Epistemographer

Back in the states, though not at home. Thanks to the miracle of crossing the International Date Line, managed to work about 28 hours of travel back from New Zealand into a single day last Thursday, and the the weekend was all about getting the various strands of my life back into some semblance of order. Had to cut this “picking up the pieces” short, however, in order to fly out to San Francisco yesterday. I’m in the Bay Area through Thursday night, mostly at a series of meetings about the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (read: NDIIPP), about which I’ll post some notes if relevant.

It’s looking like this year is going to be full of really interesting and engaging projects; I can hardly wait to get started!

The two categories that I’m thinking a lot about are amateur identity and commons-based peer production. Both have enjoyed increasing cultural prominence over the past several years, and their emergence has been very much framed in revolutionary rhetoric.

I’ll begin with a simple declaration: I want to very much separate the categories of “amateur” and “commons-based peer production,” in large part because the two have been so often conflated in both popular and scholarly discourse. This conflation seems to particularly have its roots in examinations of open source communities, a natural consequence of the twin facts that such communities are most often composed of amateurs, and that the entire project of open source has become the canonical example of commons-based peer production. In the rush of exuberance around open source, however, I’d argue that we’ve lost a very key of precision about what exactly we mean when we talk about amateurs and peer production.

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Continuing to think out loud, rehearsing and revising ideas from the previous post. Comments most welcome.

Anyone familiar with STS theory who read this (from my last post):

…it’s as if the instruction manual which was normally held fixed by both the physical nature of print and various cultural force has been posted on a wiki, where anyone and everyone can edit or add to it in a virtually frictionless manner.

will immediately realize that I’m not talking about anything new – this is essentially the process of “opening up the black box,” taking knowledge which has been treated as fixed or “made” and opening it up for renegotiation. There’s a whole body of literature on how this happens (including a good percentage of my dissertation), so I won’t go into it here.

One of the things I really like about the “instruction manual” metaphor for how we learn and pass on knowledge about technology is that it’s explicitly focused on writing. The “black-box” metaphor is incredibly useful for the ways in which it highlights transparency vs. opacity (in fact, this is the core tension of the metaphor), but it does so by shifting emphasis a bit from the knowledge that is/has been made to its relative state of visibility. By talking about “instruction manuals,” we can again foreground the nature of this knowledge as having been “written”; by people, in local contexts.

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I’m putting together a draft of a paper to give at a Yale Information Society Project lunch in a few weeks. This was set up months ago, in large part with the goal of forcing me to actually get down in tangible form a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and point myself in a specific direction for my next research project. Unfortunately, I’ve been finding it remarkably hard to get back into writing (particularly after having spent months revising my dissertation into a manuscript, currently out for review). That in mind, I figure I’ll start sketching out my argument here, so I can at least get some of the ideas out while I’m figuring out the connections between them.

So, the general topic in which I’ve been increasingly interested are the people who fall somewhere between the traditional categories of “producer” and “consumer.” Thus far, I’ve got a title:

The Instruction Manual and the Wiki: Amateur Identity and Technology in Commons-Based Peer Production

I’ve been thinking a lot about instruction manuals as a metaphor for the ways that we use technology; if, following general STS theory, the actual meaning of a technology is structured by the frame of knowledge layered on top of it, then we can think of there being a sort of cultural “instruction manual” for every artifact.

A key property of an instruction manual is that it’s tangible, words on paper, a fixed codification of what one can do with a specific thing. When we buy a new camera or VCR or microwave oven, the manual that comes with it was produced by the corporation that made the artifact itself (though not necessarily by the actual designers and engineers who made the artifact; this is an important point, and one which cries out to be studied by some sort of ethnography of technical writing). We, as consumers/users, are expected to learn how to use this new thing we own by reading the manual.

One might raise the point that instruction manuals are almost universally reviled, and the goal of many designers is to create technologies that are, in a sense, prêt à employer – for many, the ideal design is one which requires no instruction manual, but which is so obvious on its face that any further discussion of how it is to be used is superfluous. The thing that gets left out of this argument is the fact that there is still an instruction manual of sorts, just one which hangs in the intangible threads of culture that inform our day-to-day lives. At one point, users needed an instruction manual to understand that a green button with a right-pointing triangle meant play and a red button with a square meant stop, but this knowledge became so ubiquitous as to become invisible, so commonplace as to be obvious.

This is one mode of using a technology – following the instruction manual (whether physical or cultural). There’s another distinct mode, however, one which is either prized or punished depending on the particular context; this what happens when a person picks up a thing and plays, in essence revising (or even creating out of whole cloth) sections of the instruction manual for that thing¹. In these cases, it’s as if the instruction manual which was normally held fixed by both the physical nature of print and various cultural force has been posted on a wiki, where anyone and everyone can edit or add to it in a virtually frictionless manner.

That’s the key tension here, between the instruction manual and the wiki as models of how we learn what a given technology is good for.

¹ The word “play” is really important here, though I’m still trying to understand exactly how…I first realized this at this year’s 4S meeting when talking with Bart Simon about video games, at which point I first grasped how useful Game Studies might be to the study of amateurs/hackers/tinkerers in general…

Technorati Tags: amateurs, technology

I’ve always been drawn to explicit discussion of the things that academics tend to leave hidden under the surface. For example, two of the first pieces of advice I always give prospective or new graduate students is this:

There will often be times that everyone around you seems vastly more well-read, ahead on their research, and just generally more competent than you. They’re not, really. Moreover, they’re just as insecure, and think the same thing of you.

and

Graduate school isn’t about reading everything you’re assigned; this is a superhuman feat, and you’re doomed to failure if you try. It’s about learning how to discern exactly what you need to read in order to be able to talk intelligently, and feeling confident enough to leave the rest behind.

That said, in various conversations over the past month (particularly at 4S and SHOT) I’ve been figuring out a new bit of advice that I’ll be passing along in the future:

Don’t plan on achieving any really new research in your first year after defending. You’ll feel like you should be, but if you can spend the year decompressing from the intensity of the dissertation and firming up the ground under your feet, you’ll have achieved wonders right there.

Technorati Tags: academia, advice

Schedule looks great. Just registered and lined up lodging. Huzzah!

Technorati Tags: SXSW

Bridging S&TS and Communication Studies: Scholarship on Media and Information Technologies
Pablo Boczskowski and Leah Lievrouw

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Like many out in the online world, I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging lately. I’m totally on board with the whole folksonomy/user-defined taxonomy/emergent order/Wisdom of Crowds thing, and totally convinced that statistically aggregating the individual choices of a large pool of individual actors is an unbelievably valuable way to structure and move through massive heaps of data.

Here’s the thing, though: I noticed that tags were introduced on DailyKos earlier this week, and something struck me as kinda hinky. In short, Kos was encouraging the community to not only tag their own articles, but to tag each others’ posts with whatever keywords seem relevant.

The tricky thing here is the intent behind the tagging: on DailyKos, people are choosing tags not for themselves, but for their fellow community members. They’re essentially embarking on a hugely utopian vision of collective classification, which is all well and good but for one thing – it entirely misses the boat on why tagging in the Flickr/del.icio.us sense actually works.

Earlier this year at SXSW, I picked up a phrase that I’ve been horribly overusing: “leveraging solipsism.” The whole point of the phrase is to indicate that there are things that we do for ourselves, and the choices that we make when doing things solely to benefit ourselves might in fact be useful when aggregated with all the choices made by other users. This is how Amazon recommendations work (we buy books for ourselves, and a statistical analysis of other purchases by people who bought the same books as us results in a list of books that we in all likelihood will also like). This is how Google works (everybody links to sites they like, so the most-linked-to sites much be the most useful). This is how del.icio.us works (I use tags to organize my own bookmarks, and when I click on a tag I can all the bookmarks that everyone thinks relate to the same topic). All is good.

The take-home point of The Wisdom of Crowds is that this structure underlies some of our core social institutions. The stock market, for example, is essentially a mechanism for aggregating the individual self-serving choices of millions of investors, usually settling on a pretty good approximation of a company’s true worth. However, Surowiecki notes, the wisdom of crowds starts to change when the crowd is self-conscious about its actions.

Think about it this way – if you’re tagging web bookmarks for your own organization, you’re going to use certain keywords. Now, think about how you might tag those bookmarks (or whether you’ll necessarily tag some of them at all) if you know that they’ll be made public, and your goal is less to make your own life easier and more to help others find sites. The two cases are by no means the same – the change in intention actually changes the words you might choose. With others in mind, your choices might be less idiosyncratic and personal, and your own initiative to find the best tags might lessen over time (because personal gain is a heck of an incentive, and helping others). Even worse, you might find yourself gaming the system – if you really like a particular page (or, if it’s your own), you might tag it with tangentially or entirely unrelated keywords to drive traffic (it costs virtually nothing to do so, and might have very tangible benefits). This is the battle that Google fights every day, because some users are aware of the aggregation system in place and have created server farms to exploit it.

What am I getting at here? I’m not sure yet, except to say the DailyKos thing is indicative of a broader trend. People (particularly early adopters) are starting to get the idea that tagging is Important, and in their zeal to implement it in some cases they’re missing out on a subtle point that is crucial to the success of tagging at all: it works best (and might truly only work at all) when you’re not thinking about the end uses of the tags at all. Kind of like Douglas Adams’ riff on flying: for it to work right, you’ve got to forget that you’re falling and essentially miss the ground.

So, as mentioned earlier, my friend Kevin has spent the summer flogging his book all across the USA. At his readings, he’s been asking people a single question: “What book changed your life?” Now, his publisher’s gotten into the act, inviting readers to describe their favorite book recommendations, and offering the chance to win 15 books, each recommended by one of the contributors to Bookmark Now.

Interested? Click here for the contest…

Topic at hand is less digital tools than digital epistemologies

“Digital” – candidate for trendiest word (1.5 million books use it in their title), but very ill-understood.

Revisionist history of epistemology:

• Descartes’ turn from the “messy stuff” of the processes of understanding the world to the mechanistic explanations of it
• Late 19th-century: people started to think that the mechanical world-view could explain everything, “fusing the world that Descartes sundered through an expansionist ploy on the part of the mechanistic side.”
• Computers grew out of the project of fusing “meaning” and “mechanism”

• Implication that computers are somehow “special”, bridging this chasm

“There aren’t any computers; we’ve been misled”

• It’s not that there are no physical devices, but rather that the notion of computers as occupying a special and unique place in the epistemic landscape is fundamentally wrong

• Being “digital” doesn’t make a computer special

5 examples of the impact of “Computers aren’t special”

• It was a claim of the “fusion” agenda that computers could be fully explained by a mechanistic account
• Wrong: meaning is inextricably bound up with computer functionality and use
• We should hold our systems accountable for their dimensions of “meaning”
• Ontologies are contingent on local culture and perspectives
• Every piece of metadata is a political act

• We as humanists shouldn’t be party to the re-institution of the dualism between physical and mental that’s bound up by how many use “digital”

Computers represent a historical moment in which we have sufficient power and sense of complexity to allow back into our analysis all the stuff that Descartes swept away.

* Cute phrase: “Computing reunites the world of matter with the world of things that matter.”

Idea: “Digital” fundamentally points at the abstraction of information from the physical medium on which it’s encoded. It’s not that it has no physical presence, but rather that this very presence is one step removed from its corporeal form. (Kind of a neutrality of physical presence, like speaking through a filter that makes all voices sound the same.)

Technorati Tags: 2005 Digital Tools Summit