Epistemographer

Just in case anybody’s been wondering where I’ve been the past few days, here’s the update…

On Sunday morning, Jenny’s dad had a heart attack in synagogue. Luckily, both a doctor and a defibrillator were on hand, and within a few minutes he was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. He wound up having emergency bypass surgery, and I drove out to Cleveland Sunday to be with Jenny and her mom. Right now, her dad’s recovering as well as could be hoped – when not under sedation, he’s alert and responsive, can answer questions and recognizes friends and family. While it’s going to be a long road ahead, things look hopeful.

I’ll be in Cleveland for the next few days at least – right now, needless to say, everything’s kind of up in the air…

Phoebe Sengers just presented an interesting critique of S&TS, arguing that as we’ve been discussing it this weekend, there are several aspects which in fact obstruct S&TS from engaging with engineers and designers in HCI and other cultures. In essence, her argument is that in emphasizing itself as an academic discipline, S&TS has erected boundaries around itself, which have the effect of closing out interesting connections with other research.

This is an interesting angle, especially for the crowd gathered in this room. Cornell has been one of the pioneers of a certain flavor of Science & Technology Studies (yesterday, Sheila Jasanoff discussed the ways in which even the placement of the ampersand in S&TS as opposed to ST&S is a political move that reflects the Cornell project of building S&TS as a discipline), and most of the people here are pretty much within the core set of S&TS practice. The “Making Digital Stuff“ panel, and Phoebe more particularly, seem very interested in connecting S&TS with other kinds of research, which would have positives and negatives. On the plus side, expanding the boundary of S&TS (or rendering it a little more diffuse) would bring more researchers under the big tent, researchers who according to Phoebe and others are already reading S&TS literature and see themselves as doing resonant work. On the other hand, between the Science Wars and countless institutional battles, the erection of S&TS as a discipline itself rather than an interdisciplinary collective has been essential to the accumulation of the institutional resources and power which are essential to the practice of scholarship, both on the departmental and individual level.

Sometimes, I wonder which course S&TS will follow – will it become a real and tangible field like English or Political Science, or will it eventually become a sort of virtual discipline like Marxism, offering a way to view the world and a set of theoretical tools with which to do so, but without any of the trappings of a more explicit discipline (departments, PhD programs, endowed chairs, etc.)…

Was so tired last night, I went to bed at 11:00 pm. Woke up at 6:15 am, decided that was too early, set my alarm for 8:00 and went back to sleep. Woke up at 11:15. Argh indeed.

On a campus like Cornell’s, you’d like to think that it would be relatively easy to get a wireless internet connection up and running. Unfortunately, the campus wireless network is a patchwork of balkanized zones, with one overarching initiative linking some of them, but which doesn’t cover any of the buildings in which the Science & Technology Studies department lives and works.

To get a wireless connection on the seventh floor of Clark Hall (where this conference is), I had to go to a small room in the basement and plead with some network admins to add my MAC address to the list for their special, standalone wireless access point. Pain in the butt, but I’m online now.

Stuff like this:

I’ve also been hired, for this tour, as the unofficial spokesperson for Music For America, a political action committee run by smart young people. According to the mission statement for Music For America, “We believe that the Democratic Party has become a pale shadow of the progressive powerhouse it once was. Many of its leaders reject the energy and enthusiasm of youth and abandon all ties to music and art ‚Äî a source of strength in the party for decades ‚Äî in favor of bland centrism, or worse, a blind parroting of Republican ideology.”

I have no idea what the hell that means, but they made some nice stickers with my name on them, and I will pimp them mightily.

Note the time on this – I’m backsliding into old, insomniac habits something fierce. I blame the pristine, mountain air up here, or something.

I’ll be spending Friday through Sunday at a conference hosted by my department. If I can snag a wireless connection in the room the sessions are in, I’ll try to blog it a bit – if not, I’ll post some synopses afterward…

Been meaning to write something about this for a few days, but I’ve had my hands full…

A few days ago, Alex at Relevant History wrote about the rise of the “amateur” vs. the “professional” with regard to blogs:

Some people have taken umbrage with the term “amateurization,” on the grounds that it’s pejorative: empowerment is what’s going on, they argue. But I think that the term “amateur” is exactly the right one— if we know who amateurs once were, and what being an amateur meant. Essentially, bloggers are operating a system that Victorian gentleman scientists would have recognized immediately.

I’d add that Alex’s point seems to tie in with something I wrote about a few days ago, the distinction between buying and tipping. One doesn’t tip a professional, because by definition they are producing a good or service for a fee. The Victorian amateur scientists Alex describes didn’t work for a fee – rather, their efforts were funded through the patronage of either wealthy family members or other sources.

The difference, of course, is that the patronage system of Victorian science relied on relatively consolidated sources of money – bloggers, on the other hand, seem best supported when they can draw support from widely distributed patrons, reducing the burden on any individual donor (and the risk that any one patron’s wealth might dry up). And though there aren’t many bloggers making a living from their “hobby” yet, I’d wager that this will change in the next few years (consider the Andrew Sullivan example)…

Though I don’t really live here these days, it’s really good to be around. It only takes a few hours to remind me how much I love the academic culture, and the sheer density of interesting, smart people on the south end of the third floor of Rockefeller Hall (not to mention this little upstate town more generally). Down in New York, I don’t have this kind of context on any regular basis, and it’s not until I’m back in it that I realize how much I’ve missed the people and the discussions.

Something interesting and a little bit amazing happened tonight. Around noon on Saturday, Jeralyn at Talk Left posted a plea for help (short version: her computer was dying, and she needed a new one to continue blogging from the road). Among others, Atrios linked to her request around 8 pm. Between then and the time I’m writing this, someone has purchased a new computer for Jeralyn off of her Amazon wishlist. A $2,400 computer.

Now, I’m not somebody who buys into the technologically rah-rah, “everything’s different now that we have the internet!” sort of rhetoric, but it does seem to me that something worth noting has been happening – in short, a resurrection of the old patronage model, but on a grand and distributed scale. This isn’t anything new, of course – when I buy a CD from a musician whom I’ve just heard play at a local bar, I feel like I’m not just buying a commodified good, but rather that I’m helping to support his or her ability to make music. Now, it seems like some people are starting to use the internet to expand the reach of the metaphorical hat they leave out on the street, even as you get the sense that they’d be doing what they’re doing regardless of whether or what you toss in it, just like that musician at the local bar.

In a way, the crucial difference here is between buying and tipping. In the first case, you’re paying for a good or service, and feel no attachment toward the person producing it. In the latter case, you find yourself caring about the person you’re tipping, empathizing with them and appreciating them, not merely what they produce. You’re giving them money not in exchange for something, but simply to enable them to keep doing what they’re doing, because it pleases you and you feel it makes your life richer.

One might say that Howard Dean’s mammothly successful online fundraising campaign taps into this sort of ethic. It’s arguable that he’s been so successful not just because people are voting with their money, but because donors very explicitly see him as performing a valuable service, speaking for them and their views (or even just offering a contrary voice). They don’t just pay him, they identify and empathize with him, and they give money not in exchange for his services, but to enable him to continue doing what he does.

The interesting thing is that in a world where major corporations are trying to figure out how to force their users to pay for downloaded music, the patronage model seems to be taking hold in the world of words and ideas, inspiring people to willingly and happily click the “Donate” button and leave a tip, whether a few bucks or a new Sony computer.

…aye, ye scalawags, it be “Talk Like a Pirate“ day, and a fine day fer talkin’ like a pirate ‘tis. Ye can git yer pirate name here (courtesy that fine master of the high seas, Captain Blood and Guts) – mine be Cannibal Drake Ironman.

In honoro’t‘occasion, I’d liket’offer a little bito’news, pirate style:

Despite t’lawsuits filed last week against 261 people accusedo’illicitly distributin’ music over t’Internet, millionso’others continuet’copy and share songs without payin’ for them.

Last week, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, t’most popular file-sharin’ software, accordin’t‘Nielsen/NetRatin’s, only about 5 percent fewer than t’week before t’record industry’s lawsuits became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even experienced a slight uptick in users.

Arrrrrrrr…

(fer t’ whole story, hoist yer yardarm here)