SIGDOC 2012 posters

I hope you're strongly considering submitting a paper to SIGDOC 2012. (Paper deadlines are June 1.) But I also hope you'll help us spread the word. One way would be to share this picture with interested colleagues. Post it to Facebook, print it out and put it on your door, anything you can do to let everyone know about this great conference.

Questions? Contact us through the website. Or in the comments here. Hope to see you in Seattle!

Reading :: Net Smart

Net Smart
By Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold is known for books investigating how technology changes communities, books such as Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. But his latest book, Net Smart, is not an investigation. Think of it instead as a handbook for being a successful member of such communities.

Net Smart is a light book, and much of it will sound familiar or even obvious to those who have closely followed his previous work. That's okay. Rheingold says that this book is for a range of people, including adults who are online but are having trouble managing their time and attention; intelligent but fearful parents of children who are going online; young people who enjoy being online but want to interact in deeper ways; older people who are puzzled by new media; businesspeople who want their employees to be net smart; and educators who want their students to connect old and new literacies. In other words, if you've been attending South by Southwest Interactive or working on your MA in media theory, this might not be the book for you.

On the other hand, it might. Even though Rheingold writes simply for this broad set of audiences, his long and deep experience with online communities has given him keen insights that others may not have. Rheingold covers several lessons, including:

• Controlling and being mindful of our scarcest resource: our attention.
• Critically examining and testing assertions (a.k.a "crap detection").
• Recognizing and developing participation skills for participatory culture.
• Understanding collective intelligence and crowdsourcing.
• Understanding social networks and social network analysis.

And although the book is for a general audience, it's easy to see that it's based on deep experience. Personally, I found myself highlighting references to more scholarly texts such as texts on social network analysis.

In sum, Net Smart is a well written and timely book. You may find it useful for yourself. But if you already consider yourself "net smart," consider giving a copy to someone who could use it.

Ryerson University

I'm in the Toronto airport waiting for my flight back to Austin. Toronto's a great city, about the size—and vibe—of Chicago. Downtown, among other things, is Ryerson University, where I spoke yesterday.

Ryerson is a polytechnic university. Among other things, it has a relatively new Master's program in professional communication. It's a one-year terminal MA for fast trackers, and it looks fascinating—and not at all conventional. The standout sight for me was the posters that students produced in a theory course: each poster graphically mapped out relationships among theories, and each was beautifully, professionally produced. Judging from the students' work, and from the students' questions during the presentation, this is a unique program in the best sense.

I've long been a fan of the work of Catherine Schryer, who is now the chair of the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson, so when she invited me to speak at Ryerson, I jumped at the chance. I'm really glad that I did.

Thanks to all the faculty and students who came to hear me talk about genre theory, Castells, Latour, spambots, hipsters, Galileo, SEO, Pokemon, shuttle buses, and cardiologists. (It was a wide-ranging discussion.) And thanks especially to Isabel Pedersen, who served as my liaison throughout the day. I hope the visit was as valuable for you as it was for me!

Symmetry as a methodological move, Part II

We've been discussing the oft-misunderstood principle of symmetry in actor-network theory. Last time I emphasized that symmetry is a methodological stance meant to get at certain things and not others–not wholesale anthropomorphization. Let's pursue that line further by performing a thought experiment. I emphasize that this is just a thought experiment for reasons that will become clear below.

Aristotle believed and taught that heavy objects fall faster than light ones, in direct proportion to their weight. Galileo disagreed, and described a classic experiment in which he stood at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with two balls, dropped them, and they hit the ground at about the same time. (It's unclear whether Galileo actually performed the experiment.)

Suppose you want to perform a similar experiment. Since I'm at the University of Texas campus, let's imagine that you ascend UT's Tower to the observation deck. You bring a one-pound weight and a ten-pound weight.

Photo © 1980 Larry D. Moore (CC-BY-SA), available  at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uttower1.jpg

(NOTE: You can only do this as a thought experiment. The observation deck is inaccessible except during guided tours due to a tragic incident. Also, dropping weights from the observation deck is a misdemeanor. Obviously, I do not endorse actually performing this experiment.)

Leaning over the railing, you drop the two weights at the same time. Not surprisingly, you discover that Galileo was right and Aristotle was wrong. The ten-pound weight does not fall ten times faster than the one-pound weight; they hit the ground at roughly the same time.

Interesting, you think. And then you decide to try a second variation of the experiment. You ascend the tower again, this time with a one-pound weight, a ten-pound weight, and a 150-pound hipster.

(NOTE: Again, you can only do this as a thought experiment for obvious legal, moral, and ethical reasons.)

When you reach the observation deck, you repeat the experiment, this time dropping all three objects at the same time. It turns out that no matter how ironically the hipster falls, in terms of gravity, he behaves exactly as the other weights do. For the purposes of the experiment, the hipster is exactly the same as the other two weights; you treat them symmetrically, and so does gravity.

But when you descend the elevator to the bottom of the tower, you discover that what is treated as symmetrical in one network of meaning is not treated as symmetrical in other networks. Dropping the weights is a misdemeanor. Dropping the hipster is a felony. The law of gravity treats them as symmetrical, but state and federal law do not.

When Latour describes humans and nonhumans as symmetrical, he means that differences among actants (both human and nonhuman) are generated within a given actor-network rather than preexisting them; we can't presuppose those differences. Consider Galileo's experiment as well as the previous illustration of elevator capacity: in these narrowly defined situations, humans and nonhumans act in exactly the same way. (If the tower experiment were a physics problem, you wouldn't even specify the materials, you'd just plug in the weight values.) But of course these networks of meaning are always entangled with other networks, as they should be. There are many good reasons why you would never actually perform this experiment, and they go beyond trouble with the law to basic questions of empathy and morality, questions that apply to all people,  few if any artifacts, and to some extent to nonhuman animals. 

But Latour talks about situations in which people are actually interacting: scientists, technologists, the public. Aren't these social rather than technical? And in social situations, don't we have to treat humans and nonhumans differently? 

The answer is: it depends on your methodological aims. Even in terms that we consider very human–cognition and persuasion–it sometimes makes sense to take a symmetrical viewpoint in one's methods. We'll see an example in the next post in this series.

Symmetry as a methodological move, part I

"This circulating gene entangles patients and researchers as it goes along. ... we see that the gene is domesticated, tamed, and integrated into a collective that holds it and is held by it. It is a civilized and civilizing gene, performing the collective and performed by it. And this integration into the society of the gene, or insertion into the genetics of society, would have been impossible without a starting point: the parity, the symmetry, between the complementary forms of knowledge that constitutes the foundations of this collective." (Callon & Rabeharisoa 2003, p.201)

This quote from a recent class echoes through your head as you walk down Austin's 6th Street on a beautiful spring day. Callon & Rabeharisoa are talking about a collaboration between research scientists and the French Muscular Dystrophy Association, which was clear enough, but in the latter half of the paper they make this assertion, consistent with the principle of symmetry that actor-network theory embraces.

Symmetry seems ridiculous to you. What's the point of pretending that genes, stars, and rat kidneys are actors in the sense that people are? Why apply the same language to both? Maybe this is one of those "critical theory" moves you've heard people talking about. To you, it seems more like attention-seeking. Latour likes to say that symmetrical language is not metaphorical but that he isn't engaging in anthropomorphism either. Obviously he's trying to have it both ways.

Enough. It's spring break. South by Southwest Interactive is winding down, but South by Southwest Music is just ramping up. You walk past the back of a club, where roadies are struggling to move a ton of sound equipment. It's going to be an exclusive show, evidently, because fourteen undernourished hipsters have already lined up at the front of the club; they're thumbing their iPhones and checking out each others' ironic t-shirts. A little farther on, seven well-nourished tourists on Segways ride along the sidewalk in a neat line, like ducks. And as you pass Jim-Jim's Water Ice, you see a mounted policeman on one horse, holding another horse's reins. The other policeman is in line getting a snow cone. Ah, Austin.

But you don't have time to enjoy the scenes. You hurry on toward the Driskill Hotel, where a temporary job awaits you. When you get there, you find out that the job is pretty easy.

"See this elevator?" your supervisor asks. "It's old. It has a maximum capacity of 2000 pounds. Max. But people try to overload it all the time. Your job is to make sure they don't." He turns on his heel and walks away.

Easy, you think. But then you wonder: about how much is 2000 pounds?

Let's see, you reason to yourself. Two thousand pounds is a ton. Like a ton of stereo equipment, you think whimsically, remembering your walk.

But how many people? Maybe thirteen or fourteen people - like those fourteen undernourished hipsters in front of the club. Or seven well-fed tourists on Segways, you think, imagining the line riding into the elevator. Or two horses and a police officer. Any of these combinations would come out to about 2000 pounds. You resolve that whatever combination of humans and nonhumans might come through the door, if they are above 2000 pounds, they can't ride together.

Humans and nonhumans? You laugh a little, thinking back to the notion of symmetry. What if the hipsters argued: "But we're not horses! Hello? Do horses have an encyclopedic knowledge of craft brews? Did horses listen to Mumford and Sons long before they were cool? Do horses have iPhones? Of course not! Horses don't even have thumbs!"And you imagine yourself retorting: "Maybe that matters if you're trying to get backstage. But not here. All that matters is how much you weigh."

You don't believe for a minute that hipsters are the "same" as horses, that stereo equipment is the same as overfed tourists, or that policemen are the same as Segways. But for the purposes of your job, they are judged by exactly the same criteria. Four hours later, it occurs to you that you are indeed performing a kind of symmetric analysis.

More than that: If you don't, the elevator will.

Reading :: The Exploit

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
By Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

Note: I reviewed the Kindle version, so I don't include page numbers.


The Exploit: A Theory of Networks seeks to develop an ontology of networks. The authors attempt to build this ontology from at least three very different traditions of networks - but unfortunately, rather than putting these traditions into dialogue, they conflate the traditions' definitions of networks. Since these definitions and their applications are so different, The Exploit becomes incoherent in places. In my judgment, it does not reach its goal of developing an ontology of networks.

To understand what went wrong, let's look at three distinct ways that the term network is used in the literature. (See Milton Mueller's excellent book Networks and States for more on how the term is used in different ways.)

In network analysis, a network is a set of nodes (units) connected by links or edges. Since this is a form of analysis, anything can be considered a node - an academic paper (linked via citations), a set of phones (linked by wires and switches), a group of people (linked by communication lines), you name it. As long as the units are consistent and the links are identifiable, you can perform a network analysis. That doesn't mean that the phenomenon you're studying is a network in an objective sense. For instance, you could study a hierarchical organization via a network analysis - and many people do - even though the hierarchical organization is not considered to be a network per se. Network analysis typically involves mathematical tools. (See Barabasi.)

In contrast, networked organizations are a phenomenon rather than a method of analysis. In this tradition, networks are a distinct organizational form, demonstrably and qualitatively different from other organizational forms such as tribes, hierarchical institutions, and markets. In networked organizations, control and discretion are typically decentralized (pushed to the individual level of the organization), although command may still be centralized. Networked organizations are often studied qualitatively. As a phenomenon, networked organizations are networked organizations no matter what analysis you apply. (For instance, al Qaeda is considered a networked organization; but the US Army in World War II was an entirely different kind of organization, a hierarchical one.) For examples, see Ronfeldt; Arquilla & Ronfeldt; Castells; and Toffler, who Ronfeldt cites as a strong influence.

A third construct, sociotechnical networks, is again an analytical frame rather than a phenomenon per se. In this tradition, theorists analyze the social and technical as an inseparable unit made up of varying other units (which could include humans, animals, tools, activities, concepts, etc.). One early example is Bateson's example of the blind-man-with-cane, in which he invites us to consider how the blind man taps his cane to navigate. By himself, he can't; with the cane, he can feel the curb, even though he's not touching it. The system of man-cane-curb is a sensory system in a way that the individual elements are not. This networked understanding of sociotechnical systems is used in somewhat different ways by Deleuze & Guattari, Latour, Engestrom, and others; I wrote a book about it. 

So: at least three kinds of networks and thus three different understandings of what the term network means. Two are analyses, one is a phenomenon. Two are largely qualitative, one is quantitative. Two involve fixed units (in social systems, these are people); one doesn't. They're bound together by the metaphor of network but little more.

Unfortunately, The Exploit doesn't acknowledge or even seem to realize the deep differences among these. I actually gasped out loud when I realized that they had read Arquilla and Ronfeldt's work on networked organizations, but missed how A&R carefully separated this phenomenon from network analysis. Indeed, they soon conflate Arquilla and Ronfeldt's networked organizations with Barabasi's work on "heterogeneous systems, be they terrorism, AIDS, or the Internet." And a couple of paragraphs later, they ask: "what is the principle of political organization that stitches a network together?" - a question that is unanswerable as long as the senses of network are still conflated. Incredibly, late in the book, they claim that Arquilla & Ronfeldt's notion of netwar is grounded in graph theory - despite the fact that A&R don't employ mathematical analysis!

The authors similarly deploy terms from network analysis in ways that seem inconsistent with it. For instance, in discussing SARS and bioterrorism, they claim, "Such skirmishes highlight an important point in our understanding of networks: That the networks of emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism are networks composed of several subnetworks" such as the genome, epidemiological networks, knowledge networks, and pharmaceutical networks. But they don't explain the units and links of these subnetworks, nor how they qualify as subnetworks of a larger network (as opposed to, say, interfering networks). 

The authors do seem to hew closer to a sociotechnical understanding of networks in some places, particularly when they discuss Deleuze, Negri, and others in this line. Shockingly, although the authors mention Latour near the end of the book, they actually don't mention actor-network theory, nor do they correctly represent Latour's discussion of symmetry in their discussion of it: 

Yet despite Latour's emphasis on the way that human actors are influenced by nonhuman actants, there is a sense in which the nonhuman is still anthropomorphized, a sense in which the circumference of the human is simply expanded.

The principle of symmetry - the stance in which Latour applies the same terms and concepts to humans and nonhumans - the reason why he is constantly having to explain that he doesn't actually have conversation with lampposts - and the authors think that they just might possibly detect a hint of anthropomorphism. And that seems like as good a place as any to conclude this review.

Reading :: The Origins of Writing

The Origins of Writing
Edited by Wayne M. Senner

I read this 1989 edited collection over the winter break, but have been buried under other duties, so I haven't been able to give it its due. That's a shame, because it's an enjoyable book, with a variety of pieces including a chapter by Denise Schmandt-Besserat. The collection covers Sumerian tokens, early cuneiform, Egyptian heiroglyphics, the development of the Phonecian, Arabic, and Latin alphabets, runes and Celtic scripts, Chinese and Mesoamerican writing.

With this broad sweep, the collection ends up alighting briefly on different forms of writing. That means that readers get a sampling of these different writing systems and (sometimes) a sense of how they interact. But it also means that we don't get a sustained argument of how writing developed and spread.

Nevertheless, we see some interesting connections. In his chapter on the invention and development of the alphabet, for instance, Frank Moore Cross argues that the alphabet was invented only once (p.77). Nevertheless, five major, independent systems developed in the ancient Near East (p.77). Despite the mystic rumors swirling around runes, Elmer Antonsen compellingly argues in his chapter that these developed from the Latin alphabet, but adapted both for language and for the Germanic tendency to cut letters into wood: "the runic shapes avoid curves and horizontal lines, changing them to angles and oblique lines" because in wood "it is difficult to execute curves, and horizontal lines would tend to be obscured by the grain of the wood" (p.144).

These chapters, and the others, tell us fascinating things about how the diverse set of writing systems - some of which bear very little resemblance to each other - developed and interacted. If you're interested in the history for writing, check it out.

Reading :: Cross-Cultural Technology Design

Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users
By Huatong Sun

I've been a fan of Huatong Sun's work ever since I read her award-winning dissertation a few years ago. That dissertation synthesized activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies to examine how people use SMS (texting) in US and Chinese contexts. It was timely.

So is this book, which is based on the dissertation but expands into subsequent studies of locally used technology. Sun argues that to design technology for local users, we must better understand local technology adaptation and meaning-making. That doesn't mean simply examining big-C "Culture" according to basic precepts or characteristics; it means examining how users themselves interpret, localize, and integrate technologies. How do practitioners and designers "develop an effective approach to design appropriately localized products that meet the cultural expectations of local users, support their complex activities in concrete contexts, empower their agency, and mediate their identities" (p.xiv)? Sun's answer is "the design philosophy and model of Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE), which integrates action and meaning throughout the cyclical design process in order to make a technology both usable and meaningful to local users" (pp.xiv-xv). She illustrates its principles through studies of text messaging - "a technology that is poorly localized at the developers' site but is then rescued by users' localization efforts" (p.xv).

Sun brilliantly draws on specific, well grounded examples of text messaging to illustrate her principles, avoiding the essentialism that too often characterizes examinations of cross-cultural communication. She doesn't make her story a contrast of US and Chinese use, but rather a contrast in how locally grounded individuals perceive and use the same technologies in different contexts. In doing so, she illustrates the

seven defining features of the CLUE framework:

1. The CLUE approach highlights the praxis of use.
2. Local culture constitutes the dynamic nexus of contextual interactions and manifests numerous articulations of practices and meanings.
3. User experience is both situated and constructed.
4. Technology use is a dual mediation process.
5. Structured affordance comes from dialogic interactions.
6. Culturally localized user experience respects use practices of individual local users and values their efforts at user localization.
7. Design is both problem solving and engaged conversation. (pp.233-234)

Sun illustrates each feature well through sensitive, compellingly told stories interspersed with data. And although the sweep of theory is broad, through these stories she manages to make it understandable, applicable, and convincing. 

Full disclosure: Huatong and I discussed this book project as she planned it, and I encouraged her to develop it and send it to a top-notch press. If you want to see why, just pick up a copy. It's solid work, and recommended reading for anyone interested in technology design, technology localization, and related issues.

Full disclosure 2: Forgot to mention that I received a free copy of the book. It's worth list price.

Synthesis Lectures on Human-Computer Informatics

Interested in HCI? Of course you are. So take a look at this Morgan & Claypool series edited by John M. Carroll. Each entry is a small monograph on an HCI topic. They're all blind reviewed. Currently they seem to be priced at $20 a pop, which I think is quite reasonable for these compressed, focused monographs.

Most interesting for me is the upcoming Kaptelinin and Nardi monograph, "Activity Theory: A Primer for HCI Research." I was privileged to review the manuscript. It's a great, compressed discussion of AT and how it relates to HCI - and an efficient, focused text that makes a great introduction to AT in general.

Seminar: Writing Persuasive Business Proposals

A while back I mentioned my upcoming seminar, Writing Persuasive Business Proposals. It's on Friday, June 8; if you're going to be in Austin, please consider enrolling!

This seminar is under the auspices of UT's Human Dimensions of Organizations program, which is full of people with incredible insight and expertise into how organizations work. We'll be starting up an MA program in fall 2013; if your business has (a) a wicked problem and (b) an individual you'd like to develop to solve it, take a look at this innovative program.

Review :: Reality is Broken

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
By Jane McGonigal

In this book's penultimate chapter, "Saving the Real World Together," Jane McGonigal describes a massively multiplayer game aimed at forecasting trends called World Without Oil. In this game, participants are given a scenario: The world has hit Peak Oil; the gap between global supply and demand has widened; and no other energy source is on the horizon. What will happen?

McGonigal, who is Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future, was the participation architect for this project. Eventually 2000 online gamers from all walks of life participated in developing scenarios for six weeks. McGonigal reports that two main strategies emerged: reducing demand or competing more aggressively for available supply. And what gives her hope is that these gamers, though they first gravitated toward strategy #2, eventually stabilized on strategy #1. "It was the proof-of-concept game that convinced me we can really save the real world with the right kind of game. It's the project that inspired me to define my biggest hope for the future: that a game developer would soon be worthy of the Nobel Prize" (p.312).

In this scenario, and this quote, we see both the promise and the fundamental problem of the book.

First, the promise. As McGonigal argues throughout the book, games do certain things for us. They "optimize human experience ... help us do amazing things together, and ... enable lasting engagement" (p.346). They "increase self-motivation, provoke interest and creativity, and help us work at the very edge of our abilities" (p.346). They put us in a positive mood; make our (in-game) work more satisfying and productive; help us see failure as positive feedback that gives us a better shot at reasonable goals; make us more social; and put our efforts in context on epic scale (p.346). They help us to get out more and interact with strangers (p.347). Harnessing their potential can result in more wins, more collaboration, and more foresight to apply to "planetary-scale problems"(p.348). McGonigal supplies plenty of examples of each of these lessons.

And she also describes the problems with reality as compared to games:

Reality is too easy. Reality is depressing. It's unproductive, and hopeless. It's disconnected, and trivial. It's hard to get into. It's pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating. It's hard to swallow. It's unsustainable. It's unambitious. It's disorganized and divided. It's stuck in the present. (p.348)

But, she adds, reality is better than games, since we live here and can change it. She urges us to apply game dynamics, game problem-solving, and game engagement to reality: "Life is hard, and games make it better" (p.349). And throughout the book, she gives examples of how applying game principles to real-world problems can do exactly that. McGonigal has an encyclopedic knowledge of games and game strategies, and it was a pleasure seeing how she applies this mastery to various problems.

So that's the promise. Where's the problem?

Let's go back to this statement about reality: "It's disorganized and divided." All true. Compare the beautiful simplicity of a game - for instance, the console game I most recently played, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - with real life. The game is well delineated, with a clear goal and a clear, guided set of steps to reach it. You have a mission, you have some leeway to achieve it, but you also have a clear set of progress indicators. Similarly, McGonigal's games provide clear parameters, goals, and feedback mechanisms. Sometimes the goal is to get out of the house, wear a costume, and film yourself dancing in public places; sometimes it's to collaborate with a global community to "discover" and play an ancient Olympic sport; sometimes it's to solve the problem of Peak Oil. In all cases, you know your mission and your problem is figuring out how to achieve it. Gaming makes reality better—by ordering it, clarifying it, giving you the parameters for engaging with it. The feedback loop is there to give you a thrill when you pass milestones.

That thrill? It's the thrill of obedience.

Here's the thing. In a game like World Without Oil, the players are given specific parameters. The world has hit Peak Oil; the gap between global supply and demand has widened; and no other energy source is on the horizon. These are unquestionable. In reality, we have to grapple with many more parameters, and many parties may dispute each parameter. Furthermore, if even one party refuses to accept a premise or parameter, the others are affected by this dynamic. Reality is indeed "disorganized and divided" because no one party can assert a set of premises by fiat.

To put it another way, gamifying reality means solving the problem of politics and persuasion by wishing it away; it makes life better by replacing the hardest problems, the problems of agreement, with the much easier problems of achieving goals given specific parameters. We've been here before.

Whether we're tackling the problem of Peak Oil or simply trying to get introverts to mingle and act more like extroverts (pp.166, 197), the problem is a given. People get a thrill from acting in unison and solving a common, clearly defined problem under a well-defined set of rules—especially the sort of people who like to solve word puzzles and who excel on the SAT. But there's a vast gulf between a 1600 on the SAT and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and unfortunately this book doesn't address that gulf, nor does it seem to even be aware of it.

Spinuzzi's Spambots

I have a vanity search set up on Tweetdeck so that I can see if people are mentioning my name on Twitter. One blessing of having a name like "Spinuzzi" (as opposed to "Jones" or "Williams") is that I don't get too much noise - a relatively high percentage of Spinuzzi mentions really will be about me. But many aren't. For instance, there's a high school baseball coach in California whose students tweet about him daily.

But what really interests me is a set of bizarre tweets like these, all of which mention "Spinuzzi" in some way:

These all appear autogenerated from a relatively small set of templates:

• (firstname) (lastname) is (adjective). (pronoun) (verb) the (noun).
• Going to watch (movie name), (firstname) (lastname) r u ready?
• (firstname) (lastname) thinks I'm (noun) and (noun).

They've been going on for a while now, at least a few months, and they've increased dramatically. 

Let's click through to one of these accounts and see what it looks like:

Again, we see a relatively small number of templates cranking out a huge number of variations. Why? I'm guessing it has something to do with some of the other tweets interspersed between these ones:

If an account exclusively sent out links to products, perhaps it would be caught in Twitter's spam filters. But if the account also sends out a wide range of legitimate sentences - sentences that have nouns, verbs, and adjectives - it might trick the spam filter into seeing the account as genuine. I suspect that's what's happening here. Bots lying to bots. 

The EU forgets

In 2007, I criticized what I considered to be an unworkable plan to institute forgetting on the Internet. The idea was to mandate that providers delete one's records after a certain time. That way, for instance, your teenage antics wouldn't follow you around forever and you can rest assured that your duckface pics and embarrassing status messages would expire.

According to Jeffrey Rosen, the EU has now proposed internet forgetting as a universal right - and not in the context of expiration, but rather in the context of individual requests:

The proposed right would require companies like Facebook and Google to remove information that people post about themselves and later regret—even if that information has already been widely distributed. 

So if your 2007 duckface pic embarrasses you in 2012, you can delete it from Facebook. If your friends shared it, you can ask Facebook to delete it from their streams too. A journalistic exemption exists, presuming you can make a case for it - if you can't, and you remove it anyway, you face a million-Euro fine. And

Moreover, the right to be forgotten can be asserted not only against the publisher of content (such as Facebook or a newspaper) but against search engines like Google and Yahoo that link to the content. 

So if you're Rick Santorum, you can tell the search engines to remove content.

As Rosen argues, this EU law conflicts with US First Amendment rights. The impact on US companies doing business in the EU - such as Google - remains unclear.

Hints in Skyward Sword

PopWatch has an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, the director of the Legend of Zelda franchise (among others), about his choices in designing various games. Since I just finished the most recent Zelda game, Skyward Sword, I was interested in what he had to say about the hint system:

In Skyward Sword, there’s a magic stone that will give the player hints if he gets lost. It reminds me of the Super Guide/Cosmic Guide function in New Super Mario Bros. Wii andMario Galaxy 2. Now, when I was a kid, I spent days trying to beat some of the difficult levels in Super Mario Bros. 3. If you could go back in time, would you create similar guide functions in those games? 

Back in those days, the ways in which we could entertain people in the videogame world were rather limited. And because of that, [having the gamers] find out any and all the solutions themselves was one of the most important elements. Today, there are many, many ways to entertain people in one single videogame. And the Internet has made it so easy for people to ask for clues. We are mindful of that changing circumstance. Whenever we are making the game, we are making it for those who really need and want to know about a solution or a hint. But there are those who do not want to ask for those kind of hints. They really want to solve any riddles or challenges for himself, for herself. We are mindful of both of these types of people whenever we are making these games today.

Fascinating! Anyone who's played a Zelda game can tell you how tempting it is to peek at the many walkthroughs and FAQs when they're really stuck on a puzzle. Miyamoto can't wipe out those external guides, but he can create a sort of safety valve that gamers can use - or ignore - and that may be easier to use than taking the time to google a FAQ. Great example of how to set up a system that gives people choices within a coherent framework.

Don't just send in a resume: How to write a letter of application

Over the years, I've given a lot of people advice about how to write a letter of application for a job. Many of them have taken my advice - and they usually get the job.

What's the advice? It's all about what the letter is supposed to do.

What's the letter of application?
People often think of the letter of application (or "cover letter") as, at most, a way to specify what job they want and how much they want it. The heavy lifting, they figure, is done by the resume. In fact, many people don't even write a letter of app, they just send in the resume.

In most cases, this is a terrible idea.

It's a terrible idea because the letter of application really performs a very specific, important function. Think about it this way:

Your skills and abilities

Their needs

You have skills and abilities. They have needs.

These are represented in certain genres:

Your skills and abilities		Their needs
Resume		Job description/ad

Notice that a vast gulf separates the two. The resume serves as a sort of fact sheet about your skills and abilities, education, experiences, and so forth - all the things that you might bring to bear on a job. The job description represents the employer's needs. At this point, you may look at a job description and say, "hey, my skills and abilities fit their needs." But they may not be able to draw the same conclusions, and even if they do, they may not see the match as clearly as they will with other resumes.

That's especially true when your skills and abilities must be inferred from one context to another. Here's an obvious example. Suppose that they need someone who has experience leading a team in solving work problems. You're about to graduate from college, so your jobs have not been leadership jobs - you've served as an intern, as a junior analyst, etc., but you haven't led. You have, however, led in other contexts: you've held officer positions in your sorority, in your synagogue's outreach program, etc. And some of those leadership experiences look a lot like the one described in the job ad - more than might be casually obvious.


So you need something to fill the gap. I bet you can guess what it is.

Your skills and abilities	How your skills and abilities meet their needs	Their needs
Resume	<- Letter of application ->	Job description/ad

The letter of application, done well, interprets the resume for them in terms of the needs they outlined in the job description. In a sentence, its message is: "You need X, and I can provide it."

How do I identify and rank the needs?
First, you'll identify the needs listed in the job ad. For this, print out the ad and use a highlighter to highlight specifics in the ad (these may be listed as skills, duties, or requirements). Often you'll generate a long list.

Next, make sure that you can make a plausible case for filling these. If you can't - for instance, if they ask for four years' work experience and you don't have it - don't waste their time and yours. If you can, proceed.

Next, rank these needs. Some will be pro forma (ex: "four-year college degree required"). Others will be very specific to the job, and these will probably be ranked more highly. If you can leverage them by linking multiple needs together, you're ahead of the game.

How do I write the letter of application?
First, outline your letter of application. I recommend using the same approach that I use when writing letters of recommendation: the much-reviled five-paragraph essay.

Why? For this task, the five-paragraph essay is perfect. You need to write a letter that:

• identifies a focused set of needs and your ability to fulfill them;
• succinctly signals its structure for the harried HR folks who are having to read hundreds of these letters; and
• ends with a clear next step for them.

So I recommend the classic five-paragraph essay structure. It'll look like this:

1. First paragraph: Introduction. I want this job, and I'm qualified because of A, B, and C. These match your needs.
2. Second paragraph: I have the qualification A. Here's some examples from my resume (and maybe elaborations or other stories).
3. Third paragraph: I have the qualification B. Here's some examples from my resume  (and maybe elaborations or other stories).
4. Fourth paragraph: I have the qualification C. Here's some examples from my resume (and maybe elaborations or other stories).
5. Fifth paragraph. So I have qualifications A, B, C. Call me.

This approach is by-the-numbers, but it's also very clear and on-message. Notice that if you have four points instead of three (A, B, C, and D), you'll simply add another middle paragraph to generate a six-paragraph letter. 

Next, you'll flesh in the sections. What you'll generate may look something like this letter. It's straightforward and functional. It's simple, but it packs in a lot of information and relates it directly to the applicant's resume, interpreting it in terms of the specific job. And its strong framing at beginning and end help the reader to understand exactly what's covered. 

Will this letter of application get you the job? I can't say. But I can say that if you follow these steps, you'll at least generate a solid link between their needs and your skills. Good luck!

Commentary on "How Not to Reform Humanities Scholarship"

So lots of people in rhetoric and writing, especially computers and writing, are talking about Gary Olson's post "How Not to Reform Humanities Scholarship."

Olson counsels deans and department chairs—and us—to beware "commentators there who were recommending changes in how the discipline conceives scholarly work." In particular, he notes:

Among other things, the reforms call for replacing the traditional monograph-style dissertation with alternative types of final projects; reconceiving professional scholarship to be less dependent on traditional forms and standard scholarly venues; and moving more toward open-access dissemination of scholarship. 

Olson argues that "the proposals are wrongheaded and ill-timed" for various reasons:

Retaining the monograph-style dissertation.

• "Learning to produce a traditional monograph-style dissertation, then, is essential training for a humanities scholar these days because the experience helps neophyte scholars overcome the cultural and cognitive sway of attention deficit to which we are all prone now."
• "allowing doctoral students to produce alternative projects may well disadvantage them on the job market, as hiring committees—or at least some members of them—may not be as receptive to experimental forms and may favor candidates who have, in fact, produced a monograph."

Using traditional forms and venues; avoiding open-access scholarship.

• "more and more online journals are claiming to employ a peer-review process. That could be a positive development if we can arrive at a point where the community of scholars has confidence that the review process in online venues is as rigorous as it is in top-tier print journals. At the present, however, many scholars are still skeptical that the processes are equivalent."

Olson concludes: "We're trying to keep new and aspiring colleagues from making choices that might damage their careers, at least until more consensus can be established within the disciplines. And we're trying protect [sic] the reputation of the humanities."

Olson's argument has not been well received by some readers, both in the comments, on Facebook, and in at least one blog commentary. As one commenter points out, Olson is covering—and not properly separating—two different issues: whether the proposals will damage the scholarship itself, and whether the proposals will lead to work against which the academy (dissertation, tenure, and promotion committees) is prejudiced.

Here, I only focus on Issue 1: whether the proposals will damage the scholarship itself. And in this sense, I think Olson's argument is a mixed bag. 

For instance, although I strongly prefer monograph-style dissertations—they provide a strong framework for developing a research arc—monographs are not the rule in many other scholarly fields. When Olson warns that "critics of the humanities to assume that [the humanities] are inferior disciplines and therefore expendable," I remember that in many fields, the monograph is seen as a post-tenure project, one that a senior scholar can take on because her or his "real" work of articles, conference proceedings, and grants has already been done. Scholars in these other fields still manage to "produce long, in-depth, sustained projects," but those projects consist of tightly interrelated, tightly argued strings of publications. Surely we can't blame the digital age for how, for instance, molecular biologists publish.

I have a bit more sympathy for Olson's argument about online publications, though I think he hasn't quite done his homework. As many commenters have correctly noted, many online publications - including journals and books - have indeed established peer review processes. For instance, the WAC Clearinghouse includes several open-access books that are edited by top-flight scholars and dually published online and in print. The medium itself doesn't matter; the process does.

At the same time, open-access books and journals face at least two problems that impair their process. 

One is a money-and-labor problem. A traditional academic press makes money from (some of) its publications, and that money goes to a lot of necessary things besides stamping ink onto dead trees: encouraging submissions, picking up the tab for sending the journal editor to recruit papers at conferences, offering small honoraria to reviewers (in the case of books), copyediting, checking references, designing book covers, and promoting publications. With scholar-supported open-access journals, this work is still necessary, but must be shifted to people who are willing to do it for free - usually scholars, who must then take time away from their own scholarship, teaching, and/or graduate mentorship to do work that they're not necessarily well prepared to do. In particular, scholars who are good at big-picture applications such as journal editing are often not good at small-picture applications such as copyediting. 

The other is a chicken-and-egg problem. A traditional journal makes its reputation in part by 

(a) enlisting a recognized senior scholar as editor; 

(b) enlisting an editorial board of scholars who can apply a consistently high standard to reviewing articles; and 

(c) recruiting high-quality papers that exceed that standard. 

Without those conditions, any journal will struggle. Open-access journals are at a particular disadvantage at this present moment, though, because 

(a) senior scholars recognize that they take a lot of work due to the money-and-labor problem, so they don't take them on, leaving less advanced scholars to fill the gap; 

(b) without a senior scholar as editor, journals face difficulties in recruiting senior scholars to their editorial boards and enforcing consistent standards from their editorial boards, as well as 

(c) recruiting papers from senior scholars. 

(All these issues stand apart from the fact that senior scholars are the most likely to distrust open-access publications.) 

So (a)-(c) work against open-access journals, depressing the necessary confidence that will lead scholars to submit papers and tenure review committees to accept those publications as demonstrating high-quality scholarship. In turn, that lack of confidence means that scholars tend to send their best work to traditional journals.

I do think that the prejudice in favor of print publications will fade away over time—we're in a transitional period. But unless open-access publications can decisively address both the money-and-labor problem and the chicken-and-egg problem, that transition period will be a lengthy one. 

Democrats for Drones

The Washington Post reports on a poll today about the Obama administration's counterterrorism policies, including its vastly expanded use of drones. Key paragraphs:

Obama has also relied on armed drones far more than Bush did, and he has expanded their use beyond America’s defined war zones. The Post-ABC News poll found that 83 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s drone policy, which administration officials refuse to discuss, citing security concerns. 

The president only recently acknowledged the existence of the drone program, which some human rights advocates say operates without a clear legal framework and in violation of the U.S. prohibition against assassination. 

But fully 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones, meaning that Obama is unlikely to suffer any political consequences as a result of his policy in this election year.

The poll's results are lamented by some on the left, who see the results as exposing hypocrisy - after all, liberal Democrats opposed the Bush administration's much more sparing use of drones. Equalityanddemocracy.org asks "Do you surrender your autonomy by joining a political party?" while Glenn Greenwald calls it "repulsive progressive hypocrisy." People on the right agree, with Instapundit calling the previous opposition to Bush-era drones "partisan crap" and linking to Hot Air's sardonic overview.

We can stipulate that the poll results reflect hypocrisy, but that misses what I think is the important strategic picture. Why have consecutive administrations stepped up the use of drones, and in particular, why has the Obama administration scaled up its use of drones so much? If we step back and take a broader view of military development over the past few decades, the expanded use of drones looks like an obvious answer to a conundrum our political leaders face.

That conundrum is concisely explained in John Arquilla's excellent 2008 book Worst Enemy. On the one hand, the US finds itself involved in an increasing number of theaters, due in part to political pressure to do something. (Today's possible intervention targets include Syria.) On the other hand, we dearly want to minimize soldier casualties - especially now, with an all-volunteer army and 24/7 news covering each casualty. So how do we satisfy both conditions? Arquilla's suggestions in 2008 included reinstating the draft and leaning more on influence operations, both of which he preferred to Powell-era airstrikes that minimized US casualties at the expense of increased civilian casualties. But he also suggested that better organization and communication could give an advantage to comparatively low-tech dispersed solutions such as drones.

The problem is that weaponized drones have functioned like small Powell-era airstrikes. They reduce the likelihood of US military casualties - to zero - and they expand the number of theaters in which the US can practically operate. But they retain the likelihood of civilian casualties, and in doing so, reproduce the problems of the Powell Doctrine on a smaller, more dispersed scale: "staggering expenditures, major collateral damage inflicted upon innocents, and growing global resentment of the United States" (Arquilla p.xi).

For now, the political advantages of projecting force without risking our volunteer forces outweigh the disadvantages. So of course the Obama administration - and administrations of either party in the near future - will continue and expand drone strikes. And this expanding drone policy will continue to garner broad public support - unless the public becomes more isolationist, relieving the political pressure to intervene in a broad range of theaters.

Reading :: The Story of Writing

The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs, & Pictograms, Second Edition
By Andrew Robinson

I just finished reviewing Robinson's slim book on writing, Writing and Script, which is largely a condensed version of this thicker and larger book. The Story of Writing has over 350 illustrations, many of which are photographs. It's a beautiful book, appropriate for display as well as reading, and many of its comparisons and descriptions gave me the same thrill that I got when reading Schmandt-Besserat's books on the origins of writing. What an amazing thing it is that we developed writing, and that we held onto it long enough to make it useful!

Robinson focuses on the origins and development of writing here, and in much more detail than he could in Writing and Script. So he gets to devote whole chapters to (for instance) cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Linear B, Mayan glyphs, Chinese writing, and Japanese writing. He also devotes a whole chapter to undeciphered scripts - a fascinating chapter, and one that helps us to realize just how fragile a writing system can be.

If you're interested in the origins of writing, but you're not an archaeologist, I recommend this book. It's a beautifully illustrated and well written introduction.

Reading :: Writing and Script

Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction
By Andrew Robinson

This little book lives up to its subtitle: It's pocket-sized and only 157pp, and serves as a condensed version of Robinson's earlier book The Story of Writing. Like that earlier book, Writing and Script attempts to provide an overview of writing from its emergence to the present day. That's an enormous charge, but most of the book covers the origins and development of writing.

In fact, I picked up this book specifically because I was interested in learning more about the origins of writing. I've read about it in Denise Schmandt-Besserat's work, but wanted a broader take. In this sense, Writing and Script provided a nice overview. Robinson is openly skeptical of Schmandt-Besserat's thesis that writing emerged from tokens, characterizing it as a minority view for which "the correlation is patchy"; although the "theory is reasonable, it seems overcomplicated" (p.7). Robinson favors the view that tokens and bullae accompanied the origin of writing but did not precede it; rather, writing emerged from pictograms (p.8). "What is virtually certain, though, is that the first written symbol began life as pictures" (p.9).

Robinson discusses the geographical origins and likely chronology of writing's development (p.19 et passim), acknowledging the many questions about whether it appeared first in Mesopotamia or Egypt, and suggesting that writing was invented many times in different places (an account at odds with Schmandt-Besserat and Erard's assertion that it was only invented three times in human history).

Overall, Robinson packs a lot of information into this little book. I very much enjoyed the accounts of writing and the comparisons of different scripts, especially the ones that are genetically linked. The book is a quick but fascinating read, and I recommend it highly if you're at all interested in the development of writing.

Reading :: The Next 100 Years

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
By George Friedman

As I mentioned in a recent review, Friedman is CEO of Stratfor, an Austin-based provider of geostrategic analysis. In this book, Friedman attempts to forecast the geostrategic challenges of the next century. Given the tremendous changes of the last 100 years, one might consider this undertaking to be well beyond the ability of even a foremost geostrategic analyst. Friedman acknowledges the point and emphasizes that he can't predict the details of the future - just the broad outlines. For instance, Friedman predicts that the US will continue to be the dominant global power, despite predicted challenges from Russia (2020s), an alliance between Turkey and Japan (2050s), and Mexico (2080).

Those challenges may seem oddly specific, but Friedman argues that they flow from the geostrategic implications of each country. Russia has become a net commodities exporter, meaning that it has a limited window to achieve security by reclaiming a buffer region via satellite countries, including Poland - which will not want to go back into the fold. Japan is a net importer and must guarantee the steady flow of imports for its own strategic security, and that need will clash with US interests in the Pacific. And Mexico, Friedman says, will pose a challenge late in the century not just because it will be a first-world nation at the US border but also because the US border region will become culturally much more similar to Mexico. So Friedman confidently predicts that these issues, involving these entities, in roughly this timeframe, will come to pass.

Friedman does also speculate in greater detail about these conflicts, though he marks these as speculation. This speculation reaches its height in Chapter 11, where Friedman plots out a war in which Japan and Turkey join to attack US' ally Poland in the 2050s. The war begins when Japan's moon base launches missiles to disable the US' orbiting battle stations, providing cover for Turkey to invade Poland in super-soldier exoskeletons - well, you get the idea. Chapter 11 would make a great plot for a science fiction story.

Reading this book is like reading vintage Toffler. As a thought experiment, it's intriguing, and the timeline helps us to consider how geostrategic issues such as borders and imports may lead to conflicts later in the century. But for every prediction Toffler got right, he had at least one that went wildly wrong. Yes, we have adhocracies all over the place, but we don't have undersea villages. Similarly, this book's value is more in how it helps us to consider geostrategic issues and their implications than it is in providing specific predictions. If that's something you're interested in doing, certainly take a look.