Reading :: The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico

The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico
by David Ronfeldt

About halfway through this book, I tweeted that books like this one are why I gave up fiction. It's true: The book is fascinating, combining a gripping story with a fascinating analysis and rousing implications. And lest people in my field discount its relevance, let me emphasize that this story is about how rhetoric helped David (the Zapatista movement) win a war against Goliath (the Mexican army).

That's an oversimplification, certainly, but it highlights some of the issues at play here. On New Year's Day 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) – with only 1000 to 2000 insurgents – occupied five towns and a city in Chiapas; soon it declared war on the Mexican government (p.1). This insurrection “began as a traditional, Maoist insurgency” (p.45), with the traditional Maoist strategy of building into large units, eventually regiments and divisions, that could take on the government's forces in symmetrical warfare (pp.48-49). Such insurrections had happened before in Mexico, and they had been swiftly crushed by the government. But this time, something odd happened. In press conferences and communiques, the ELZN disavowed Marxist and other ideological leanings, instead emphasizing its indigenous roots and solidarity, appealing for creation of a true democracy and socioeconomic reforms (implying the abrogation of NAFTA) (p.2). It called for a peaceful nationwide civic struggle, not an armed conflict, to reach these goals. And it called for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to monitor the conflict (p.2).

What on earth happened? The authors of this RAND report patiently take us through the history of the crisis, using the netwar framework to explain how the Zapatista strategy changed as NGOs became involved. For instance, the Zapatistas suddenly found themselves supported by single-issue NGOs: NGOs representing the rights of indigenous peoples and by NGOs representing human rights in general (pp.37-39). But they also enjoyed the support of multiple-issue NGOs: ones dealing with Central America, ones opposing NAFTA (p.39). Suddenly many NGOs looked at the Zapatistas and saw an organization that supported – or apparently supported – their issues. And such NGOs were networked with each other, with activists, and with the media. Despite itself – for the ELZN was generally hierarchical (p.43) – the ELZN was drawn to networking with the NGOs, and in doing so, became part of their network.

That meant changing. To use the language of actor-network theory, the Zapatistas and NGOs were interessed: they collectively defined the problem, and in the process, locked themselves into place as actors. The ELZN disavowed a Marxist struggle and instead took up a “compromise agenda” that reflected the shared goals of the NGOs supporting them (p.51). The list of NGOs, by the way, is quite lengthy (pp.58-60). This swarm of NGOs attacked the Mexican government – not violently, but rhetorically: through the media, bloodlessly exerting pressure that, incredibly, held the army at bay.

But the Mexican army changed too. The netwar “has prompted tactical decentralization, institutional redesign in favor of smaller, more specialized and mobile forces, new efforts at joint operations, and improvements in interservice intelligence sharing” (p.77). After all, “it takes networks to fight networks” (p.79).

I've discussed some of the theoretical apparatus and implications of this analysis elsewhere. But the story is well worth reading, not just because it's interesting or theoretically rewarding, but because the Zapatista netwar is one prototype for the networked organizations – and the low-level conflicts – that very well may become common in our near future. If you're interested in organizations, in rhetoric's transitions, or in the future of the state, I highly recommend this book.

Google Wave vs. Google Docs

I've been a GDocs user for a while now, in great part because I like its commitment to collaboration. I even have students use it to peer review papers and turn in papers to me. (Reactions have been generally positive.)

So as I begin using the alpha version of Google Wave, I've been trying to figure out where it fits. After all, Docs and Wave do seem to overlap in at least one function, collaborating on documents. Here are some tentative thoughts I posted to my Twitter feed a couple of days ago:

• GDocs has better readout of revision history, but Wave alerts you to unseen changes and puts your collaborators across the top.
• GDocs embeds comments; Wave splits wave sections (blips) when you comment on a portion of the wave. Document vs. Hyperforum.
• Wave has stronger mashup potential because it doesn't closely imitate conventional docs. But it is weak now because extensions are scarce.
• GDocs is better for working with documents in more structured, turn-taking collaborations. Wave may be better in agile or synchronized collaboration.
• GDocs kills email pingpong (sending versions of documents as attachments, which leads to version control issues). Perhaps Wave kills the idea of documents?

Let's think of it this way. GDocs adds capabilities to the word processors we all know. In fact, GDocs' button bar looks a lot like older versions of MS Word. It uploads Word documents. It does Word- or Works-like things. It starts with the molar unit of the document and adds collaboration.

Wave starts with collaboration, and adds capabilities to produce different sorts of genres within that collaborative paradigm. Documents are just one.

So Wave will have a higher learning curve (as I can attest) and will be less specialized for producing documents. Consequently, it's not as well honed for producing traditional documents. But it's a more general collaborative tool.

As Wave is developed, I expect that we'll see Google giving its API a workout to increase interoperability with GDocs and other services. But I'm not sure if we'll see a collapse between the services, which are still doing rather different things.

"Does TIMN imply developing the so-far least favored (+N?) option: networked non-profit cooperatives?"

David Ronfeldt, about whose TIMN framework I recently blogged, has some thoughts about how a TIMN (Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks) analysis might characterize different kinds of governance. At the end, he points toward further possible work, including this:

Can TIMN help assess what seems to be ideologically amiss with liberalism and conservatism in the United States? Have both moved too far from being soundly triformist? Is one of them turning too tribalist (even monoformist) for its own and the country’s good? And what about a current policy issue — healthcare — that has liberals and conservatives all riled up, at odds over whether to go for a public (+I) or private (+M) option? Does TIMN imply developing the so-far least favored (+N?) option: networked non-profit cooperatives? I’m still working on this part, and I’ll post a separate announcement when it’s ready to be inserted here. Maybe next week.

I'm looking forward to this development. Either way, I like that this theoretical framework can become a tool to think beyond the current twinned either-or fallacy that the health care debate has become in this cycle.

"It’s decentralized now."

Earlier this year, I blogged about the health care town halls and TEA parties, suggesting that the health care protesters were leveraging a hybrid top-down, bottom-up approach in which independent groups or individuals make lateral connections online, come together for protests in which they agree with specific claims (although perhaps not reasons or warrants), and make personal connections at those protests that allow them to scale further. I pointed to Manuel Castells' work and the netwar literature as ways of understanding this phenomenon, and I concluded:

I'll end by stating again that in examining this development, I am not taking a side - even if there were a side to take. Protesters - of the WTO, of Social Security reform, of health care reform, etc. - don't necessarily have a coherent side, any more than federations of knowledge workers do. In describing this tactical development, I'm not endorsing any of these groups, any more than I would be endorsing Nazi Germany by analyzing the Blitzkrieg.

The Blitzkrieg, of course, was a revolution in military tactics built around tight communication between air and land power. Although we have negative associations with the term Blitzkrieg, the basic tactic is neutral - and has become the foundation for modern conventional warfare, including the US' AirLand Battle conceptual framework.

So I was interested to click through an NYT article today and see an account of another protest, one very different from the health care protests and TEA parties, but one that had much in common with them tactically. The article: "Gay Rights Marchers Press Cause in Washington." Here are some representative quotes; I've added emphasis.

“I think this march represents the passing of the torch,” said Corey Johnson, 27, an activist and blogger for the gay-themed Web site Towleroad.com. “The points of power are no longer in the halls of Washington or large metropolitan areas. It’s decentralized now. You have young activists and gay people from all walks of life converging on Washington not because a national organization told them to, but because they feel the time is now.”

Indeed, the marchers were enraged that a national organization was not protesting:

The rally on Sunday and a black-tie gala on Saturday hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights advocacy group, made for a glaring dichotomy. Mr. Obama, who spoke at the dinner, had the crowd on its feet reiterating his pledge to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and declaring his commitment to gay rights as “unwavering.”

The President had no statement, and Rep. Barney Frank dismissed the protest. And

Organizers of the march encountered considerable opposition from within gay political circles and from those who argued that it was hastily planned and would divert resources from campaigns at the state level.

This disjuncture between a national advocacy group and the marchers is a big difference with the health care protesters, who enjoyed varying levels of support from conservative groups. On the other hand, the national organization that might have supported the gay rights marchers under a Republican administration has instead sought an accomodationist footing with a nominally friendly Democratic one. When the White House next changes hands, we might see these differences reverse.

In any case, I think we'll see more hybrid and/or bottom-up demonstrations, tying in more groups and claims, and developing in sophistication and tactics as they proceed. I think we'll also see these groups drawing on each others' tactics in an ideology-free way, just as Blitzkrieg became AirLand Battle.

Some tentative thoughts about a networked rhetoric

I've been rereading David Ronfeldt's RAND working paper "In search of how societies work: Tribes - the first and forever form." Ronfeldt's work is fascinating to me, partially because it's really grappling with the broad implications of organizational forms, partially because it's often illustrated with very concrete cases (e.g., his monograph with Arquilla, Fuller, and Fuller on the Zapatista netwar in Mexico, which I'll be reviewing soon). This work ranges broadly - like Castells, Ronfeldt seemingly reads from everywhere - and has interesting implications, although I approach those implications gingerly because I don't feel that I've reviewed them enough to stand solidly on them.

So I'll be tentative here, speculating about what Ronfeldt's ideas might mean for a networked rhetoric.

Ronfeldt lays out his TIMN framework here: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks. These, he suggests, are the four major forms of organization. Plenty of minor forms exist, but, he argues, as hybrids of these four. These emerge over time, in response to specific conditions, and differently in different societies; although, he says, forms of each have existed since ancient times, different forms become ascendant under different conditions. They tend to coexist in a given society. And each "embodies a distinctive set of structures, beliefs, and dynamics (with bright and dark sides) about how a society should be organized - about who gets to achieve what, why, and how" (p.1).

These different forms matured during different epochs: tribes in the Neolithic era; hierarchical institutions, most notably with the Roman empire; competitive markets with England and the US in the 16th century; and collaborative networks in the present day (pp.1-2).

These forms also emphasize different things: tribes, social identity and belonging; institutions, power and administration; markets, complex exchanges; and networks, Ronfeldt suggests, perhaps emphasize social equity. I think that perhaps he's more on the mark at the top of p.2, where he suggests networks emphasize collaboration across boundaries.

The forms are typically overlaid: as a new form becomes ascendant, the old forms are often strengthened, although their scope becomes more limited (p.3).

And the forms, Ronfeldt argues, involve "different kinds of bonds, transactions, decision rules, and coordination mechanisms. Each has a long, distinct history of association with different philosophical ideals, codes of conduct, and mentalities. Moreover, each requires an actor to have different kinds of information to perform well in that particular form" (p.16). And "What is deemed rational - how a 'rational actor' should behave - is different for each form" (p.20). They are also enabled through different information technologies: tribes, early language; institutions, writing and printing; markets, telephony and radio; and networks, the Internet and faxes - and we might add texting (p.20).

(Just to illustrate, recall that writing apparently emerged to address a thorny accounting issue that the Sumerian empire - an early institution - faced when gathering tributes from its far-flung tributaries.)

With all that in mind, let's tentatively postulate that Ronfeldt has given us a starter framework for understanding types of rationality in different societies, and by extension, a way to conceive of effective logic within each.

Tribes respond well to affiliation, since their key purpose is identity, their key effect is solidarity, and their key information technology is the spoken word; we can see the effect, Ronfeldt says, in failed states. In tribes, "it is not at all illogical to have one code for one's kin and another for outsiders. Indeed, it may seem sensible - and not at all unethical or illegitimate - to behave in what modern analysts may regard as deceptive, exploitive, and even murderous ways toward outsiders" (p.40). Among other things, Ronfeldt suggests that racism is largely situated within a tribal frame.

Institutions, on the other hand, have the key purpose of power and authority; the key effect of sovereignty; and the key information technology of writing and print. Their structure is hierarchical, meant to deal with groups of people that have scaled beyond the limits that tribes can handle. Institutions help people to deal with others that they don't necessarily know by name. Think in terms of Hammurabi's code, which was promulgated so that everyone knew the laws to follow and the rights they had under the laws. What we know as classical rhetoric was codified during this period, originating with a particular institutional setting: the courts.

Markets address the issue of complex exchanges. They have the key purpose of trade and investment, Ronfeldt says; the key effect of competition; and the key information technologies of telephony and radio. Their structure is the exchange. Ronfeldt doesn't address rhetoric here, but we might draw from Drucker's account in Post-Capitalist Society, where he says that the modern age is characterized by knowledge applied to tools, to work, and lastly to knowledge itself (the management revolution). Efficiencies, leverage, and measurable outcomes might be aspects.

So now we get to networks, and Ronfeldt fills the boxes with question marks. Key purpose: Social equity? Key effect: collaboration? Key information technologies: Internet and fax (no question marks here). Networks span boundaries, connecting actors from different organizations, spaces, tribes, markets, etc. "What is distinctive about information-age networks is that people who are far removed from each other can connect, coordinate, and act conjointly across barriers and distances. ... this form is suited to enabling people to address modern, complex policy issues that may require efforts from many directions at the same time, such as health management and disaster recovery. These networks offer new designs for mutual collaboration that cannot be characterized as tribal, hierarchical, or market in nature" (p.22).

Ronfeldt and colleagues offer several examples in the netwar literature, but one of the best is their analysis of the Zapatista netwar. The Zapatistas (EZLN) began as a traditional Marxist insurgency, arranged along Maoist lines in which guerillas would build up forces and eventually form regiments and divisions to confront the enemy. Unfortunately for the EZLN, this strategy was not working. But the EZLN found that it gained traction among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) interested in various issues, such as indigenous rights, human rights, and anti-NAFTA sentiment. These NGOs did not necessarily agree with each other about many things, but they did detect a shared set of propositions - which the EZLN quickly clarified as its own, shifting its objective from revolution to reform, jettisoning much of the Marxist language and demands along the way. As Ronfeldt et al. put it in the Zapatista study, "NGO coalitions arose that were characterized by 'flexible, conjunctural [coyuntural], and horizontal relations' held together by shared goals and demands" (quoting Castro 1994; brackets in original). And "To some extent, this was a compromise agenda" (Ronfeldt et al. p.51).

Let's think about this, tentatively, in rhetorical terms. Under classical (and arguably institutional) rhetoric, arguments are expected to be internally coherent. Let's use the Toulmin structure as an example: A well-formed argument has a claim supported by reasons, each of which is in turn supported by evidence. Connecting the claim to each reason is a warrant, an assumption shared by both the speaker and the listener. The more reasons, the better; the more evidence per reason, the better. And in a well-formed argument, none of these can contradict each other.

But in the Zapatista example, we see something rather different. True to network principles, different actors cross boundaries to collaborate on a single set of shared goals and demands. Let's call this set of goals and demands the claim. The NGOs are largely single-issue: indigenous rights, human rights, anti-NAFTA, etc. They come from different regions, are based in different countries, and reflect different ideologies. But they are all interessed (to use actor-network theory's terminology) in the same problem or proposition or claim; they all define it and are in turn defined by it. So in Toulmin terms, each contributes warrants, reasons, and evidence. But these components do not have to be coherent with the components of the other NGOs. NGOs A, B, and C may have completely different logics, ideologies, warrants, reasons, evidence, etc. But they swarm the proposition/claim and lend their support to it.

Since this networked argument is not coherent, it provides a much more difficult target. It may not even appear rational to an institutional actor, and in fact it's probably a lousy argument by institutional (classic rhetorical) standards. To use terms from my recent book: institutions expect a woven argument; networks deliver spliced arguments.

For fun, let's (again, tentatively) plug this back into the recent health care town hall protests I blogged about recently. As I argued there:

they are united in tactical opposition rather than strategic objectives. And they come into contact and network with those who have similar tactical goals through information technologies that also help them to rapidly coordinate.

That is, they are united in claim or proposition, not in reasons, warrants, or evidence. They don't necessarily form a coherent argument because they have their own, often orthogonal reasons for opposing the health care bill. Seniors worry about Medicare cutbacks; deficit hawks worry about the deficit; proceduralists worry about the aftermath of a rush job; birthers and red-scare types worry about socialism. They might trade reasons and evidence, but they don't necessarily buy into each others' arguments. They don't have to.

What does this sort of networked argument look like to an institution? Either it looks irrational or it looks like a "vast right-wing conspiracy." Addressing this sort of argument with a structured counterargument, point by point, as President Obama attempted, doesn't help much because such counterarguments are geared to exposing incoherencies and contradictions, and incoherencies and contradictions aren't a liability in this case.

Of course, the rationalities of the earlier forms have not disappeared and can still be exploited. Individual institutions can be vulnerable to institutional counterarguments, for instance. Racism - and for that matter, the accusations of racism leveled by some of the President's defenders - can be considered a tribal appeal. But a rebuttal for networked rhetoric perhaps remains to be developed.

One more thought. Activity theory, I suggest, is institutional; actor-network theory is networked.

As mentioned, these are early, tentative thoughts. Comments?

Reading :: The Ethics of Internet Research

The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process
By Heidi McKee and James Porter

Internet research - specifically, qualitative research conducted in Internet spaces, such as email, listservs, social networking sites, and virtual environments - has become increasingly important as we conduct more interactions via Internet media. Yet, as the authors point out, institutional review boards and other research ethics bodies have not kept up: in some cases they have tended to interpret Internet research as archival research, demanding relatively low hurdles for consent, while in other cases, they have demanded much higher hurdles. In this book, McKee and Porter examine the ethical and institutional issues that surround this sort of research. Through their interviews with several Internet researchers - including, I must add, my friend and fellow Iowa State alum Dave Clark - they look at a range of ethical actions that these researchers have taken that go beyond the demands of their IRBs. And they push toward an understanding of ethics that is more tuned to the specifics of Internet research.

So they do useful work here, and I'd recommend the book to scholars who are embarking on Internet-based studies. (I should mention that I haven't conducted such a study so far.) I am not entirely in step with some of their conclusions, such as their recommendation that "the genre of the social science report ... [be revised] to include a section on ethical issues" (p.156), a move that I worry will bog down the genre with pro forma pronouncements as ethical standards for Internet research become more settled. But as a temporary feature during the development of Internet research ethics, such a section makes sense.

If you're doing Internet research, I suggest giving this book a read.

The G20 Protests

Not long ago, I analyzed the health care town halls in network terms, linking the protestors' tactics to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Now we're seeing something more similar to the WTO protests, the G20 protests currently going on in Pittsburgh. I'm not going to attempt an analysis, at least not yet, but it's worth quoting John Robb on them:

In general, governments worldwide are losing control over all of the classical forms of national power from borders to finances to communication to media to economic activity to security to trade flows (of all types). The upshot of this accelerating weakness is a tendency to view any and all forms of public protest as a security threat.

Right. Castells goes further, noting that the state traditionally asserts a monopoly on violence (Communication Power p.51, for instance), and that "because networks are global, the state, which is the enforcer of power through the monopoly of violence, finds considerable limits to its coercive capacity unless it engages itself in networking with other states, and with the power-holders in the decisive networks that shape social practices in their territories while being deployed in the global realm" (p.51). But nonstate actors are also in play, as the Seattle protests nicely demonstrated, and these threaten states' abilities to enforce power.

So, Robb points out, states have begun turning to paramilitary operations, early and free use of nonlethal weapons on crowds (e.g., sonic weapons, tear gas), and speech restrictions. And as Robb warns:

This effort will almost undoubtedly generate unintended consequences (we can already see protest groups learning to counter this by using flash mob mobility via cell phones).

Yes, and as with the previous examples, groups are mingling and networking, using Internet and mobile communication technologies to coordinate, exhort, and plan. Techniques in one context are deployed in others - on both sides. For instance, one response to the town hall protests has been to hold "virtual town halls" in which representatives control the communication channels and thus the conduct of the meetings. The results have been less unruly, but also have been perceived in some quarters as analogous to Potemkin villages. Such communication management is perhaps analogous to the "free speech zones" Robb notes, but we can imagine more aggressive measures along these lines, such as disrupting mobile phone service or social networking.

Reading :: Communication Power

Communication Power
By Manuel Castells

Although Internet media had played a role in politics before, including the early success of the Dean campaign, perhaps the most startling impact it had was on Dan Rather's famous report about George W. Bush's National Guard service. Based on what he called "unimpeachable sources," Rather claimed to have solid evidence for the long-circulating rumor that Bush had used family connections to avoid serving in Vietnam, and in the waning days of the election, he grimly told the electorate that the war president was a draft dodger. His evidence: memos purportedly written by Bush's National Guard commander.

You know the rest. Bloggers and commenters at Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Powerline examined the memos and noticed what anyone who has closely followed the shift from typewriter to word processor should have noticed: the memos were written in a proportional font and were automatically tracked. One person created an animated GIF showing one of the memos alternating with the same text typed into Microsoft Word with the default settings; except for smudges, the two were identical. Alerted by these differences, others noted content discrepancies. The story, which could have seriously compromised the Bush campaign, instead damaged CBS News. Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, was terminated, and Rather was put out to pasture. And bloggers famously told the legacy media that they would "fact check your ass."

It's telling – and disappointing – that the closest Manuel Castells gets to addressing this watershed event is to call Bush a "draft-dodging, alcoholic, drug abuser" (p.236) while holding Rather up as a sterling example of the US media, trying and sometimes failing to criticize the Bush adminstration enough (p.171, footnote 21). I found this quite disappointing, since one of the things that I admired about Castells' The Power of Identity was his evenhandedness in examining networked relations among disparate social movements despite his sympathy for one (the Zapatistas) and his antipathy for the other two (the black-helicopter crowd and Aum Shinrikyo). We sorely need that sort of evenhandedness to understand the very phenomenon Castells is trying to examine here – communication power – but Castells is anything but evenhanded. And in ignoring the Rathergate blog swarm and other examples that go against the anti-Bush narrative, he loses several opportunities to provide a fuller, more challenging analysis.

Indeed, I regret to report that Castells seems to entirely give up the analytical view in spots. His account of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, for instance, reads like a campaign ad – or a love letter – in which he is unaccountably credulous of the campaign's statements and actions. He extensively cites Obama's books as his major sources on the candidate's life, seemingly unaware or unconcerned that political autobiographies are typically crafted to work within a campaign's narrative. He enthuses that Obama is a different kind of candidate, oriented less to the left-right divide and more toward the future vs. the past (p.375). He even finds himself arguing that "Obama ... made a strategic alliance with the Chicago political machine, but he was not part of it" – and in the next sentence, suggesting that since the Daley machine produced such successful policies, maybe this dynasty wasn't so bad after all (pp.388-389).

Omissions such as Rathergate and commissions such as the offhand embrace of machine politics (when they support Obama, at any rate) are hard to overlook, and they cast a pall over the purpose of the book. In the opening, Castells describes how as a college student in Franco's Spain, he tried to resist the dictatorship's censorship. He came to believe that "power is based on the control of communication and information" (p.3). He is interested, then, in "why, how, and by whom power relationships are constructed and exercised through the management of communication processes, and how these power relationships can be altered by social actors aiming for social change by influencing the public mind" (p.3). In particular, he's interested in how communication power is exercised in the network society, which is constructed around digital technologies, technologies that have produced media of "mass self-communication" (p.4). What's mass self-communication? Think in terms of the blogs by which bloggers published their own analyses of Dan Rather's memos and contributed to each others' interpretations – just to pick an example out of the air.

Castells, as usual, is wide-ranging, and he tells us at the beginning that he will draw on various theories (which he characterizes as "disposable tools," p.5) without wasting too much time critiquing or reconciling them (p.6). And so he does. At times, this is regrettable: actor-network theory, for instance, is cited in a single sentence, called "brilliantly theorized," yet is characterized as being about "humans" – which is pretty much the opposite of Latour's intent (p.45). Nevertheless, Castells covers the network society pretty well in chapter 1, which is largely an update of his argument in The Rise of the Network Society.

His next chapter, on communication in the digital age, delves into the idea of mass self-communication: communication that could potentially reach the masses, but "is self-communication because the production of the message is self-generated, the definition of the potential receiver(s) is self-directed, and the retrieval of specific messages or content ... is self-directed" (p.55). Mass self-communication coexists with interpersonal and mass communication, generating a hypernetworked diversity that encourages mixing and recombining (p.55). This present age is undergoing at least four transformations of communication: a technological transformation based on digital communication; a transformation of the organizational and institutional structure of communication; a transformation of the cultural dimension of multilayered communication; and a transformation involving the social (typically power) relationships underlying the evolution of this multimodal communication system (pp.56-57). Castells traces the implications of each here, quite densely; I won't summarize all of his conclusions.

So far so good. But things start to slide, I think, in Chapter 3. Here, Castells starts borrowing from neuroscience and cognitive science, and I'm not thrilled with the results, which seem sutured together without enough theoretical structure to provide a well-structured argument. Castells tried to counter this criticism in the Overview, but I'm not buying it. I'll skip over the neuroscience portion he borrows from Damasio and go straight to the Lakoff. Frankly, I haven't read Lakoff, but every summary of his work has read like Castells' summary here: (a) Framing an issue is important because once people accept a frame, they can't see outside of it; (b) conservatives have successfully framed issues by activating the frames of terror and patriotism, frames that trigger conservative impulses in the hearers because we get more conservative when we think about death; (c) liberals need to therefore get off the ball, stop being so cerebral and even-handed, and start activating their own frames. I won't launch an extended critique of this line of reasoning (as Castells represents it, anyway). Instead, I'll just point out that that there's a rich history of studying and theorizing persuasion (i.e., rhetoric) and it has historically been critiqued by those who don't trust persuasion because the truth is so obvious that people could not be persuaded otherwise without some sort of nefarious trickery. I don't give this any more credence than I do the other side of the coin: conservative rumors that President Obama is such a successful speaker because he uses known hypnosis techniques.

Castells rides this horse a bit more in Chapter 4, discussing the rise of scandal politics (and illustrating it, as I mentioned at the beginning of this review), and really contributing some valuable theoretical work on why it is ascendant. Scandals, he says, have become the hidden expression of political struggle by other means (p.261; think here about Speaker Pelosi's claim that the CIA had never briefed Congress about waterboarding, for instance). He examines three different countries (the US, Russia, and China) to demonstrate how states use techniques tailored to their political climates in order to assert message control. This is among the most valuable parts of the book: how communication networks are "programmed."

Even more valuable is Chapter 5, on "reprogramming" communication networks through individuals' insurgent activities. Let's pass over Castells' merciless characterization of non-actors as "selfish parasites" (p.300), and let's applaud the apparent return of Castells' analytical distance as he points out that social change could be in any given direction (p.301). He argues that social change requires "reprogramming" communication networks, changing the power relationships embedded in these networks (p.302), and he points to "the potential synergy between the rise of mass self-communication and the autonomous capacity of civil societies around the world to shape the process of social change" (p.303). His extended example is that of the 2004 Spanish election, in which the ruling party claimed falsely that terrorist bombings were the work of Basque separatists rather than al Qaeda (p.349). The mass media were constrained from reporting fully, but citizens exchanged text messages, organized rallies, and forced further journalistic investigation, leading to the defeat of the ruling party. Alas, later in the chapter, he covers the Obama campaign in much less analytic detail, as I mentioned above.

Castells concludes by counseling us, without apparent irony, to "practice your critical thinking every day" (p.431).

I've been hard in this review on Castells, who I have admired in his previous efforts for his ability to cover and synthesize many different bodies of research in the service of understanding the network society. And Castells has some genuine, solid contributions here. But as I've intimated above, the book is quite patchy, with some parts reading like a second draft, some parts highly polished, some parts highly analytical, some parts glossy and nearly analysis-free. In a way, this book reminds me of Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, which (to my eye) seemed like the sort of book one writes when one no longer wants to bother answering critics. Unfortunately, the result is a fair amount of gold mixed with a fair amount of dross. Proceed carefully with this book, and "practice your critical thinking every day."

Reading :: The Ayes of Texas

The Ayes of Texas
By Daniel da Cruz

I read perhaps one book of fiction per year. This year, I picked up a piece of Cold War science fiction about which I had always been curious. The premise behind this 1982 book, The Ayes of Texas, is classic Cold War paranoia. In 1994, the Soviet Union is going strong, having taken over most of the world; the United States has gotten bogged down in pouring foreign aid into its own third world client states, including India and China. The Soviets have demonstrated their own strategic defense initiative and shown off their vast underground cities, both of which guarantee their ability to survive a nuclear struggle. An uneasy detente rests over the world. As the author explains, Reagan's attempts to reverse his predecessor's neglect of the military has doomed the US.

In this situation, a Texan millionaire, who happens to be a triple amputee WWII veteran, answers the call of the Texas governor by secretly refurbishing his old WWII ship, the rusting Texas. At the same time, the Soviets have proposed a peace accord that is a transparent Soviet ploy: one that would have the US abandon its industrial base and focus on agriculture. The weary US public buys this, but a few don't, and the Texas millionaire is among them. He riles up sentiment in Texas against a Soviet fleet that is touring US ports; the result is Texas secession and an unlikely battle in which the city of Houston annihilates the entire Soviet 17th Fleet.

The book is interesting mainly as a relic of Cold War paranoia in which Soviet expansion was inevitable, and only a Machiavellian Great Man could save the free world. As we now know, in retrospect this chain of events is not plausible: Carter's military spending had begun an upward trajectory even before Reagan came into office; the Soviet Union had already begun to suffer from overexpansion; and Great Men are overrated. But the book reflects the mindset of its time, and that's really the most interesting thing about it. I don't recommend the book.

Reading :: The Reagan Imprint

The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror
By John Arquilla

As John Arquilla notes, many books have been written that speculate about President Reagan, seemingly open, but in practical terms one of the most private and closed presidents we have ever had. Arquilla does not set out to "crack the carapace of his psyche" (p.9), but rather to examine his strategic thinking based on foreign (not domestic) policy. And in those senses, Arquilla comes up with some surprising answers. He argues that Reagan was in many ways the pivot of presidential foreign policy, a president that has not been appreciated for his strategic insights as well as his strategic successes. "In short," Arquilla argues, "the world would be far more complicated and infinitely more dangerous had Ronald Reagan not risen to the presidency. But he did, making a favorable peace with the Russians just in time to give the United States the running room it needs to cope with a new era of complex problems and grave global challenges" (p.212).

Arquilla is, of course, most concerned with foreign policy strategy in general and military strategy in particular. I've reviewed some of his previous work on this blog, including his recent book on reforming the military to better deal with asymmetric warfare and some of his writings on netwar. In this book, he is most interested in "the Reagan imprint," the lasting influence that Reagan's strategic thinking had on the US military, US strategy, and the conduct of subsequent presidents. Arquilla's assessment is not entirely positive, but it appears thorough and searching to this lay reader.

This portrait of Reagan may be hard for some to take, given a popular perception of Reagan as driven by ideology, Christian apocalyptism, and half-remembered movie plots. But Arquilla builds a case that Reagan was "above all else a strategic thinker" (p.215). Although the entire book builds this case, I'll quote from the book's excellent summary. Arquilla singles out five ways in which "Reagan transformed American grand strategy" (p.215):

• From containment to rollback: Up to Reagan's election, the US had taken the strategic position of containing Soviet expansion: a reactive, resistant strategy. Reagan elected to "take the initiative away from the Soviets" (p.216) by encouraging those under Soviet control to resist: "helping others help themselves," as Arquilla put it (p.216). Arquilla demonstrates that Reagan's successors (Bush, Clinton, Bush) have in their different ways followed through on these principles by "helping others free themselves" (p.216, my emphasis).

• From deterrence to defense. Arquilla argues that up to Reagan's term, the Cold War emphasized avoiding war between the US and the USSR at all costs, because it would spiral into nuclear war. That was partially because US forces could not react quickly or forcefully enough to repel an expected Soviet invasion of Europe; war games with this scenario inevitably led to a nuclear conflagration. Reagan reasoned that building conventional forces meant opening a middle ground on which conventional warfare could be fought – making the world safe for conventional warfare, as it were – and thus making nuclear war less likely. Reagan was fond of saying that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," and Arquilla argues forcefully that Reagan's statement was not merely window dressing, it was a core tenet driving his strategy. The other component was, of course, ballistic missile defense (p.217). Arquilla demonstrates that this shift in strategy has influenced each of his successors.

• From arms racing to arms reduction. "Until Reagan came along," Arquilla argues, "statesmen and strategists generally believed the superpowers were locked into an airtight, inescapable security dilemma" (p.218). Every attempt at defense could be understood as a threat by the other side; the arms race could be slowed through limitation talks such as SALT, but not stopped or reversed. Reagan rejected this dilemma and engaged in arms reduction talks (START) (p.218).

• From propaganda to public diplomacy. Arquilla emphasizes that Reagan was the first president to use the term "information strategy" – and the first president of the Cold War to actively pursue one. The Great Communicator rejected "the propaganda that had characterized the war of ideas before him," and in contrast, "his strategy consisted of steadily increasing presssure on our adversaries by communicating directly with those people they were oppressing" (p.219).

• From coercion to constructive engagement. Finally, Arquilla points out the more subtle change that Reagan introduced in our engagement with dictators. Reagan, Arquilla argues, inherited "a diplomatic strategy that, in its emphasis on containment, had come to rely on cultivating friendly despots to help defend areas that might come under threat of Soviet influence or control" (p.220). But the contradiction between US tolerance of dictators and its articulated human rights policy was severe. Reagan's solution was to "buil[d] his constructive engagement concept upon [the idea that some dictators were less odious than others] and added his own flourish about all tyrannies of the mind being weak. Their inherent weakness made it possible for us to think in terms of engaging them diplomatic, for time was always on our side according to this point of view" (p.220). Again, his successors followed this principle.

Lest Arquilla be thought as a Reagan cheerleader here, he also points to the failings in Reagan's strategy, failings that have made us far less able to deal with terrorism.

• Allowing Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons. This failure arose from Reagan's need to accommodate Pakistan as it helped to support the Afghan muhajadeen against the Soviet incursion. Yet Pakistan's nuclear development led to the rise of the AQ Khan network and North Korean proliferation, as well as the possibility of nuclear weapons being taken by terrorist networks (p.222). Unfortunately, Arquilla adds, Reagan's successors have followed his lead.

• Turning the concept of waging a war on terror into practical policy initiatives. Here, Arquilla uses "war on terror" to mean addressing asymmetric warfare – something that the US military is not well optimized or prepared to do, since it was shaped by Reagan's Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger to fight conventional wars. Weinberger preferred to take on terrorism using conventional forces. Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz preferred covert special operations forces – the forces that were used with such success in Afghanistan under George W. Bush's administration. "Had Reagan's choice been to launch an irregular war on terror more than twenty years ago, the odds are that al Qaeda and other networks would not have become the potent threats they are today," Arquilla argues (p.223). Again, Reagan's successors have all followed this path.

• Reagan's revitalization of the military gave the Pentagon free reign. This "resulted in a reaffirmation of the most traditional views of strategy and warfare at a time when the need to anticipate the rise of irregular adversaries was acute" (p.225). Reagan thus built a military optimized for a type of warfare that is "ever less likely to occur," and his successors have followed suit (p.225). Forces have been too large for their jobs.

Nevertheless, Arquilla makes a compelling case for Reagan's presidency as a transformative one, a presidency that in terms of strategy was driven by ideas rather than ideology. In the main text, Arquilla goes into great detail about how Reagan's actions were essential for spurring the collapse of the Soviet Union, taking on critics who have claimed the USSR would have collapsed even without Reagan's influence; how Reagan introduced essential ideas of informational strategy, drawing on his experience in the media; and other wrinkles. For many of my readers, these arguments will go against long-held assumptions about the Reagan presidency. But Arquilla limits his claims, supports them, and evaluates the results evenhandedly. If you're interested in strategy, in asymmetric warfare, or in informational strategy (the most direct connection to rhetoric), his book is worth a read.

A personal note. Reagan was president until 1988; I graduated from high school in 1987. As a high schooler, I had a surface understanding of the foreign policy challenges at the time, and a somewhat deeper appreciation for Soviet totalitarianism once I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago just before my senior year. And like many who grew up in the 1980s, I was pleasantly surprised to make it through high school without being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Arquilla's book has given me a better understanding of the challenges we faced during that decade, and a better appreciation of the challenges we face during this current time.

Reading :: Conversation and Community

Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation
By Anne Gentle

I checked in my LinkedIn updates the other week, and Anne Gentle's status message said that she had just published this book. Curious, I checked out the description on Amazon.com, and then I did something I almost never do: I bought the book on Amazon, new, without even seeing it. That's because Gentle has finally taken on something that technical communicators desperately need to do: she has written a book that grapples with how technical communication is impacted by, and can leverage, social media.

I've ridden this hobby horse for a few years. The last chapter of Tracing Genres through Organizations, for instance, discusses a speculative "open system" in which users could contribute their own free-form documentation. These way-out predictions now look timorous and tentative, as I acknowledge in the summer 2009 issue of JBTC, since people use Google to find answers to very specific questions and Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. to establish communities. In my principles of technical writing classes last year, I had a project based on establishing a relationship between static, official documentation and dynamic, user-contributed documentation. But I haven't done the practical groundwork to guide such work. So I was delighted to see that Anne Gentle has.

Gentle really comes to grips with the shift that ubiquitous Internet connections have precipitated. As she points out, consumers more and more frequently start their documentation searches with an Internet search engine, and they frequently look for documentation that matches their learning style – which may be a YouTube video, podcast, or set of photos rather than traditional written documentation (p. 17). Meanwhile, the third-party print market has begun to feature page turners (e.g. the For Dummies books) (p.21) rather than the spare reference guides and user guides that were developed during the tech comm heyday of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The tech comm landscape is much more populated these days, and writers have to be sensitive to the entire ecology of texts and what niche each one fills.

In Chapter 2, Gentle does a nice job of listing such niches of social media (pp.30-33), covering not just community content, discussions, and video, but also texting, microblogging, and tagging. She discusses user-generated examples such as the World of Warcraft wiki (p.37). And as the book progresses, she outlines how writers can determine the best contributions they can make, their starting points, and their strategies for best impacting social media. She describes social media roles (p.73) and the phases of a strategic plan for social media engagement, such as the listening phase, the participation phase, the content sharing phase, and the platform or stage phase (pp.75-78). She also discusses the social capital involved in developing documentation – and encouraging users to generate their own (p.107).

So I'm thrilled that Gentle has written the book and that it covers what it does. Conversation and Community isn't perfect – it's going to be difficult to follow for the people who need it most, students in introductory tech comm courses, who are not as familiar with basic tech comm concepts as the book requires them to be. But for those who have worked as technical writers, the book provides an accessible, strategically minded discussion of social media and how they can work with it. I am strongly considering adopting it for one of my classes. Take a look.

Reading :: Team Writing

Team Writing: A Guide to Working in Groups
By Joanna Wolfe

Whenever I talk to people in industry about what they need from UT graduates, they typically tell me that students need to be able to manage projects. That doesn't typically mean formal project management, but it does involve setting objectives, developing a task list and schedule, delegating, and collaborating with others. Unfortunately, group projects in writing classes typically don't provide mechanisms for helping students to collaborate or plan projects; students are usually thrown into groups and asked to cooperate. So I've put together a standard presentation for my classes focusing on the strategic, tactical, and operational components of project planning; I've asked them to use project management software with common task lists; and I've had them use collaborative software for writing, such as Google Docs or a wiki.

Joanna Wolfe, who received her PhD from the University of Texas not long ago, has gone light years beyond that. I am really thrilled with this book, which introduces students to the basics of project management and collaboration. Based on her work on collaboration for an NSF grant, she has systematized collaboration for students, including several genres such as task schedules, meeting minutes and agendas, project plans, and team charters. She includes diagnostics for discovering students' working styles so they can become aware of how each member prefers to work. She comes up with innovative ways of dealing with low-investment students, such as allowing disinterested students to negotiate up front for a lower grade in return for a lower workload. She describes different methods of collaborative writing, of conflict resolution, of soliciting feedback, of prodding late team members to contribute.

In short, Wolfe has put together what I consider to be an invaluable guide for team projects. The book is thin and she assures us that it could be handled within a two-week class segment. It is supplemented by videos on the book's website. And it can be optionally bundled with other Bedford/St, Martin books at a discount – something that will lead me to reexamine that catalog. I will almost certainly assign this book in some of my future courses.

"Have you contributed your writing?"

Kristen Suchor, CCCC & CEE Administrative Liaison at the National Council of Teachers of English, just emailed me asking me, and my associates, to post samples of our writing to the online gallery in honor of the National Day of Writing:

Therefore, I’m asking you as a CCCC leader to help spread the word to your family, friends, and colleagues, encouraging them to submit to the National Gallery. If you could send even a brief note with information about submitting to the Gallery and the National Day on Writing to just 10 people, that would help us tremendously. We now have several samples of writing posted (http://www.ncte.org/dayonwriting/samples) that may be helpful to pass along as your family, friends, and colleagues are considering what writing they want to submit to the Gallery.

As a CCCC leader, I exhort you to do this. Clear our your wastebaskets. Save your sticky notes, your shopping lists, your tally sheets, your crumpled diner receipts, and other ephemera. Upload your tweets and especially your Foursquare messages. If you play Facebook games or take quizzes, take some screen caps. The National Gallery needs your texts.

In other news, if you printed the Internet, it would supposedly be a book weighing 1.2 billion pounds. In honor of the National Day of Writing, I hope you will all take some time to read it and contemplate how we need to make texts a bigger part of our lives.

ATTW 2010 call for papers

Just forwarded to me. Comments below:

ATTW 2010
Synergies: The Intersections of Research and Teaching

13th Annual Conference
March 17, 2010
Louisville, KY

The Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) invites proposals for papers, poster presentations, and workshops to be given at its annual conference immediately preceding the CCCC. The thirteenth annual conference will be held in Louisville, KY, on Wednesday, March 17, 2010. The full-day event includes concurrent sessions, poster presentations, workshops, book exhibits, and opportunities for exchanging ideas, working on projects, and networking in a supportive and challenging academic environment.

This year's conference will highlight ways that research informs teaching and teaching informs research. It will challenge researchers, teachers, and practitioners of technical and professional communication to push beyond the generic "implications for teaching" section appended to research articles to explore the synergies and questions available when we place research and teaching into conversation.

Submissions on all topics are welcome, but we especially encourage proposals that examine topics such as the following:

* the effectiveness of established or innovative pedagogies,
* a research question sparked by an observation in the classroom,
* pedagogical experiments sparked by research findings,
* the needs of the workplace, the university, the field, or the community and ways to meet or challenge these needs in service, major, or graduate courses,
* the roles, challenges, and benefits of instructional technologies,
* the implications of existing research for the design of programs and curriculum,
* pedagogies that can be used to teach research in the university and in the workplace,
* research methods that can be used to examine pedagogies,
* the relationships between teaching and research as they play out in different contexts within our discipline,
* directions for future research on pedagogy or questions raised by classroom experiences.

Proposals, limited to 300 words, are due October 5, 2009. All proposals will be peer reviewed. We offer three formats:

1. Regular Sessions: Individuals may submit proposals for 15-minute talks that will be placed on panels by conference organizers. Groups may submit proposals for 45-minute panel presentations. To submit proposals, follow the conference links at www.attw.org after September 21, 2009.

2. Poster Presentations: Posters will be on display throughout the day with special times dedicated for conversations about this work. Follow the same process for submission as for a regular session.

3. Workshop Sessions: The conference will include two 90-minute workshops overlapping with the regular sessions. Workshops that would help newcomers integrate into our field are especially encouraged. Please submit workshop proposals directly to Summer Taylor (slsmith@clemson.edu).

For additional information, contact the conference chair, Summer Taylor at Clemson University (slsmith@clemson.edu). New teachers of technical and professional communication are particularly invited to attend the conference, as are graduate students and CCCC attendees interested in technical and professional communication.

Just two comments. One is that although I highly encourage people to go, I won't be there this year. (I've decided to take a break from traveling, and only plan to go to SXSWi.)

The other is that although I understand the urge to "push beyond the generic 'implications for teaching' section appended to research articles," I've generally done that by not including implications for teaching. I don't have anything against implications for teaching, but not every study has those implications, and too often I see that subsection jammed into the end of TCR article manuscripts when implications for theory or methodology would be much more apt. I don't see that same tendency in any of the social sciences or most of the humanities, and I wonder if it's a generic convention left over from composition's emergence as a subfield.

Reading :: Terror in the Balance

Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts
By Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule

This book was one of several I received recently from Oxford University Press. I suppose it counts as pleasure reading, since it's far outside my expertise, focused on constitutional law. In any rate, I'll make this a short review since I don't have the ConLaw background to evaluate it critically on its own terms.

In a sense, that's what the book is about: deference to others' expertise. But in this case, deference is a more high-stakes issue, since the topic is: to what extent should the judiciary defer to the executive branch in times of crisis? The authors argue that the judiciary has traditionally given much deference to the executive branch in such periods, allowing it to temporarily compromise civil liberties because "civil liberties interfere with effective response to the threat" (p.4). This deference sometimes leads to bad decisions, they acknowledge, but they claim that "Both Congress and the judiciary realize that they do not have the expertise or the resources to correct the executive during an emergency. Only when the emergency wanes do these institutions reassert themselves, but this just shows that the basic constitutional structure remains unaffected by the emergency." They argue that "the traditional practice of judicial and legislative deference has served Americans well, and there is no reason to change it" (p.5).

The authors use some Bush-era cases as case studies, but they make clear that they do not defend particular choices on their merit (p.9). (Indeed, they say, many executive decisions are bad calls; they point to the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII as one.) Rather, they argue that deferring to the executive branch leads to swifter decision-making and does not lead to systematically biased decision-making. They further assert that as the emergency recedes, Congress and the judiciary reassert themselves, as in the Hamdan and Hamdi decisions that reined in some of the Bush Administration's earlier executive decisions.

The authors' arguments for this view are heavily based in ConLaw, a body of work - and, I suspect, a form of argumentation - with which I am unfamiliar. To me, the arguments look bloodless and Machiavellian, in the positive sense of being ruthlessly pragmatic rather than idealistic. I am not sure I find them convincing, particularly the point that the legal system can systematically bounce back from deference, but as I say, I don't have the ConLaw background or the historical background to take these on in a principled fashion.

I also thought that parts of the book were unfocused, particularly in Ch.6, where the authors take a detour to argue for narrowly legalizing coercive interrogation on pragmatic grounds. For me, this was the most uncomfortable part of the book: the authors acknowledge the moral issues with coercive interrogation, but argue that legalizing it would be the best pragmatic way to control it and meet our national moral obligations. As I said, the arguments are sometimes bloodless - and in this case, this shocking (to me) argument distracted from the book's central argument about judicial deference.

I did enjoy touring the legal system as a system, though. In any case, a thought-provoking book.

More on that SXSWi panel

As you recall, I've put together a South by Southwest Interactive panel on What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work. We've solidified the panel at this point, so here's what we're going to cover:

Clay Spinuzzi: I have been developing deep knowledge in how people collaborate day to day, especially in how they use innovations and technologies and how they organize their work in looser work relationships. I've written a couple of books on the topic (see the right bar of this blog). So I'll bring

• Detailed case studies of loose work organization, especially in Austin
• Comparisons of what motivates coworkers and coworking proprietors at different spaces in Austin
• Connections between these loose org trends and Austin's local economy

Drew Jones: Drew is a trained anthropologist and consultant who has been studying how work is changing as Gen Y takes over the workforce. He's involved in a consuntancy, Shift101, and a related coworking space, Shift Workspace. Drew literally (co)wrote the book on coworking and another on innovation. He'll bring

• A broad idea of work trends and generational trends across the country
• Deep experience in mentoring the broader coworking community and specifically coworking in his space
• Background on innovation

Gary Swart: Gary Swart is CEO of oDesk Corporation (www.odesk.com). oDesk facilitates connecting, maintaining, and building trust among online workteams. Gary will talk about the practical challenges of "loosely coupled, highly aligned teams working remotely, including our own use case of 70+ remote resources working directly for oDesk from around the world." He'll bring

• A broad international idea of how to connect workers in loose, sometimes ad hoc organizations
• International trends
  
• Trust and accountability building among people who haven't met face to face
  
• Strong, scalable, successful solutions for connecting people
• Case studies illustrating the above
• A CEO's perspective

Needless to say, I'm very excited about how the panel is taking shape. Please do click through and give us a thumbs up.

"Have you ever noticed how many, many people are writing and just how much writing there is in the world?"

At the NCTE Inbox blog, Millie Davis lists several pieces of quotidian writing that she has noticed: satellite information for farmers, testimonials for service providers, billboards, texting, etc. And she concludes, "Writing is a significant part of our lives—not just English-teacher lives but the lives of repair people, babysitters, kindergarten artists, pet-sitters, lawyers, bloggers, farmers, hospitality workers, truckers, travelers, advertisers, nurses, trades workers, and more." She says she has noticed these much more lately, since she has been thinking about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)-proposed National Day on Writing.

Yes: writing developed out of a quirky Sumerian accounting system to keep tributes straight, not to express great truths or arguments. And in a highly literate society it saturates every corner of our lives, from our workplaces to our streets to our bodies. Writing is everywhere, often rough, opportunistic, localized, pragmatic, and unrelated to the idealized formal genres that are valorized by so much of our formal schooling.

A writing teacher's discovery of quotidian writing is like a fish's discovery of water.

That's part of what makes the idea of a National Day on Writing so odd and unappealing to me: it's like having a national day on personal hygiene, or clothing, or walking. Writing is one of our most important skills, but it's also too generalized and far-reaching a skill, with too many untaught applications, to be defined by a professional teachers' group. Especially one whose members are surprised to discover that we are surrounded by texts.

From big brother to little sisters

So President Obama has been quoted as claiming in a conference call with rabbis that "we are God's partners in matters of life and death." Reported how? As Mickey Kaus points out, the reporting came from the live Twitter feed of one of the rabbis involved in the call, and that rabbi has now deleted the tweet. As I mentioned earlier, during the campaign, the explosion of peer-to-peer outlets, what Castells calls mass self-communication, means that nothing is private anymore - but as we can see in this instance, it also means that anything can be published, and absent recorded evidence, it's very difficult to verify.

Vote for my SXSWi panel!

I'm a little behind in promoting my SXSWi panel due to a recent trip. Please consider voting for it!

What Coworking Tells Us About the Future of Work
What happens when people can work anywhere - home offices, coffee shops, libraries, coworking spaces? With mobile computing, telecommunications, and broadband, knowledge workers are choosing new work arrangements and self-organizing in looser, more transient arrangements. We'll discuss these broad trends and what they mean for work, using coworking as a specific example.

Reading :: The Information Society and the Welfare State

The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model
By Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen

Given my interest in the Nordic countries' "third way" between socialism and capitalism, I was eager to pick up this book, which is an attempt to examine how Castells' discussion of the information society fares in the Finnish welfare state. The authors emphasize that Silicon Valley is not the only model for the information society - we won't become a planet of Silicon Valleys - and they set out to examine Finland's development as another model.

Unfortunately, this book is not the sort of expansive theorization that I have enjoyed so much with some of Castells' other books. It is filled with statistics and case studies about the Finnish economy, it seems to incisively examine Finland's upcoming challenges, and it does note the fact that Finns have traditionally resisted flexible work because it threatens to weaken the welfare state. This is all good and valuable work, but unless you have a specific interest in Finland's development, it may not be riveting to you.