Reading :: Blog

Originally posted: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:45:41

Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World

by Hugh Hewitt

Near the end of this book, published in early 2005, Hugh Hewitt discusses the implications of the blogosphere for one particularly relevant sector:

When the first Supreme Court nominee of the new media era arrives, watch the blogs explode with commentary and investigation. Everey opinion the nominee wrote or case on which the nominee participated will serve as fodder for the new media. Anita Hill would not have lasted a weeked with the new media on her case. But a flawed nominee will melt more quickly than a Popsicle in Vegas in July. ... It will be a magnificent battle of text merchants. (p.148)

And so it came to pass. First Roberts, then Miers, and now Alito are being subjected to blogospheric examination. But it's worth noting Hewitt's role in Miers' inquiry: faced with a pick who appeared underqualified, whose position as President's counsel raised real questions about the separation of powers, Hewitt fell in line behind the nominee. Blogger Qando describes Hewitt in this way:

If you were to combine all three Powerline bloggers, Sean Hannity and any given Republican Party Chairman in some sort of GOP experiment to create the most reliable Republican pundit ever...you'd have Hugh Hewitt: the distilled essence of The Party Man.

I point out this issue not to hammer on Hugh Hewitt as a person but to illustrate one of the problems with Blog, his book on the blogosphere. Blog really does have some interesting insights and even flashes of brilliance. But it is also frequently blinkered because Hewitt really is a Party Man: he casts things in terms of Right and Left, he identifies Right as right, and he identifies the President as Right. So other dimensions of the political discussion ? in the Miers case, the good and proper perpetual antagonism among branches of government, which transcends party lines ? gets lost in his analysis. Symptomatically, he describes Andrew Sullivan as a "onetime conservative" ? after all, Sullivan used to support the administration, which made him conservative, and now he doesn't, which made him liberal. Yes?

No. But this limitation, which causes Hewitt to gravitate to heroic bloggers on the Right, diminishes the insights of the book only a little. Hewitt cites two ways of understanding the blogosphere as a transformative moment, a moment in which "everyone can be a journo" if they have a cameraphone and a blog (p.x), every reader can be an ombudsman and editor (p.37).

One way is by seeing the blogosphere as symptomatic of a Reformation. In Chapter 2, Hewitt retells the story of the Protestant Reformation, noting how the printing press provided the means for relatively cheap reproduction of texts and therefore routed around the bottlenecks that had allowed the Catholic Church to monopolize information. Once the printing press made the Scripture available to the masses, the principle of sola scriptura became a workable principle and the priesthood of the believer became tenable. That is, the printing press allowed Christians to decentralize church authority. This metaphor is somewhat illuminating, though I suspect it's not especially accessible to those without an evangelical background.

The other way is by seeing the blogosphere in terms of military strategy. In Chapter 1, which I found the most interesting chapter in the book, Hewitt calls on conflict theorist John Arquilla's work to provide a strategic vocabulary. Hewitt quotes Arquilla, who sounds a bit Harawayan:

Networking means much the same for the military as it does in business and social-activist settings, not to mention among information-age terrorists and criminals: monitoring the environment more broadly with highly sophisticated sensors; expanding lateral information flows; forming and deploying small, agile, specialized teams; and devolving much (but not all) command authority downward. But it also has a doctrinal implication that these other types of actors are learning faster than the U.S. military: It's a good idea to become adept at "swarming."

Swarming is a seemingly amorphous but carefully structured, coordinated way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable "pulsing" of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions. It will work best ? perhaps it will only work ? if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. The aim is to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, attack it, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse. (pp.3-4)

Let me emphasize that Hewitt is quoting Arquilla here; these are not Hewitt's words. Hewitt's contribution here is not in originating the idea but in applying it to the blogosphere. Although the idea doesn't really fit ? the blogosphere is not divided neatly into warring camps except in the minds of Hewitt and similar partisans ? it provides some insight into blog swarms.

Both ways of understanding the blogosphere emphasize decentalization of authority, and this is a theme that runs through the book. Hewitt contends that decentralization of authority has been most obvious in journalism so far, but it is spreading across other information fields as well (p.94). So the second half of the book is all about managing organizational identity in the face of this new decentralization. Hewitt really embraces what has elsewhere been called the "hyperlinked organization", encouraging blogs at all levels of the organization, as well as discussing strategies for dealing with blog swarms. (One is simply being truthful; here, he sounds a lot like The Cluetrain Manifesto.) In fact, he says that CEOs should blog honestly and daily (p.124).

Blog, in fact, was published by Thomas Nelson publishing, whose CEO has been blogging for a while on the theme of "working smart." I ran across this blog via a link from 43 folders and have checked in occasionally; after reading Blog, I'm fairly certain that the author began blogging on Hewitt's advice. It's relatively secular. (In fact, the CEO took a lot of heat in his comments section a while back when he announced that his company would donate Bibles to Katrina victims. One commenter asked: Why Bibles? Why not the Koran? The CEO replied: Um, because we publish Bibles. Like the commenter, I hadn't realized that fact until I read the reply.)

The second half of the book loses steam. In fact, Hewitt is clearly blue-skying the implications of blogging for different sectors in Chapter 12, probably because the book wasn't long enough. But the first half of the book is certainly worth reading.

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Reading :: Essentials of Strategic Project Management

Originally posted: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 20:56:51

Essentials of Strategic Project Management

by Kevin R. Callahan, Lynne M. Brooks

I know very little about project management, but I've been meaning to learn, both for my own edification and for better understanding organizations. So I went to the library and picked up ? I'm not ashamed to admit it ? the thinnest two project management books I could find. One was Essentials of Strategic Project Management, which turned out to be a good move. Essentials is a short read broken into assimilable chunks. And although it's pitched to larger organizations, the principles are applicable to academic organizations as well.

The book sets up a typology for managing projects: "STO," which stands for the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of planning. The strategic level is managerial and involves initiation and planning of projects. The tactical level involves some planning as well, and also execution; project leaders handle this work. Finally, the operational level, which is handled by team members, involves some execution as well as closing and control (p.32). The typology, of course, is a way of ensuring a division of labor and (not incidentally, though this is dealt with gently in the examples) avoiding compulsive top-down micromanagement.

Once the typology is described, the book discusses how to mesh it with the organization type and the organization's overall business strategy. Coherence is a big theme here, not surprisingly, and the authors devote a lot of thought to reconciling the different components of a complex organization.

One of the more thought-provoking sections for me was the one on project maturity. Apparently project management maturity in organizations has five levels:

1. Initial Process
2. Structure Process and Standards
3. Organizational Standards and Institutionalized Processes
4. Managed Process
5. Optimizing Process

By my reading, my organization is between levels 1 and 2. And although academic units are certainly different from business units, I still think there's a lot to learn from the maturity model set forth here. I'll have to do some meditating on this.

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Reading :: The Cluetrain Manifesto

Originally posted: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:37:10

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual

by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger

In the Acknowledgements of this book, the authors thank "Dan Gillmour, who despite strong reservations about The Manifesto's style, deemed it significant enough to cover it in the San Jose Mercury-News" (p.185). I know what Gillmour means. This book's style varies across the four authors, but Christopher Locke sets the tone in his chapters, which tend to discuss how important it is to get away from business-speak and write in our own authentic voices. Here's a sample:

But maybe ? and it's a big maybe ? companies can get our of their own way. Maybe they can become much looser associations of free individuals. Maybe they can cut "their" people enough slack to actually act and sound like people instead of 1950s science-fiction robots. Gort need more sales! Gort need make quota! You not buy now, Gort nuke your planet!

Easy there, Gort. Calm down boy. Here, chew on this kryptonite.

Everybody's laughing. No one gives a rat's ass. So here's another question. Perhaps you even thought of it yourself. How come this book ended up in the business section of your local bookstore instead of under Humor, Horror, or True Crime? Hey, don't look at us. (p.182)

And it goes on in this vein. Despite Locke's appalling ignorance of 1950s science fiction conventions, the thing that really jumped out at me was how mannered the style is. The authors are fairly obsessed with authenticity, insisting that the marketplace is a conversation and that conversations are between (authentic) people rather than inauthentic corporate drones. But despite this expressivist orientation, the style is so excessively performative that it sounds as inauthentic as what it replaced. But also quite familiar. Compare it to the text on the back of the Gloomaway Grapefruit Body Souffle jar my wife bought some years ago:

Scoop. Stroke. Smooth. When a bad day leaves you thinking enough is enough, you'll know why they say I love juicy. Lively Grapefruit spontaneously creates a sense of optimism and contentment. Your whole being is nurtured in silky-softness. Laugh and let go. The sad stops here.

The text is a little more sedate, but the half-baked jump-cut mass culture references, slightly reoriented phrases, and forced informality is still here. Locke's authentic voice sounds a lot like ad copy written to Gen-Xers.

Unfortunately, the book is a lot more repetitive than ad copy. It seems as if every page contains one of the following: the phrase "markets are conversations"; a reference to authenticity; or the claim that employees and customers are laughing at executives, who are really just frightened little boys. In fact, Locke seems obsessed with the third point. The quote above gives the faintest glimmer of the frequency with which this theme is raised, in lengthy and explicit terms. That leads me to think that he's really describing his own fears and assuming everyone else shares them. When you're obsessed with everyone else's opinion of you, of course you'll try to show that you're clued in via your concepts and your style. And when you think that everyone is similarly obsessed, of course that will become your main theme, the thing that you believe will motivate them to change. It's an extrovert's view of the world. As an introvert, I found it tedious.

But like Dan Gillmour, I found worth in the book as well. Clear away the repetition, posturing, and etc. and you'll find a fairly prescient view of how new media had begun to change business. The book mostly focuses on marketing and services, but it also has broader applications.

For instance, in his first chapter, Locke manages a relatively coherent discussion of how global competition led to micro markets, resulting in problems for command-and-control management (p.13). Locke points to Total Quality Management as one noble but failed experiment in trying a more "conversational" model, even pointing to it as a precursor of the open Internet conversation (p.14). "Top-down command-and-control management has become dysfunctional and counterproductive," he declares (p.21). He expects more and more market share to be taken by microsize competitors which can spring up overnight and reconfigure themselves quickly because of Internet business dynamics. "The Net will cause radical discontinuities, catastrophic breaks in the already crumbling facade of business-as-usual," he says (p.25), providing an early vision of what Zuboff and Maxmin would later call "federations."

In a later chapter, Doc Searls and David Weinberger argue that advertising is no match for the "word of web," the communication among customers that allows them to quickly share experiences and expertise. One example is Amazon's ratings system. Elsewhere, I've made a similar argument about software documentation.

Weinberger argues later that organizations are becoming "hyperlinked," which is to say, each person in an organization can have connections to those within and outside that organization (p.155). Someone deep inside a product development team can discuss products directly with customers, for instance, bypassing managerial barriers. He looks forward to an "economy of voice" (p.158) in which organizations are valued because of the conversations in which their members engage. Unfortunately this can take an ugly turn:

In a hyperlinked organization, voice plays the old role of the org chart, telling you whom you should work with. That Mary is the Under-VP of Expectation Deflations for the western semi-region tells you nothing. That Mary is wicked smart, totally frank, and a trip to work with tells you everything. (p.148)

Everything? What this tells me is that Weinberger's ideal organization is a meritocracy in which the measure of merit is extroversion, not expertise or reliability or the other things we typically associate with workplace merit ? and that, in my experience, people in hyperlinked organizations tend to seek out.

The Cluetrain Manifesto can be a painful experience to read, though probably not for the reasons that the authors expect. But it also has some insights that could be useful ? not least insights into the mentality of those who have enthusiastically hyped the Net Economy.

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Reading :: Digitizing the News

Originally posted: Mon, 24 Oct 2005 10:28:55

Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers

by Pablo J. Boczkowski

Digitizing the News is an interesting account of how newspapers have attempted to move online. Boczkowski's first three chapters give us necessary background, while the next three describe case studies conducted at three newspapers conducting online experiments in the late 1990s. Towards the end of the last case study we find out that one of his informants and mentors was Jeff Jarvis ? which may give you an idea of Boczkowski's take on these online experiments.

Boczkowski first gives us a history of newspapers' online experiments, starting with Videotex in the early 1980s and moving up to the late 1990s. Papers originally saw online media as a way to repurpose content. But then papers began to recombine content by customizing general products (ex: delivering particular kinds of stories to particular readers); providing vertical information streams on one subject (ex: city guides); providing a network of content across locales (ex: careerpath.com); and providing archives of past stories. Finally, they moved to recreating, providing content developed primarily or exclusively for the site; this involves making the byproducts of newswriting available, but it also means opening ways for users to generate content. This involves unbundling a unitary media artifact (p.64).

The last part ? the ability of users to generate content ? is the kicker, of course. As Boczkowski says, newspapers are used to generating a unidirectional information flow. But with user-authored content, suddenly there can be a multiplicity of information flows, often poorly integrated (p.96). As Boczkowski explores in the last case study, these user-authored flows hae traditionally been placed under heavy editorial control, but an explosion in user-authored flows has made that control untenable (p.152). Boczkowski talks about "gate-opening" (as opposed to gatekeeping). "Workers thus open up the online paper to contributors, turning it into a space for knowledge creation and circulation. ... The shift from traditional gatekeeping to newsroom routines centered on the facilitation and circulation of knowledge produced by a vast and heterogeneous network of users-turned-producers" (p.158). In dailies,

the editorial function has been constituted as mediation work, the product defined as a unidirectional flow of generalized content, and readers inscribed as content consumers rather than producers. To manage such a production system, dailies, like many firms since the nineteenth century, have become organizational hierarchies with centralized authority and relations of dependence among the various levels. (p.164)

Yes, and this organization has outlasted the print media whose characteristics helped to shape it. Boczkowski urges a different approach, which he calls "distrubuted construction":

the thrust of distributed construction is that, given certain conditions, content production in new media does not happen inside a firm's newsroom but results from the interactions with users. ... distributed construction illuminates new engagements between media organizations and consumers who contribute to the production process while making a living some other way. (p.166)

Boczkowski gets the term "distributed construction" from "distributed cognition." Unfortunately, this is characteristic of his analysis: in later chapters he draws from distributed cognition as well as from actor-network theory and articulation work, but doesn't seem to delve deeply or gain many insights from them. That surprises me, since Trevor Pinch served as his dissertation advisor.

Nevertheless, the book is worth reading, especially for people who are interested in new media.

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Reading Roundup: Czerwinski and Mark on Fragmented Work

Originally posted: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 23:33:06

After reading the New York Times article on fragmented work, I looked up two of the researchers quoted in the article. Some interesting stuff here.

Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E., and Wilhite, S. (2004). A diary study of task switching and interruptions. In CHI ?04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 175?182, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

This article does a good job of using and explaining diary studies, an intriguing data collection method that has its advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that participants have control over the data collection and what and how they choose to code can be as instructive as the data itself. The result is that participants choose their own scale and definition for tasks, events, and details.

Most intriguingly, the authors provide a prototype application for helping participants switch tasks.

Hutchings, D. R., Smith, G., Meyers, B., Czerwinski, M., and Robertson, G. (2004). Display space usage and window management operation comparisons between single monitor and multiple monitor users. In AVI ?04: Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, pages 32?39, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

Czerwinski and her colleagues have used other methods as well. In this article, they use Vibelog to log system events in order to get a sense of how participants used screen real estate. They demonstrate through several intriguing visualizations that the larger the screen real estate, the more productive the participant tends to be and the more likely s/he is to recover from interruptions. Of course, logging system events has the opposite problem from diary studies: you get a precise idea of what happens on screen, but not much insight into what's happening offscreen.

Bradner, E. and Mark, G. (2002). Why distance matters: effects on cooperation, persuasion and deception. In CSCW ?02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, pages 226?235, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

In this article, Bradner and Mark are interested in how perceptions of distance affects interactions. They investigate with a straight-ahead experiment: a participant sits in a room with a terminal and interacts cooperatively (via either webcam or IM) to solve problems with someone at a distance. The participant is told that the participant is either in the same city or across the country. The greater the perceived distance, the less cooperatively the participant tended to interact.

Gonzalez, V. M. and Mark, G. (2004). "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness": Managing multiple working spheres. In CHI ?04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 113?120, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

Here, the investigators turn to shadowing as a data collection method. In their in situ study of 14 information workers over a seven-month period, they concluded that people organize work in large, thematically connected units that they call "working spheres." Workers switch among an average of ten working spheres.

The term brings to mind other units of analysis, such as activity systems. But Gonzalez and Mark mean ways in which people divide their work (ex: central, peripheral, personal) rather than stable cyclical object-oriented activities:

We define a working sphere as a set of interrelated events, which share a common motive (or goal), involves the communication or interaction with a particular constellation of people, uses unique resources and has its own time framework. With respect to tools, each working sphere might use different documents, reference materials, software, or hardware. It is the whole web of motives, people, resources, and tools that distinguishes it from other working spheres. (p.117)

Notice that the working sphere is primarily defined by the material and human concatenation rather than the orientation toward a particular goal -?although "motives" is slipped in there. This sounds much more like distributed cognition's functional units than, say, activity theory's activity systems. And without that strong object-orientation, it seems likely that the unit is going to have trouble being nailed down or explained. On the other hand, downplaying the motive gives the working sphere the same advantages as actor-networks, ontologically speaking.

The authors also note that many artifacts both signal and describe work: post-it notes, planners, printouts, and email inboxes. Finally, they provide a nice succinct definition of work fragmentation based on the appropriate literature (p.119). They found that workers tended to switch between working spheres about every three minutes.

Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M., and Harris, J. (2005). No task left behind? : Examining the nature of fragmented work. In CHI ?05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 321?330, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

This article appears to be describing the same study as the one above. The authors argue that there are two components to work fragmentation: (a) time spent in the activity and (b) frequency of interruptions.

We define work fragmentation as a break in continuous work activity. Studies continually describe how the work of information workers is characterized by spending short amounts of time in tasks and switching frequently. This has been found with managers [7,13,23], financial analysts [6], software developers [18], and even telecommuters [8]. Studies have also reported on the interruptions that information workers experience [4,7,16,20]. (p.321)

They invoke the literature on work fragmentation more thoroughly here, and argue that "managing multiple activities is becoming more recognized as a basic characteristic of work life for information workers" (p.321).

Mark, G. and Poltrock, S. (2003). Shaping technology across social worlds: groupware adoption in a distributed organization. In GROUP ?03: Proceedings of the 2003 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, pages 284?293, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.

The authors are here concerned about spatial and temporal distribution of work, particularly in distributed organizations:

Distributed organizations can be considered to be fluid organizations. The boundaries between work units may be in continual flux as teams reconfigure to incorporate expertise drawn from any geographical location in the company. Distributed organizations do not have one adoption context, but many, depending on for example, whether people are working with colleagues who are collocated or remote. Thus, various contexts and group configurations are involved in adoption decisions. We propose social world theory as a framework for understanding technology diffusion across distance in a distributed organization. (p.285)

They see social world theory as a complement to working spheres. My inclination is to subsume both in terms of activity systems and networks: it would allow them to get to the main idea of a social world as a unit of collective action, describe multiple adoption contexts (p.285), and describe action as fluid, diverse, and multiple (pp.285-286). Nevertheless, the piece is really valuable for thinking about how human activity is changed by distributed work.

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Reading :: Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

Originally posted: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 09:47:14

Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

by Tracy Bridgeford (Editor), Karla Saari Kitalong (Editor), Dickie Selfe (Editor)

I really liked Brad Melenbacher and Stan Dicks' chapter in this collection, which describes a framework for conducting service learning-oriented research. The framework integrates a variety of user-centered design and usability methods, and the appendix does a nice job of summarizing usability principles. What Melenbacher and Dicks provide is not a how-to, but a 50,000 foot view of what a solidly integrated course looks like.

If only the rest of the collection followed suit! But the chapters mostly fall into the pattern set by innumerable pedagogy articles: they describe tips, tricks, and palliatives aimed at making TC assignments easier to swallow. If you've been itching to bring literature into the TC classroom, compel students to write autobiographies, or oversee their role-playing, this collection is for you. Otherwise -- the Melenbacher and Dicks piece is Chapter 13, pp. 219-237.

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Reading :: Capital, Vol.2

Originally posted: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:12:30

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume 2)

by Karl Marx

As I said in my review of Capital Vol.1, I'm not an economist and my primary interests are in how Marx describes work organization and (more generally) sociological development. Vol.2 doesn't give me a lot to go on here, since it is primarily concerned with describing how commodities circulate. Nevertheless, it hes some interesting points that relate to my current projects.

My current projects have been centering around work fragmentation and knowledge work. As I said in my review of Vol.1, Marx is dealing with industrial capitalism, and capitalism has changed a bit since then. In particular, Marx makes the following assertions:

• In the transport industry, production and consumption are simultaneous (p.135). This assertion also seems to have direct implications for the communication industry.
• "Continuity is the characteristic feature of capitalist production" (p.182).
• The more perishable a commodity is, the less appropriate it is as the object of capitalist production (p.206).
• Capitalism reduces transport costs by increasing the scale and developing transportation and communication infrastructure (p.229). It seems to me that distributed work results from a radical increase in communications infrastructures, a distribution of means of communication, and communication itself as production.
• Workers are drawn from a latent surplus population into new lines of work, then released after the inevitable crash (p.391). In distributed work, to what extent is this cycle regularized and how has it changed the nature of work and learning?

I'm still trying to wrap my head around Marx's insights, but it seems to me that he still has a lot to say in terms of how we understand work. The hard part for me is in figuring out ? without any economic background ? what transfers and what has been obviated. >

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Reading :: Power and Legitimacy in Technical Communication, Vol.2

Originally posted: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 20:28:22

Power and Legitimacy in Technical Communication: Strategies for Professional Status

by Teresa Kynell-Hunt (Editor), Gerald J. Savage (Editor)

Technical communication is still trying to establish itself as a field, as we're told in this collection, much of which is devoted to figuring out what to do to advance that goal. But the collection illustrates in quite direct fashion why that goal is going to be difficult to achieve. The authors come to the question from a variety of theoretical (and sometimes atheoretical) perspectives, draw from different literatures, conceive different roles for technical communicators and TC researchers in the academy, chart different courses, assert different values.

Now, it's easy as a reviewer to pick apart collections, which are very difficult to keep cohesive. But in the best collections, the chapters achieve some sort of coherence through a shared, established theme or set of themes ? and they sustain that coherence through dialogue. This collection doesn't do that; "power and legitimacy" turn out too be too weak to hold it together, and dialogue is almost entirely lacking, with so little shared across essays that they don't even seem to come from the same field. So Beth Thebeaux launches an extended attack on theorists and urges us to get back to serving industry rather than reading fiction or dabbling in postmodernism; Jimmie Killingsworth urges us to bring science fiction into our classrooms; Jerry Savage invokes postmodernist theory to critique TC in industry; and nobody responds to each others' points.

The individual essays tend to be interesting, sometimes even thought-provoking. Thebeaux's essay in particular, an extended straw person argument, is entertaining and had me composing responses in my head. But as a whole, there is no whole.

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Reading :: Literate Lives in the Information Age

Originally posted: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 08:58:59

Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States

by Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher

The book Literate Lives is a set of 20 case studies selected from over 350 people who filled in questionnaires or conducted interviews with the authors over a six-year period. It has many virtues, summed up nicely by the conclusion. Here, the authors discuss how these case studies cover the years during which personal computers came on the market and became pervasive.

Today, personal computers have become embedded so deeply in the landscape that they are disappearing, becoming invisible, much like electricity or cars or ballpoint pens, all emergent technologies from previous periods in U.S. history. When this disappearing act is complete, when the memories of what some have referred to as the computer revolution have faded, these first-hand accounts of people's lived experiences will help us remember how computers dramatically altered our lives, and literacy, at one particular point in history. (p.211)

A virtuous project indeed, one with considerable promise. Selfe and Hawisher further connect these micro-level case studies with the broad sweep of technological and social change during the times they cover, a technique that helps us to contextualize them.

But virtues without moderation can become vices. The broad sweep or macrolevel picture comes from the extensive digital divide literature, particularly the series of reports entitled Falling Through the Net published during the Clinton years. The statistics in these reports are closely reflected in the 20 case studies, so closely that the case studies' microlevel narratives appear to be selected primarily to illustrate the extant macrolevel data. And that's exactly what they do. The problem is that we already know the stories from the macrolevel data; the case studies don't appear to have anything further to offer, or at least we don't discover anything more about literacy from the case studies than we do from reading the statistics.

The case studies would be much more useful -- and differentiated from the macrolevel narratives, and lifelike, and surprising -- if they were more systematically analyzed. We get narratives of how the participants first encountered computers and how they gained access to different programs, but not much detail about how these literacies can be categorized, mapped, or systematically studied. The case studies, as Selfe and Hawisher tell us in the conclusion, are analyzed along the axes of race, sex, and class -- not a very sophisticated analytical framework. Imagine what this book could have been if it had adopted Stuart Selber's comprehensive and well developed "multiliteracies" framework instead.

For me, this was the most disappointing aspect of the book. Its corpus could have been a goldmine with some systematic analysis, shedding insight into the interplay among literacies across different generations and cultural lines. But instead we get a stream of narratives with lingering attention on the race/gender/class struggles and with frequent adjectives such as "courageous," "undaunted," and "inevitable." You know these stories, you've seen them on American Dreams. They hold no surprises -- and in a study like this, that's the most disappointing thing of all.

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Reading :: The Rhetoric of Risk

Originally posted: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 08:46:08

The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments

by Beverly J. Sauer

The Rhetoric of Risk won the NCTE 2002 best book in scientific and technical communication. It's easy to see why. In scope and in breadth, it's impressive; in overall project, it does a lot to make rhetoric and professional communication directly relevant to other fields. The particular field Sauer is addressing is the mining industry, specifically the tangle of regulations that surround its practices and ensure safety. Sauer methodically works through various genres, including training documents, procedures, maps, and post-mortality reports, to examine how well these work.

To make sense of these, Sauer describes a six-part cyclical rhetorical transformation of knowledge:

1) Local documentation

2) Accident reports

3) Statistical reports

4) Policy and regulations

5) Practices and procedures

6) Training and instruction

These types of documents, she says, all feed into each other; local knowledge becomes instantiated in national policy and vice versa. But this explicit, textual knowledge can't represent everything; workers' embodied knowledge is also important, and difficult to represent outside of gestures. One of her most interesting claims, in fact, is that judgement in assessing risk is based on three warrants: embodied knowledge ("pit sense"), scientific knowledge, and engineering expertise. Two of these can be described textually, but pit sense tends to be described and represented through gestures. Sauer investigates these gestures thoroughly in Chapter 7, in which she demonstrates that the presence and absence of gesture can reveal the understanding of risk.

The book's not perfect. One thing that bothered me was that Sauer would occasionally make broad pronouncements about what "activity theorists" think, and each time her sole cite was a chapter by Edwin Hutchins, who is not an activity theorist! But overall it provided an illuminating view of regulation and documentation in a massive, risk-heavy, slowly changing industry.

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Reading :: Dialogic Inquiry

Originally posted: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:01:15

Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Socio-cultural Practice and Theory of Education

by Gordon Wells

As the title implies, Gordon Wells is mostly interested in how education is conducted. He works within a Vygotskian framework, drawing heavily on cultural-historical activity theory to conceptualize knowledge and to think deeply about how people learn. The book turns out to be both interesting and valuable, particularly the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1.

Here, Wells draws on Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and Halliday, turning up what I thought were some striking parallels. Based on this discussion, he argues that we should think not of knowledge but of knowing, a collaborative attempt to better understand and transform their shared world" (p.76). Only individuals know, but they do so in shared activity. Knowing is "a goal-oriented social process mediated by representational artifacts" (p.83). And knowledge is developed in a "spiral of knowing" (p.85), which appears to be based on Ilyenkov by way of Engestrom.

As we get into the book, the theoretical work continues. For instance, Wells productively examines classroom activity at the three levels of activity (activity, action, operation), and makes the point that these are not just hierarchically related, they are different perspectives (p.169). He addresses the issue of scope in activity (p.180). He argues that genre "provides a way of characterizing the organization of the chosen actions and operations in terms of socially shared specifications of the constituent elements and their sequential arrangement" (p.181). And he acknowledges that there are different perspectives on the enactment of an activity system, depending on who occupies the subject position.

In other words, Wells, presents a sophisticated understanding of activity theory and grapples with many of the questions that "third generation" AT has been addressing. If you're interested in seeing AT's potential for informing educational research, take a look.

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Reading :: Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism

Originally posted: Sat, 24 Sep 2005 10:23:22

Mikhail Bakhtin : Between Phenomenology and Marxism

by Michael F. Bernard-Donals

Just after the beginning of the fall classes, I placed this book on the counter in the department's office along with my other stuff so that I could go back and make coffee. (I drink a lot of coffee, and the DRW buys the good stuff.) As I'm about to pour myself a cup, I hear my colleague Trish Roberts-Miller say, "Oh! Clay, you're teaching Michael Donals' book? That's great!" Apparently they taught together in Missouri. Small world.

I wasn't teaching from this book, though. I picked it up because I had become very interested in the difference between dialogics and dialectics and I wanted to know what others thought about it. Bernard-Donals doesn't address the question head on, but he does have some really interesting thoughts on how Bakhtin is situated. Some of these thoughts are quite foreign to me: I came to Bakhtin from the perspective of North American genre theory, which emphasizes sociocultural explorations of lived activity. Bernard-Donals, in contrast, comes from the perspective of literary criticism. Consequently, he cites a stableful of scholars whose work I haven't read and don't plan to read (Althusser, Eagleton), and what he means by "Marxist" tends to be deeply grounded in these critics' work. Consequently, "his" Bakhtin sounded quite a bit different from "mine."

Bernard-Donals' argument, in a nutshell, is that Bakhtin occupied an ambivalent position between phenomenology and Marxism. He drew on phenomenology for his exploration of individual human cognition and human aesthetics. But when he turned to social aspects and formations, he drew on Marxism (pp.2-3). Bakhtin, however, never reconciled the two -- and consequently, different camps "read" different Bakhtins.

All right, I thought to myself as I read this. I'm not terribly familiar with phenomenology, and I'm cautious about what is entailed by Marxism in literary criticism -- and Bakhtin, though we tend to consider him a language philosopher, mostly worked through literary criticism. So let's see how this develops.

The first three chapters primarily deals with the issue of phenomenology, and Bernard-Donals has lots of interesting things to say here about individual cognition (with some footnotes on Vygotsky; see p.30). He does a good job of explaining the difference between dialogue and dialogism, for instance (p. 34). And, although he doesn't bring in dialectic specifically, he suggests in his discussion of answerability that one's situation and interpretation never match (p.57). He hits his stride pretty well here.

But just as he does, he gets a stone in his shoe. In Chapter 4, he turns his attention to the Marxist texts. What are Bakhtin's Marxist texts, you may ask. Simple: the ones that don't bear his name.

That's right, he's referring to the three books that were ostensibly written by the other members of Bakhtin's circle, Voloshinov and Medvedev, both of whom were card-carrying Marxists. These texts have long been disputed -- which is to say, they seem to strongly reflect many of Bakhtin's ideas, and they are certainly better than the other books by their putative authors, but Bakhtin was silent on whether he had actually had a hand in them. They are markedly different from Bakhtin's other books in that they quote Marx and Engels, invoke dialectic (positively), discuss ideology, and follow the sorts of moves that got books published in Stalinist Russia. It's worth noting, as many have, that these books (published in 1927-1929) were quite different from Bakhtin's Dostoevsky book, published in 1929.

So when Bernard-Donals notes the strong Marxist cast in these texts, and the relative absence of phenomenology, one would expect it to be a strong argument against Bakhtin's authorship of them. Bernard-Donals actually addresses the controversy: "That Marxism and the philosophy of language and The formal method bear the name of authors other than Bakhtin does not seem reason enough to remove these books from the Bakhtin canon" (p.88). He acknowledges some of the proofs against Bakhtin's authorship, then argues that Bakhtin's overall project is "at least in some respects fellow-traveling with historical materialism" (p.88). Yes, but that isn't proof that Bakhtin did or did not write the disputed texts. Somehow, the question gets lost and Bernard-Donals emerges at the end of the paragraph simply assuming that Bakhtin really was the texts' author! Perhaps there is an argument here that simply eludes me.

To be fair, Bernard-Donals argues that Bakhtin treats language as "ideological material" in other, undisputed books as well as the disputed ones. But that resemblance -- which is not surprising, given the pervasiveness of the Marxist project in the Stalinist years, the Marxist orientation of the Bakhtin circle, and the consequent elevation of the questions that Marxism tended to ask -- seems to be miles away from actual proof. Not all materialist theories are dialectical materialism. Not all sociologically oriented theories are Marxist.

And so the second half of the book frustrated me. Bernard-Donals concludes, after comparing Bakhtin's work with that of historical materialists, that Bakhtin "did not offer a theory of social transformation per se" (p.132). He offers criticism of this gap. But this is what distinguishes Bakhtin so sharply from the Marxist project, isn't it? Bakhtin turned from dialectics to dialogics, from the Engelsian evolution of everything to the ritual decrowning of Rabelas, from the scientific monologue envisioned by Vygotsky to the circling, circulating, unfinalizable dialogue in Dostoevsky. >

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Reading :: Rapid Contextual Design

Originally posted: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 09:36:57

Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design by Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, Shelley Wood

Somehow it's appropriate to read this book after Aristotle. Like Aristotle's Rhetoric, Rapid Contextual Design has a few striking ideas and a lot of exhaustive advice about the details. It is indeed "a how-to guide to key techniques." And they're generally quite useful.

In fact, what I've always liked about contextual design is that it's sort of ethnography light: easy to grasp, rapidly deployable. It's not as rigorous as good ethnographic research, but it doesn't require a PhD either. I've found it to be a good way to introduce students to the concepts of fieldwork, although I'm careful to stress that one CD course does not make them qualified anthropologists. What I inevitably find, though, is that students have trouble with the details: how to conduct an unstructured interview, how to run an affinity session, how to walk the wall and do visioning. That's where this book really shines: it's full of advice about things as diverse as inductive coding, arranging for site visits, tactfully getting interviewees back on track, and constructing paper prototypes. Much of the advice is just as applicable to other types of field research, and I'm certainly going to be passing it along to my students this fall.

Contextual design itself continues to evolve in its techniques and rationale. Look carefully and you'll find some subtle adjustments to how the authors portray the methodology and how they justify its parts. They've also added some common HCI techniques: profiling and scenarios, for instance.

I don't see this book making it into heavy rotation on my shelf, but I imagine I will look at it whenever I teach this class or use CD on my own. >

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Capital, Volume 1

Originally posted: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 09:36:26

Capital, Volume 1

by Karl Marx

Yrjo Engestrom has said more than once that to understand activity theory, you have to read Marx. And unfortunately my formal education didn't include Marx. So with some trepidation, I undertook the book on my own.

My feelings are mixed. Libraries have been written about the book, countries have reworked their economies around it, and entire fields have sprung up around it. So what can I say about it? Let's delineate the scope of this review a bit. I'm not a political theorist, economist, or sociologist, so I'll tend to skip over these aspects. Instead, I'll focus on Capital's impact on the sorts of things I've been studying: activity theory, dialectic, work organization, and work structure.

In those terms, I found Capital somewhat underwhelming -- simply because I've heard most of it before, from people who have drawn heavily from Marx's work. Braverman, Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, Leont'ev, Ehn, Bodker, Kyng, Engestrom, and even Zuboff and Maxmin have addressed Marx's masterwork so thoroughly, and fields such as sociology and cultural studies have drawn so freely from it, that reading the book gave me a sense of deja vu. (Engestrom was wrong, then, in a sense.) At the same time, Marx's painstaking description of the labor conditions of industrial capitalism gave me great insight into why Marx was so motivated to change things. When Marx drifts too far toward polemic, engaging in hasty generalizations and straw man attacks, it's worthwhile to keep in mind the conditions that he opposed.

Marx starts with the familiar-in-retrospect contradiction between use-value and exchange-value (p.126 -- actually the second page of Marx's text, which follows a lengthy set of prefaces and introductions). According to Marx, use-value comes from the abstracted human labor materialized in it, and the value of an article is determined by the amount of labor necessary for its production (p.129).

Commodity production necessitates a division of labor because it calls for heterogeneous forms of labor (p.132). Later, Marx argues that the division of labor is "an organization of production which has grown up naturally, a web which has been, and continues to be, woven behind the backs of the producers of commodities" (p.201). Marx describes this web as a chain of producers who in turn consume the products of other producers (p.201), and he later argues that "there develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin, entirely beyond the control of the human agents" (p.207). Marx gets into some really interesting discussion along these lines later, when arguing that manufacture takes two forms: heterogeneous and organic. Heterogeneous manufacturing is like watchmaking, in which different streams of supplies eventually come together (p.461); organic manufacturing involves the same material being progressively transformed, allowing the different stages to be isolated and to yield a chained division of labor (p.463) in which work that had been accomplished in one place, by one person, is distributed in space and time (p.464).

The division of labor is further discussed on p.456, where Marx really begins to analyze how industrialism had changed labor; he argues that each option becomes crystallized into an exclusive function of a particular worker (also see p.457). I can see how the notion of chained activity systems comes from this early industrialist understanding of human activity, and I can see why Zuboff and Maxmin argue that these conceptions have reached the end of their shelf life -- something that particularly leapt out at me in Marx's Ch.13.

One oft-quoted passage of Capital is Marx's comparison between bees and human architects; he argues that the architect conceives in advance, then constructs, whereas the bee works by instinct (p.284). The object of labor, he says, is anything that labor separates from its connection with the environment (p.284) -- a great summary of what others such as Ilyenkov would later develop theoretically and what activity theorists would eventually turn into the focus of activity theory. In this understanding, instruments of labor -- which can include even the earth itself (p.285) -- indicate the social relations among laborers (p.286). Notice that here we see the three points of the minimal activity theory triangle: subject, object, and mediational means! It's a short, sophisticated discussion of labor that neatly prefigures so much in the activity theory tradition. Indeed, Marx even makes the point that a product can shift from tool to object and back again (p.288, 289), that the object is "soaked" in labor (p.296), and that the product of the labor represents definite masses of crystallized labor time (p.297).

Underlying the above work, of course, is dialectic. Marx didn't discuss dialectic much -- more's the pity, since Engels took up the slack, and not well in my opinion -- but he has some interesting examples of how irregularities and conflicts led to more accurate investigations of friction (Arkwright) and steam (Watt) (pp.498-499).

As I said, Capital is a rich and fascinating book, and even though it sounds familiar from cover to cover, that's only because it prefigures so very much of what came later. In reading it, I found myself understanding activity theory, dialectic, participatory design, new economy literature, and so forth in new ways. It's a struggle -- nearly a thousand pages -- but the prose is surprisingly easy to follow and the examples are generally quite clear. Now I wish this book had been part of my formal education; it's a pity I waited until now to read it.

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Reading :: The Art of Rhetoric

Originally posted: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 10:10:23

The Art of Rhetoric

by Aristotle

It's been a while since I read excerpts from this book, the first to attempt to systematize my discipline. Aristotle was the student of Plato the student of Socrates, the smug absolutist on whom we generally blame rhetoric's bad reputation. (See Latour's evisceration of Plato's Gorgias in Pandora's Hope). Fortunately Aristotle was much more broad-minded than Plato, and his sympathetic, systematic treatment of the subject serves as the basis for innumerable first-year composition textbooks as well as scholarship.

Oh, you know what I'm talking about. Aristotle is the source for our argument that rhetoric is the probabilistic counterpart to logic and that its enthymeme is the counterpart to the syllogism (pp.66-70); that rhetoric's genres are deliberative, forensic, and epideictic (pp.80-81); and that rhetoric's proofs are the appeals to emotion, character, and reason (Ch.6-8). Having just taught first-year composition using an excellent textbook along these lines, I've found it pleasant to go back to this source material.

Of course, most of the material involves seemingly endless lists of examples -- much more boring than that comp textbook. But some of it is really fascinating. Take Aristotle's discussion of how rhetoric fits in: like dialectic, it treats subjects that everyone can grasp (p.66). But in rhetoric, proof is central, and enthymemes are the "flesh and blood of proof" (p.67). An enthymeme is a type of syllogism (p.68). And Aristotle is careful here to say that rhetoric is not persuasion, it's "the detection of the persuasive aspects of each matter" (pp.69-70); it's analysis. Notice how this discussion serves as an implicit rebuke to the Gorgias.

As Latour argues, Socrates has no interest in politics and consequently no respect for rhetoric. Aristotle characterizes rhetoric as a political offshoot of dialectic and logic. Whereas logic is inductive and relies on the syllogism, Aristotle says, rhetoric is deductive and relies on the enthymeme (p.75). But rhetoric also has induction in the form of examples (p.77). Unlike logic, rhetoric considers groups, not individuals, and its premises are matters for deliberation rather than settled (p.76).

I haven't read Aristotle to any extent since grad school, so it was refreshing to come back to this text and see what I could get out of it this time. Although many of the particulars are tedious, the overall discussion of rhetoric's place still seems fresh to me. Certainly Aristotle made a place for the despised art in his taxonomy, and although that place seems a little cramped to me, it's a good start.

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Reading :: Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

Originally posted: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 19:23:23

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age

by Stuart A. Selber

I just finished writing a review of Stuart's book Multiliteracies for a Digital Age for the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, so out of fairness I won't post a full review here. What I will say, though, is that the book is impressive. Stuart has managed to systematically analyze the concept of computer literacy, articulate a strategy for addressing it within writing classrooms, and create a solid framework for scaling computer literacy efforts from individual classrooms all the way up to the university level. If you're involved in computers and writing, particularly at the curricular level, you really ought to read it.

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Reading :: The Culture of Fear

Originally posted: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:48:49

The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

by Barry Glassner

Every year, every student in first-year composition reads what we call the "First Year Forum" book: a book that has been selected in order to anchor discussions across all first-year comp courses at UT. The idea is to have students across campus reading the same text, discussing it in their dorm rooms as well as their classrooms, and ideally having the author visit campus. We won't be able to have the author come to campus in 05-06 -- the author, John Stuart Mill, is apparently in no shape to visit.

But we did manage to have Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, come to discuss the 2004-2005 First Year Forum book. I missed out on the talk, but not the book, which I just finished using in my summer II course.

Glassner's strength is that he documents nearly everything. When talking about fears of -- and I'm reading off the front cover -- "crime, drugs, minorities, teen moms, killer kids, mutant microbes, plane crashes, road rage & so much more," he does a terrific job of dissecting the perception of various dangers and contrasting them with the available statistics. He also provides overlooked but more severe dangers in comparison. That's great.

Unfortunately, the book has some real flaws as well. Glassner holds some definite views that he does not treat with the same scrutiny as the views he challenges. Sometimes the results are, frankly, embarassing.

To understand why our first example is embarassing, let me give you a sense of what it's like to read Culture of Fear. Glassner's introduction has 49 footnotes; Chapter 1 has 43; Chapter 2 has 70. Each footnote has an average of two citations (my estimate; I didn't make a comprehensive survey). When bringing these citations to bear on dubious fears, Glassner ruthlessly pounds us with statistics, mostly having to do with body counts. That's admirable.

But then we get to p.66, where Glassner describes how Advo, Inc.

mails out an estimated 57 million postcards each week to American households. Each card features on one side the smiling face, birth date, eye color, hair color, and other vital information for a missing child, and on the reverse side an advertisement for a local business. The question "Have you seen me?" printed above the child's picture has multiple meanings: it asks if we've seen the child and, at the same time, if we've seen the advertisement and the product or service it advertises. As Marilyn Ivy, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, notes in an essay about this marketing device, "That a child is missing -- not at home -- also brings up fears that perhaps we as residents at home are missing something too." (p.66)

Whatever one thinks of Advo's postcards -- and I routinely throw them away without a glance, I confess -- it's quite a charge to level that they are meant to manipulate readers into buying things rather than to perform what their producers and advertisers believe to be a valuable service. And that's what Glassner appears to be saying here. What monsters these people must be to prey on the worries and fears of their customers! So what mountain of evidence does Glassner quote to demonstrate that this is so? Interviews from advertisers? Surveys of the ads' readers? No, nothing. It's simply stated as obvious, not needing proof. Glassner would never let his opponents get away with something like that. But here he is, without a shred of evidence, accusing Advo and its advertisers of profiting from human misery.

Glassner, as I implied earlier, uses the body count as his measure of danger. On this point he scolds us for being afraid to fly. "In the entire history of commercial aviation, dating back to 1914, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Three times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year" (p.183). Sure, I think most people know that driving is more dangerous than flying. But Glassner doesn't seem to account for the fact that most of us think one death is more terrifying and horrible than the other. Would you rather die swiftly in a two-person accident over which you have some control? Or in a two-minute free fall with 60 people screaming around you? Glassner doesn't seem to consider that people can make rational choices using criteria other than body count.

Usually. But, strangely, Glassner does feel free to use additional criteria when he gets to a couple of his hobby-horse issues. For instance, automobiles cause many more deaths per year than guns, yet guns are "a danger that by any rational calculation deserves top billing on Americans' lists of fears" (p.xix). Because gun deaths are more senseless? More preventable? More immoral? More benighted and backward? There are arguments to be made -- good ones -- but Glassner doesn't make them, treating the question as obvious. Perhaps the answer is simple as the fact that Glassner owns a car but no guns. But that would mean that he's using statistics to affirm his own beliefs rather than to dispassionately get to the bottom of the issue -- wouldn't it?

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Reading :: The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital

Originally posted: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 08:28:47

The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital

by E.V. Ilyenkov

As an activity theorist, I've become convinced that AT needs to continue developing along the lines of the "third generation" work that Yrjo Engestrom has been advocating. I'm familiar with many of the sources on which Engestrom draws, especially M.M. Bakhtin, but I had not read any Ilyenkov until recently. And the more that I read of Engestrom, the more I became convinced that I had to absorb Ilyenkov in order to better understand contradictions and dialectics.

Dialectics, I hasten to add, is a weak spot of mine. In my graduate education we discussed dialectics only in passing and never read any of the source material in class. And technical communication literature typically doesn't draw much on dialectics except in passing. In fact, most of what I knew about dialectics came from Bakhtin's implicit, under-the-table comparison of it with dialogics. So, incredible as it sounds, my understanding of dialectics -- the core of activity theory -- has been learned inductively by reading endless AT studies. Maybe that's okay, since as far as I can tell, many North American activity theorists haven't studied dialectics either. But it's become apparent that I can't really progress in understanding AT theoretically or methodologically until I understand dialectics as it was understood in the Soviet milieu, the milieu in which activity theory developed. So I began reading up on dialectics in earnest last year, working up to the source materials.

The most important of these source materials, of course, is Marx's Capital. I've begun this work, but have paused to read Ilyenkov's work in hopes that it would summarize and illuminate Marx's discussion. At this point I'm not sure how well it succeeds on that count, but it does seem to summarize and illuminate the Soviet understanding of dialectics in the late 1970s -- which, for my present project, is actually more valuable. Furthermore, Ilyenkov either summarizes or extends (I'm not sure which yet) the implications of Marx's work for understanding development, objects, and contradictions.

In my recent review of Ilyenkov's Dialectical Logic, I mentioned that it seemed to be very much like the other Soviet work I'd read from that era: triumphalist, scornful of non-Marxist and non-dialectic work, and unstinting for its praise of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. There are actually some real differences among these thinkers, but those differences tended to be suppressed rather than explored in the Soviet milieu, and Dialectics is no exception. As I've noted elsewhere, this tendency to consecrate Marxist writers tended to cover up the fact that Engels radically expanded the scope of dialectics, making it a theory of everything: when hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, when two animals produce a hybrid, when potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, and when a culture adjusts to new tools, these are all examples of dialectic. Dialectic becomes a -- I should say the -- natural law. As Haraway and Serres both note in their idiosyncratic ways, the practical effect is that the logic of dialectic becomes naturalized and imposed on nature.

The results are quite limiting. As Ilyenkov describes it, dialectics is unrelentingly oriented toward development: from the abstract to the concrete, from the simple to the complex, from folk knowledge to scientific knowledge, from feudalism to socialism. That is, it's teleological -- so much so that if intelligent life were to be wiped from the Earth, we can be certain that it would arise again (in Dialectical Logic p.55)! For Ilyenkov, time's arrow points one way, and that way leads not just from the past to the future but also from the less evolved to the more evolved. Given that fervent belief, it's not really that surprising that the Soviets wrote so triumphantly: they believed that the iron law of nature dictated that "imperialism" would globally give way to communism (p.134).

(A set of inerrant texts that have to be reconciled by hook or by crook; a teleological narrative of progress; a natural law dictating the rise of intelligent life. Hmm, what does that sound like?)

As a totalizing theory of everything, dialectics seems severely compromised and is vulnerable to the many criticisms leveled by Haraway, Serres, Deleuze & Guattari, and others. But as a theory of development, it's on firmer ground (despite its teleological tendencies). And this is where Ilyenkov really starts to pull his weight. Ilyenkov contributes several things: an account of the "ascent from the abstract to the concrete"; a discussion of the "spiral-like theory of development" on which Engestrom has based his Developmental Work Research approach; and a thorough discussion of contradictions as engines of change.

The "ascent from the abstract to the concrete" refers to the movement from the abstract -- "any one-sided, incomplete, lopsided reflection of the object in consciousness" (p.36), a "particular definition" (p.58) or characteristic -- to the concrete, "a logical combination (synthesis) of particular definitions into an aggregate overall theoretical picture of reality, as movement of thought from the particular to the general" (p.58). Out of many examples -- Ilyenkov tends to go over the same ground many times, perhaps having something to do with the spiral theory of development -- one sticks out. Like Engestrom, Ilyenkov draws on the example of Carnot from Engels' Dialectics of Nature. He introduces Engels' quote in this way:

In actual fact, mankind has always obtained universal, 'infinite' generalisations and conclusions, not only in philosophy but in any area of knowledge as well, through analysis of at least one typical case rather than through abstraction of those identical features that all possible cases have in common. (p.170)

So Carnot's discovery of this law of thermodynamics, which is the abstraction developed through his analysis of a steam engine, led to the concrete applications in 10,000 steam engines. Simple, abstract, common characteristics inevitably lead to complex, concrete, unique, particular syntheses of these characteristics. The abstract and the concrete have a dialectical unity (p.105) in that they are different aspects of the same reality.

Let's get to the "spiral character of development," which is used so expertly in Engestrom's Developmental Work Research approach and his discussions of learning by expanding. Ilyenkov argues that

This dialectics of all real development, in which the universal necessary condition of the emergence of an object becomes its own universal and necessary consequence, this dialectical inversion in which the condition becomes the conditioned, the cause becomes the effect, the universal becomes the particular, is a characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle, or, to be more precise, of a spiral which extends the scope of its motion all the time, with each new turn.

At the same time there is a kind of 'locking in itself' here which transforms an aggregate of individual phenomena into a relatively closed system, a concrete integral organism historically developing according to its immanent laws. (pp.115-116)

This spiral is not circular, with an effect becoming its own cause, because dialectics regards cause and effects as manifestations of "a system of mutually conditioning aspects, as a historically emerging and developing concreteness" (p.117).

Now let's get to the final and most important contribution: the discussion of internal contradictions in objects. Ilyenkov argues that in the dialectical-matrialist conception, a single object (in the AT sense) must be traced through "different stages and phases of its maturity" (p.205) in order to highlight "the abstract outlines of its inner structure" that "remain the same throughout its historical development" (p.206). If phenomena or categories disappear during the development of the object, "they are not attributive, internally necessary forms of being of the object" (p.206). If we interpret this as a methodological principle for identifying objects rather than a law of development, it makes quite a bit of sense -- and helps to address Steve Witte's criticism that it's impossible in principle to identify an activity.

Unlike metaphysics, which interprets contradictions as imperfections in reasoning, dialectics sees contradictions "as the necessary logical form of the development of thought, of the transition from ignorance to knowledge, from an abstract reflection of the object in thought to the ever more concrete reflection of it" (p.234). And "Dialectics regards contradiction as a necessary form of development of knowledge, as a universal logical form. That is the only way to consider contradiction from the point of view of cognition and thought as a natural historical process controlled by laws independent from man's desires" (pp.234-235). Internal contradictions -- those that cause tensions within an object, such as the primary contradiction between exchange-value and use-value -- are the ones that drive changes in the object as participants work to resolve the contradiction (p.238; cf. p.266). And now we can see why Ilyenkov asserts that

objective reality is a living system unfolding through emergence and resolutions of its internal contradictions. The dialectical method, dialectical logic demand that, far from fearing contradictions in the theoretical definition of the object, one must search for these contradictions in a goal-directed manner and record them precisely -- to find their rational resolution, of course, not to pile up mountains of antimonies and paradoxes in theoretical definitions of a thing. (p.244)

And "Dialectical contradiction is not in this case an insurmountable barrier in the way of the movement of the investigating thought but, on the contrary, a springboard for a decisive leap forward in a concrete investigation, in further processing of empirical data into concepts" (p.251). A contradiction is "a necessary expression of a real fact in its origin" (p.253). And at this point in the book, we can see clearly how crucial it is -- despite its modernist, teleological leanings -- to the "third generation" reconceptualization of activity theory. Without Ilyenkov's discussion of the object and the elaboration of contradictions in its development, activity theory would have a much less articulated discussion of development on its hands. In particular, Ilyenkov's discussion of internal and external contradictions suggests that we can't understand networks of activity by simply looking for ways in which discrete activity systems link up; we have to understand these linkages as interpenetrating activity systems that foster internal contradictions.

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(Tracing Genres through Organizations and Activity-Centered Design)

Originally posted: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 08:57:25

Discussions are heating up over a recent post of Don Norman's in which he urges us to move away from "human-centered design" and toward "activity-centered design." The latter term is based on "my own brand of 'Activity Theory,' heavily motivated by early Russian and Scandinavian research." (But not on the book by the same title, which happens to be in the same book series as mine.) Norman once again issues his call for designers to be dictators and to design around "activities." In his understanding, "activity is a coordinated, integrated set of tasks."

Dan Brown and Peter Merholtz have both been kind enough to mention my book as a counterexample to Norman's heavy-handed design dictatorship, and Dan in particular nails one of the problems with Norman's conception: it's static. As I wrote in a comment on Dan's blog, Norman doesn't seem to have taken into account the central way in which activity theory handles change, through contradictions. That's not terribly surprising, since design-as-dictator strategies tend to attempt to find the one best way to perform an activity (without reflecting much on the criteria for making that judgment), and then maximize stability by forcing users to learn and use the system as designed. This, I think, is why it's so vital to look at so-called "third generation" activity theory, which pushes contradictions to the forefront and -- more importantly -- attempts to describe networks of interpenetrating, developing activities and how they interact with each other.

Elsewhere, Andrew Otwell reacts to Norman's piece by asking, "I wonder to what extent UCD?s and Activity Theory?s expectations of design inputs (deep examination of the formations of user goals, dissection of community and social network relationships) are really artifacts from an era in computing that?s passed." The question is valid: much activity theory work on IT, until recently, drew deeply on the Scandinavian participatory design tradition from the early to mid 1980s. (I have a piece on the subject coming out in Technical Communication Quarterly this fall.) But the more recent "third generation" work has taken the knowledge economy/distributed capitalism more seriously and attempted to work out theoretical and methodological tools for addressing more rapid, less stable work formations. Search for "knotworking" on my site and you'll see what I mean.

As I say in my book, I think the key challenge will be to provide sustainable structures on which workers can build and formalize their own innovations. Since the book was published, we've seen an explosion of such tools. So when Dan praises 37 Signals, I agree -- and I see opportunities in applying "third-generation" AT to disparate activity networks using similar tools. >

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Reading :: Dialectical Logic

Originally posted: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 21:00:45

Dialectical Logic: Essays on its History and Theory

by E.V. Ilyenkov

I've provided a link to the electronic version of this book at marxists.org since Amazon doesn't list the version I read and doesn't have much on the book at all. Ilyenkov is credited by Yrjo Engestrom as the thinker that brought the issue of contradictions back to the forefront of dialectical thought; Engestrom and others applied the work to activity theory, making possible the development of the third generation of AT. For those of us who came late to activity theory, it's hard to imagine AT without contradictions as the central explanation for developmental change.

In this book, Ilyenkov does develop the idea of contradictions as the driving force of change and development in human activity. But the book mainly deals with the history of dialectical logic. Ilyenkov traces the prehistory and history of Marxist dialectic, touching briefly on Aristotle before jumping to Descartes, Locke, Bacon, Liebniz, and a series of other philosophers. Ilyenkov reserves extended discussion for Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Lenin. Those who are familiar with Soviet publications from this era will not be surprised that Marx and Lenin are treated as infallible while the others are treated as men who couldn't quite escape their preconceptions. In vintage Soviet form, Ilyenkov casts Hegel's contributions in this way:

Marx, Engels, and Lenin showed both the historical contribution of Hegel and the historically conditioned limitations of his scientific advances, the clearly drawn boundary across which the Hegelian dialectic could not step, and the illusions, whose power it was incapable of overcoming despite all the strength of its creator?s mind. Hegel?s greatness, like his limitations, was due on the whole to his having exhausted the possibilities of developing dialectics on the basis of idealism, within the limits of the premises that idealism imposed on scientific thinking. (p.227).

Although Ilyenkov is a careful thinker, he sounds downright Engelsian in his claims for dialectic. "Dialectical Logic is therefore not only a universal scheme of subjective activity creatively transforming nature," he declares, "but is also at the same time a universal scheme of the changing of any natural or socio-historical material in which this activity is fulfilled and with the objective requirements of which it is always connected" (p.8). So is dialectic a logic -- a sociohistorical phenomenon -- or is it a universal law that applies equally to all types of change, as Engels would have it? My reading suggests the latter: Ilyenkov later approvingly quotes Engels' assertion that natural dialectic inevitably will produce thinking minds (p.55) and Lenin's assertion that thought is the highest form of development of the universal property of sensation (p.56). Later, Ilyenkov hails Schelling's contribution of the "truly universal" law of bifurcation, derived from various examples (magnetic polarity; acids and alkalis; positive and negative electricity). Again, this sounds much like Engels, and supports Deleuze and Guattari's charge that dialectic is arborescent. Finally, Ilyenkov insists that dialectical schemas revealed by Hegel were universal forms and laws of the natural world reflected in man's collective consciousness (p.251; cf. 290; 312). Haraway's critique of dialectics seems more and more relevant here.

Let's return to the question of contradictions, because this is where Ilyenkov makes his real contribution. Ilyenkov boldly asserts that "Contradiction as the concrete unity of mutually exclusive opposites is the real nucleus of dialectics, its central category. On that score the cannot be two views among Marxists" (p.320). Contradictions, he says, are the principle of self-movement in a "concrete, developing system" (let's say an "activity system" here) and are "the form in which the development is cast" (p.330). They provide the impetus for development; dialectics "is the means of resolving these contradictions" (p.322). In fact, studying contradictions is all about studying human activity geneticallly (i.e., historically-developmentally). How did this system develop? What contradictions have arisen and how will they be resolved?

We can see how the third generation of activity theory has taken on Ilyenkov's specific approach to studying development, while moderating or suppressing what appears to be a strongly teleological, universalist understanding of the principle. I'm becoming more and more convinced that activity theory is treading a difficult path at this point, attempting to hold onto the modernist understanding of dialectics and contradictions while simultaneously trying to integrate postmodernist, amodernist, and poststructuralist ideas (multiplicity, dialogism).

Is it worth reading this book? If you're interested in a history of dialectics, or if you're interested in how activity theory's notion of contradiction was developed, you should. I'm interested in both. But be prepared for -- how should I put this? -- some remarkably Soviet prose. >

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(Reading Roundup)

Originally posted: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 22:24:28

I've been buried with work, but I'm also busy reading several texts.

Currently I'm making my way through E.V. Ilyenkov's 1977 book Dialectical Logic: Essays on its History and Theory, an overview of dialectic as it developed from Spinoza to Lenin. Yrjo Engestrom has been citing Ilyenkov quite a bit in relation to how activity theory understands contradictions and the object of activity. I should be done with that soon and will probably post a review by the end of the week.

Next up is Ilyenkov's Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx's Capital and, of course, Capital itself. I haven't read Capital yet, but I've started it and will pick it up again once I've finished with Ilyenkov.

Engestrom once said that you can't truly understand activity theory until you've read Marx. And now Ilyenkov tells me I can't really understand dialectic until I've read Hegel. See how the game is played?

Somewhere in here I will also read Stuart Selber's

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, which I've agreed to review for a journal.

Finally, I'll need to wedge in Holtzblatt et al.s' Rapid Contextual Design: A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design. I don't plan to use that book in my contextual design class this fall, but it should help me as I put together assignments and readings. >

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Reading :: The Natural Contract

Originally posted: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 18:21:51

The Natural Contract

by Michel Serres

The Natural Contract, published in French in 1992, appears to have significantly influenced Latour's later Politics of Nature. Like that later book, this one argues that the pro-ecology movement should abandon the modernist divide between culture and nature, humans and their environment, in favor of an understanding in which the two are inextricable. "So forget the word environment, commonly used in this context. It assumes that we humans are at the center of a system of nature" (p.33). Rather, Serres strives for a symmetrical view in which there are no a priori or positional differences between humans and others.

But surprisingly -- and not so surprisingly, if you think about it -- this line of argument leads to familiar terrain that seems to have less and less to do with ecology. For instance, Serres continues his campaign of sideswipes against contradictions and dialectic (p.11, 50, 64, 81), which is now linked to and blamed for the problem at hand.

... this long war is still called history, and its law is dialectics, or the law of tribunals, which has nothing to do with the world, only with the exquisite disputes indulged in by refined men among themselves. So law prevails over the sciences, even globally, and that means that the laws of the world of men prevail over the laws of the world of things. In the end that means that people will look down on the world of things. (p.81)

This discussion of dialectics comes in the context of a "virtual contract" between humans, one that Serres contrasts with the "natural contract" that he says must be struck among all groups in the ecology. Along those lines, he provides some meditative passages on the "virtual contract" and its origins. I was more interested by a line of argument that Serres makes on the question of privacy. Serres claims that

when everyone knows everything right now about everybody and lives by this knowledge, you have antiquity's notion of freedom and the ideal city, and also the ideal of modern philosophers since Rousseau, the ideal of the media and social science, of the police and bureaucracy: poll, clarify, inform, make known, expose, report. A terrifying nightmare, one that if you've lived in small villages or large tribes, you'll want to avoid all your life, for it is the height of enslavement. Freedom begins with the ignorance I have and wish to preserve of the activities and thoughs of my neighbor, and with the relative indifference that I hope they harbor for mine, for want of information. (p.68)

The freedom of Athens was a freedom that came from busybodies, neighbors who spied on neighbors and told everyone else what they found out! "Everybody played the part of spy and inquisitor for everyone else" (p.69). Freedom is slavery in this context -- the freedom of equal participation in government comes at the price of continual, distributed monitoring. So Serres sees the development of specialties such as law enforcement and prosecution to be an enormous plus: "Better to have the policeman and the prison, these highly visible, specialized organs, recognizable by the uniform and the bars, than the omnipresent eyes and ears of one's associates and of those all-seeing strangers who represent the virtual contract and act on its behalf" (p.69). Specializations can be black boxed, and we gladly do so rather than wading through all the arguments involved with understanding them. But of course this sort of specialization carries its own dangers; we've seen a recent blogospheric upsurge in fact-checking the media, for instance.

The Natural Contract, like Serres' other books, contains no cites, just allusions. It's not as heavily metaphorical as The Parasite but it's not a walk in the park either. Check it out if you're interested in ecological philosophy, symmetry, or influences on Latour's later work.

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