy director of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where Dolly was born, said: "There are many losses before implantation, during pregnancy, and many cloned animals die within a few hours or days of birth. So it's a very risky procedure; and there's no reason to suppose it's going to be any easier in humans than it is in those species which have been cloned so far."
If I remember correctly, it took 200+ tries to produce Dolly. I've often wondered what sort of creepy creatures came before the one we could identify as a sheep - and extending these thoughts to the realm of humans really freaks me out...
"Dr Harry Griffin, the deputy director of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where Dolly was born, said: "There are many losses before implantation, during pregnancy, and many cloned animals die within a few hours or days of birth. So it's a very risky procedure; and there's no reason to suppose it's going to be any easier in humans than it is in those species which have been cloned so far."
If I remember correctly, it took 200+ tries to produce Dolly. I've often wondered what sort of creepy creatures came before the one we could identify as a sheep - and extending these thoughts to the realm of humans really freaks me out...
On Agency - Theory Version, Pt. I
I want to concentrate on two particular aspects of (social) agency put forth by Bruno Latour in his book Pandora's Hope: A Proliferation of Hybrids and A Collective of Human and Non-Humans.
[It seems to me that most technology design that takes into account concepts of "agency," uses cognitive rather than social criteria. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm more interested in concepts of *social* agency - and so we'll start with Latour.]
Latour is one of my favourite sociologists - first, because he is French and they don't seem interested in maintaining rigid distinctions between sociology and anthropology; second, because he is a beautiful writer and that should count for something; and third, because he has articulated notions of non-human actors (what he calls actants).
He wasn't the first to think this way, and if you're interested in the history of these ideas, I recommend you check out the work of Michel Serres and Michel Callon. There is also a good MA teaching unit and bibliography from Lancaster University on these and related subjects. You can also take a look at critiques of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to see the current state of inquiry. This should also give you a good sense of my understanding of social systems theory and some of its problems. And if you are interested in notions of FLOW, you might like to trace the development of these ideas from earlier work in ANT.
Serres proposes the social is always already materially heterogeneous, and it is the object that stabilises sociality. Latour draws out a collective of humans and non-humans, extending sociality to objects. Purity, or pure form, is replaced by a proliferation of hybrids. Recalling the notion of a continuum, Callon and Latour claim that their “general symmetry principle is thus not to alternate between natural realism and social realism but to obtain nature and society as twin results of another activity… network building.” Differentiation has always been part of modernity, but so too have transversal connections (de-differentiations): linkages and networks across the divisions which create relative stabilities. According to Latour, social interactions are actively localised by objects, framed by associations between humans and non-humans. And these frames comprise convoluted networks, constructed simultaneously by hybrids of human, technological, natural and material elements. Latour’s actor/actant is something that acts or to which activity is granted; defined by what it does, by its performances. And actions may be understood as factishes: part fact, part fetish, performed and always emerging.
An actor/actant must be made relevant to others (interessement), be made indispensable to others (translation), and be granted consent by others (enrolment). Translation refers to “all the displacements through other actors whose mediation is indispensable for any action to occur… chains of translation refer to the work through which actors modify, displace, and translate their various and contradictory interests." Immutable mobiles allow new translations and articulations, while simultaneously keeping other relations intact. As such, actor networks are characterised by constant transformation through performative practices. They do not seek to explain what is between local pockets of order, but to claim that there is nothing in between them, nothing but networks. Spatiality/sociality is transformed into associations between actors and between networks; scale is understood in terms of connections.
AFTER ANT:
According to John Law actor-networks can often deal with inconsistency and complexity, but there remains a tendency towards drawing things together: controlling, limiting and mastering disorder with the network. Challenging ANT, Mol and Law argue that the “social doesn’t exist as a single spatial type. Rather it performs several kinds of space in which different ‘operations’ take place… There are other kinds of space [where] neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Sometimes, then, social space behaves like a fluid”. Drawing on the notion of flow from the work of Deleuze and Irigaray, Rob Shields explains that flows are spatial, temporal and, importantly, they are also material. “The significance of the material quality of flows is that they have content, beyond merely being processes… Flows signal pure movement, without suggesting a point of origin or a destination, only a certain character of movement, fluidity and direction… It is not that they are relational between objects or fixed points – which are taken as immutable mobiles – but they are the being of relation."
Enter D&G.
[It seems to me that most technology design that takes into account concepts of "agency," uses cognitive rather than social criteria. And there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm more interested in concepts of *social* agency - and so we'll start with Latour.]
Latour is one of my favourite sociologists - first, because he is French and they don't seem interested in maintaining rigid distinctions between sociology and anthropology; second, because he is a beautiful writer and that should count for something; and third, because he has articulated notions of non-human actors (what he calls actants).
He wasn't the first to think this way, and if you're interested in the history of these ideas, I recommend you check out the work of Michel Serres and Michel Callon. There is also a good MA teaching unit and bibliography from Lancaster University on these and related subjects. You can also take a look at critiques of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to see the current state of inquiry. This should also give you a good sense of my understanding of social systems theory and some of its problems. And if you are interested in notions of FLOW, you might like to trace the development of these ideas from earlier work in ANT.
Serres proposes the social is always already materially heterogeneous, and it is the object that stabilises sociality. Latour draws out a collective of humans and non-humans, extending sociality to objects. Purity, or pure form, is replaced by a proliferation of hybrids. Recalling the notion of a continuum, Callon and Latour claim that their “general symmetry principle is thus not to alternate between natural realism and social realism but to obtain nature and society as twin results of another activity… network building.” Differentiation has always been part of modernity, but so too have transversal connections (de-differentiations): linkages and networks across the divisions which create relative stabilities. According to Latour, social interactions are actively localised by objects, framed by associations between humans and non-humans. And these frames comprise convoluted networks, constructed simultaneously by hybrids of human, technological, natural and material elements. Latour’s actor/actant is something that acts or to which activity is granted; defined by what it does, by its performances. And actions may be understood as factishes: part fact, part fetish, performed and always emerging.
An actor/actant must be made relevant to others (interessement), be made indispensable to others (translation), and be granted consent by others (enrolment). Translation refers to “all the displacements through other actors whose mediation is indispensable for any action to occur… chains of translation refer to the work through which actors modify, displace, and translate their various and contradictory interests." Immutable mobiles allow new translations and articulations, while simultaneously keeping other relations intact. As such, actor networks are characterised by constant transformation through performative practices. They do not seek to explain what is between local pockets of order, but to claim that there is nothing in between them, nothing but networks. Spatiality/sociality is transformed into associations between actors and between networks; scale is understood in terms of connections.
AFTER ANT:
According to John Law actor-networks can often deal with inconsistency and complexity, but there remains a tendency towards drawing things together: controlling, limiting and mastering disorder with the network. Challenging ANT, Mol and Law argue that the “social doesn’t exist as a single spatial type. Rather it performs several kinds of space in which different ‘operations’ take place… There are other kinds of space [where] neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Sometimes, then, social space behaves like a fluid”. Drawing on the notion of flow from the work of Deleuze and Irigaray, Rob Shields explains that flows are spatial, temporal and, importantly, they are also material. “The significance of the material quality of flows is that they have content, beyond merely being processes… Flows signal pure movement, without suggesting a point of origin or a destination, only a certain character of movement, fluidity and direction… It is not that they are relational between objects or fixed points – which are taken as immutable mobiles – but they are the being of relation."
Enter D&G.
Follow-ups
Given my interest in the social construction of scientific knowledge, I've been meaning to follow up on the Bogdanov Affair - and in the few weeks since I've been paying attention, it's been renamed the Baez Hoax! Still, some of the best discussion I've found is on Google's sci.physics.research newsgroup - including comments by Alan Sokal. And who knew that these folks were so witty?!
As someone who knows nothing about theoretical physics, I stare blankly at their proofs, but love that these equations appear within people's responses. It's like they suddenly start speaking another language ;) But I don't really need to understand in order to appreciate a certain aesthetics - and I'd love to see what a wicked collage artist could do with bits and pieces of these posts...
Also: Howard Rheingold discusses Smart Mobs on The WELL. (via peterme)
As someone who knows nothing about theoretical physics, I stare blankly at their proofs, but love that these equations appear within people's responses. It's like they suddenly start speaking another language ;) But I don't really need to understand in order to appreciate a certain aesthetics - and I'd love to see what a wicked collage artist could do with bits and pieces of these posts...
Also: Howard Rheingold discusses Smart Mobs on The WELL. (via peterme)
Tuesday, November 26
Usually my horoscopes speak of misery and gloom, but not today
"LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): What metaphor shall we choose to refer to the role you've played so skillfully in recent weeks, Leo? Archaeologist of the abyss? Plumber of the undertow? Scavenger of the scrap heap of history? I love the brazen resourcefulness you've summoned as you've cleaned out the gunk that was clogging up your depths. In any case, it's now time to crawl up out of the muck and onto center stage. You're primed to start blinding us all with your light again."
Email limbo?
Ever wonder where lost email go? In the process of switching things about the other day, I seem to have lost some email. Since I now know of eight messages that disappeared - if you recently (past few days) sent me a message - chances are I did not receive it. And it would be great if you could send it again, please and thank you.
Querencia and Amnesty
A recent post by Adam caught my attention:
"Querencia is a place where one feels secure, 'a place from which one's strength of character is drawn.' In Spain, it is the place in the ring where the wounded bull goes to renew his strength and center himself, ready for a fresh charge. What a beautiful concept: A place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs... But thus my take that we need digital querencias as well - safe harbors of slow time, where ideas can be nurtured to fruition, evaluated with respect to the fullest of their resonances. This would be a parallel to the rush of aggregated feeds: switching metaphors, a slower-moving branch, not a tributary, of that mighty river. The digital querencia has a lot of resonance with the 'moments of amnesty' from ubiquitous computation I was talking about..."
I love this idea of "safe harbors of slow time" - which reminds me of concepts we worked with in archaeological interpretation. In The Structures of Everyday Life, Fernand Braudel advocates a model of history involving change at the level of structure (longue durée), at the level of conjuncture, and at the level of event (événement). Of interest here is the longue durée - literally, the "long time" - but equally able to conjure "slow time" in comparison to the more short-term and immediate changes of conjuncture and event.
I often find online explorations of ideas to move too quickly. I don't mind the fragmentation of ideas, but I do get concerned that digital memes never hang around long enough to engage us in more than fleeting ways. Moments of "slow time" are crucial to human experience and understanding. They also afford us the opportunity to be and to dwell - in the way that phenomenologists describe. And I like that.
But back to querencia - which I take to describe a place of being - and the importance of "amnesty" (from the Greek amnesia). Being and dwelling are always already connected to memory - to familiarity and even to provenance. But querencia also refers to "a place in which we know exactly who we are" and thus conjures nostalgia, of dwelling through memory. And that is also a bit of a dangerous place where we can forget things that shouldn't be forgotten...
So - Adam's suggestion is a lovely compromise: "a parallel to the rush of aggregated feeds". I imagine the Temporary Autonomous Zone alongside the Temporary Occupied Zone. Places where we can be cared for and find safety - and places of risk and uncertainty. But I'll have to think some more on this one ;)
"Querencia is a place where one feels secure, 'a place from which one's strength of character is drawn.' In Spain, it is the place in the ring where the wounded bull goes to renew his strength and center himself, ready for a fresh charge. What a beautiful concept: A place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs... But thus my take that we need digital querencias as well - safe harbors of slow time, where ideas can be nurtured to fruition, evaluated with respect to the fullest of their resonances. This would be a parallel to the rush of aggregated feeds: switching metaphors, a slower-moving branch, not a tributary, of that mighty river. The digital querencia has a lot of resonance with the 'moments of amnesty' from ubiquitous computation I was talking about..."
I love this idea of "safe harbors of slow time" - which reminds me of concepts we worked with in archaeological interpretation. In The Structures of Everyday Life, Fernand Braudel advocates a model of history involving change at the level of structure (longue durée), at the level of conjuncture, and at the level of event (événement). Of interest here is the longue durée - literally, the "long time" - but equally able to conjure "slow time" in comparison to the more short-term and immediate changes of conjuncture and event.
I often find online explorations of ideas to move too quickly. I don't mind the fragmentation of ideas, but I do get concerned that digital memes never hang around long enough to engage us in more than fleeting ways. Moments of "slow time" are crucial to human experience and understanding. They also afford us the opportunity to be and to dwell - in the way that phenomenologists describe. And I like that.
But back to querencia - which I take to describe a place of being - and the importance of "amnesty" (from the Greek amnesia). Being and dwelling are always already connected to memory - to familiarity and even to provenance. But querencia also refers to "a place in which we know exactly who we are" and thus conjures nostalgia, of dwelling through memory. And that is also a bit of a dangerous place where we can forget things that shouldn't be forgotten...
So - Adam's suggestion is a lovely compromise: "a parallel to the rush of aggregated feeds". I imagine the Temporary Autonomous Zone alongside the Temporary Occupied Zone. Places where we can be cared for and find safety - and places of risk and uncertainty. But I'll have to think some more on this one ;)
That's an Ape, not a Monkey
"A public inquiry into controversial proposals to build a new primate research facility on the outskirts of Cambridge, UK, is set to begin on Tuesday."
Some professor once remarked that the greater apes (gorillas, chimps and orangs - our closest relatives) have the cognitive abilities of a five-year-old child, so we shouldn't be able to do anything to them that we can't do to children. I like this measuring-stick ;)
A quick Google search on "primate research" will give you a sense of how much work is going on in this area - and of the controversy involved.
And, finally, if it has a tail it's a monkey - otherwise, be sure to call it an ape ;)
Some professor once remarked that the greater apes (gorillas, chimps and orangs - our closest relatives) have the cognitive abilities of a five-year-old child, so we shouldn't be able to do anything to them that we can't do to children. I like this measuring-stick ;)
A quick Google search on "primate research" will give you a sense of how much work is going on in this area - and of the controversy involved.
And, finally, if it has a tail it's a monkey - otherwise, be sure to call it an ape ;)
Monday, November 25
Mostly fixed
The site's been up and down the past couple of days as I switched hosts and played with some new comment functionality. It seems to be working fine now - we'll see how it goes ;) I needed a way to easily mark my original research notes from my updates - and now you have a way to comment too! Enjoy. Special thanks go to Craig.
Still working on rss version...
Still working on rss version...
Sunday, November 24
All Music
FREE JAZZ: profile | essay | avant-garde jazz | free funk | noise | jazz rap | jazz funk
ROCK: bongwater | king missile | butthole surfers | the cramps | sonic youth | hüsker dü | velvet underground | the stooges | the misfits
SHIBUYA-KEI: profile
ROCK: bongwater | king missile | butthole surfers | the cramps | sonic youth | hüsker dü | velvet underground | the stooges | the misfits
SHIBUYA-KEI: profile
Not a Real Canadian?
I loathe the Canadian winter and so every year, I spend the first few days of snow thinking about the coming summer - some six months away! Gives me something to look forward to so that I can survive the environmental bleakness ;)
So next May, I might head for England. Through our university exchange program, I can spend the summer registered at Lancaster University. I've wanted to talk to the sociologists there for years... And there are some folks I'd like to see in Nottingham, and of course, in London. Any interesting events scheduled yet? Any suggestions for places to visit or people to meet?
But I'd also like to spend some time in Boston and New York... good thing I still have six months to think about this ;)
So next May, I might head for England. Through our university exchange program, I can spend the summer registered at Lancaster University. I've wanted to talk to the sociologists there for years... And there are some folks I'd like to see in Nottingham, and of course, in London. Any interesting events scheduled yet? Any suggestions for places to visit or people to meet?
But I'd also like to spend some time in Boston and New York... good thing I still have six months to think about this ;)
Horizon 4 - ubiquitous, wireless and wearable computing
In May, I attended the Banff New Media Institute's Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones Summit. I had an ugly flu, and couldn't be nearly as sociable as I would have liked - so I didn't have the best of times...
Don't get me wrong - I met some great people!
Sha Xin Wei's work at GeorgiaTech's Topological Media Lab (along with sponge and foAm) is fascinating, and I thank him for always responding to my questions.
Maggie Orth and Joey Berzowska are doing amazing work at International Fashion Machines. And I was really impressed by Orth's dissertation (MIT Media Lab).
Sue Jenkins Jones was kind enough to send CDs of her work and the Textiles Futures program at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, in London. Very cool.
Ingrid Bachman's Interactive Textile Group at Hexagram (currently offline for updates) seems to be doing wonderful things, but, despite occassionally finding myself in Montreal, I have yet to manage a visit. In her presentation, she discussed a scarf she wove - the loom's movements were directed by seismographic information - and the resulting patterns on the scarf could be successfully read by seismologists. I thought about this earthquake scarf for weeks, and somewhere in my stacks of paper is an essay I wrote about it and the performance of science.
And the list goes on... I had never seen computing mesh so clearly with my ideas as did the work on interactive textiles! Voluptuous, intimate... beautiful.
But I have to admit I wasn't very interested in the discussions on surveillance ("dangerous zones") - with the exception of Konrad Becker's crazy-cool presentation on technology and social control. Steve Mann came at us through the ether and it was just disappointing...
SO - drawing on this conference, the latest edition of Horizon Zero looks at the public/private aspects of ubiquitous, wireless and wearable computing. All sorts of interesting stuff.
AND - I'd love to hear from people who recently attended either Ubicomp or Doors - is there any overlap between these discussions and what you saw?
Don't get me wrong - I met some great people!
Sha Xin Wei's work at GeorgiaTech's Topological Media Lab (along with sponge and foAm) is fascinating, and I thank him for always responding to my questions.
Maggie Orth and Joey Berzowska are doing amazing work at International Fashion Machines. And I was really impressed by Orth's dissertation (MIT Media Lab).
Sue Jenkins Jones was kind enough to send CDs of her work and the Textiles Futures program at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, in London. Very cool.
Ingrid Bachman's Interactive Textile Group at Hexagram (currently offline for updates) seems to be doing wonderful things, but, despite occassionally finding myself in Montreal, I have yet to manage a visit. In her presentation, she discussed a scarf she wove - the loom's movements were directed by seismographic information - and the resulting patterns on the scarf could be successfully read by seismologists. I thought about this earthquake scarf for weeks, and somewhere in my stacks of paper is an essay I wrote about it and the performance of science.
And the list goes on... I had never seen computing mesh so clearly with my ideas as did the work on interactive textiles! Voluptuous, intimate... beautiful.
But I have to admit I wasn't very interested in the discussions on surveillance ("dangerous zones") - with the exception of Konrad Becker's crazy-cool presentation on technology and social control. Steve Mann came at us through the ether and it was just disappointing...
SO - drawing on this conference, the latest edition of Horizon Zero looks at the public/private aspects of ubiquitous, wireless and wearable computing. All sorts of interesting stuff.
AND - I'd love to hear from people who recently attended either Ubicomp or Doors - is there any overlap between these discussions and what you saw?
Saturday, November 23
Sites that almost slipped by without mention - and that would have been a shame
Hope you enjoy these as much as I have:
Matt Webb's Interconnected
Fabio Sergio's Freegorifero
Chad Thornton's Brightly Colored Food
Stewart Butterfield's Sylloge
and Jonathan Jaynes' Diary of a Superfluous Man.
Matt Webb's Interconnected
Fabio Sergio's Freegorifero
Chad Thornton's Brightly Colored Food
Stewart Butterfield's Sylloge
and Jonathan Jaynes' Diary of a Superfluous Man.
Friday, November 22
Magical realism, Part 2
dearest anne,
stumbling upon your page amongst so many ones and zeros made me think of a certain ann (née) hathaway. i'll admit that i've not much to say at the moment, but i can say that there were some things on your web page that made me smile out loud. i didn't have the time to look at everything, but there were lines and words that made me think not only of a famously unknown jilted wife, but also of three enormous tableaux called something like 'man condemned to death' atop a hill in barcelona and of how the scent of bitter almonds inevitably reminded dr. urbino of the fate of unrequited love. that's enough for now...
with love and squalor,
...
wow.
stumbling upon your page amongst so many ones and zeros made me think of a certain ann (née) hathaway. i'll admit that i've not much to say at the moment, but i can say that there were some things on your web page that made me smile out loud. i didn't have the time to look at everything, but there were lines and words that made me think not only of a famously unknown jilted wife, but also of three enormous tableaux called something like 'man condemned to death' atop a hill in barcelona and of how the scent of bitter almonds inevitably reminded dr. urbino of the fate of unrequited love. that's enough for now...
with love and squalor,
...
wow.
Thank Wittgenstein
Christopher Robinson: "You heard it here first: We declare war on nouns! Nouns are evil. Nouns promise more than they can possibly deliver! Empty signifiers -- to hell with them all!"
Right on! Does this come in a t-shirt version?
Right on! Does this come in a t-shirt version?
Monumentality and dwelling
There's something about the relationship between monumental architecture, memory and dwelling:
space + time
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes "the monument thus effected a ‘consensus’... rendering it practical and concrete. The element of repression in it and the element of exaltation could scarcely be disentangled; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the repressive element was metamorphosed into exaltation." Somewhat, the appeal of a monumental space is its perceived ability to answer all our questions even before we ask them. That is, monuments are “imposing in their durability... [they] seem eternal, because [they] seem to have escaped time. Monumentality transcends death...”. In this way, monumental space is “greater” than human beings, as the unfortunate reality of decay and death is reformulated as a splendid living space. But Lefebvre reminds us that “this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power and knowledge have in common."
phenomenology
In order to understand how monumentality is produced, Lefebvre advocates a focus on the active “texture” of space, rather than on the “reading” of architecture and space as “texts”. Texture consists of spaces covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the anchors for these webs. And monuments have “horizons of meaning,” where different actions in different times constitute and reconstitute a multiplicity of meanings attached to that space: the “mortal ‘moment’ (or component) of the sign is temporarily abolished in monumental space."
"Monuments should not be looked upon as collections of symbols (even though every monument embodies symbols - sometimes archaic and incomprehensible ones), nor as chains of signs (even though every monumental whole is made up of signs). A monument is neither an object or an aggregation of diverse objects, even though its ‘objectality,’ its position as a social object, is recalled at every moment, perhaps by the brutality of the materials of masses involved, perhaps on the contrary, by their gentle procedures. It is neither a sculpture, nor a figure, nor simply the result of material procedures... What appears empty may turn out to be full [as the body] is transformed into a ‘property’ of monumental space, into symbols which are generally intrinsic parts of a politico-religious whole, into co-ordinated symbols."
poetics
And finally of interest here, Lefebvre describes two primary processes which function in monumental space: “1) Displacement, implying metonymy, the shift from part to whole, and contiguity; and 2) condensation, involving substitution, metaphor, and similarity." Social space, or the place of social practice, is condensed in monumental space. Each monumental space “becomes the metaphorical and quasi-metaphysical underpinning of society, this by virtue of a play of substitutions in which the religious and political realms symbolically (and ceremonially) exchange attributes - the attributes of power; in this way the authority of the sacred and the sacred aspect of authority are transferred back and forth, mutually reinforcing one another in the process."
Part II - How is monumentality lived?
space + time
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes "the monument thus effected a ‘consensus’... rendering it practical and concrete. The element of repression in it and the element of exaltation could scarcely be disentangled; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the repressive element was metamorphosed into exaltation." Somewhat, the appeal of a monumental space is its perceived ability to answer all our questions even before we ask them. That is, monuments are “imposing in their durability... [they] seem eternal, because [they] seem to have escaped time. Monumentality transcends death...”. In this way, monumental space is “greater” than human beings, as the unfortunate reality of decay and death is reformulated as a splendid living space. But Lefebvre reminds us that “this is a transformation, however, which serves what religion, (political) power and knowledge have in common."
phenomenology
In order to understand how monumentality is produced, Lefebvre advocates a focus on the active “texture” of space, rather than on the “reading” of architecture and space as “texts”. Texture consists of spaces covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the anchors for these webs. And monuments have “horizons of meaning,” where different actions in different times constitute and reconstitute a multiplicity of meanings attached to that space: the “mortal ‘moment’ (or component) of the sign is temporarily abolished in monumental space."
"Monuments should not be looked upon as collections of symbols (even though every monument embodies symbols - sometimes archaic and incomprehensible ones), nor as chains of signs (even though every monumental whole is made up of signs). A monument is neither an object or an aggregation of diverse objects, even though its ‘objectality,’ its position as a social object, is recalled at every moment, perhaps by the brutality of the materials of masses involved, perhaps on the contrary, by their gentle procedures. It is neither a sculpture, nor a figure, nor simply the result of material procedures... What appears empty may turn out to be full [as the body] is transformed into a ‘property’ of monumental space, into symbols which are generally intrinsic parts of a politico-religious whole, into co-ordinated symbols."
poetics
And finally of interest here, Lefebvre describes two primary processes which function in monumental space: “1) Displacement, implying metonymy, the shift from part to whole, and contiguity; and 2) condensation, involving substitution, metaphor, and similarity." Social space, or the place of social practice, is condensed in monumental space. Each monumental space “becomes the metaphorical and quasi-metaphysical underpinning of society, this by virtue of a play of substitutions in which the religious and political realms symbolically (and ceremonially) exchange attributes - the attributes of power; in this way the authority of the sacred and the sacred aspect of authority are transferred back and forth, mutually reinforcing one another in the process."
Part II - How is monumentality lived?
Stepping back for others
There's nothing so gratifying as being able to do what you do best, and then having others push it to do what they do best.
Fabio Sergio on structure, performance, building and the role of designers in evocation. And I love his final question: if buildings learn, what do they dream? This reminds me of someone in one of my classes a few years ago who wanted to know if cyborgs feel pain... These are my kind of questions ;)
Next on my task list: figure out the difference between emergence and evocation.
Fabio Sergio on structure, performance, building and the role of designers in evocation. And I love his final question: if buildings learn, what do they dream? This reminds me of someone in one of my classes a few years ago who wanted to know if cyborgs feel pain... These are my kind of questions ;)
Next on my task list: figure out the difference between emergence and evocation.
Thursday, November 21
Magical Realism
Macondo is a nice site dedicated to the work of master author Gabriel García Márquez (via plep).
Growing up in South America first introduced me to the literary tradition of magical realism, and a few years ago I had the pleasure of teaching a course in Latin American Studies for which I assigned One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the textbooks. Sometimes it was much easier getting students to think about things through a work of fiction, and this is one of the greatest.
On magical realism - something close to my heart: "These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales... These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic -- and sometimes highly effective -- experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic."
Brilliant and beautiful writing...
Growing up in South America first introduced me to the literary tradition of magical realism, and a few years ago I had the pleasure of teaching a course in Latin American Studies for which I assigned One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the textbooks. Sometimes it was much easier getting students to think about things through a work of fiction, and this is one of the greatest.
On magical realism - something close to my heart: "These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales... These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic -- and sometimes highly effective -- experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic."
Brilliant and beautiful writing...
Theory - Part 3
This brings me back to my post on social software because I implicated Mr. Shirky in those comments, and accordingly, if unwittingly, suggested something beyond my particular position or context. As field-notes, my comments are always placed in a broader context of study - of which readers may not be aware. And to be honest, I can't always find a way to make them relevant to everyone who reads them. (You may find it interesting that I tag my posts with certain words that help *me* remember other connections and hint at larger life experiences that impact my thinking. It's a way of tracking relationships between events and ideas.)
This morning I received a message from Mr. Shirky that expressed confusion over what the hell I was talking about - and not the expected confusion that arises when one cites D&G ;) I could have made it more explicit that I used his post as a way to jump to something else I was interested in. I've been working at textual analysis, and what caught my interest was the possibility of using constitutional documents to say something about online sociality. But again, as a theory wank, my concern really revolved around how these texts could be interpreted (there is never just one answer and every answer has its consequences). It was never my intention to suggest that his *goal* was to develop models for online social systems. He was quick to point out that he shares my sense that "human social relations defy systematization" and that he couldn't "understand what [I] read in those documents that led [me] to assume they were proposing such systems." First, I tend to believe that intentionality is not something we can get at, and it never occurred to me that I might be suggesting what such documents propose or intend. I was interested in what such documents might do - in the sense of what sorts of boundaries they create and how those boundaries impact sociability in particular spaces and times.
But this also suggests to me that Mr. Shirky and I are working with different notions of what constitutes a system, a problem I also acknowledged in my responses to Peter Merholz, as well as with different notions of what constitutes sociality. Truth is, I didn't provide clear definitions, and that led to generalisations and possible misunderstandings that could fuck things up. Anthropology and sociology use related, but different, definitions of systems than those employed in the hard sciences and engineering... and I fear I became involved in a conversation where we may have been speaking at cross-purposes. So, shame on me for not recognising this sooner! Add to this my understandings of sociality, which have nothing to do with the cognitive sciences, and we find ourselves in a mess ;)
Without wanting to be antagonistic, Mr. Shirky raised a point that I've already responded to him on, but that I think is worth opening up to broader discussion. He wrote that "These constitutions, in other words, are ways of governing without systematizing, and the simple automations in these systems (karma, posse mailing list, whatever) are ways of helping the core group, however defined, identify exactly those events that are most in need of human intervention. Seen in this light, a constitution is a kind of filter for identifying anomalous social events."
I would begin by arguing that there is no way to govern without systemisation (the question remains what might constitute any particular form or texture of systemisation) - so in that sense, I am interested in how boundaries are negotiated, in what remains fluid and what remains stable. This, of course, assumes that the role of any system or framework is, in part, to define what is relevant and what is not (the problem of context). These criteria need not be fixed or rigid, but I do not believe that these criteria are ever value-free. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that in the documents at hand, it can be difficult to identify the boundaries - and I completely agree - but that shouldn't absolve us of our responsibility to find the boundaries and try to understand even the most temporary of their implications. By claiming that *any* social event is anomalous it is implied that there is a norm which is being violated, that there is something that doesn't fit in the container.
And my task is to identify the container, figure out when and where it leaks, and what the implications or consequences are. And this brings us full-circle to my position as theory wank. I don't always succeed at making this information useful to people - and in that sense, I have indeed failed at what I consider an academic duty. But I can't let that stop me trying to answer my questions and I only hope that occasionally I am able to provide ideas that will help you answer your own questions...
Peace out.
This morning I received a message from Mr. Shirky that expressed confusion over what the hell I was talking about - and not the expected confusion that arises when one cites D&G ;) I could have made it more explicit that I used his post as a way to jump to something else I was interested in. I've been working at textual analysis, and what caught my interest was the possibility of using constitutional documents to say something about online sociality. But again, as a theory wank, my concern really revolved around how these texts could be interpreted (there is never just one answer and every answer has its consequences). It was never my intention to suggest that his *goal* was to develop models for online social systems. He was quick to point out that he shares my sense that "human social relations defy systematization" and that he couldn't "understand what [I] read in those documents that led [me] to assume they were proposing such systems." First, I tend to believe that intentionality is not something we can get at, and it never occurred to me that I might be suggesting what such documents propose or intend. I was interested in what such documents might do - in the sense of what sorts of boundaries they create and how those boundaries impact sociability in particular spaces and times.
But this also suggests to me that Mr. Shirky and I are working with different notions of what constitutes a system, a problem I also acknowledged in my responses to Peter Merholz, as well as with different notions of what constitutes sociality. Truth is, I didn't provide clear definitions, and that led to generalisations and possible misunderstandings that could fuck things up. Anthropology and sociology use related, but different, definitions of systems than those employed in the hard sciences and engineering... and I fear I became involved in a conversation where we may have been speaking at cross-purposes. So, shame on me for not recognising this sooner! Add to this my understandings of sociality, which have nothing to do with the cognitive sciences, and we find ourselves in a mess ;)
Without wanting to be antagonistic, Mr. Shirky raised a point that I've already responded to him on, but that I think is worth opening up to broader discussion. He wrote that "These constitutions, in other words, are ways of governing without systematizing, and the simple automations in these systems (karma, posse mailing list, whatever) are ways of helping the core group, however defined, identify exactly those events that are most in need of human intervention. Seen in this light, a constitution is a kind of filter for identifying anomalous social events."
I would begin by arguing that there is no way to govern without systemisation (the question remains what might constitute any particular form or texture of systemisation) - so in that sense, I am interested in how boundaries are negotiated, in what remains fluid and what remains stable. This, of course, assumes that the role of any system or framework is, in part, to define what is relevant and what is not (the problem of context). These criteria need not be fixed or rigid, but I do not believe that these criteria are ever value-free. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that in the documents at hand, it can be difficult to identify the boundaries - and I completely agree - but that shouldn't absolve us of our responsibility to find the boundaries and try to understand even the most temporary of their implications. By claiming that *any* social event is anomalous it is implied that there is a norm which is being violated, that there is something that doesn't fit in the container.
And my task is to identify the container, figure out when and where it leaks, and what the implications or consequences are. And this brings us full-circle to my position as theory wank. I don't always succeed at making this information useful to people - and in that sense, I have indeed failed at what I consider an academic duty. But I can't let that stop me trying to answer my questions and I only hope that occasionally I am able to provide ideas that will help you answer your own questions...
Peace out.
Theory - Part 2
Relatedly, I've been corresponding with Erik Peeters in South Africa about ethics and Hakim Bey's TAZ - and yesterday he took me to task:
"Anarchy sounds a lot better when you aren't starving to death. [Bey's take on art] appears to me to be uniquely applicable to western, and rich society. The challenge to art in South Africa is a lot more existential. Poets make no money, no-one, not even the most successful writers, gets to live off art alone. Thus I find the anarchy called for a little spurious - it is an anarchy you can afford because your continued survival is guaranteed by the well-fare state. Your personal course of study would be entirely impossible in South Africa - no-one would pay for your internet connection. Also, I find your concept of contexually contingent ethics highly dangerous. South Africa currently is gripped by an ethics of violence. If you go over there as a tourist, chances are almost even that you'll get raped, or killed. These are contextually contingent ethics - their origin can be studied and possibly analised. However, these ethics also threaten the life of my parents and parents-is-law. Under the circumstances, ethics suddenly become a lot less negotiable. The anarchy suggested by the internet is a rich man's anarchy - and it depends for its life on the very capitalist forces it pretends to abhor. Statements made about morals need to count in the place where people actually live, in the place where real choices have to be made. For instance, I can't afford much moral ambiguity in relation to the past of my country - either apartheid was wrong, or it was right. It leaves no space for grey areas."
Hmm. Theory meets practicality, and for Erik, theory loses the battle. I'll be the first to admit that he makes some really valid points about the digital divide, and ones that should never be ignored when discussing new technologies. And while I respectfully disagree about there being "no space for grey areas," I completely agree that ethics need to be local rather than global, and in that sense I am only ever writing from my position in the world. If you find yourself in a different situation, it's entirely possible that you will have no use for my ramblings.
"Anarchy sounds a lot better when you aren't starving to death. [Bey's take on art] appears to me to be uniquely applicable to western, and rich society. The challenge to art in South Africa is a lot more existential. Poets make no money, no-one, not even the most successful writers, gets to live off art alone. Thus I find the anarchy called for a little spurious - it is an anarchy you can afford because your continued survival is guaranteed by the well-fare state. Your personal course of study would be entirely impossible in South Africa - no-one would pay for your internet connection. Also, I find your concept of contexually contingent ethics highly dangerous. South Africa currently is gripped by an ethics of violence. If you go over there as a tourist, chances are almost even that you'll get raped, or killed. These are contextually contingent ethics - their origin can be studied and possibly analised. However, these ethics also threaten the life of my parents and parents-is-law. Under the circumstances, ethics suddenly become a lot less negotiable. The anarchy suggested by the internet is a rich man's anarchy - and it depends for its life on the very capitalist forces it pretends to abhor. Statements made about morals need to count in the place where people actually live, in the place where real choices have to be made. For instance, I can't afford much moral ambiguity in relation to the past of my country - either apartheid was wrong, or it was right. It leaves no space for grey areas."
Hmm. Theory meets practicality, and for Erik, theory loses the battle. I'll be the first to admit that he makes some really valid points about the digital divide, and ones that should never be ignored when discussing new technologies. And while I respectfully disagree about there being "no space for grey areas," I completely agree that ethics need to be local rather than global, and in that sense I am only ever writing from my position in the world. If you find yourself in a different situation, it's entirely possible that you will have no use for my ramblings.
On being a Theory Wank
My friends are right - I am a qualitative theory wank - with all the good and bad that comes with that. And the past 48 hours have really given me a taste of what that can mean ;)
So let me start by telling you what PLSJ means to me. By the time I finished my BA in anthropology I was convinced that anthropologists create a peculiar type of cultural knowledge because they do not give people access to their field notes. Last month I posted some comments on the role of reflexivity and transparency in the production of academic knowledge. I set up this site as a way to engage these topics as I do my research. But it turns out that my professors had a point - we can't anticipate people's responses to our thinking out loud and that sometimes causes problems. I still believe that posting my research notes serves a valuable purpose, even if it serves me most of all ;) I would much rather engage people with half-baked ideas than to simply give access to my final response (which can seem more definitive than it actually is). I'm flaky, and hopeful, enough to believe that by doing so, I open rather than close the discursive space. I am a qualitative researcher and, accordingly, it is never my task or goal to tell you "what it all means"...
So why all this concern? On Tuesday I did some thinking out loud about social software and since then I have received an unusual amount of correspondence. First, let me say that I was really pleased to hear from so many intelligent people, and even a little flattered that they would find my comments interesting. But I also seemed to have stumbled upon a community about which I know very little. I am not a techie, and I only occasionally practice at design. That either group of people would find my research as anything but tangential to their practice comes as a bit of a surprise! And I promise I will respond to each of you individually as I get the time.
As I've said many times, my primary concern is social and cultural theory and I work with examples of, and ideas around, new technologies to advance these theories. I am often reminded by my friends that being a theorist is a dangerous job - in many ways we don't need to answer practical concerns and that can be quite off-putting to people who actually need to accomplish something "real". I never forget my place of privilege: I am supported by the State - by Canadian taxpayers - to think about things and to imagine different realities. And while that may indeed be work, it sure as hell isn't considered a job.
So let me start by telling you what PLSJ means to me. By the time I finished my BA in anthropology I was convinced that anthropologists create a peculiar type of cultural knowledge because they do not give people access to their field notes. Last month I posted some comments on the role of reflexivity and transparency in the production of academic knowledge. I set up this site as a way to engage these topics as I do my research. But it turns out that my professors had a point - we can't anticipate people's responses to our thinking out loud and that sometimes causes problems. I still believe that posting my research notes serves a valuable purpose, even if it serves me most of all ;) I would much rather engage people with half-baked ideas than to simply give access to my final response (which can seem more definitive than it actually is). I'm flaky, and hopeful, enough to believe that by doing so, I open rather than close the discursive space. I am a qualitative researcher and, accordingly, it is never my task or goal to tell you "what it all means"...
So why all this concern? On Tuesday I did some thinking out loud about social software and since then I have received an unusual amount of correspondence. First, let me say that I was really pleased to hear from so many intelligent people, and even a little flattered that they would find my comments interesting. But I also seemed to have stumbled upon a community about which I know very little. I am not a techie, and I only occasionally practice at design. That either group of people would find my research as anything but tangential to their practice comes as a bit of a surprise! And I promise I will respond to each of you individually as I get the time.
As I've said many times, my primary concern is social and cultural theory and I work with examples of, and ideas around, new technologies to advance these theories. I am often reminded by my friends that being a theorist is a dangerous job - in many ways we don't need to answer practical concerns and that can be quite off-putting to people who actually need to accomplish something "real". I never forget my place of privilege: I am supported by the State - by Canadian taxpayers - to think about things and to imagine different realities. And while that may indeed be work, it sure as hell isn't considered a job.
Wednesday, November 20
Ack! Not more on social software!
Recently pointed at Matt Webb's comments on social rhetoric. Interesting.
And I've had a chance to think about some of Peter Merholz's comments on my earlier post. BTW Peter, thanks for outing my insecurities so clearly ;)
After reading them the first time, I went to chat with one of my Phd committee members - someone who very much appreciates a systems approach to sociality. As he pointed out, systems thinking stands out simply because it focusses our attention on relationships rather than on elements. I guess I had taken that focus for granted (never underestimate what different generations of scholars are exposed to - or the influence my supervisor will have on my thinking for years to come), and I was more concerned with what comes after that.
Our conversation leads me to qualify a statement I made in my post: since there are many types of systems thinking, I should better articulate which kinds strike me as inadequate. And I'll have to get back to you on that one ;) The only thing I can say right now is that I respectfully disagree with Peter that systems thinking has always given us adequate accounts of biological, let alone social, systems. *Strict* systems thinking is far too contained - too concerned with order and purity - for my liking. Sometimes Science has a nasty habit of presenting interpretation as fact; my basic position is that scientific knowledge is no less constructed than social knowledge (it is social knowledge?), and I take issue with certain ontological and epistemological assumptions... but I was reminded of Michel Serres' take on unstable systems, and I see a lot of merit there.
And Peter's comments about academics and non-academics are very valuable to me. I do try not to use a lot of jargon when I write, but I do forget sometimes that readers may not have been exposed to people and ideas I take for granted. (Once you have the words for certain ideas, it's hard not to use them.) Having said that, it's a bit difficult to provide adequate context for a broad readership. He writes: "The Web is an amazing entity in part because it allows for a fairly seamless bridging of academic and non-academic life." True, but it seems that we still have a language/worldview barrier to overcome; negotiating a shared vocabulary is not always easy. I've added some links to my earlier post in an attempt to provide some context...
But it was the final comments that made me smile the most! Alas, Peter and everyone else will have to bear with me on those questions. If I had all the answers, I'd be defending my dissertation tomorrow ;)
And I've had a chance to think about some of Peter Merholz's comments on my earlier post. BTW Peter, thanks for outing my insecurities so clearly ;)
After reading them the first time, I went to chat with one of my Phd committee members - someone who very much appreciates a systems approach to sociality. As he pointed out, systems thinking stands out simply because it focusses our attention on relationships rather than on elements. I guess I had taken that focus for granted (never underestimate what different generations of scholars are exposed to - or the influence my supervisor will have on my thinking for years to come), and I was more concerned with what comes after that.
Our conversation leads me to qualify a statement I made in my post: since there are many types of systems thinking, I should better articulate which kinds strike me as inadequate. And I'll have to get back to you on that one ;) The only thing I can say right now is that I respectfully disagree with Peter that systems thinking has always given us adequate accounts of biological, let alone social, systems. *Strict* systems thinking is far too contained - too concerned with order and purity - for my liking. Sometimes Science has a nasty habit of presenting interpretation as fact; my basic position is that scientific knowledge is no less constructed than social knowledge (it is social knowledge?), and I take issue with certain ontological and epistemological assumptions... but I was reminded of Michel Serres' take on unstable systems, and I see a lot of merit there.
And Peter's comments about academics and non-academics are very valuable to me. I do try not to use a lot of jargon when I write, but I do forget sometimes that readers may not have been exposed to people and ideas I take for granted. (Once you have the words for certain ideas, it's hard not to use them.) Having said that, it's a bit difficult to provide adequate context for a broad readership. He writes: "The Web is an amazing entity in part because it allows for a fairly seamless bridging of academic and non-academic life." True, but it seems that we still have a language/worldview barrier to overcome; negotiating a shared vocabulary is not always easy. I've added some links to my earlier post in an attempt to provide some context...
But it was the final comments that made me smile the most! Alas, Peter and everyone else will have to bear with me on those questions. If I had all the answers, I'd be defending my dissertation tomorrow ;)
Looking for the collective?
If the idea of Smart Mobs gets you all excited, or if you're just interested in collective or group behaviour, I highly recommend two books:
1.) Elias Canetti on Crowds and Power. I particularly enjoy Canetti's take on the mobile vulgus, the moveable or excitable crowd.
Canetti offers an explanation of the ways crowds form, develop, and dissolve, using taxonomies of collective (masse) movement as keys to the dynamics of sociality and sociability. And Canetti’s crowds are performed as collective multiplicities, actual and virtual, de-differentiated and always already present. For Canetti, the most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge: “Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it.” This moment is one of de-territorialisation, when we are freed from the burdens of distance; but during a discharge the crowd is also an illusion, in danger of dissipating and being re-territorialised and closed. The destructiveness of crowds is an attack on all boundaries, and de-territorialisation makes possible the crossing of boundaries. To this, Canetti adds the eruption: the sudden transition from a closed to open crowd, the crowd overflowing. So the performances that bind the crowd may also push the boundaries of the crowd until it disintegrates. “The crowd is open so long as its growth is not impeded; it is closed when its growth is limited… The stagnating crowd lives for its discharge… the process here starts not with equality but with density… In the rhythmic crowd… density and equality coincide from the beginning. Everything here depends on movement." The rhythmic, or throbbing crowd is characterised by a specific state of communal excitement: “the means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied,” not moving, but gathering intensity at one place and creating frenzy. In this sense, the stagnating (closed) crowd is always becoming the rhythmic (open) crowd.
2.) Michel Mafessoli's The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. The mobile vulgus can also recall the place or experience of (collective) recognition, of memory, and of Mafessoli's "ethic of aesthetics."
1.) Elias Canetti on Crowds and Power. I particularly enjoy Canetti's take on the mobile vulgus, the moveable or excitable crowd.
Canetti offers an explanation of the ways crowds form, develop, and dissolve, using taxonomies of collective (masse) movement as keys to the dynamics of sociality and sociability. And Canetti’s crowds are performed as collective multiplicities, actual and virtual, de-differentiated and always already present. For Canetti, the most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge: “Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it.” This moment is one of de-territorialisation, when we are freed from the burdens of distance; but during a discharge the crowd is also an illusion, in danger of dissipating and being re-territorialised and closed. The destructiveness of crowds is an attack on all boundaries, and de-territorialisation makes possible the crossing of boundaries. To this, Canetti adds the eruption: the sudden transition from a closed to open crowd, the crowd overflowing. So the performances that bind the crowd may also push the boundaries of the crowd until it disintegrates. “The crowd is open so long as its growth is not impeded; it is closed when its growth is limited… The stagnating crowd lives for its discharge… the process here starts not with equality but with density… In the rhythmic crowd… density and equality coincide from the beginning. Everything here depends on movement." The rhythmic, or throbbing crowd is characterised by a specific state of communal excitement: “the means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied,” not moving, but gathering intensity at one place and creating frenzy. In this sense, the stagnating (closed) crowd is always becoming the rhythmic (open) crowd.
2.) Michel Mafessoli's The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. The mobile vulgus can also recall the place or experience of (collective) recognition, of memory, and of Mafessoli's "ethic of aesthetics."
Tuesday, November 19
Understanding Play: Games and Storytelling
Got some interesting links today from Prof. Dennis G. Jerz on Interactive Fiction. Amongst other things, he's working on this IF glossary and book.
This led me to Roger Giner-Sorolla's 1996 Crimes Against Mimesis (any aspect of an IF game that breaks the coherence of its fictional world as a representation of reality.) He writes, "There are three possible elements of challenge in a game: coordination, chance, and problem-solving. Chess is an example of a game that is pure problem-solving; a slot machine is a game that is pure chance; and a shooting gallery is a game that is a pure test of hand-eye coordination." (I am reminded that several people wrote to discuss play as problem-solving, which does not easily fit into the categories I mentioned earlier.) In terms of my initial criteria of simulation or mimicry, Dr. Jerz also points at Emily Short's Desiderata for a Physical Simulation Library.
I mentioned Espen Aarseth's book Cybertext a few days ago, and certainly Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen know way more about this stuff than I do... And at Peter's suggestion, I'm also tracking down a copy of If/Then: Design Implications of New Media.
And now this makes me wonder how we might distinguish between play and games. Justin wrote that "the most obvious differentiation that I can come up with is that a game generally has a pre-determined win/lose state, whereas play may continue indefinitely. This, of course, has its exceptions..." and he pointed me at Danny Hills' keynote at the Game Developer's Conference "back in 2000 where, among other things, he discussed the how's and why's of Play, and also talked about why Play is so important."
Thanks for the wonderful feedback - I've got some interesting ideas to work with.
This led me to Roger Giner-Sorolla's 1996 Crimes Against Mimesis (any aspect of an IF game that breaks the coherence of its fictional world as a representation of reality.) He writes, "There are three possible elements of challenge in a game: coordination, chance, and problem-solving. Chess is an example of a game that is pure problem-solving; a slot machine is a game that is pure chance; and a shooting gallery is a game that is a pure test of hand-eye coordination." (I am reminded that several people wrote to discuss play as problem-solving, which does not easily fit into the categories I mentioned earlier.) In terms of my initial criteria of simulation or mimicry, Dr. Jerz also points at Emily Short's Desiderata for a Physical Simulation Library.
I mentioned Espen Aarseth's book Cybertext a few days ago, and certainly Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen know way more about this stuff than I do... And at Peter's suggestion, I'm also tracking down a copy of If/Then: Design Implications of New Media.
And now this makes me wonder how we might distinguish between play and games. Justin wrote that "the most obvious differentiation that I can come up with is that a game generally has a pre-determined win/lose state, whereas play may continue indefinitely. This, of course, has its exceptions..." and he pointed me at Danny Hills' keynote at the Game Developer's Conference "back in 2000 where, among other things, he discussed the how's and why's of Play, and also talked about why Play is so important."
Thanks for the wonderful feedback - I've got some interesting ideas to work with.
More on social software
As the current BoingBoing guest blogger, Clay Shirky is collecting a list of formal constitutional documents for research into what works in social software. "In keeping with the great tradition of chaos in online social systems, everything here documents some crisis or period of prolonged difficulty. These documents are concrete wisdom about social software."
LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction, by the Wizards of LambdaMOO -- The wizards depart, and then return quite crankily.
How Did the Moderation System Develop? from the slashdot FAQ. -- Gaming the system as the principle concern of system design.
Our Replies to Our Critics from the Wikipedia FAQ -- Leverage for a core group to keep things on an even keel.
Okay - let me see if I understand correctly: 1. Online social systems are chaotic. 2. Chaos creates crisis and order emerges as codified constitutional documents. 3. Constitutional documents represent concrete social wisdom. 4. Wise online social systems are ordered.
As an academic, my primary interest is social and cultural theory as related to virtual spaces and new technologies. So my concern here is what notions of sociality are being employed in the definition(s) of social software. This may seem tangential to design, but I would argue that the models we use to develop new technologies actually help constitute our experience of the social. In other words, technologies are never neutral, and the relationship between people and technology is one of reciprocal construction.
So how is sociality being defined? In a word, as a system. A quick-and-dirty history of social systems theory begins (and ends?) with functionalism, the most influential form of social explanation for much of the past century. The functionalist perspective holds that society, as a system, is separated from the external environment by a boundary that maintains internal order. At the micro level, interaction between people can be viewed as a functional system: the interaction will have a purpose, and the social system of rules and conventions, strictly speaking, coordinates not the people but their actions. For theorists like Niklas Luhmann, this is a good thing, as it removes the burden of responsibility from individuals. For theorists like Habermas, this poses a threat as it removes society from the control of the people who constitute it. (I filtched this bit from a textbook, so please forgive the generalisations.)
At the risk of alienating myself from every computer engineer and challenging conventional design wisdom, my position is that systems theory is completely incapable of explaining the richness of human interaction and sociability. And I don't want new technologies designed along those lines, because I don't want my experiences as a social creature to be defined in those ways.
Working as an information architect allows me to indulge my desire to bring order to chaos, to impose control. But I'm no longer convinced that should be my goal.
Dervin outlines how we have understood the concept of information over time:
1. Information describes an ordered reality.
2. Information describes an ordered reality but can be "found" only by those with the proper observing skills and technologies.
3. Information describes an ordered reality that varies across time and space.
4. Information describes an ordered reality that varies from culture to culture.
5. Information describes an ordered reality that varies from person to person.
6. Information is an instrument of power imposed in discourse on those without power.
7. Information imposes order on a chaotic reality.
8. Information is a tool designed by human beings to make sense of a reality assumed to be both chaotic and orderly.
Definitions 2-7 are variations on definition 1: all rely on notions of a fixed and orderly reality against chaos. Definition 8, on the other hand, allows for the experience of a world simultaneously ordered and chaotic. While Dervin may partially rely on notions of unity, she moves us away from notions of order and denies notions of purity by creating a hybrid definition of information.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that every social phenomena faces escapes and inversions, and it is in these lines of flight, where there is leaking between segments, that sociality escapes organisation and centralisation. And so it is to these lines that we must look to find the socially meaningful. De-territorialisation is characterised in terms of nomadic subjectivity, and nomadism is based on freedom of movement, on choice, on becoming. Nomadic space is smooth, without features, undifferentiated from other spaces. Nomadology itself is a line of flight, a process which constantly resists the sedentary and the fixed.
In other words, it's not about being inside or outside of a system, but rather about trajectories of movement, or directionality. So when it comes to using constitutional documents as a means of understanding sociality, we are stuck defining this process as one of containment. In any process of containment, we must define "in" and "out" - and this is, by definition, reductive and exclusionary.
Last year I wrote a paper on the Hacker Jargon File as allegory. We could view the Jargon File as the definitive statement on hacker culture, but we would be remiss if we neglected how the editor(s) decide what constitutes hacker jargon, or the criteria for inclusion in the lexicon. The Jargon File itself is both absolute and relative: there is such a thing as the “hacker community,” the people and practices involved in constructing, maintaining, sharing and changing the file; and yet the “community” remains heterogeneous and unfixed. The file itself is in a state of flux, as a “living document,” never finished. It contextualises, decontextualises and recontextualises hacker slang and shared meaning. And my analysis does the same. And so too the authors of each text are contextualized, decontextualised and recontextualised in the process of reading and writing. Together we make an unruly bunch, difficult to pin down, to stabilise, even temporarily. At this point, instead of trying to bring order to this chaos, to stop the flow, to say “what it all means,” I want to draw attention to the sense of mobility, of leakage. For if I can say anything about these objects and subjects, I can say that they do not cooperate with traditional notions of object and subject. These categories resist me, and I resist them; we may even contradict each other. All I can do is point to these places of movement, of contradiction, of interpellation. My exercise then becomes one of allegory – to represent that which cannot be represented. I can write of texture, but not of form. I can “evoke but not describe.”
So now I'm working on how technologies can be designed to evoke, rather than to describe; to perform rather than to represent...
LambdaMOO Takes A New Direction, by the Wizards of LambdaMOO -- The wizards depart, and then return quite crankily.
How Did the Moderation System Develop? from the slashdot FAQ. -- Gaming the system as the principle concern of system design.
Our Replies to Our Critics from the Wikipedia FAQ -- Leverage for a core group to keep things on an even keel.
Okay - let me see if I understand correctly: 1. Online social systems are chaotic. 2. Chaos creates crisis and order emerges as codified constitutional documents. 3. Constitutional documents represent concrete social wisdom. 4. Wise online social systems are ordered.
As an academic, my primary interest is social and cultural theory as related to virtual spaces and new technologies. So my concern here is what notions of sociality are being employed in the definition(s) of social software. This may seem tangential to design, but I would argue that the models we use to develop new technologies actually help constitute our experience of the social. In other words, technologies are never neutral, and the relationship between people and technology is one of reciprocal construction.
So how is sociality being defined? In a word, as a system. A quick-and-dirty history of social systems theory begins (and ends?) with functionalism, the most influential form of social explanation for much of the past century. The functionalist perspective holds that society, as a system, is separated from the external environment by a boundary that maintains internal order. At the micro level, interaction between people can be viewed as a functional system: the interaction will have a purpose, and the social system of rules and conventions, strictly speaking, coordinates not the people but their actions. For theorists like Niklas Luhmann, this is a good thing, as it removes the burden of responsibility from individuals. For theorists like Habermas, this poses a threat as it removes society from the control of the people who constitute it. (I filtched this bit from a textbook, so please forgive the generalisations.)
At the risk of alienating myself from every computer engineer and challenging conventional design wisdom, my position is that systems theory is completely incapable of explaining the richness of human interaction and sociability. And I don't want new technologies designed along those lines, because I don't want my experiences as a social creature to be defined in those ways.
Working as an information architect allows me to indulge my desire to bring order to chaos, to impose control. But I'm no longer convinced that should be my goal.
Dervin outlines how we have understood the concept of information over time:
1. Information describes an ordered reality.
2. Information describes an ordered reality but can be "found" only by those with the proper observing skills and technologies.
3. Information describes an ordered reality that varies across time and space.
4. Information describes an ordered reality that varies from culture to culture.
5. Information describes an ordered reality that varies from person to person.
6. Information is an instrument of power imposed in discourse on those without power.
7. Information imposes order on a chaotic reality.
8. Information is a tool designed by human beings to make sense of a reality assumed to be both chaotic and orderly.
Definitions 2-7 are variations on definition 1: all rely on notions of a fixed and orderly reality against chaos. Definition 8, on the other hand, allows for the experience of a world simultaneously ordered and chaotic. While Dervin may partially rely on notions of unity, she moves us away from notions of order and denies notions of purity by creating a hybrid definition of information.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that every social phenomena faces escapes and inversions, and it is in these lines of flight, where there is leaking between segments, that sociality escapes organisation and centralisation. And so it is to these lines that we must look to find the socially meaningful. De-territorialisation is characterised in terms of nomadic subjectivity, and nomadism is based on freedom of movement, on choice, on becoming. Nomadic space is smooth, without features, undifferentiated from other spaces. Nomadology itself is a line of flight, a process which constantly resists the sedentary and the fixed.
In other words, it's not about being inside or outside of a system, but rather about trajectories of movement, or directionality. So when it comes to using constitutional documents as a means of understanding sociality, we are stuck defining this process as one of containment. In any process of containment, we must define "in" and "out" - and this is, by definition, reductive and exclusionary.
Last year I wrote a paper on the Hacker Jargon File as allegory. We could view the Jargon File as the definitive statement on hacker culture, but we would be remiss if we neglected how the editor(s) decide what constitutes hacker jargon, or the criteria for inclusion in the lexicon. The Jargon File itself is both absolute and relative: there is such a thing as the “hacker community,” the people and practices involved in constructing, maintaining, sharing and changing the file; and yet the “community” remains heterogeneous and unfixed. The file itself is in a state of flux, as a “living document,” never finished. It contextualises, decontextualises and recontextualises hacker slang and shared meaning. And my analysis does the same. And so too the authors of each text are contextualized, decontextualised and recontextualised in the process of reading and writing. Together we make an unruly bunch, difficult to pin down, to stabilise, even temporarily. At this point, instead of trying to bring order to this chaos, to stop the flow, to say “what it all means,” I want to draw attention to the sense of mobility, of leakage. For if I can say anything about these objects and subjects, I can say that they do not cooperate with traditional notions of object and subject. These categories resist me, and I resist them; we may even contradict each other. All I can do is point to these places of movement, of contradiction, of interpellation. My exercise then becomes one of allegory – to represent that which cannot be represented. I can write of texture, but not of form. I can “evoke but not describe.”
So now I'm working on how technologies can be designed to evoke, rather than to describe; to perform rather than to represent...
Monday, November 18
The Stooges
If there's a song out there that bears your name, may it be as wickedly sweet as Iggy and the Stooges "Ann" (1969)
you took my arm and you broke my will / you made me shiver with a real thrill / you took my arm and we walked along / down the road to a quiet song / i looked into your cool cool eyes / i felt so fine, i felt so fine / i floated in your swimming pools / i felt so weak, i felt so blue / ann, my ann / i love you / ann, my ann / i love you right now!
you took my arm and you broke my will / you made me shiver with a real thrill / you took my arm and we walked along / down the road to a quiet song / i looked into your cool cool eyes / i felt so fine, i felt so fine / i floated in your swimming pools / i felt so weak, i felt so blue / ann, my ann / i love you / ann, my ann / i love you right now!
Too much time?
Check out this cool clock. (Thanks Jason!)
And as if I didn't have anything better to do - I went shopping for my nephews' Christmas present, a Logiblocs Super-Inventor Kit. How cool is that?!
And as if I didn't have anything better to do - I went shopping for my nephews' Christmas present, a Logiblocs Super-Inventor Kit. How cool is that?!
Chronicles of a PhD, or Tales of Ordinary Madness
Bukowski knew it well: we're Perverse Creatures. And I'm okay with that.
In a recent attempt to grasp some personal goings-on, I reread parts of D&G's A Thousand Plateaus. It consoles me ;)
But now I'm all fixated on de-territorialisation, re-territorialisation and lines of flight... and for sure that's a space of perversion.
In a recent attempt to grasp some personal goings-on, I reread parts of D&G's A Thousand Plateaus. It consoles me ;)
But now I'm all fixated on de-territorialisation, re-territorialisation and lines of flight... and for sure that's a space of perversion.
I'd like to know how you play
I'm currently zipping through the literature on PLAY - and four types repeatedly come up: games of chance, games of competition, games of simulation or mimicry, and games of vertigo (making your head spin). The first thing I do when I read something is to gauge it against my own experience - and so I find myself thinking that I gravitate towards games of competition and vertigo.
I was one of those kids who loved spinning round and round until I fell over. Now I actively seek out mental vertigo - the practice of cramming a bunch of disparate ideas into my brain and spinning them about to see what happens. I am a geek and I love this. But the competition thing makes me a little uncomfortable: I'm not much of a fan of organised sport (with the exception of the World Cup and rugby), religion or rampant capitalism - and yet I find myself inescapably drawn to the world of academia, with its inherent competitiveness. (We'll just skip any psychoanalysis of this...)
My concern is that these types of play inadequately account for social interaction in space and time. There is a tendency to regard playfulness as a separate space (one of leisure rather than work) and, consequently, as non-productive behaviour. And that doesn't seem right to me. As much as I believe that we don't always interact in order to achieve something, I'm suspicious of any account that claims our interactions are non-productive. Of course, the question then becomes "What is being created?"
So, while I can only offer my gratitude for helping me with my research, what I would love to know is: How, When and Where do you play? And if you're so inclined, try to give a stab at what you think is produced through your playfulness. That would be way cool ;)
I was one of those kids who loved spinning round and round until I fell over. Now I actively seek out mental vertigo - the practice of cramming a bunch of disparate ideas into my brain and spinning them about to see what happens. I am a geek and I love this. But the competition thing makes me a little uncomfortable: I'm not much of a fan of organised sport (with the exception of the World Cup and rugby), religion or rampant capitalism - and yet I find myself inescapably drawn to the world of academia, with its inherent competitiveness. (We'll just skip any psychoanalysis of this...)
My concern is that these types of play inadequately account for social interaction in space and time. There is a tendency to regard playfulness as a separate space (one of leisure rather than work) and, consequently, as non-productive behaviour. And that doesn't seem right to me. As much as I believe that we don't always interact in order to achieve something, I'm suspicious of any account that claims our interactions are non-productive. Of course, the question then becomes "What is being created?"
So, while I can only offer my gratitude for helping me with my research, what I would love to know is: How, When and Where do you play? And if you're so inclined, try to give a stab at what you think is produced through your playfulness. That would be way cool ;)
On qualitative methods and textual analysis
After reading Christine A. Barry's Choosing Qualitative Data Analysis Software, I've been playing with ATLAS.ti, NVivo and N6 - software packages that allow you to code qualitative data into hermeneutic units.
I wanted to try it out on a small project of tangential interest before applying it in my PhD research - I guess I just want to have some idea of the limitations and implications for knowledge production. And coding information is never a value-free process. After all, we need to tell the software what to look for, and by asking some questions rather than others, I delineate boundaries of inquiry and interpretation. As Barry points out, "The main worries are: that it will distance people from their data; that it will lead to qualitative data being analysed quantitatively; that it will lead to increasing homogeneity in methods of data analysis; and that it might be a monster and hi-jack the analysis... [and some] features might indeed lead researchers to perform types of analysis more suited to quantitative data. Counting occurrences, giving more weight to more frequent events, ignoring isolated incidences, and formulating and testing out rigid hypotheses are not sensible ways to analyse qualitative data. This type of analysis would lead to clashes between method and approaches to epistemology and explanation favoured by qualitative researchers."
Already I am concerned with the inability to deal adequately with rhetorical or narrative analysis, and I might need to turn to a program like Ethno2 for event structure analysis - although I'm equally concerned with the limitations of any analysis that seeks to structure data sequentially, and suggest causal relationships...
I wanted to try it out on a small project of tangential interest before applying it in my PhD research - I guess I just want to have some idea of the limitations and implications for knowledge production. And coding information is never a value-free process. After all, we need to tell the software what to look for, and by asking some questions rather than others, I delineate boundaries of inquiry and interpretation. As Barry points out, "The main worries are: that it will distance people from their data; that it will lead to qualitative data being analysed quantitatively; that it will lead to increasing homogeneity in methods of data analysis; and that it might be a monster and hi-jack the analysis... [and some] features might indeed lead researchers to perform types of analysis more suited to quantitative data. Counting occurrences, giving more weight to more frequent events, ignoring isolated incidences, and formulating and testing out rigid hypotheses are not sensible ways to analyse qualitative data. This type of analysis would lead to clashes between method and approaches to epistemology and explanation favoured by qualitative researchers."
Already I am concerned with the inability to deal adequately with rhetorical or narrative analysis, and I might need to turn to a program like Ethno2 for event structure analysis - although I'm equally concerned with the limitations of any analysis that seeks to structure data sequentially, and suggest causal relationships...