Epistemographer

Just saw an absolutely fantastic example of the technology/public interface: Oprah did a segment on TiVo. Now, I myself haven’t gotten a TiVo yet, mainly because I don’t live in one place all the time where I have cable TV, but I have enough friends who swear by it that I’ve got a good sense of the details of what it can do (now, if I could bolt a DirecTV dish on the roof of my car and wire up a TiVo in there, that’d be a different story…)

One of the things I find fascinating about TiVo is the way in which the technology is constructed not simply as a thing in and of itself, but as a thing which is esentially a VCR, but better. Over the course of this Oprah segment, this point was hammered over and over: it’s like a VCR, but without tapes; it’s like a VCR but smarter; it’s like a VCR but easier to program.

So, not only are we seeing the construction of a new technology, we’re actually watching this happen based on understandings of an older technology. However, these tropes surrounding the VCR (particularly the idea that it’s hard to program) haven’t been around since the beginning of the industry…in fact, as I wrote in a paper that I’ll get around to sending off to be published someday, the idea of “not being able to program youtr VCR” that Oprah self-identified with only dates back to around 1990. In fact, I’ve got a copy of an old Betamax sales tape that shows how to program your Beta, and it uses pretty much the exact same rhetoric as TiVo is now.

This seems to be the life-cycle of a consumer electronic technology – introduction, obsolesence, and rebirth of a new one, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its old meanings.

Was out with a cold over the weekend, and in the process of getting back in the swing of things I seem to have slipped into an inverted nay/night schedule. For those who know me, this should come as no real suprise…I’ve got a tendency to get very focused and task-oriented when I’m working on a big project (which makes me vaguely concerned about what’s going to happen to me when I start dissertating with gusto).

At the moment, the project that’s keeping me up nights is a complete overhaul of an online database system I’ve been designing for the journal Social Studies of Science. The system itself is actually pretty cool, walking the user through the manuscript review process step by step, and coordinating the efforts of an Editor in Chief, a handful of Collaborating Editors, and hundreds of referees.

When I initially designed it, I’d set up a sort of rule-based process. Every time an action was taken, the system would figure out what had to happen next, and store those tasks in a constantly-updating mySQL table – sort of a central “To-Do” list. Unfortunately, I started to find that the people using the system (myself included), kept coming up with ways of doing things that deviated from the neat and tidy flowchart just enough that I wound up with orphaned tasks, left behind when a user wanted to skip a step or used that back button one too many times.

So, the past few days were devoted to gutting the whole system, excising any and all references to that “tasks” database table, and shifting to a paradigm based on momentary context – when a user opens the file of a given manuscript, a series of scripts look to see what’s already been done, and then suggest what still remains. For example, if a query was sent to ask someone to review the manuscript, the script checks to see if a response has been logged, and if it’s been more than a few weeks, prompts the user to nudge the prospective referee.

The funny thing is that as I was rewriting the code I realized that I’d unconsciously implemented the same paradigmatic shift in the way that AI researchers have conceptualized their work, from the older rule-based/symbolic systems to more current systems that are essentially reactive to their environment. Hell, I studied this stuff in several classes, and even wrote a paper or two on it back before the VCR took over my academic life, yet I didn’t think consciously of the importance of designing a system that is contextual until I’d done it the wrong way first.

The lesson here, I guess, is that there actually is quite a bit that one learns while working on a PhD in the humanities/social sciences that is exportable and directly relevant to day-to-day projects. Unfortunately, I only seem to consciously apply said knowledge in hindsight, once I’ve made the very mistakes that I studied and critiqued in the classroom. Phoebe Sengers would find this damned funny.

In the end, though, the strangest thing about this whole project is that I’m essentially practicing user-centered design, while one of my users is the very person whose work first clued me in to the necessity of contextual, user-centered design. It’s so circular, it makes my head spin.

Another navel-gazing post about blogs. Yeah, there’ll probably be lots of navelgazing here at epistemographer.com (at least I didn’t call this The Reflexive Blog)…

So, as I was driving through torrential downpours from New York City to Ithaca tonight, I had a long cell-phone conversation with my mom about current affairs. Now, my mom is pretty up-to-the-minute as news consumers go, and we tend to have great talks about current affairs. However, I noticed something tonight – she hadn’t heard of a lot of the news items that I’ve been reading a lot about lately.

I asked her what she thought about the Iraq news of the past few days, and she assumed that I meant the presumed deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. The interesting thing is that I wasn’t thinking of the siege in Mosul at all when I asked the question – to me, the big Iraq news was the slow, Watergate-esque climb up the Bush administration heirarchy in the examination of its questionable actions in presenting the case for invading Iraq to the American people.

So we’re talking, and I find myself explaining all about Joseph Wilson and his mission to Niger, Bush’s State of the Union address, the much-discussed 16 words, and Wilson’s recent editorial claiming fraud on the part of the Bush administration. She’s heard something about the State of the Union speech, but not much else. I bring up the attempted vilification of Joseph Wilson, the Robert Novak column on Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, and the various articles and columns about the ramifications of a white house official blowing the cover of a CIA operative. This is all (pardon the phrase) news to my mom, and I realize that she and I simply aren’t existing in the same media worlds right now.

I don’t have access to cable TV at Jenny’s place in Brooklyn (heck, we barely get a decent NBC broadcast signal), and I read the daily newspapers online, so with the exception of NPR or other talk radio while driving, pretty much all the news I get is via a computer screen. More importantly, I’ve been getting more and more of my news from blogs like TPM or Eschaton these days. That’s not to say that I’d claim these blogs as indistinguishable from a journalistic institution like the Washington Post – I’m well aware of the lower barriers to entry inherent in blogging, and in fact appreciate that they result in even more explicit biases. I can triangulate in on an issue by reading posts on it from across the “ideoblogical” range (heh…aren’t I cute). Plus, I’m a good enough relativist to acknowledge that there is no such thing as an “objective” press, and that claims to truth are ultimately validated or discarded based on the number of people who believe them to be true, rather than by neutral observers.

But I’m getting off topic – my real point here is that my mom and I seemed to have an entirely different picture of what’s “news”, hers based on television, mine based on blogs, with newspapers somewhere in between. Here’s where this gets interesting: it doesn’t seem like we’re just learning through different media that happen to prioritize news differently…it’s that the news cycle, and in fact the entire gatekeeping function of the blogosphere is qualitatively different from that of the mass media. More than that – I feel like I’m ahead of the curve, like the issues that I’m thinking about and reading about haven’t really hit the television news cycle yet, leaving me and my blog-informed knowledge-world out of sync with the one defined by more the “mass” television and newspaper media.

Lately, it seems that this lag of mass media behing blogs ranges anywhere between a week and a month. I’d love to see an agenda-setting study about the actual role that blogs play in setting the agenda for the mass media (which would make sense, since one would might assume that those working in media would be more active bloggers and blog-readers)…

Via Wired News:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers.

Something about this ruling seems to conflict with the Universal v. Reimerdes decision from a few years back, which hinged on the posting of the DeCSS code by those scamps at 2600, and their subsequent posting of links to the DeCSS code elsewhere once they were enjoined from posting the actual code (see coverage from Wired here and here). The upshot was that 2600 was found to be responsible not solely for its own speech, but also for the speech to which it referred as a mediator. Didn’t matter what kind of publication was doing the linking…so long as the material being linked to violated the DMCA, the linker could be held responsible.

This more recent decision, on the other hand, seems to rely on a different conception of the blogger as a mediator between reader and information:

“One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they’re not just selling information — they’re selling reliability,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren’t necessarily selling anything, they’re just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn’t exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward.”

This shifts the argument from the nature of the information being linked to, to the nature of the person doing the linking, drawing a boundary that means that the exact same link (and hence the exact same speech) can be legal or illegal. The moral of the EFF quote above seems to be that blogger linking/excerpting is exempt from legal liability because bloggers aren’t selling the reliability of their information, but are simply “cut[ting], past[ing] and forward[ing].”

So, we’re left with an image of bloggers as invisible and frictionless mediators of information, while the “one-way news publications” are responsible for the editing and quality assurance of its product. Seems reasonable, until you look at the boundary, and realize that it’s rather fuzzy and gray. I tend to think of blogs (especially those like Talking Points Memo or Andrew Sullivan) as eroding the constructed idea of the editorial press on its pedestal, rather than serving as foils that reinforce it. Along those lines, where would Drudge fit in this schema?