Coworking in Austin: FG Squared

A few days ago, Steve Golab of FG Squared contacted me, wanting to talk coworking. “FG Squared has created a co-working space inside of our business,” he said, and invited me to take a look.

I met Steve a couple of years ago, through a former student, and later worked with FG Squared to develop the program for Interactive Austin 2009. But I hadn’t dropped by FG Squared in a while, so I was eager to see what they were up to - and particularly how they were developing a coworking space. After all, the majority of coworking spaces in Austin are standalone, not housed in an existing business - although I could imagine the advantages.

FG Squared, Steve explained, started 17 years ago by bartering web design services in exchange for office space. Later, as they grew, they leased their own space. But at this point - especially as more FG Squared employees have begun working from home - the leased space has become too large for the company’s current size. More, because some FG Squared employees work at home part of the time and on premises at other times, the capacity fluxes. At first, the company saw the excess space as a liability. But - remembering the company’s roots, and cognizant of the success of coworking in Austin - Steve decided to turn the extra space into an asset by opening the space to coworking.

Yes, that asset is partially financial: coworking helps to pay the lease. But as importantly, the coworking increases social capital in the tight-knit Austin interactive media scene. Steve facilitates interactions among coworkers; he introduces FG Squared visitors to coworkers and vice versa; he encourages networking. When FG Squared is approached by a client who needs something FG Squared can’t provide, he refers them to an able coworker who works in that specialty or at that scale. He even lets competitors use the conference room, he says.

FG Squared benefits directly in another way: “The office doesn’t feel empty,” Steve added. In fact, as a company, FG Squared realizes the same benefits that individual coworkers do: less isolation, more socializing, more contact with people working on different projects.

Coworkers get several things from this arrangement. One is coffee that, Steve emphasized, is “free and strong.” Another is wifi: FG Squared strengthened wifi throughout the building to accommodate its coworkers. Just as importantly, Steve has instituted an application process to ensure that new coworkers fit into the space: he wants a respectful, safe environment that revolves around interactive design. Currently, he’s developing a membership application and handbook to spell out the coworking space’s ground rules.

So who’s working in the coworking space? One full room is devoted to FeedMagnet, which includes three full-timers and a part-timer. Sometimes they spill out into the rest of the space, which is fine. Individuals also have desks, including an SEO specialist and the manager of a set of bars. A conference room is shared by the coworkers and FG Squared, and a few other rooms are on the list to be converted into coworking rooms.

As I’ve discussed in other coworking blog posts, coworking is partly driven by the trend of outsourcing noncore functions, partly by the rise of mobile technologies, partly by a glut of unused office space. Steve recognizes all of these trends, and he’s looking for a way to genuinely engage with them to provide a win-win situation for coworkers and FG Squared. His goal is to create a space that nurtures entrepreneurs (like Conjunctured or Cospace) within the bounds of another organization (somewhat like Soma Vida or Space12). It would be easy to see FG Squared’s approach as a simple “retail play” to help it make rent, but Steve sees it as genuine, actual community building. I expect this model to become more common as coworking continues to spread.

Upcoming appearances

So I decided a while back to sharply limit the number of conferences I went to, since I dislike travel. Naturally, that means that I suddenly realize I have committed to 5-6 speaking engagements over the next three months. At least most of them are in Austin.

If you're interested and able, please do come see me at one of the following appearances:

• C4 Workspace Lunchtime Learning: Future of Work, January 25, San Antonio. I'll be Skyping in to talk about "How Adhocracies fit into the Future of Work."
• TILTS 2011, Symposium One: Access, Authority, and Identity, February 3-5, Austin. I'll be delivering the presentation "Loose Stories about Loose Organizations."
• Writing Research Across Borders, February 17-20, Washington, DC. I'll be delivering a talk titled "Genre and Generic Labor."
• South by Southwest Interactive, March 11-15, Austin. I'll be leading the core conversation "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work."

I may also be doing something for RISE on March 7. Stay tuned!

Reading :: Before Writing, Volume I

Before Writing: Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Last month, I reviewed Denise Schmandt-Besserat's How Writing Came About, a popularization of her research on the origins of writing in the Western world. More specifically, that book was a popularization of Before Writing, Volume I, in which Schmandt-Besserat methodically lays out her argument. That argument, in a nutshell, is that writing emerged from a quirky Sumerian accounting system involving clay tokens. See my review of How Writing Came About for a more in-depth discussion of the argument and timeline. Here, I'm going to concentrate on the additional points that Schmandt-Besserat makes in this more elaborated volume.

Tokens, Schmandt-Besserat tells us, were the earliest uses of clay - predating pottery and architecture (p.29). (Occasionally, they were also made of stone, ocher, or plaster; p.30). She notes that when the token system was being developed, it started with simple tokens, then developed additional complex tokens. We know that these tokens comprised the same system because they "were found together in the same sites and the same hoards and were enclosed in the same envelopes"; they became perforated at the same time; and they are "the prototypes of pictographs representing basic commodities in the Sumerian script" (p.29). And whereas in the popular book Schmandt-Besserat described how the token system led to writing, here she also points out that once writing emerged, the token system dwindled, reverting to a few basic shapes (p.29).

Tokens varied in care and manufacturing from site to site. She notes only one possible piece of evidence for a mold; most were clearly made by hand, some even retaining fingerprints (pp.29-30).

Schmandt-Besserat emphasizes that these tokens were found in disturbed contexts: they were used, then discarded. Furthermore, 88.5% of tokens were from sacred precincts (p.62). In fact, tokens were associated with major public buildings decorated with clay cone mosaics (p.70). Complex tokens evolved in tune with the evolution of archaic Eama, she notes (p.73). In comparison, in Susa, "complex tokens do not appear during the fluorescence of the Susa temple but rather after its destruction by fire" (p.84) - a fact that suggests that the complex token system was introduced by conquerors (p.182).

Who were using these tokens? Most were found in storage units and dumps, although a few were found in houses, swept into hearths (p.95). Very occasionally they are found in tombs.

In the early 4th millennium BC, tokens began to be stored using two related methods. One was clay envelopes - basically hollow balls that were baked with the tokens inside. The other was strings that held perforated tokens; these strings were sealed with bullae that closely resembled small clay envelopes, but were solid, with the ends holding the strings (pp.108-109). Generally, envelopes held simple tokens, while strings held more complex ones (p.110). Counters held in envelopes tended to be smaller and more casually made; they crumble more easily and were likely not fired (p.123).

Marked envelopes were quite rare, but fell into at least three types, which I'll list along with the number of examples: sinking counters into the envelope surface (1); impressing counters onto the envelope surface (14); scratching the counter impression after the envelope dried (2); and possibly perforating the envelope to affix a matching string (7) (pp.127-128). The impressions were usually made with the counters themselves, but sometimes with a stick, stylus, or thumbnail. Some of these techniques were dead ends, but direct impressions and stylus markings were the beginning of writing (p.128).

"The first tablets were a decisive step in the invention of writing and amounted to a revolution in communication technology," Schmandt-Besserat argues (p.129), starting a chapter on impressed tablets. Here we start to see many of the tablets, and for me, this was a moving part of the book: actually seeing the markings on one side of a tablet and a cylinder seal on the other (p.132); seeing the impressions, in an emerging hierarchical order likely carried forward from the accountant's table and the string order, with larger units to the right (p.135); seeing the emerging boustophedon order of marks (p.136); and reading the author's speculation about emerging dual-use styluses for creating wedges (p.137). Schmandt-Besserat carefully traces the evolution of tokens to signs here, tracing 17 signs back to their original token prototypes (p.137), then showing the point at which scribes made the leap to creating pictographic representations of tokens rather than simply impressing them (p.139). After all, "the major drawback of the impressed technique was the blurring of the shapes of their token prototypes," meaning that they had to be identified in context (p.142); pictographs helped to address this issue. Schmandt-Besserat offers charts comparing drawings of tokens with later pictographs, making it easy to see how one is represented by the other - but it doesn't have the tremendous impact of the photographs of tablets in which impressions and pictographs are mixed (p.143). (My note on this page reads: "Damn! There they are!")

Remarkably, by the time they began using pictographs, our early scribes had made the leap of abstracting numbers. Whereas counters were repeated in 1:1 correspondence, pictographs never were (p.153).

Now we get to the analysis. Since much of this was covered in my review of her other book, I'll just hit the highlights.

One, Schmandt-Besserat firmly associates developments in writing with developments in civilization. Before agriculture, we have sparse evidence of writing-like activity, mostly notched bones, which carried quantitative data about which we can only speculate (p.160). Agriculture began "a new economy based on sedentariness, new settlement patterns in open air villages, new technologies such as ground and polished stone, and the use of new raw materials such as clay" - and also "generated new symbols," which "were different in form and content from anything used previously": the entirely manmade clay tokens (p.161). Schmandt-Besserat speculates that these tokens were themselves the evolution of a previous system using natural materials (twigs, sticks, grains); but the token system comprised unique shapes "for the unique purpose of record keeping" (p.161). The greatest novelty was that these comprised a system, one that could be expanded (p.161) and that represented both quantitative and qualitative information (ex: three sheep tokens) (p.162).

Intriguingly, this new reckoning technology did not seem to have anything to do with the exchange of goods, but rather for administration in the newly hierarchical context of agriculture (pp.167-168). Indeed, social organization determined the function of writing: egalitarian (tribal) societies only needed to tally, while rank (institutional) societies had to develop accounting to support "an elite overseeing a redistributionist economy" (p.170). (Compare this to David Ronfeldt's thesis about forms of organization.) Evidence suggests that counting developed as a status symbol: "writing, therefore, bestowed on the ruler the full control over the input, as well as the output, of the community properties" (p.172). With the rise of the State, complex tokens emerged (along with temples, "monumental architecture, the monopoly of force, and bureaucracy, which point to new strategies in pooling communal resources," p.178). In this context, envelopes and bullae were used to represent unpaid taxes (p.181). In this reading, complex tokens in distant countries represented tribute; recall that in Susa, "complex tokens, envelopes, and impressed tablets appear after the destruction of the temple, when the monumental buildings were replaced by modest structures" (p.182).

Schmandt-Besserat then discusses counting and the emergence of writing. Counting, she points out, is not innate but learned (p.184); in some groups, in fact, counting does not involve "finding out how many items there were in a set" so much as "comparing or verifying a collection" (p.185). If you represent five sheep with five tokens, and you verify your collection by matching each sheep with a token, that's comparing, not counting as we might think of it. The token system, then, didn't initially provide for abstract counting: it didn't separate the item from the count. Bear in mind that "the human brain has not evolved since the appearance of Homo sapiens-sapiens about seventy thousand years ago"; they had the same capacity we do, but the hunting-and-gathering way of life did not challenge them to develop abstract counting (p.189). That changed with tokens, which introduced cardinality tied to object specificity (pp.189-190). Tokens did not express abstract numbers; they were the numbers. But at some point, the increasing complexity of the system led to abstract numbers, which appear on the first pictographic tablets (p.191). Abstract numbers, she speculates, were invented by one nameless individual (p.192), but spread rapidly.

The first abstract numerals were impressed signs, formerly representing quantities of commodities, but now abstracted. They retained a dual meaning for a while, until the concrete meaning was replaced with other symbols (p.193). True pictography, Schmandt-Besserat argues, resulted from abstract counting. Eventually, pictographs began to be used phonetically - a change that, Schmandt-Besserat says, was not socioeconomically triggered as the others were (p.194).

Like her other book, this one really impressed me (pun intended) with the scope of history, the pressures that led to the invention of writing, and the fact that it could have gone so much differently (and in other parts of the world, did, of course).

This book is a bit longer and more technical than How Writing Came About, but it's still very readable and gripping. If you're thinking about picking up one of these books, I'd suggest this one just because it's more complete. But definitely pick one of them up - the story they tell is absolutely fascinating.

Reading :: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One)
By Elizabeth L. Eisenstein

I've been putting off writing this review for a while because I knew it would take time to write. Eisenstein's book is a classic, and is widely cited, particularly among scholars who want to draw a parallel between the printing revolution and our current explosion of digital texts and genres. It's also a very large book: 708pp, excluding bibliography and back matter. The size is daunting, but the material is interesting and often gripping. And although I'm not a historian, Eisenstein seems to be careful about the claims she makes, taking time to answer critics of her earlier publications.

At least one critic wasn't convinced: the anonymous critic who wrote notes in the margins of this library book. According to this critic, "she spends too much time proving that all of her predecessors are wrong, & too little time saying anything." But without impugning the anonymous critic, I found much that was worthwhile in this book.

Eisenstein is specifically concerned with the printing revolution in early-modern Europe, beginning in the late 15th century. She argues that this revolution is an "unacknowledged revolution," that is, that printing had a far broader paradigmatic impact than has previously been acknowledged. "Far from being integrated into other works," she complains, "studies dealing with the history of printing are isolated and artificially sealed off from the rest of historical literature" (pp.5-6). Yet "neither political, constitutional, ecclesiastical, and economic events nor sociological, philosophical, and literary movements can be fully understood without taking into account the influence the printing press has exerted upon them" (p.7). Printed materials are so common now that we take for granted how much they have impacted and changed our lives:

Indeed the more abundant [quotidian printed materials] have become, the more frequently they are used, the more profound and widespread their impact. Typography is thus still indispensable to the transmission of the most sophisticated technological skills. It underlies the present knowledge explosion and much of modern art. In my view, at least, it accounts for much that is singled out as peculiarly characteristic of mid-twentieth century culture. But, I repeat, the more printed materials accumulate, the more we are inclined to overlook them in favor of more recent, less familiar media. (p.17).

If you're familiar with my work, you can imagine how compelling this thesis would be to me. You may also see a parallel to Denise Schmandt-Besserat's argument on how writing came about, which attributes similarly sweeping changes to that earlier revolution.

Eisenstein argues that beyond printing itself, the printing press led a new coordination of intellectual labor, in which the printer became a boundary-crosser who wore many hats (p.56). Printing also allowed easier comparisons and cross-references (p.72). Suddenly, for instance, Montaigne "could see more books [in] a few months ... than earlier scholars had seen after a lifetime of travel," and consequently conflict, diversity, and contradictions became more visible to him than to his predecessors (p.74). But the printing press didn't just enable new enlightenment, it also enabled new mystification: one working thesis was that various ancient philosophical and mystical texts were fragments of an ancient ur-text penned by Adam, encapsulating secrets revealed to him before the Fall (pp.77-78). Similarly, another initial effect was to widely disseminate "seemingly authoritative, actually fraudulent esoteric writings" (p.78). Tools that were useful in one domain, such as astronomical tables, were applied in other domains, resulting in "the fixing of precise dates for the Creation or for the Second Coming" (p.79).

Print culture also generated new genres and components. For instance, there was no equivalent in scribal culture for the new how-to books (p.88). Print leveraged the power of identical copies, so indexes became practical and desirable (p.91). Indexes and cross-references, though based on previous forms, were newly systematized (p.93).

At the same time, the more accessible ancient texts became, the less mystical and less relevant they became: in the case of the Corpus Juris, for example, printing led to access, which led to demystification (pp.103-104). New forms of classification became possible, and publishers established the lasting, seemingly fundamental division between sciences and humanities in order to divide their catalogs more easily (p.107).

The sciences developed under print culture. In particular, data (tables, charts, indexes) had often been garbled by scribes, and ignorant printers tended to garble them more quickly; but strong printers corrected them more quickly, and through sometimes innovative methods: "They created vast networks of correspondents, solicited criticism in each edition, sometimes publicly promising to mention the names of readers who sent in new information or who spotted the errors which would be weeded out" (p.109). Related, print culture resulted in a new ethos for guarding data: Thomas Jefferson exemplifies this new ethos, arguing that valuable data were best preserved by making them public - and printing them frequently (p.116).

Printing affected law in similarly fundamental ways. "Much as M. Jourdain learned that he was speaking prose, monarchs learned from political theorists that they were 'making' laws. But members of parliaments and assemblies also learned from jurists and printers about ancient rights wrongfully usurped. Struggles over the right to establish precedents became more intense, as each precedent became more permanent and hence more difficult to break" (p.119).

Printing also affected public life, particularly through journals, gazettes, and newsletters. By the 18th century, "Increasingly the well-informed man of affairs had to spend part of each day in temporary isolation from his fellow men"; by the 19th, "gossiping churchgoers could often learn about local affairs by scanning columns of newsprint in silence as well." Eisenstein forwards print as an explanation for the weakening of community ties during that time (p.131). "To read a printed report encourages individuals to draw apart," she argues, and "the shift in communications may have changed the sense of what it meant to participate in public affairs. The wide distribution of identical bits of information provided an impersonal link between people who were unknown to each other" (p.132). Communal solidarity was diminished, but "vicarious participation in more distant events was also enhanced" and "new forms of group identity began to compete with an older, more localized nexus of loyalties" (p.132). Similarly, private life began to change, with progressively differentiated groups of readers (men, women, children); age-grades in schools; peer groups; and an emerging youth culture (p.134; cf. Hernandez). Eisenstein also hints at the impact of printing on the emergence of the modern State (pp.134-135; cf. Bobbitt).

The above summary, I'm afraid, is only of Part I of the book. In subsequent chapters, Eisenstein examines a number of topics in greater detail. First, she examines the Renaissance and the Reformation. In particular, she argues that in Italy, the advent of printing helps to explain "a shift in human consciousness and a concurrent revolution in communications" (p.226). Print enabled greater border-crossing (p.249). It enabled a classical revival, initially involving a flood of mysticism, but giving way to less mysterious, more systematic study (p.279).

During the Reformation, Eisenstein argues, Protestantism was the first movement to exploit print's potential as mass medium and for propaganda (p.304). Luther believed that printing was "'God's highest and extremist act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward'" - and also as "'the last flame before the extinction of the world'" (p.304). (It's worth noting that last semester, as I was reading this book, someone at the edge of campus handed me a tract that made a similar claim based on the penetration of digital media.) Luther was nevertheless take aback when his 95 Theses, which he had expected to circulate locally among academics, were reprinted and disseminated widely (p.306). "If we stay at the Wittenberg church with Luther we will miss seeing the historical significance of the event," Eisenstein states, sounding like Latour (p.310). Part of that significance was that Bible printing had changed the church. Eisenstein quotes Eugene Rice as arguing that the medieval church was more ecumenical and compromising, with more room for doctrinal disagreements; during the Reformation, doctrinal disagreements polarized into Protestantism and Catholicism (p.325). Eisenstein suggests that print precipitated this change (p.325). Indeed, when the Catholic church began to ban books, it created what publishers considered to be an irresistable untapped niche with built-in appeal (p.416).

Print also allowed people to compare religious texts, to examine them in different languages, and to study them independently. Calvin, for instance, represented "a new kind of theologian, one who had taken no degree in theology and had never been ordained priest" (p.402). "On the desirability of lay literacy, doctrinaire Calvinists and more tolerant Erasmians, ambitious men of letters, and profit-seeking printers were all in accord" while Anglicans "objected, in 1543, to Bible-reading among 'women, apprentices, husbandmen'" (p.421). For Puritans, Bible-reading was "the most vital principle of [their] creed" (p.421). Protestantism, Eisenstein argues, was a "book religion," and she outlines the cycle that encouraged and established this culture (p.422). This print culture resulted in books of coded behavior, "internalized by silent and solitary readers" and manifesting in a "voice of individual conscience"; but it also created a collective morality - including "a 'middle class' morality which harked back to Xenophon and the Bible [and] was fixed in a seemingly permanent mold" (p.429).

Print's effects on religion were sometimes much darker: Eisenstein attributes the witch craze as a byproduct of printing - as well as literal fundamentalism, which became more widely possible as more people became conversant with the literal Bible (p.439). "The many changes introduced by the new technology, far from synchronizing smoothly or pointing in one direction, contributed to disjunctions, worked at cross-purposes and operated out of phase with each other" (p.440).

In science, "the shift from script to print preceded a transformation of world views" (p.459). Before print, knowledge degraded with copies. For instance, Ptolemaic world maps were copied by hand, degrading rather than evolving, with no established process of feedback (p.479). Printing, on the other hand, expanded the number of possible contributors, contributors who were not "educated"and so could make original contributions rather than recapitulating the contributions of the past (p.486).

Science was also directly impacted by religion. For instance, Christians had a challenge in locating Easter both on a repeating calendar and in proximity with the season. This complex problem spurred developments in calendars, astronomy, and chronology (p.610); "By a seeming paradox, their most sacred festival kept Christians bent toward puzzle-solving of a purely scientific kind" (p.611). Similarly, "The Koran did not provide the same incentive that the Vulgate did to master strange tongues or dig up ancient scrolls" (p.612). Print enabled the expansion of techniques that resulted from these religiously grounded complex puzzles.

In her conclusion, Eisenstein links the print revolution to the emergent digital texts she saw (in 1979, when the book was published). She points out that "the process that began in the mid-fifteenth century has not ceased to gather momentum in the age of the computer print-out and the television guide. Indeed the later phases of an on-going communications revolution seem altogether relevant to what is happening within our homes, universities, or cities at present. In particular, they are relevant to apocalyptic pronouncements about contemporary Western culture delivered by modern intellectuals and literati" (p.704).

Overall, this book was fascinating, and it provides a good starting point for examining and theorizing the enormous changes that the print revolution abetted. I particularly appreciated the focus on more quotidian texts in addition to great texts such as the Bible, law, and scientific treatises: it's often in the quotidian texts that fundamental changes develop and spread. The book also provides a model for examining contemporary changes in digital texts - changes that surely won't be parallel, but may result in similarly fundamental cultural and paradigmatic changes. If you're interested in writing, and you have a solid chunk of time to devote to reading a book, try this one out.

Coworking in Austin: Perch Coworking

Like many other Austin coworking spaces (Conjunctured, Soma Vida, Brainstorm, Space12), Perch Coworking is in East Austin. But its space is very different. Located "on the ground floor corner of a mixed-use development," Perch has a clean modern design that fits in with the rapidly gentrifying area - and the young independent professionals who are living and working here.

Those two themes - design and local independents - surfaced frequently in my talk with Perch's owner, Lisa McTiernan. Lisa, who does homeowner association management for condominiums, opened Perch in late October. Like many independents, Lisa is often on the move, but still needs somewhere to land and to have occasional meetings. Since her HOA client base is in the central/east Austin area, she began looking for "interesting, affordable, workable workspace in central or east Austin." But she also had other requirements in mind: a beautiful space with a modern design aesthetic ("minimalistic, clean, uncluttered"), natural light, and ground floor access.

Lisa had heard of coworking when she lived in Los Angeles, so she began researching area coworking spaces in downtown Austin. But none quite fit her criteria. And then the space on East 6th opened up. After discussing the opportunity with friends, Lisa decided to open the space as a coworking space that would serve as

a community work space for folks who either are freelancers, entrepreneurs, work from home, whatever the case may be. ... they need a non traditional or part time flex office space where they can truly get some serious work done, network with others, have ... a different environment in which to be productive. And also ... a really affordable office space that's low commitment. Just something really flexible and easy.

Perch is not a large coworking space: It consists of an open-plan room and a conference room. But its aesthetic is clean and modern, with thoughtfully placed tables and a beautiful view to the street. (Its furniture and design remind me of Link Coworking more than any other Austin coworking space.) As Lisa says, it's a pleasant environment to work, "flexible and easy," and Lisa is continually thinking about how to tweak the arrangement so that people feel comfortable in the space.

The furniture rolls away - which is useful since Perch also hosts occasional yoga classes. Perch also recently hosted part of the East Austin Studio Tour, displaying local artists' work. Lisa wants that function to be a regular feature, regularly rotating artwork to keep the space fresh.

These features and Perch's ground floor location mean that Lisa gets a fair amount of foot traffic. They also mean that Perch's members are proud to meet their clients in the space.

All in all, Lisa is excited about coworking in general and Perch's role in particular. She believes that "coworking will move in to ... more and more well designed spaces" and one of its key challenges is to ensure that as coworking spaces grow, they don't become cramped. In that sense, Perch is Lisa's manifesto of what a coworking space should be.

Reading :: The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
By Jane Jacobs

A few weeks ago I was visiting Link Coworking and Liz Elam, the proprietor, told me that Link was starting a book club. No fluff, either, she said: we'll be reading Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I recognized the title from a previous discussion with Bijoy Goswami, and it sounded interesting, so I picked it up. (If you're in Austin, come join us next month to discuss it.)

It's an interesting read, written well (and angrily). I see a lot of affinities with some of the work I've done, although Jacobs was working on a grander scale and in an earlier time (the book is copyrighted 1961). Jacobs wants to know: what makes a city healthy? How should cities be planned? More to the point, how should they not be planned?

Let's get into the book via the second question. Jacobs was unhappy with - really, livid about - the "modern, orthodox city planning" she saw in 1961's great cities. In particular, she was deeply unhappy with the plans and solutions of Robert Moses, who was deeply involved in city planning in Jacobs' home of New York City. This school of city planning relied on strong central planning: "As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge" (p.17). Such Utopias, she says acidly, would work if only people did exactly what the planners wished them to: "people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would," she notes in one example (p.90). Strongly centralized city planning results in inflexibility, she argues, and people must contort themselves to their environments (p.80). Of course, the planners are confounded. "Street gangs" fight, not in streets, but in parks - the open spaces that city planners want families to use, but that families avoid because of crime (p.76). As Jacobs says later in the context of slums: "The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so" (p.171).

Methodically, Jacobs examines various features of cities - sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods - and grimly describes how "modern, orthodox city planning" has re-engineered them in ways that destroy any sort of commons (p.82). She notes the proper function of sidewalks for putting specialized people in contact with each other in a non-specialized, mixing context (p.54), and laments how planners often narrow sidewalks. She deplores housing projects, which reduce people's opportunities for privacy, causing them to limit their number of friends for self-protection (p.67). She argues that in moving children from busy, broad sidewalks to city parks, planners have moved children from a high adult-child ratio environment to one in which few if any adults are present (p.77) - reducing supervision and mentoring, but also separating children from the working world of adults (p.84; cf. Rogoff; Hernandez). She argues passionately that city components must be mixed use (p.132), encouraging diversity of use, mixed times of use, diversity of residence, and diversity of social and cultural strata (see the entirety of Part 2). She condemns long blocks for sabotaging mixed use, since long blocks allow passers-by to ignore streets - the use pools in the main arteries, far from their natural use (p.183), and thus long blocks can't make an argument for relevance the way short blocks can (p.178). And just as blocks should vary, the buildings within them should vary in age (Ch.10).

As Jacobs argues in the last chapter, the city is not a simple problem, it's a problem of organized complexity; it's a complex system of interacting components (p.435; see p.376). The problem with orthodox city planning, she says, is that it takes cities' problems as problems of simplicity or disorganized complexity. In doing so, they lose the organic nature that makes a city work.

Given the age of the work and the subject, halfway through the book I was reminded of Saul Alinsky, whose work as a community organizer seemed to fit into the context of the community action that Jacobs advocates as resistance to simple-minded city planning. And voila: Alinsky shows up in a footnote in Jacobs' discussion of Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards city district (p.297).

Overall, it's a highly interesting book. But to what can we apply it? Jacobs makes clear that her prescriptions apply only to "great cities" and not to small cities, suburbs, or towns, which are "totally different organisms" - not dense enough for these prescriptions to apply (p.16; see also p.146). Jacobs doesn't clarify her criteria for what constitutes a great city, so let's put it in context. In 1960, New York had a population of 7.78 million and population density of 24,697; Austin today has just a tenth of that population and just over a tenth of that density (only 3,126.6)! For those of us not living in great cities, the lessons might be more analogical than direct. But they're still valuable. Particularly, Jacobs provides us some good principles in her notes on methods: "to think about processes"; "to work inductively"; and "to seek for 'unaverage' clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more 'average' quantities are operating" (p.440). Good advice for any such project, I think. I can't wait to see what the others in the book club picked up from this book.

Reading :: Catching Fire

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
By Richard Wrangham

Perhaps a year ago, I read an excerpt from this book, whose hypothesis immediately intrigued me. After waiting for a long time for it to become available at the library, I bought the book on the Kindle. No pun intended.

What's the book's hypothesis? In a nutshell: cooking is what made us human. More precisely, Homo Erectus emerged as a byproduct of learning to cook, and therefore the genus Homo owes its entire existence to cooking. No cooking, no human beings.

This is a rather contested hypothesis. As Wrangham explains, the accepted story is that cooking came much later, and the evolution of Homo is usually attributed to meat eating. Some people, such as raw foodists, even claim that cooking is bad for us. But Wrangham marshals several points in favor of his theory:

• Cooked foods release more calories than raw ones. For instance, the human body absorbs about 95% of starch in potatoes by the time the food matter reaches the ileum. For uncooked potatoes, that number plummets to 51%. You have to eat almost twice as many raw potatoes as cooked ones to get the same benefit. In fact, great apes eat about twice as much per day as we do, by weight. Interestingly, apes - and other animals - prefer food cooked.
• Human beings have much shorter intestines than other animals. We can't extract the same amount of calories from raw foods. We also have smaller mouths, weaker jaws, smaller teeth, and smaller stomachs.
• Human beings' brains are proportionally the largest in the animal kingdom, about 2.5% of our body weight, but using 20% of our basal metabolism rate (compared to 8-10% in other mammals).
• Human beings are more resistant to Mailard compounds than other animals. (Mailard compounds are carcinogens that result from cooking.)
• Cooking is practiced by every known human society.
• Those who subsist on raw food alone report feeling hungry all the time, as well as negative impact on their sexual functions: a rate of infertility greater than 50%.
• Human beings spend about 5% of their day chewing. If we were to eat only raw food, Wrangham estimates that we would be chewing for about 42% of the day (just over 5 hours). The average calorie intake for a human being is over six times that of a chimpanzee. (At this point, I thought about Clay Shirky's argument in Cognitive Surplus.)

Wrangham argues that given the above, we couldn't evolve without cooking. The numbers don't add up: Raw food simply doesn't give enough calories to support our massive energy-hungry brains, and our small mouths and teeth aren't up for the task of processing it at any rate.

In Wrangham's view, our ancestors enjoyed three evolutionary leaps due to food. First, they began chewing meat along with a rough leaf, which provided additional traction and helped to break down the food. (Chimpanzees do this today, and Wrangham describes persuading his friends to imitate the chimps with raw goat meat and leaves.) Second, they began pounding the meat to tenderize it, using logs or rocks. (Chimpanzees use rocks to smash open nuts, and we've found habiline remains next to crude stone hammers.) Finally, they began cooking. Wrangham pegs each advance to a corresponding increase in cranial capacity: the more our ancestors processed food, the more they could get from it, meaning that they could support larger brains and smaller guts.

So that's the basic argument, and I found it fascinating, although I don't have the background to properly judge it. This argument could have fit into a smaller book or even an article, but Wrangham expands it considerably in a few ways, not all good.

First, he adds several anecdotes that don't always hit the mark: for instance, he recounts a very few known incidents in which people had to survive on raw food and compares them to many anecdotes in which people elected to, for instance, cook each other. You would think that these anecdotes would be fascinating, but they're so dense here that I felt as if I were reading Ripley's Believe it or Not.

Second, in Ch.6-7 he speculates that cooking is at the root of the division of the sexes, a fairly standard interpretation in the vein of evolutionary psychology. I think Wrangham overreaches here.

Third, and more generally, Wrangham tends to go over the same ground a lot. We are repeatedly treated to information about how small human intestines, jaws, and teeth are, how big our brains are, how much cooking changes raw food. A good ruthless edit could have streamlined the book considerably.

Still, the book's fascinating and it's easy to read. I raced through it. If what I've outlined sounds like what you'd like to read, take a look.

---

Now a quick aside. This is the first book that I read in its entirety on my phone, a Nexus One running Android. I used the Kindle application, which, unlike Google's eBooks, allows bookmarking, highlighting, and notes. Recently I blogged about my worries regarding reading strategies in ebooks, so this book provided a good chance to try out some new strategies.

In general, the results were positive. My eyesight is still good, so I made the font as small as possible, increasing the number of words on the page. The Kindle's highlighting and notes are good, good enough to replace the sticky notes I usually use. I appreciated that my reading progress and notes synched across platforms, so when it was time to write this review, I simply fired up the Kindle app on my netbook and got started. The Kindle's search feature was also very useful for looking up various topics that I had forgotten to tag in the notes. And, of course, I didn't have to carry the book. Nor did I have to wait for it to be delivered.

On the other hand, I have plenty of complaints. One is that the Kindle doesn't allow me to copy from the text or highlighting. I understand that they're trying to keep me from infringing copyright, but they also keep me from copying fair-use passages. Another is that the Kindle doesn't have page numbers. If you want to find out where the information above comes from, you'll have to search the book as I did. A third issue was that, since the Kindle doesn't use page numbers, the progress bar was misleading: I finished the book at the 50% mark and discovered that the rest of it was end matter, including the (useless) index.

That being said, I have been relieved at how relatively painless reading this book on the Kindle app turned out to be. For books that cost more in print + shipping, particularly ones that I can't find in a used book store, I'll certainly consider the Kindle. I can't say the same for Google's eBooks at present.

Reading in the Future

I read a lot. That includes the quotidian micro-reading we all do (email, Twitter, Facebook, texts, news) as well as more sustained reading, such as books. Over the last few years, micro-reading - short works, up to a few paragraphs - has migrated mainly to my phone, which is always with me. But sustained reading has mostly stayed where it's always been (for me): in books and in printouts, annotated mostly through small sticky notes in the margins.

Why? And should that change? I've been wondering over the last week or so whether I should migrate to an e-reader.

1984-ish: My brother and I buy a Commodore 64, disk drive, and printer. We begin playing an Infocom text-only adventure, Deadline. It's complicated, so we decide to set the game to print every interaction so that we can review it later. Soon we run out of paper.

1986-ish: I write a report for high school in longhand. My mother types up the final version on a dedicated word processor.

Transitioning from print to digital was not intuitive. Those of us who went through it thought that a printer was a vital accessory: The computer was where you produced a text, but paper was where you composed it (in longhand), edited it (sometimes on a printout), and shared it (not just out of preference, but also necessity: few friends had a C64, let alone a disk drive or modem). But there were other reasons to use paper.

1989: Working on my undergraduate degree in computer science, I draft programs on paper, type them into the computer, then try to compile them. At the end of a session, I print out the code and hand-edit it. I have to. The screen only shows 80 characters per line and only 24 lines, so I can't get a panoramic view. With a printout, I can lay out several pages, compare different parts of the code, and see how they relate. Also, the printout is much more portable than the computers in the university computer lab - I haven't bought my own computer yet. When I explain my process to an experienced programmer, he says, "Oh, you can't compose on glass?"

1990: I get a home computer and a home copy of Borland's Turbo C Integrated Developer Environment. It changes everything. Now I can split the window and look at code at two different places simultaneously. I can search for unique identifiers too. I can also try out code more rapidly. I don't have a home printer, although I do print out code at school - more occasionally.

Access is a big deal, but so is text density. You simply can't fit much text on an 80x24 screen, and it's very hard to remember the shape of the text you can't see. When you're used to relying on reading strategies based on a broad field of vision, and you lose that broad field of vision, you have to develop new strategies or new tools to compensate. The split screen and search were two such tools.

1994: I begin using Mosaic.

1998: Working on my dissertation, I oscillate between printouts (which I heavily mark up at coffee shops and in my office) and the computer representation, which resides on my home hard drive and at least two 3.5" floppy disks.

1998: I borrow a Palm Pilot and try the to do list, calendar, and notes. I begin to see the potential for microreading.

2000: I'm playing Mario Kart with three other players in Lubbock. The screen shows four different viewpoints, one for each player. I have a hard enough time interpreting what's happening in my quadrant. But one of the other players easily watches the four screens simultaneously. He laughs as he launches a blue shell, then sees it pass through the other players' viewpoints to hit the one in the lead.

Tools aren't the only thing that can improve reading, of course, because human beings don't come off an assembly line. Human beings develop strategies for reading too. When I realized that my friend could pay attention to all four quadrants simultaneously, I realized that he had developed strategies that I couldn't realistically hope to develop. This made me feel old.

2000: After trying to take field notes in notebooks for a month, I buy a Palm Pilot and a collapsable keyboard, on which I take the rest of the field notes. I set up macros to speed up the process and I obtain a simple Palm-based database for managing participant information. (These data eventually become my second book.)

2001: I encourage my students in the computer lab to save their work to a USB drive. One doesn't - instead, he simply mails the file to himself in Yahoo Mail, which is accessible anywhere. I am fascinated at what suddenly seems like an obvious solution.

2002 or 2003: I use a small grant to buy a Sharp Zaurus, which runs Linux. I start outlining papers on it, but find that even with its greater screen density, it's too hard to get a sense of how the paper develops. I also get a copy of mysql running on it, which I use for formulating queries of my field notes.

Microreading is great for small screens. And we do a lot of microreading: to do lists, shopping lists, calendars, references. For sustained reading, though, I have trouble getting the hang of using the small screen. That wasn't for lack of trying. Meanwhile, more and more content was migrating online.

2007: Inspired by research on multiple monitors coming from Microsoft, I request and receive a second monitor. It helps tremendously. I start grading online.

2008: I buy an Android phone and am frustrated that I can't edit Google Docs with it.

2010: Android now allows Google Docs editing. I use it a little.

2010: Apple releases the iPad. I am unimpressed. It's too big.

2010: I finally buy an eBook, Phillip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent, for $9. It's 679 pages. I try to read it on my phone, and quickly realize that although I'm reading the words, I'm not retaining them. It feels like I'm reading through a straw. A week later, I find the same book at a used book store and purchase it for $2.

At this point, I have microreading down. I read an enormous amount of text through my phone. But when I try sustained reading on the phone, it eludes me. It's as if I'm still stuck in 1990, still trying to figure out the tools - or in 2000, realizing that I don't have the strategies to cope. Sure, I can add a monitor, but I realize that I'm trying to meet two opposing conditions: field of vision and mobility. Greater mobility means a smaller screen, which means a smaller field of vision, which means less sustained reading.

This would not be a big deal but for three things:

• I like mobility. I don't like hauling books around.
• I like tools. I want to use tools that will enrich my reading experience, such as search, and print books don't offer many new tools.
• I like strategies that improve reading. And part of me is worried that I'm missing out on strategies that will improve my reading - and that some may simply be beyond me, though they'll be intuitive to younger readers. That is, I begin to wonder if my reliance on print books is my version of the VCR my parents couldn't figure out how to program.

So that's where I am now. I'm interested in how others are dealing with the same issues. In particular, if you read ePubs:

• On what form factors do you read them? Laptop, tablet, dedicated reader, phone?
• What tools do you use to aid your ePubs reading? Search, highlighting, notes, other? Are some of these outside the ereader?
• What strategies do you use when reading ePubs? Do you combine them with other versions? Tackle different types or sections of readings on different form factors? Follow a nonlinear pattern when reading? Bring different expectations to ePubs?

I'd love to hear what you think. Leave your comments, or tweet me @spinuzzi.

Reading :: How Writing Came About

How Writing Came About
By Denise Schmandt-Besserat

In grad school, I ran across an article that made a deep impression on me, Denise Schmandt-Besserat's 1986 article on the origin of writing in the West:

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1986). The origins of writing: An archaeologist’s perspective. Written Communication, 3(1), 31-45.

The article, which I ended up citing in the preface of my first book, really altered my understanding of writing. Based on extensive archeological work, Schmandt-Besserat argued that writing was not developed for literature, religion, or storytelling. Rather, it was a hacked-together accounting system, originally implemented as a set of clay tokens. Here's how I glossed it in my book:

Denise Schmandt-Besserat argued in 1986 that Sumerian writing, which was at that time considered to be the oldest example of writing, essentially started as a quirky Sumerian accounting system. According to her account, tax collectors began making clay tokens representing livestock, bushels of grain, and containers of oil to tally the actual goods that they had collected. Since it became unwieldy to carry around these tokens, eventually Sumerian bureaucrats began making clay “envelopes” to hold them. And since it was not possible to see inside these envelopes, they would press each token into the side of the clay envelope to make an imprint before firing it. The resulting group of impressions functioned as a tally of the livestock. Eventually some clever accountant realized that once the impressions were made, the tokens were moot. Soon the envelopes became round tablets and scribes eventually began imitating the tokens’ impressions with a stylus. The rest, as they say, is history.

The article really brought home to me the materiality of writing - and the series of accidents and adjustments that went into our most protean tool.

Of course, Schmandt-Besserat's 1986 article was a summary of much longer works. Another, lengthier summary is her book How Writing Came About, a popularized version of her more scholarly Before Writing: Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform.

I haven't read the scholarly version yet, but How Writing Came About is just breathtaking. For me, at least, I mean that literally: at several points I was actually holding my breath. Maybe that's corny, but when Schmandt-Besserat carefully peels back the years and reconstructs the trail of innovations that gave us writing, I got a clearer sense of the length of time involved, the problems that had to be solved, the societal and organizational changes that accompanied writing's evolution, and the many ways in which it could have been stifled. Schmandt-Besserat isn't a suspense writer by any means - she has a dry style even in this popularized version - but the material makes up for that, carrying the story forward.

So what's the story? There are two.

The first story is that of the archaeologist unraveling the evidence to determine the origin of writing - not an easy feat, given how broadly that evidence was scattered and how deeply embedded were the assumptions about writing. As Schmandt-Besserat explains in the Introduction, myths claim that writing was a gift from the gods - or God. In the 18th century, scholars adopted the pictographic theory: that writing evolved from pictures (p.4). And in the 1930s, when very early tablets surfaced that seemed to contradict the pictographic theory, archaeologists tried to reconcile evidence and theory by positing earlier versions from which abstract symbols evolved (p.5). Yet challenges continued to occur. One was that tablets did not emerge until well after the establishment of cities. "How, then, did the Mesopotamian city-states function without record keeping?" (p.6). Nevertheless, archaeologists stuck by the pictographic theory. "At the same time," Schmandt-Besserat tells us, "excavations steadily produced small tokens that, as I will show, were the antecedents of writing" (p.7).

Yes, tokens:

small clay objects of many shapes - cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, etc. - served as counters in the prehistoric Near East and can be traced to the Neolithic period, starting around 8000 B.C. They evolved to meet the needs of the economy, at first keeping track of the products of farming, then expanding in the urban age to keep track of goods manufactured in workshops. The development of tokens was tied to the rise of social structures, emerging with rank leadership and coming to a climax with state formation. (p.7)

Right. And this gets us to the second story.

Tokens were counters, counters that allowed people to keep track of their goods - a vital precursor to city administration. But counters don't scale well by themselves, since once you get past a certain point, it's quite unwieldy to carry around tokens. So people developed a variety of methods to store and archive tokens. One way was to create clay "envelopes" (like hollow balls) in which tokens were placed and sealed. Of course, a closed and sealed envelope doesn't give you a good idea of how many tokens, or what kinds of tokens, are inside, so "accountants eventually resolved the problem by imprinting the shape of the tokens on the surface of the envelopes prior to enclosing them" (p.7). (I explain to my students that this method is similar to baking a calzone after embedding one of the ingredients on the outside.) Soon - "soon" in archaeological time, anyway - accountants realized that the outer markings made the tokens superfluous. They began producing solid clay balls with token markings on them, then began using a stylus to imitate the imprinting of tokens. "The signs were not pictures of the items they represented but, rather, pictures of the tokens used as counters in the previous accounting system" (p.7).

At this point, the author provides a few photographs. And if you're like me, you stop breathing. I'm not overly emotional, but there's something arresting about seeing these crude tokens and envelopes, invented and adapted by nameless scribes in the deep past, just trying to solve a problem and unwittingly creating a system that would eventually encode legends, histories, laws, sacred texts, mathematics, as well as picayune applications such as bubble gum wrappers and this blog post. It's like seeing the first wheel or hammer. But in these precursors of writing, you can actually see the fingerprints of the craftsmen who developed them. These tools weren't developed by a faceless mass of people - they were developed by individuals with names and families, aspirations and disappointments.

The solid clay balls were a turning point because the markings, although superficially the same, "assumed an entirely new function. Whereas the markings on envelopes repeated only the message encoded on the tokens held within, the signs on the tablet were the message" (p.55). After the envelopes gave way to the clay balls ("tablets"), it took 200 years (eight generations) to move from token impressions to additional pictographic representations (p.57). The plainer tokens were conveyed by being impressed, while more complex tokens were "transcribed into incised pictographs" (p.79). That is, there were two different scripts. Why? The author speculates that this is due to "the way tokens were handled in various offices": simple tokens were impressed because they were kept in clay envelopes, but complex tokens weren't - because they were "perforated and strung," that is, kept on strings or thongs (p.57). And why were there two different kinds of tokens stored in different ways? "The plain tokens represented products of the farm and the countryside, whereas complex tokens stood for goods manufactured in the city. It is therefore logical to assume that the two types of tokens were handled by different hands in different offices" (p.57). Eventually, they met in the emerging writing system.

The plain/complex token division gives us some idea of the environments that produced writing. In Ch.5, Schmandt-Besserat further explores these environments, taking us back to pre-writing symbols (e.g., notches on bones), then to the neolithic symbols that emerged in conjunction with agriculture: "the clay tokens modeled in distinctive shapes, each representing a precise quantity of a product" (p.93). Unlike the previous symbols, the tokens were entirely manmade and entirely for communication and record keeping (p.93). "The greatest novelty of the new medium, however, was that it created a system. ... This system made it feasible to simultaneously manipulate information concerning different categories of items, resulting in a complexity of data processing never reached previously" (p.93). And "Furthermore, the system was open; that is to say, new signs were added when necessary by creating new token shapes, and the ever-increasing repertory constantly pushed the device to new frontiers of complexity" (p.94).

Tokens were in fact "the first code," and evidence suggests that they even used a rudimentary syntax: "It is likely, for example, that the tokens were lined up on the accountant's table in a hierarchical order, starting on the right with tokens representing the largest units. That was how Sumerians organized signs on a tablet, and it is logical to assume that the procedure was inherited from former usage in handling tokens" (p.94). As a code, the token system spread intact across the entire Near East.

Schmandt-Besserat speculates that the token system itself evolved from "a former usage of counting with pebbles, shells, twigs, or grains." But "the various shapes have no known Paleolithic or Mesolithic antecedents. But the counters have the merit of bringing together as a set, for the first time, each of the basic geometric shapes, such as the sphere, cone, tetrahedron, triangle, quadrangle, and cube" (p.94). Some were probably iconic, but others appear arbitrary (p.94).

Yet as the system became more widely used, it failed to scale well. For one thing, "the tokens lacked a capacity for dissociating the numbers from the items counted" (p.96). For another, "the number of types and subtypes of tokens multiplied over time in order to satisfy the growing need for more specificity in accounting. ... This proliferation of signs was bound to lead to the system's collapse" (p.96). The system had advantages: "the system was simple" and "the code offered new performances in data processing and communication" (p.96). And the system "presaged the Sumerian writing system" in its semanticity, discreteness, systematization, codification, openness, arbitrariness, discontinuity, independence of phonetics, syntax, and economic content (pp.97-98). But its drawbacks included its format, the difficulty of making permanent records, and its inefficiency due to its limited repertoire of tokens (p.98). These drawbacks led to writing, which offered permanence; accommodation of more diverse information, an end to the repetition associated with one-to-one correspondence, and an end to the limited system of concept signs by becoming phonetic (p.98).

Look how long it took:

• 30,000-12,000 BC: tallies
• 8,000 BC: tokens
• 3,100 BC: writing

In Chapter 6, Schmandt-Besserat puts these different systems into socioeconomic context. "Tallies, plain tokens, and complex tokens were different because each fulfilled the needs of a distinct economy and social organization. Writing, on the other hand, was a result of other stimuli" (p.101). Specifically, "Tallies, plain tokens, and complex tokens kept track of vastly different items: the former recorded time, whereas the latter two computed agricultural products and manufactured goods" (p.101). This part really got my attention, since it reminds me of some of the epochal readings I've been doing over the last few years.

• The author argues that before agriculture, people needed only to track time (via tallies), since "lunar notations would make it possible for dispersed communities to gather at intervals to reaffirm their ties and celebrate rituals" (p.101).
• But "agriculture brought about a need for accounting," so tokens appeared (p.102). Interestingly, tokens did not seem to be used for trade yet.
• With the advent of industry, the token system expanded, for the first time generating "complex tokens" that represented "finished products typical of urban workshops, such as textiles, garments, vessels, and tools; processed foods, such as oil, bread, cakes, and trussed ducks; and luxury goods, such as perfume, metal, and jewelry." Still, these complex tokens were not related to trade (p.102). Complex tokens were strung, while simple (agricultural) ones continued to be kept in clay envelopes.

Schmandt-Besserat ties these writing precursors to their societies' socioeconomics. Specifically,

• hunter-gatherer societies do not accumulate many goods, so they don't need an accounting system, just a tally system for keeping track of time (p.103). She estimates that the egalitarian system typical of hunter-gatherers can manage a maximum of 300 people (p.104).
• agricultural societies are "rank societies," in which an elite oversees a redistributive economy (p.104). Such rank societies involve both redistribution and control - two functions at which writing excels. "Writing was the backbone of the economy of redistribution - an economy that brought prosperity to Sumer" (p.105).
• The State resulted in complex tokens (p.107). "Complex counters belong to the Mesopotamian temple institution, where they coincided with such socioeconomic changes as monumental architecture, the monopoly of force, and bureaucracy which point to new strategies in pooling communal resources" (p.108). These changes also include taxation (p.108).

Writing, then, is the outcome of abstract counting - the subject of Ch.7. (As I tell my students, if you enjoy reading and writing, go thank an accountant.) In Ch.7, Schmandt-Besserat goes into the details of counting and the transition to abstract writing. Just go read it.

Part III of the book consists of pages and pages of artifacts - mostly tokens - categorized by type and function. It's fascinating.

Okay, let's wrap it up. Go get this book and read it. As I said, it's a popularization of Schmandt-Besserat's scholarly work - work which I'll need to read and cite soon - but it's packed with insights and careful inferences that will change your understanding of writing. It's especially important for those who study the history of writing, but I hope you can also see how it informs information design, information architecture, professional communication, and socioeconomic studies of writing. If you have a scrap of reverence for writing, this book will make you breathless too.

Reading :: Cognitive Surplus

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
By Clay Shirky

When I got this book in the mail, I started reading the plaudits on the back aloud. "Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things Internet." "Clay masterfully makes the connections." They seemed very impressed with me until I confessed that it was really Clay Shirky's book.

Okay, so maybe I'm a little envious. But Shirky earns those plaudits with clear, engaging writing and a thesis that is both unintuitive enough and intriguing enough to get people reading. In this case, the thesis is that economic changes have given us free time, and each generation finds ways to invest its free time. For newly industrialized London in the 1700s, the solution was gin. For 1950s US, it was the sitcom. For this generation, it's the Internet and other connectivity tools. That is, this generation's cognitive surplus is no longer completely wasted: people can actually make and share things. In one anecdote, Shirky recounts explaining Wikipedia to a TV producer, who sighs, "Where do they find the time?" "Hearing this, I snapped, and said, 'No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from.'" (p.9).

Bravo. As Shirky passionately argues, the TV generations spent enormous time in the basement comparing Ginger and Mary Ann. The Internet generation - some of it - spends time producing things. Those things might include the innumerable versions of "Bed Intruder" that I surfed on YouTube this morning, sure. But some include the blog post I'm currently writing, which may possibly help someone out, or Wikipedia, or fan fiction. That's not simply because of innate generational differences. "Generations do differ, but less because people differ than because opportunities do" (p.121).

Overall, the book is well written and intriguing, and does a great job explaining how "makers" fit in and thrive. I'd recommend it to anyone who's trying to figure out participatory culture - or trying to find some good pleasure reading.

Reading :: Postmodern War

Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict
By Chris Hables Gray

In the Preface of this book, Chris Hables Gray announces that he wants to address a "dogma" of the history profession: that history is not progressive. Gray disagrees: "There are patterns we can see that clearly show a kind of progress, if we remember that love and cancer both progress, grow, and spread" (p.vii). This seems like a statement at odds with postmodernism, but Gray, who apparently developed this book from a dissertation directed by Donna Haraway, is clearly concerned that war as a way of life really is progressing. He signs his Preface "Love and Rage, Chris Hables Gray" (p.viii).

Love and rage do permeate the pages of this book, particularly the latter. Unfortunately, rage makes people careless. Gray criticizes Arquilla and Ronfeldt, but he confuses their netwar concept with Network-Centric Warfare (p.24 and elsewhere); he criticizes Latour for claiming that nonhumans should have rights as humans do (p.75 - a mischaracterization); he criticizes AI researchers from not learning from the Bhagavad-Gita (p.72), forgetting that this sacred book's central message was that Arjuna should put his conscience aside and slaughter his enemies for the glory of Shiva. Finally, Gray proves his point that "while the enemy is labeled female, our weapons can be considered male" by quoting - the owner of the New England Patriots (p.43).

With this track record, I am reluctant to take many of the book's assertions at face value. Gray attempts a cultural studies-based critique of postmodern war, and in some places he succeeds, but this 1997 text suffers from the events of the last 13 years. For instance, he scoffs at the suggestion that Third World countries are an actual threat, and instead suggests that they are simply justifications for further swelling military budgets (p.34); today, we are dealing with the aftermath of the A.Q. Khan network, including the actual threat of actual long-range missiles tipped with actual nuclear warheads, and SDI has new life as a shield against such threats. He criticizes the move to heavily "market" military news (p.41); now we can see the repercussions of controlling information during warfare, repercussions that don't just belong to the US (see readings by Arquilla and the US Army War College).

That being said, Gray does provide some valuable thoughts about postmodern war. Some of the best contributions are represented by the bullet points on p.169, where Gray argues that "the main moral justification for war is now peace"; "war is becoming cyborgian" (think Predator); "the battlefield is now a [3D] battlespace"; "many targets may not be attacked"; and "wars can only be won politically" (pp.169-170). These statements, and others in this chapter, not only make sense but seem in accord with later work on fourth-generation warfare. (Search this blog for Arquilla, Ronfeldt, Robb, and 4GW for more examples.)

Last thing. Gray starts his book in Sarajevo, where World War I started in 1914 and where the US and allies tried to stop ethnic cleansing in 1995. What jumps out here is that these dates bookend the "Long War" that Phillip Bobbitt discusses in his masterpiece The Shield of Achilles. Although Gray and Bobbitt seem to come from very different places, I saw several points of possible conversation between the two books throughout.

Reading :: Through the Interface

Through the Interface: A Human Activity Approach To User Interface Design
By Susanne Bodker

Here's another book from my grad school days - although it wasn't on my reading list. I had just become interested in activity theory due to a talk David Russell gave one of my classes in either fall 1994 or spring 1995. At the time, activity theory had only been discussed by a handful of rhetoric and writing types, so I began looking outside the discipline, specifically at human-computer interaction and related areas (since I was very interested in how electronic communication would impact our field). This 1991 book was in the library, and I remember being incredibly excited as I leafed through it, then borrowed it, then bought my own copy.

The first thing I want to point out about the book? No triangles. When Bodker wrote her dissertation, which was the basis of this book, she hadn't heard of Yrjo Engestrom, whose work (and triangle diagrams) has since become the face of activity theory in the West. Bodker eventually heard about Engestrom at a conference, and ends up throwing in an incidental citation to Learning by Expanding in the book, but the work is actually based directly on Leont'ev and Vygotsky. Consequently, Bodker focuses much more on the levels of activity than we might expect, and leans on Wittgenstein to discuss objects and representations. It's a really interesting take on activity theory, particularly after being soaked in Engestromian AT for so long.

But this book is useful for interaction designers even if they don't care to learn about activity theory. That's because Bodker was also involved in the fabled UTOPIA project, in which the techniques of Participatory Design were developed. So Bodker's empirical cases, theorized within a second-generation AT framework, are interesting from a designer's point of view: inventive, often low-tech, driven to encourage participation. For instance, she discusses mockups developed with paper and colored slides, designed both to educate her users about computer interfaces (most had never seen one) and to encourage their full participation (they could modify the paper mockups easily). From my perspective, it's a fascinating account of how these techniques developed, how Bodker theorized them, and how they came to impact UTOPIA and Xerox PARC. (They have, of course, impacted a range of disciplines in the intervening time; see my article "Lost in the Translation" for a fuller account.)

Although the book still bears the marks of a dissertation, it's still a solid piece of scholarship. It inspired me deeply when I read it, and I was saddened when it disappeared along with a box of books during my move from Texas Tech. I finally got around to ordering a replacement, and I'm glad I did - it still holds up. Pick it up if you're interested in AT, PD, or interaction design.

Reading :: Local Knowledge

Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology
By Clifford Geertz

I picked up this book in grad school. It was on my reading list for the qualifying exams in my Ph.D. program - at that time, rhetoric and professional communication was going through the "social turn," so we were reading a lot of cultural anthropology. But I confess I didn't quite make it through the book back then. I did recently, but it involved a lot of skimming. Honestly, this classic didn't keep my attention. I think there were at least two reasons why.

The first was that these insights, which were fresh when Geertz was first writing, have become pretty well integrated into scholarship in the interim. Geertz studied cultures all over the world, and he notes issues such as multiplicity, associative thinking, and (what some might call) postmodernist blurring of categories. Such issues were still fairly new and contested in 1983 (when the book was published) and even less well known in the preceding decade, when Geertz delivered the lectures on which the chapters were based. But much has been written about these issues since 1983, so the book didn't provide much in the way of additional insights for me.

The second reason the book had trouble keeping my attention was stylistic. As noted above, the chapters were based on lectures Geertz had delivered. I could tell: The chapters were scoped too broadly, covering too much ground, without enough local detail and focus to keep me engaged or to make their arguments concretely. As summaries that connected the dots of Geertz' vast work, they did well, I assume. But I haven't read Geertz's other work, so I was frustrated by how much was glossed over, including (in many cases) methodology. Additionally, like a good lecture text, these chapters did away with strong navigational cues such as headings.

Nevertheless, I appreciate the general arc of the book. In particular, I appreciate how he got across the same lesson that Rogoff later communicated: that we must examine cultures within their own value systems and milieux. Geertz not only preaches this, he practices it.

Reading :: Militant Islamic Ideology

Militant Islamist Ideology
By Youssef H. Aboul-Enein

"Today's war will not be fought on the Clausewitzian model," argues Youssed Aboul-Enien; "it will be fought by analyzing the fantasy ideology of Islamist militancy and making it unappealing to a greater segment of the Muslim population by staying on message with key Islamic laws, histories, and precedents that discredit [militant Islamists such as] Azzam, Ibn Taymiyyah, bin Laden, and Zawahiri" (p.151). This sentence summarizes both the value and the folly of the book.

First the value. Aboul-Enien, who "is a US Navy Medical Service Corps officer and Middle East Foreign Area Officer" (p.251), argues that to combat al Qaeda and similar movements, the West needs to distinguish among Islam (the religion), Islamists (groups or individuals who advocate "Islam as a political as well as a religious system," p.2), and militant Islamists (who advocate "Islamist ideological goals, principally by violent means," p.1). Islamists can be difficult to deal with, but the real danger is militant Islamists, including al Qaeda. Aboul-Enien argues that we in the West must understand how militant Islamists diverge from the other two groups, specifically in how they interpret Islam, if we are to effectively combat it. To do this, Aboul-Enien provides a historical perspective of Islam's development, starting with Muhammad's life and the history of his successors, then focusing on key thinkers who developed militant Islamist ideology. If you've wondered about the life of Muhammad, or Islam's relationship to Judaism and Christianity, or the difference between Shia and Sunni, this book does a nice job of laying these out.

Aboul-Enien also does a nice job of demonstrating how militant Islamists diverge from the text of the Quran, ignoring swathes of it and taking statements out of context. To combat militant Islamist ideology, he argues, we must confront that ideology with the actual Quran and point out the differences. And here, we get to what I think is the folly of the book.

A nice Episcopalian seminarian might naively hope that he can persuade members of Christian Identity that their ideology is wrong, sola scriptura, but most of us wouldn't expect him to make much headway. Religious interpretation is heavily influenced by the complex semiotic system of a given community. (To give a less pejorative example, atheists who nitpick the Bible's math rarely find converts because their targets tend to have a more flexible or layered expectation of the Bible than they expect.) Religious interpretation isn't a math problem or a syllogistic exercise. So although Aboul-Enien provides what sounds like a perfectly reasonable critique of militant Islamist ideology, he seems to put too much faith in the power of orderly exigesis.

Nevertheless, I recommend the book as a good way for Westerners to understand the background of Islam and of militant Islamist ideology. It's a fascinating story, generally well told.

(Backlog)

I've been reading lately, but I haven't been blogging because my writing time has been soaked up in other ways. But the semester is over, so I'll try to pop out several reviews over the next couple of weeks, including Susanne Bodker's Through the Interface, Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, and Denise Schmandt-Besserat's How Writing Came About.

Reading :: Shopping for Bombs

Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network
By Gordon Corera

Last week, Wikileaks dumped a large number of classified US cables, including the revelation that Iran has bought advanced missiles from North Korea, missiles that could carry payloads from Iran to European and Russian cities. According to the New York Times, "The missile intelligence also suggests far deeper military — and perhaps nuclear — cooperation between North Korea and Iran than was previously known."

Disturbing? Sure. But I wasn't surprised. The week before, I had read Shopping for Bombs, in which Gordon Corera details what is known about the A.Q. Khan network. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, built a supplier and distribution network - which was 90% legal - to acquire components for developing nuclear weapons, and eventually, to sell nuclear components and secrets. It's not easy to build a nuclear bomb - it takes tremendous knowledge, resources, and patience. For instance, it takes thousands of finely calibrated centrifuges to refine uranium to the appropriate level, and it's not easy to design and machine these centrifuges or acquire the uranium. Khan figured out how to do this, largely through plans he stole in the early 1970s. And then he began to export it: to Iran, to Libya, and to other possible customers.

Of course, nuclear weapons aren't much use without missile technology to deliver it, and missiles are another tough nut to crack. Khan did not know how to develop missiles. North Korea had developed No Dong missiles, but hadn't successfully developed the bomb. So the two states transferred technology to each other. Although conclusive evidence is lacking, Corera cites circumstantial evidence that the two states, both of which were short on cash, traded secrets and technology as well as selling them. (With this precedent, it hardly seems surprising that North Korea would find it worthwhile to provide missile technology to Khan's former customer Iran.)

Corera emphasizes that although Khan had the resources of Pakistan behind him, he did not necessarily represent the State in his dealings. Khan had an extraordinary amount of leeway, so much that he could keep his dealings secret from, and untouchable by, Pakistan's prime minister.

Ultimately, what brought down the AQ Khan network was overreach. Libya decided to order the whole package - an entire nuclear program, soup to nuts, rather than ordering plans and components and making it work on their own, as Iran and North Korea had. This meant that the network had to make extraordinarily large purchases, purchases that were easier to track. At the same time, Libya (perhaps with an eye to the results of Gulf War II) decided to come in from the cold and give up its nuclear program, and its secret talks with the US provided some clues that allowed the US to intercept shipments.

Corera pens a gripping story here, one that I wish were fiction. It's well worth reading, especially in light of the Wikileaks document dumps.

RSA workshop on emerging genres

If you're not doing anything this summer, consider this Rhetoric Society of America workshop on genre:

Carolyn R. Miller, English, NC State University, Department of English

Victoria Gallagher, Communication, NC State University, Department of Communication

2011 RSA Institute

Workshop on Emerging Genres

How do we develop shared recognitions and identifications in a changing world? This question lies at the heart of rhetorical theory and practice, and the concept of genre provides a productive way of addressing it. As ways of acting together, genres constrain and enable, constitute and regulate; indeed, genres link together in systems and ecologies that constitute our social identities, institutions, and cultures. While genre has been an active area in rhetorical studies in the past 30 years (with studies of oratorical genres such as presidential inaugurals and apologias, as well as of professional and workplace genres such as scientific research articles, employee performance appraisals, and corporate annual reports), it is also a concept that cuts across disciplines and media: it has been discovered or rediscovered by literary and film studies, television and media studies, information science, anthropology, linguistics, and visual studies. Moreover, the new digital media have created a plethora of new opportunities for symbolic action and thus the potential for many new genres. Thus, we might ask: How do new genres emerge? How do they balance stability with change? How are new genres related to old ones? What are the potentialities and limitations of genre as a concept for understanding material rhetorical practices? Can the same theories that were developed for oral and print genres help us interpret visual and digital genres? This workshop will explore these questions using several cases and examples as well as inviting development of theoretical and critical approaches to new media and practices.

If that sounds interesting, click through to the application form and more information about the workshops.

"Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work"

I've just accepted a slot at South by Southwest Interactive, where I'll be leading a Core Conversation titled "Hold on Loosely: How Loose Organizations Work." My thanks to all of you who voted.

In the Core Conversation, I'll be doing a bit of talking, some of it about the research I've been doing on loose organizations in Austin. But much more importantly, I'll be leading a conversation with others who work in loose organizations - and posting a set of takeaways here on my blog.

That means I need you to come join the conversation. If you're planning to come to SXSWi2011, and especially if you work in a loose organization, please do come to the session - and be prepared to swap stories and express your thoughts about the future of your work. I'll moderate, but this really will be a core conversation.

Facebook's new trick: it turns friends into direct marketers

What really appeals to me about social media is that it lets people make direct, genuine connections with each other. I'm really taken with the fact that status messages let us pick up a sort of ambient status of our friends, colleagues, and associates. It's good to know what others are thinking, feeling, and concerned about. It's also good to hear their arguments. That's especially important during big events such as election campaigns. For instance, when I watch candidates debating, I now tune into my Twitter stream to see how people on the right and left interpret and react to statements. The reactions of people I know seem more important to me than the scripted reactions of the talking heads that are employed by news organizations. And seeing their points of view helps me to think twice about political statements rather than simply accepting them. It deepens my understanding of the national conversation and helps me to think in terms of compromises, not lines in the sand. That's good for democracy, I think.

And that's a good reason for not unfriending people whose political beliefs you disagree with, by my lights. You get out of a partisan echo chamber and begin to understand how people across the political spectrum might interpret the same statement in different ways, associating it with other statements. Let's not call it the wisdom of crowds; let's call it diversifying the viewpoints to which you listen. It doesn't mean you agree with them, but it means you understand them.

So I'll read the status messages of people across the political spectrum. On Twitter, which I love, that's the only way to share this information. On Facebook, about which I have more mixed feelings, people have other options: they can share stories, they can tag photos, they can comment on anything, and they can even post directly to your wall if they have a personal message for you that they also want to be public. It exemplifies the personal connection between people. Used well, it can deepen the personal understandings across people who hold different views.


But here's the thing about Facebook. Its primary goal is to extract marketing data from users so it can more effectively monetize them. Every Facebook interaction potentially adds to your further definition as a market segment.

What happens when you put these two together?

Alas, we found out this last electoral cycle. A few different Facebook applications rolled out that tried to marry personal connections with direct marketing. That is, they turned trusted friends into direct marketers. Here's one example from an LA Times blog:

The California Democratic Party unveiled a new tool in its kit of get-out-the-vote operations Monday: a first-of-its-kind Facebook application that sifts through a user’s friends list, matches it with the friends’ party registrations and voting histories and pops out a list people who vote Democratic but don’t regularly vote.

It then encourages users to tell their non-voting friends to cast a ballot Nov. 2.

Without a trace of irony, the story explains that "the development of the Facebook app was made possible because of funding from Chris Kelly, Facebook’s former chief privacy officer, who lost this year’s Democratic primary for state attorney general" (my emphasis). A Democratic spokesman adds, "In the same way that we target voters with direct mail, this is part of the same strategy for us" (my emphasis).

That's not the only Facebook app to do this job. BarackObama.com rolled out its Commit to Vote app, which goes through your friends list and posts a reminder to vote to your friends' wall. Yes, all your friends. Yes, this means that a form of communication that used to indicate a personal connection - posting to someone's wall - becomes the equivalent of direct mail. Worse, if the person using the Commit to Vote app shares many friends with you, your stream is suddenly full of identical direct mail pieces: the message posted to your wall and the messages posted to 33 of your friends' walls. Conservative WSJ blogger James Taranto ridicules this approach (last item): "Wow, so that's the Democrats' secret weapon. ... Facebook spam..." Yes: with Facebook, anyone can now be a direct marketer. Anyone can set up the equivalent of a robocall - for as long as they have Facebook friends, anyway.

I personally don't care who came up with the idea, on whichever part of the political spectrum. It's a very troubling turn for social media because it takes the two contradictory sides - the social features that enable deeper and more expansive personal connections, and the trove of marketing data that enable marketing connections - and fuses them together in exactly the wrong way. In 1999, the Cluetrain Manifesto urged us to understand markets as conversations. In 2010, conversations have become marketing.

I want the conversation, not the marketing. And that means that if some individual wanted to post to my wall and have an actual conversation, I would be fine with it. But unfortunately they can't. Because of the Commit to Vote app, I have restricted access to my wall, and I don't see lifting those restrictions anytime soon.