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.

Reading :: The Internet Galaxy

The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
By Manuel Castells

So I'm continuing my tour through Manuel Castells' books, of which there seem to be too many to count. Castells writes books like I write articles. This particular book was based on the author's Clarenden Lectures in 1999 – pre-crash, pre-9/11, pre-Afghanistan, pre-Iraq - and originally published in 2001; I read the 2003 reprint. With all that has happened since it was published, though, the book is surprisingly fresh and relevant. That's particularly true as I work through some case studies I've been conducting into net work here in Austin.

Castells' central argument here is that "the Internet is the basis for the organizational form of the Internet Age: the network" (p.1). Networks have been around for a long time, he allows, but information technologies have allowed them to "take on new life" (p.1). He adds:

Networks have extraordinary advantages as organizing tools because of their inherent flexibility and adaptability, critical features in order to survive and prosper in a fast-changing environment. This is why networks are proliferating in all domains of the economy and society, outcompeting and outperforming vertically organized corporations and centralized bureaucracies. (p.1)

However, "They have had considerable difficulty in coordinating functions, in focusing resoruces on specific goals, and in accomplishing a given task, beyond a certain size and complexity of the network" (p.2; this is familiar territory for those who have read about networks in business and warfare). Castells refers here to the problem of scaling that has traditionally limited networks to "primarily the preserve of private life" (p.2). But

Now, however, the introduction of computer-based information and communication technologies, and particularly the Internet, enables networks to deploy their flexibility and adaptability, thus asserting their evolutionary nature. At the same time, these technologies allow the coordination of tasks, and management of complexity. This results in an unprecedented combination of flexibility and task performance, of coordinated decision-making and decentralized execution, of individualized expression and global, horizontal communication, which provide a superior organizational form for human action. (p.2)

IT-powered networks, particularly the Internet, are now structuring "Core economic, social, political, and cultural activities throughout the planet," and "exclusion from these networks is one of the most damaging forms of exclusion in our economy and in our culture" (p.3; cf. Castells' discussion of "black holes" in End of Millennium).

Castells goes on to discuss the culture of the Internet in Chapter 2, particularly "the producers/users at the source of the Internet's creation and configuration" (p.36). He argues that the Internet culture has four layers: "the techno-meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the virtual communitarian culture, and the entrepreneurial culture" (p.37). He describes the four in more detail than I intend to do here; let's skip forward a bit.

In the next chapter, Castells moves on to e-Business and the new economy, where he drops this interesting statistic:

as of 2001, about 80 percent of the transactions over the web are B2B [business-to-business], and this implies a profound reorganization of the way in which business operates. Internal networks, by which employees communicate among themselves and with their management, are critical for the performance of the firm. The entire business organization needs to conform to the Internet-based technology through which it relates to customers and suppliers. Furthermore, as individual entrepreneurs blossom in this kind of economy, linkages between consultants, subcontractors, and firms over the web become as significant as the firm's own operations. What is emerging is not a dot.com economy, but a networked economy with an electronic nervous system. (p.65)

He describes "e-business": "By using the Internet as a fundamental medium of communication and information-processing, business adopts the network as its organizational form" (p.66). This transformation "permeates throughout the entire economic system" (p.66). He refers to his earlier work on the "networked enterprise," I.e., "the organizational form built around business projects resulting from the cooperation between different components of different firms, networking among themselves for the duration of a given business project, and reconfiguring their networks for the implementation of each project" (p.67). So "the network is the enterprise":

While the firm continues to be the unit of accumulation of capital, property rights (usually), and strategic management, business practice is performed by ad hoc networks. These networks have the flexibility and adaptability required by a global economy subjected to relentless technological innovation and stimulated by rapidly changing demand. (p.67)

Using case studies of companies such as Nokia and Cisco, Castells argues that although "the network enterprise preceded the diffusion of the Internet," the Internet "enables scalability, interactivity, management of flexibility, branding, and customization in a networked business world" (p.76, his emphasis). He discusses each of these, but I'll zero in on customization, which Yrjo Engestrom has also examined in terms of the new economy in terms of co-configuration.

Customization, Castells says, is

the key to the new form of conducting business. Cultural change, and the diversity of global demand, make it increasingly difficult to resort to standardized, mass production to satisfy the market. On the other hand, economies of scale still count, prompting the need for high-volume production as a way to lower marginal costs per unit. The right mix between volume and customized production can be achieved by operating a large-scale network of production, yet customizing the final product (be it good or service) to the individual consumer. This is accomplished by personalized, iterative, on-line interaction. But it is also helped by automated profiling incorporated into the model of on-line transactions, which allows business to target specific customer preferences. ... If customization is the key to competitiveness in the new global economy, the Internet is the essential tool to ensure customization in a context of high-volume production and distribution. (p.77)

So "Thus, what the Internet adds to the network enterprise model of business is its capacity to evolve organically with innovation, production systems, and market demand, while keeping its focus on the ultimate goal of any business: money-making" (p.77). And the Internet has changed money-making as well, by transforming financial markets (p.79); "the stock market valuation of firms has increasingly diverged from their measured book value" (p.85) because this transformation has made intangibles more valuable "in an economy where well over half of the workers process information" (p.88). In this economy, where 1.5 billion GB of information are generated each year, "The e-conomy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process" (p.90).

Such labor "must be able to reprogram itself, in skills, knowledge, and thinking to change tasks in an evolving business environment" (pp.90-91. And that self-programmable labor takes education that is oriented toward continual expansion or (as others have termed it) lifelong learning. But it also takes a certain environment, because "self-programmable labor cannot deploy its capacity in a traditional, rigid, business environment. ... The e-firm, on-line or off-line, is based on a flat hierarchy, a teamwork system, and open, easy interaction between workers and managers, across departments and between levels of the firm. The network enterprise is enacted by net-workers, using Internet capability, and equipped with their own intellectual capital" (p.91).

Such labor also tends to be operationally autonomous, particularly in small businesses and consultant-subcontractor networks (p.92). "These business entrepreneurs own their means of production (a computer, a telephone line, a mobile phone, a place somewhere, often at home, their education, their experience, and, the main asset, their minds)" (p.92; cf. Drucker, who states in Post-Capitalist Society that knowledge workers' minds are their means of production). Castells recalls a division he described in earlier writings: "the distinction between self-programmable labor and generic labor," i.e., between labor that can't and can be generalized, automated, or codified (p.94). He argues that "the entire labor force should become self-programmable" (p.95). And he stresses that both types of labor must become more flexible. (Again, Drucker addresses this issue as well in Post-Capitalist Society, drawing the distinction between knowledge work and other types of labor, such as manufacturing and agriculture.) Indeed, in the knowledge economy, "innovation is the primordial function" (p.100).

On to the next chapter, in which Castells tries to untangle the differences between virtual communities and networks. The term "community," he complains, confuses different forms of social relations (p.125). He sees the residential community fading away as "a meaningful form of sociability" (p.126) and argues that understanding current social interaction requires redefining community: "de-emphasizing its cultural component, emphasizing its supportive role to individuals and families, and de-linking its social existence from a single kind of material support" (p.127). He quotes Barry Wellman's definition of communities as networks, then adds that

Naturally, the key matter here is the displacement from community to network as the central form of organizing interaction. Communities, at least in the tradition of sociological research, were based on the sharing of values and social organization. Networks are built by the choices and strategies of social actors, be it individuals, families, or social groups. Thus, the major transformation of sociability in complex societies took place with the substitution of networks for spatial communities as major forms of sociability. (p.127)

Right, and although the Internet has accellerated that substitution, other networks – telephone and roadway systems, for instance – had already begun that work.

In the next chapter, Castells discusses networked social movements, including the Zapatistas (who he had discussed in previous work) and Falun Gong (p.138). In movements such as these, the Internet becomes "the indispensible component of the kind of social movements emerging in the network society" (p.139). That's because "social movements in the Information Age are essentially mobilized around cultural values" (p.140); because social movements "have to fill the gap left by the crisis of vertically integrated organizations inherited from the industrial era" (p.140); and because of the globalization of movements (p.142). For the second point, Castells draws on the example of the WTO protests in Seattle, as I discussed in a recent post.

The second feature characterizing social movements in the network society is that they have to fill the gap left by the crisis of vertically integrated organizations inherited from the industrial era. Mass political parties, when and where they still exist, are empty shells, barely activated as electoral machines at regular intervals. Trade unions survive only by abandoning their traditional forms of organization, historically built as replicas of the rational bureaucracies characteristic of large corporations and state agencies. Formal civic associations, and their organizational conglomerates, are in full decline as forms of social engagement ... This is not to say that people do not organize and mobilize in defense of their interests or in the affirmation of their values. But loose coalitions, semi-spontaneous organizations, and ad hoc movements of the neo-anarchist brand substitute for permanent, structured, formal organizations. Emotional movements, often triggered by a media event, or by a major crisis, seem often to be more important sources of social change than the day-to-day routine of dutiful NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. The Internet becomes an essential medium of expression and organization for these kinds of manifestation, which coincide in a given time and space, make their impact through the media world, and act upon institutions and organizations (business, for instance) by the repercussions of their impact on public opinion. These are movements to seize the power of the mind, not state power. (pp.140-141, my emphasis)

The Seattle WTO protests were characterized by

a vast coalition of extremely different, and even contradictory, interests and values, from the battalions of the American labor movement to the swarms of eco-pacifists, environmentalists, women's groups, and a myriad of alternative groups, including the pagan community. The activists of Direct Action Network provided the training and organizational skills for many protestors. But the movement was based on the exchange of information, on previous months of heated political debate on the Internet, that preceded the individual and collective decisions to go to Seattle and to try to block the meeting of what was perceived as an institution enforcing "globalization without representation." (p.141, my emphasis)

The WTO case has been discussed extensively in the netwar literature, and Castells in particular acknowledges the work of Arquilla and Ronfeldt, "in my view the leading analysts of security affairs in the informationalist paradigm" (p.158; I agree, of course). Castells is taken with the idea of noopolitik, which I have discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Let's skip a bit again, since some of this work is redundant with Castells' other work. In the chapter "The Geography of the Internet," Castells points out that the Age of the Internet hasn't obviated geography; the Internet Age is not the end of cities (p.224), because "the networked economy ... is an economy made of up very large, interconnected metropolitan regions" (p.225), because such "territorial complexes" facilitate innovation and synergy (p.226). Similarly, he throws cold water on the idea that a substantial number of people will work from home (pp.231-232). (My current studies suggest that working from home limits the sort of networking one must do in order to establish and exploit contacts, particularly potential subcontractors.) Rather than the home worker, we get the nomadic worker: wireless and mobile Internet access mean that people can work from various locations, desk assignments are reduced, and workers spend more time in the field (p.234). The result is

a multiple configuration of work spaces. The overwhelming majority of people do have workplaces to which they go regularly. But many also work from home (not instead of, but in addition to, their usual workplace), they work from their cars, trains, and planes, from their airports and their hotels, on their vacations and in the night – they are always on call, as their beepers and mobile phones never stop ringing. The individualization of working arrangements, the multi-location of the activity, and the ability to network all these activities around the individual worker, usher in a new urban space, the space of endless mobility, a space made of flows of information and communication, ultimately managed with the Internet. (p.234)

I'll just add here that we can include buses, coffee shops, and waiting rooms (where I do much of my work) as well as coworking spaces and libraries. Since Castells wrote this passage, laptops have become far more powerful and inexpensive, mobile phone lines have become more numerous than landlines, smartphones have become more powerful, free wifi has become common in urban areas, and social networking/status broadcasting technologies such as Facebook and Twitter allow us to tell our personal networks what we are doing right now.

Hand in hand with this trend, Castells notes that the trend in knowledge work is not toward complete control and monitoring of individual workers, as has been feared:

What management of information requires is, in fact, the opposite: to give workers as much initiative as they can handle, under conditions defined and organized by management. The informal transmission of information, tacit knowledge of the company, group dynamics, and economies of scale for advanced telecommunications equipment seem to be among the key elements underlying the growth of these "electronic communication factories" that become a new form of workplace in the Internet economy. (p.233)

Reading this book, several things strike me.

One is the convergence among Castells' work, the netwar literature (of which Castells reviews only a small part), and some of Drucker's work. In fact, I don't think that Castells ever cites Drucker in the books I've read, and Drucker certainly doesn't cite Castells, but they seem to note many of the same phenomena. Their orientations are quite different, but beneath the surface they have much in common (beyond the fact that they are both prolific writers). Both have influenced the discussion of netwar, which encourages me since I am seeing many parallels between netwar and networked business practices.

Another thing that strikes me is that this book seems prescient in some of its implications for work, particularly, as I said earlier, in the cases of distributed work organization I'm studying in Austin. Inside, outside, and between organizations, people are increasingly mobile, increasingly autonomous in operational terms, increasingly able to enact separations between self-programmable and generic labor, and increasingly able to turn what was once self-programmable into generic labor by leveraging protocols, APIs, and automation. So, although Castells seems prescient in examining implications, I think that networked organizations have still moved beyond what he describes in 2001 in terms of decentralization, mobility, flexibility, and change. I'll be developing these thoughts further as I continue to develop these cases.

I'm not sure I would recommend every Castells book, but if you're interested in how the Internet is changing work and society, this is a good place to start. It's more accessible and up-to-date than his Information Age trilogy, but it still bundles the most relevant of those ideas, and it does so in a readable fashion. I recommend it highly.

In the Pipeline

I'm a little behind on blogging book reviews due to the end-of-summer crunch, but here's some of the books in the pipeline - books I've either finished or am working on. I hope to post reviews over the next few weeks.

• The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model by Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen
• The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society by Manuel Castells
• Communication Power by Manuel Castells
• Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts by Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule
• Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age by Simon Lilley, Geoffrey Lightfoot and Paulo Amaral

About those health care bill town halls

In the last week, members of Congress have gone back to their districts to hold town hall meetings about pending health care reform legislation, and have been surprised by vociferous opposition. Congressional members have characterized this opposition as "astroturfing." In addressing these ongoing protests or disruptions, Mickey Kaus puckishly asks: "If an 'astroturfing' campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn't it ... community organizing?"

I think the answer is yes and no - these protests aren't wholly manufactured, but at the same time they are not community organizing in the traditional sense. They could be characterized as swarming. And reading them through the traditional grassroots/astroturf dichotomy is not productive because they are a different sort of organization.

To explain myself, let me start with a quote from Manuel Castells:

The second feature characterizing social movements in the network society is that they have to fill the gap left by the crisis of vertically integrated organizations inherited from the industrial era. Mass political parties, when and where they still exist, are empty shells, barely activated as electoral machines at regular intervals. Trade unions survive only by abandoning their traditional forms of organization, historically built as replicas of the rational bureaucracies characteristic of large corporations and state agencies. Formal civic associations, and their organizational conglomerates, are in full decline as forms of social engagement ... This is not to say that people do not organize and mobilize in defense of their interests or in the affirmation of their values. But loose coalitions, semi-spontaneous organizations, and ad hoc movements of the neo-anarchist brand substitute for permanent, structured, formal organizations. Emotional movements, often triggered by a media event, or by a major crisis, seem often to be more important sources of social change than the day-to-day routine of dutiful NGOs [nongovernmental organizations]. The Internet becomes an essential medium of expression and organization for these kinds of manifestation, which coincide in a given time and space, make their impact through the media world, and act upon institutions and organizations (business, for instance) by the repercussions of their impact on public opinion. These are movements to seize the power of the mind, not state power. (Castells, The Internet Galaxy pp.140-141, my emphasis)

Castells doesn't use the example of the current protests, because he's writing not in 2009, but 2001. His paradigmatic example is that of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999, a case that has been examined as a paradigmatic case of netwar. This case was characterized by

a vast coalition of extremely different, and even contradictory, interests and values, from the battalions of the American labor movement to the swarms of eco-pacifists, environmentalists, women's groups, and a myriad of alternative groups, including the pagan community. The activists of Direct Action Network provided the training and organizational skills for many protestors. But the movement was based on the exchange of information, on previous months of heated political debate on the Internet, that preceded the individual and collective decisions to go to Seattle and to try to block the meeting of what was perceived as an institution enforcing "globalization without representation." (Castells, The Internet Galaxy p.141, my emphasis)

Castells notes that these individuals and groups had a common tactical goal, but not a common ideological or strategic objective. Radicalized, violent elements such as anarchists marched alongside those with far less radical agendas. Readers of this blog may be reminded of John Robb's Brave New War, in which he describes the insurgency in Iraq: loosely affiliated or unaffiliated groups, often with differing ideologies, can share information and resources and "coordinate their actions to swarm vulnerable targets" (Robb, Brave New War p.16). Like the Seattle protestors that Castells describes, these groups coordinate loosely over the Internet and mobile phones, as well as through media reports, which publicize their successes and therefore present a blueprint for further groups to construct their own disruptions.

Castells' protestors and Robb's insurgents sound a lot like the knowledge work organizations that Drucker describes in Post-Capitalist Society: loose, decentralized, flexible, always moving. That's not too surprising, since both Castells and Drucker claim that such organizations have begun to characterize our workplaces, our leisure, and our civic engagement. Information technology, particularly the Internet and mobile phones, has allowed people to create loose ties and connect with like-minded people outside their own communities. In fact, Castells does a good job of examining this shift in his earlier book The Power of Identity, in which he evenhandedly examines the black-helicopter crowd, the Zapatistas, and Aum Shinrikyo as examples of networked organizations enabled partially through information technologies. Castells confesses sympathy for the Zapatistas and unhappiness about the other two cases, but he emphasizes that the three work structurally similarly; they are manifestations of the same shift.

Fast forward a few years, and we see this sort of loose networked organization entering partisan US politics. A president, fresh from an electoral victory, proposes sweeping reform of an ailing sector but leaves the details up to Congress. Over a break, Congresspeople hold town meetings to sell the plan, but the meetings are swarmed by vocal citizens who are affiliated with partisan groups and coordinated via the Internet. Shocked, the Congresspeople attempt to lock down the town halls, then shut them down entirely, characterizing the citizens as centrally coordinated mobs. The year is 2005; the issue is Social Security reform; the President is President Bush; the bill is DOA.

Now, in 2009, some on the Right are bringing up these 2005 protests to suggest moral equivalence as they defend the health care protests. That's certainly not my aim; I'm not after evaluating either protest morally. I am rather arguing that such networked protests, as Howard Rheingold said about the tea parties, are "a hybrid of top-down and grassroots organization." They are an evolution of the netwar tactics that Castells describes, tactics that temporarily tie together groups with little ideological coherence in order to counter proposed change. In that sense, they are decentralized, reactionary and counterstrategic, even though some represented groups have longer-term strategic objectives. They're going to become more prevalent, I think, since we are encountering such structures in business and leisure as well. And they're going to continue changing form over time as people leverage more information technologies.

This year's technology is Internet video, which protesters have leveraged to self-report their protests. The Drudge Report had at least four links to such videos yesterday, and Instapundit, which has reported on continuing "tea parties" since they started, has more. The unexpected opposition has led some representatives to say things they probably regret:

"This bill is un-American,” said another voter, who asked whether Kratovil has read it.

“I am reading it right now,” he said.

Such statements feed the narrative that the bill is being rushed through without due diligence, the contingency that unites many of these otherwise ideologically incoherent citizens. As Kaus intimates, these people appear to be there of their own free will, and they don't appear to have signed onto a unified slate: Birthers, anti-immigration folks, Libertarians, fiscal conservatives, senior citizens worried about Medicare, Blue Dog Democrats, Reagan Republicans, etc. don't have a lot of ideological common ground, just as union representatives and anarchists didn't have a lot in common in Seattle. But for these point protests, they only needed a common tactical goal. They "just say no," because, like the WTO protestors, 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. All these strands come together in yesterday's AP report on one event (my emphasis):

Some of the activists who've shown up at town hall meetings held recently by Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., Rep. Steve Kagen, D-Wis., and others are affiliated with loosely connected right-leaning groups, including Conservatives for Patients' Rights and Americans for Prosperity, according to officials at those groups. Some of the activists say they came together during the "Tea Party" anti-big-government protests that happened earlier this year, and they've formed small groups and stayed in touch over e-mail, Facebook and in other ways.

But they insist they're part of a ground-level movement that represents real frustration with government spending and growth.

"There isn't any group that's backing me, who's influenced me, who's pushing me to do this," said Robert A. Mitchell, a small business owner from Doylestown, Pa., who questioned Specter at a weekend town hall event about lawmakers failing to read legislation.

Note that the Tea Party protests earlier this year, which were characterized as incoherent, were networking opportunities that allowed people to make initial connections. They were able to maintain these loose ties via Internet services, and could then deploy spontaneously.

The initial response of Congress and the White House was to portray these people as dupes, liars, and worse. Now, the White House is now urging Congresspeople to pack town halls with their own supporters, a tactic that will probably result in charges that Congress is astroturfing. The problem is that such tactics assume centralized control. If I'm right in applying Castells, Robb, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, and others, that assumption is incorrect and such counterprotest measures will backfire. In fact, they will likely give protestors more common ground - protestors who are undoubtedly exchanging phone numbers and email addresses at these meetups.

So let's go back to Kaus' question. "If an 'astroturfing' campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn't it ... community organizing?" I said the answer was yes and no. Yes in that these people are genuine citizens, genuinely concerned for a number of ideological reasons, perhaps most of which are not commonly held. No, because these are not communities in the traditional sense of the term, nor is this organizing in the traditional sense. In that sense, they are very similar to the knowledge workers I've been studying in Austin, independent actors who come together in federations, swarm a problem, then disperse at the end of the project, only to come together in different combinations for subsequent problems.

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.

In fact, I worry considerably about the transition period as netwar-style protests become more frequent and more broadly deployed. At present they are disruptive, reactive, and tactical, and I don't see hope for more ideologically coherent or lasting movements based on them. Since it's easier to protest what is than to build what isn't, in the short term these protests are more likely to encourage gridlock and inaction than they are to move us toward productive development. The White House has increased this danger by handling opposition through central coordination, even setting up a centralized clearinghouse for reporting rumors about health care (like a trouble ticket system), rather than by pushing discretion to the level of individual Representatives in individual Congressional districts; they have centralized rather than decentralized, creating a single point of tactical failure for swarms of loosely affiliated agents to exploit. Just like the town hall meetings of 2005 and 2009.