Epistemographer

So, I spent six years of my life getting trained to be part of a priesthood, and like any priesthood, mine is pretty particular about holding Supreme Knowledge close to its vest (after all, the only thing that makes members of a priesthood special is that they have ways of knowing stuff that others don’t). One of the odd things about some factions of the Science Studies world (and yes, I say some – it’s a pretty balkanized place) is their massive discomfort with the idea of being too loose with their theoretical insights. It’s a conservatism borne out of ten years of intellectual siege, as well as a knowledge that a sophisticated understanding of how knowledge is produced could be pretty dangerous in the wrong hands (though, as Josh Marshall explains, it might be too late).

With that in mind, I’ve been particularly impressed with what Alex Pang’s been doing over on his (recently-bylined) blog at Red Herring. He’s had the gig for a year now and while it’s ostensibly a blog about future trends, what he’s fundamentally doing is popularizing Science Studies ideas and applying them to contemporary situations. This isn’t dumbing-down, it’s distillation, dropping book references left and right and offering accessible ways into STS scholarship for his readers. Consider today’s entry:

It retrospect, it now seems that much of the 19th century was a long experiment in changing our perceptions of space and time. Cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that rail travel affected the way Europeans thought about space and geography, and that the telegraph and electric light promoted a new view (metaphorically and literally) of urban space.


Stephen Kern, in his brilliant but controversial book The Culture of Time and Space, argued that the growth of news and mass media, rapid travel by train and steamship, telegraph and telephone, mass migration, and avant-garde art movements like Futurism, all dramatically changed European perceptions of space and time around the turn of the last century. Space seemed more fractured, with fewer parts connecting or blending into each other; time was experienced as disjointed and discontinuous. It wasn’t just Picasso or Marinetti who had this experience, Kern contends: millions had their perceptions of space and time reworked, thanks in large part to technology.

He’s bringing Science Studies to a larger audience, and reading his work there for months is one of the inspirations for my current project of daily postings. Once I hit my stride and find my voice, I only hope it’s as clear and accessible as his…

I’ve spent the past few weeks working on and off with others at the Center on a grant application to the IMLS. We’re proposing to build a package of interfaces and extensions to Firefox that will in essence stick our Scrapbook and Scribe programs into the browser itself (where more and more research is done).

With that in mind, this post by Dorothea at Caveat Lector resonated. She writes:

“For the longest time (and to this day in some places), librarians created knowledge structures for other librarians. Today we’re getting downright resentful at the thought of putting others’ needs first, opening up our toyboxes…We need to turn some real usability experts loose on our stuff. Because our stuff…is really pretty bad…We’re thinking in terms of the data, not in terms of the user.”

This echoes a lot of the conversations I’ve been hearing among librarians (at times, I feel like “eavesdropping” is a more appropriate word for what I’ve been doing w/r/t the library world); there’s a crisis of purpose in that world, in a world where libraries have to compete with Google, Wikipedia, and other massively accessible information resources, users aren’t immediately going to libraries as their first choice for information.

At question, though, are the means that will enable those users to use that information (what Raymond Yee calls “Gather, Create, Share“ tools). The natural thing for librarians to do is to start building such tools, but many have been finding that they’re not quite sure exactly what scholars and researchers want (to be fair, those users have been remarkably bad at actually communicating what they want and need), and one of the big discussions in the world of digital library tool-building seems to be whether to build tools themselves, or make resources available and leave the tool-building to users. That’s our argument at CHNM – since we’re users ourselves, we know better than librarians what historians need/want from information tools. Of course, as anyone who knows me will testify, I’m not exactly a normal historian, which raises the difficult question of whether we’re building tools for historians, or just tools for early-adopter, gearhead database-designing historian/programmers…

Around midnight last night, I flipped on my TiVo to see what it’d collected over the weekend, and realized that the first two episodes of Season 4 of 24 premiered Sunday night. Needless to say, I tore through ‘em immediately, happily rekindling my relationship with what’s arguably the most addictive show on TV.

Something struck me midway through the second episode; the experience of watching them back-to-back reminded me much more of the way I watched Season 1 (downloaded divx files) and Season 2 (DVDs via Netflix) than the way I watched Season 3 (live, week by week). There’s almost a compulsive feeling to it; one hourlong episode isn’t enough, and it’s difficult to turn off the TV with the next one at your fingertips.

On last Thursday’s episode of Charlie Rose, Kiefer Sutherland (the star and exec. producer of 24) made the point that they were starting this season in January so that they could run straight for 20 weeks. The producers apparently found that many viewers lost momentum during the several weeks off over the winter holiday, and again in early spring, so they adjusted the schedule to ensure one uninterrupted experience. I’m wondering if their sensitivity to audience preferences went even a step further; given the wild success of 24 on DVD, the decision to show the first four episodes in the span of two nights almost seems a conscious choice to mimic that success, offering viewers an initial experience that bears a closer experience to watching the show on DVD (where, notably, each disc holds four episodes) than on broadcast television.

Following the thread of my previous post, the proliferation of referral rewards programs has led to an interesting consequence; the commodification of referrals. If a referral to purchase a given product has a specific value (whether a commission of up to 10% from Amazon or 1/4 of an iPod from TiVo), then it seems natural that a market will spring up to allow the barter or sale of that referral.

It seems not too farfetched to imagine a sophisticated consumer who simply factors the value of a given product referral into the cost of that product itself – for example, someone who sets up two Amazon.com accounts; one to create Associates links and the other to purchase goods through those links, in essence buying both the goods and the Associates commission.

Put this together with the booming popularity of Google Ads and we have a return to the traveling sales representative model for middlemen, one in which rather than buying goods from producers and selling them at a profit (the wholesaler/retailer model that boomed through the last century), these mediators earn a commission from producers for delivering consumers – a model in which mediators work for producers, not themselves.

So, in addition to being a TiVo addict, I’m a member of their rewards program, which means that I can earn points toward all sorts of goodies when people activating new TiVo service put me down as having referred them. And like the headline says, I ain’t too proud to beg, so if you happen to get a new TiVo and wouldn’t mind writing in “josh@epistemographer.com,” or have gotten a TiVo in the past 60 days (the credit can be retroactive) and would be willing to say I referred you, shoot me an e-mail and I’d be mighty grateful!

At a cafe tonight, I noticed a bulletin board posting advertising a pocket-sized electronic game that would play twenty questions, which reminded me of an online artificial intelligence experiment that plays a spookily accurate game of twenty questions about which I blogged a year and a half ago.

When I got home I did a little bit of research, and it turns out that they’re related, and that the former is in fact an implementation of the latter (seems like a licensed snapshot of the neural net at a given moment). This seems absolutely brilliant – the manufacturers got hundreds thousands of people to collaboratively develop a very sophisticated knowledge base, which they’re (the manufacturers) now licensing to whomever they can.

There’s a lesson in this somewhere…