Reading :: The Wisdom of Crowds

Originally posted: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 19:24:20

The Wisdom of Crowds

by James Surowiecki

I picked up this book partially because it touches on some themes that are common in the books I've been reading lately -- distributed cognition, the sociology of scientific knowledge, etc. -- and partially because Dan Drezner recommended it. (My wife tells me it was also discussed on NPR.) And indeed it does provide some interesting insight into the issue of group decision-making. But not quite in the vein I expected.

To understand why, here's the money quote -- which I lifted from the book's website but which echoes the message of the book:

Crowds are best when there's a right answer to a problem or a question. (I call these "cognition" problems.) If you have, for instance, a factual question, the best way to get a consistently good answer is to ask a group.

This focus on problems with "right answers" is what separates Surowiecki's book from folks like Latour and Machiavelli, and even distributed cognitionists such as Hutchins. Like Latour and Machiavelli, Surowiecki argues that "crowds" can often make better decisions than individuals, even if the individuals are not terribly well informed or intelligent; as long as their input is aggregated well, decision-making turns out to be far more accurate even than the experts'.

Now, to my mind, this thesis is severely flawed in that it is explicated by reference to problems whose answers can be retrospectively verified, typically with quantitative measures. Examples include guessing a heifer's weight, the coordinates of a lost submarine, or a political candidate's margin of victory. Surowiecki explicitly disallows the question of deliberation (though he sneaks it in through the back door) -- the focus is on aggregations of guesses, the closing in on an objective solution, not the forging of open-ended political settlements. "Choosing candidates and making policy in a democracy are not, in that sense, cognition problems and so we should not expect them to yield themselves to the wisdom of the crowd" (p.270). It's not surprising to find that Surowiecki was led to research this book through his examination of market behavior. But this is an entirely different kind of "crowd wisdom" than, say, Machiavelli's discussion of republican deliberation. In Machiavelli's view, a "crowd" in a republic will almost always make better decisions than a prince, not because more people are working on a cognitive problem, but because they introduce deliberation and moderation -- exactly what Surowiecki disallows. Even Hutchins' discussion of distributed cognition is less closed and less goal-oriented than Surowiecki's.

This book is valuable for discussing market economics and probability, as well as for providing an opening for discussions of distributed cognition. But given my particular research interests, I don't anticipate cracking it often.

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(Books for this political season)

Originally posted: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 09:06:13

As we gear up for the Republican convention and a fall campaign that will quite possibly be close and brutal, I've assembled a "top ten" list of books for this political season. These are in no particular order, and they include plenty of books that don't seem obvious. They also exclude some obvious picks, such as Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War. And no, they don't include Joe Trippi's recent book or Extreme Democracy, neither of which I've been able to read yet. But these selected books all have direct bearing on aspects of this year's presidential election.

So here they are:

1. Kaufer and Butler. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design.

Kaufer and Butler's discussion of rhetoric as a design art is quite valuable, especially when applied to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The authors provide a really useful taxonomy for structurally analyzing those debates -- and I find myself applying it to the current candidates' speeches as well. Although Douglas was eventually declared the winner of his debates with Lincoln, Kaufer and Butler successfully argue that he overrelied on tactics, underinvested in a persistent rhetorical strategy, and underestimated the impact of print media on the campaign. Look for parallels in the upcoming debates.

2. Machiavelli. The Discourses.

While Kaufer and Butler provide a close analysis, Machiavelli's analysis of the Roman republic has a much larger sweep. Machiavelli, an ardent republican (small R, of course), discusses in detail what makes a republic work and what kills it. This book has plenty of advice that is pertinent to this political season. President Bush could have benefited from his advice not to trust exiles, for instance. Most interesting to me is Machiavelli's contention that republics almost always make better decisions than princes.

3. Latour. Pandora's Hope.

Latour was heavily influenced by Machiavelli, so it's no surprise that he draws a similar conclusion. In two consecutive chapters in Pandora's Hope, he analyzes the debate between Socrates and Callicles from The Gorgias. Too often, he says, we want to take sides in the debate: Might (Callicles) or Right (Socrates), power or knowledge, earth or heaven. One leads to tyranny, the other leads to the philosopher-kings lauded in Plato's Republic. But even as Socrates and Callicles were hashing out this choice, the democratic Athenians were enacting their own solution: negotiating, haggling, bargaining, and compromising to yield a workable solution. The debate between Might and Right, Latour charges, is at its core antidemocratic -- and foolish in its tunnel vision.

4. Surowiecki. The Wisdom of Crowds.

Latour and Machiavelli agree that crowds make better decisions than princes or kings. So does James Surowiecki, in this book -- which I'm still finishing up. I picked up Surowiecki's book after reading the recommendation on Dan Drezner's site, but my wife also heard a blurb about it on NPR. Like Latour and Machiavelli, Surowiecki argues that "crowds" can often make better decisions than individuals, even if the individuals are not terribly well informed or intelligent; as long as their input is aggregated well, decision-making turns out to be far more accurate even than the experts'.

Now, to my mind, this thesis is severely flawed in that it is explicated by reference to problems whose answers can be retrospectively verified, typically with quantitative measures. Examples include guessing a heifer's weight, the coordinates of a lost submarine, or a political candidate's margin of victory. Surowiecki explicitly disallows the question of deliberation (though he sneaks it in through the back door) -- the focus is on aggregations of guesses, the closing in on an objective solution, not the forging of open-ended political settlements. So the real value of The Wisdom of Crowds this political season, I think, will be in the examination of polls and voter data.

5. Zuboff and Maxmin. The Support Economy.

Voters have changed considerably over the years, of course, and Zuboff and Maxmin suggest that this can be explained partially through a paradigm shift in the economy. Citizens, they say, are looking for more individualized choices. That's true in the market, their primary focus, but they suggest that the shift can also be seen in how citizens have left large political organizations in favor of smaller a la carte movements. Whereas our parents might have been willing to subsume their political will to an organization, letting (for instance) a union leader speak for them, we are more apt to want to represent ourselves. Witness the success of Howard Dean's online fundraising -- and, I would argue, its swift collapse. And notice also the proliferation of blogs representing constituencies that can't be catalogued using the traditional left/right dichotomy. This phenomenon led to bloggers at this year's conventions as well as the rapid fact-checking of older media.

6. Bakhtin - The Dialogic Imagination.

Of course, the explosion of political blogs reminds us of something we too often forget, which is that the Republican and Democratic parties are themselves fragile and contentious coalitions. Discussing what the "typical" Democrat or Republican thinks leads to straw person arguments because the discussion rests on the notion that each party has core principles to which all members subscribe -- typically something you can put on a bumper sticker. Bakhtin's most read book provides a valuable corrective to that notion by reminding us that different dialogues are always going on, combining and coexisting perhaps, but not necessarily synthesizing in the sense that dialectic would have us imagine. What a timely message as both candidates begin their attempts to chip away at the constituencies of the other party.

7. Wertsch. Voices of Collective Remembering.

Bakhtin, of course, labored in obscurity in the Soviet Union -- served often by his ability to hide his un-Soviet theorizing in Marxist language. He invoked the dialectic as a sort of trope for dialogism. That protective reframing was, of course, widespread practice in the Soviet Union. In Voices of Collective Remembering, Wertsch helps us to examine the false histories, the double consciousness, and the clandestine discussions that would occur in the USSR. Furthermore, he suggests that in some cases these harsh conditions actually resulted in more critical examinations of history than here in the US. This book reminds us of what is at stake in telling history, and suggests to me that the current wild diversity in the blogosphere could help us to become more critical consumers of news and history.

8. Jungck. Future Workshops.

As we consider new computer-mediated opportunities to expand our political participation (what some are calling "extreme democracy"), we might recall an older, more time-consuming aproach meant to route around accreted political-bureaucratic structures. Robert Jungck's approach, future workshops, involved recruiting interested citizens for intensive brainstorming, problem solving, and consensus building. The point was to avoid the groupthink and blind allegiance that characterized the Nazi regime as well as the mindset of the early Cold War. The H-bomb horrified Jungck; he believed that if he could get ordinary citizens to invest themselves in decision-making, real change could occur. Future workshops later became integral to the participatory design approach, in which workers strove for political and technological change in their workplaces.

9. Latour. War of the Worlds.

And that brings us to this slim pamphlet, the second entry of Latour's on this list. Based on lectures Latour has given over the last several years, and framed by the events of 9/11, War of the Worlds suggests

that these events should spur a reexamination of how we think about other cultures. For too long, Latour says, we have approached other cultures through either ethnocentrism or multiculturalism -- two sides of the same coin, he argues. Our mistake, he says, is to posit that there are several cultures but only one nature. So we may "respect" other points of view, but deep down we believe there's only one correct one -- ours, since we are expert at apprehending nature as it really is. Nonsense, Latour says. There are just as many natures as cultures: in a later book, he uses the term "natureculture" to drive home the point that any separation is artificial. And if that's so, we should earnestly negotiate settlements with others to agree on a world we can coinhabit. That doesn't mean giving up on our cherished values and beliefs, but it does involve understanding that theirs may be just as cherished and valued.

10. Law. Aircraft Stories.

Finally, along the same lines, we get to a book to which I gave an uncharitable review a while back. I don't regret that review -- but let's give credit where it is due. Politics become instantiated in the material environment, and not just in the obvious ways discussed by so many cultural theorists. In his study of how aircraft were designed and built for the British military, Law demonstrates quite well that a variety of constraints guided this complex work. Among those constraints were the representations of the Soviet Union, its strategies and tactics, its technologies and pilots. These were just as important and concrete as wind shear and other "natural," "objective" constraints. Examining Law's argument here helps us to reexamine the supposed split between politics and technology, politics and nature, politics and work.

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Reading :: The Mangle of Practice

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 19:49:58

The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science

by Andrew Pickering

Some time back, I was busy buying books at Amazon.com. I had gone on a grant-funded spending spree that involved several science and technology studies (STS) books: Latour, Law, Mol, etc. After a few purchases, Amazon began making suggestions, and the foremost suggestion was always Andrew Pickering's The Mangle of Practice.

Not long afterward, I presented some of my research to the School of Information here at UT, and one of the audience members suggested that a problem I had raised had been solved by Pickering in the same book.

Since all of the signs seemed to point in the same direction, I ordered the thing. What I found was, indeed, an important book -- but, I think, more important in its critique of STS and in its general solution than in the specifics. This review will be long because I think it's vital to understand what this important book does.

Let's start with the critique. Although I don't think Pickering explicitly says this, the book is constantly in dialogue with actor-network theory (or "the actor-network," as Pickering calls it, perhaps to justify his habit of calling his theoretical-methodological approach "the mangle"). Pickering repeatedly makes clear that he owes a debt to ANT (see, e.g., footnote 9 on p.7; p.11). He agrees with its critique of traditional STS and, to some extent, its critique of sociology in general. But he finds that it has its own troubles. The mangle is an attempt to deal with those troubles via a performative understanding (achieved through practice) rather than a representational understanding. Latour and other actor-network theorists, he charges, tend to shift between the two modes -- drawing on the performative understanding for much of their analysis, but shifting to a representational (semiotic) mode whenever they are called on it! (See pp.9-20, esp. p.13, footnote 20.) Indeed, Pickering says,

From my point of view, the most attractive feature of the actor-network approach is precisely that its acknowledgement of material agency can help us to escape from the spell of representation. It points to a thoroughgoing shift into the performative idiom. And from this perspective, the appeal to semiotics in the face of [criticism] looks like a kind of retreat, a return to the world of texts and representations that one does not wish to make. (p.13)

Pickering charges in a footnote that in actor-network theory -- particularly in Latour's work -- semiotics "seems invariably to be invoked under pressure" (p.13, footnote 20). He prefers John Law's approach of avoiding semiotics entirely -- and in fact the whole notion of appealing to performance sounds a lot like Law's later work (e.g., Aircraft Stories) as well as Mol's (e.g., The Body Multiple). In fact, Pickering's critique leads him to a difficulty I've discussed elsewhere, which is that ANT doesn't have a good account of cultural-historical development -- or, as Pickering expresses it, temporally emergent agency (p.14). Pickering's counter-account is that scientific practice involves a process of "tuning" or "delicate material positioning" in which material agency emerges through an interaction or dialectic among parts of the material environment -- some of which are human (p.14). More on this in a minute.

The second and related problem with ANT, according to Pickering, is that it implies interchangeability between human and material realms: "Semiotically, as the actor-network insists, there is no difference between human and nonhuman actors" (p.15). But clearly, Pickering argues, there are significant differences among various actors -- partial proof being that humans delegate tasks to nonhumans, but never the other way round. (I disagree with this point and tend to think that the notion of tuning is itself an example -- but let's leave that for now.) Yet

actor-network theory is onto something in its extended symmetry, actually two things. One is that there exist important parallels between human and material agency, concerning both their repetitive quality and their temporal emergence; the other is that a constitutive intertwining exists between material and human agency. (p.15)

Pickering goes on to discuss his own vision, in which fields of machines are "enveloped by human practices" and around which we humans tend to act like machines (p.16). We do indeed have our own agency, our own intentionality with specific plans and goals, but we tune that agency with our material environment. "Disciplined human agency and captured material agency are, as I say, constitutively intertwined; they are interactively stabilized" (p.17). This interactive stabilization is later figured as a "dance of agency" (p.21). (Personally, I don't like dance metaphors very much; I can trace my dislike to Tom Kent's discussion of communication as a "hermeneutic dance" -- apparently "interpretive dance" was already in use.) And this leads us to what Pickering calls the "mangle":

The dance of agency, seen asymmetrically from the human end, thus takes the form of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of response to resistance, which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it.

The practical, goal-oriented and goal-revising dialectic of resistance and accommodation is, as far as I can make out, a general feature of scientific practice. And it is, in the first instance, what I call the mangle of practice, or just the mangle. (pp.24-25)

If you had trouble understanding that explanation, don't worry -- Pickering repeats it in more or less the same level of detail and volume of words throughout the book. n.b.: A mangle, apparently, is an "old-fashioned device ... used to squeeze the water out of the washing" (p.25).

Readers who have made it this far may note that Pickering's "dance of agency" is like Kent's "hermeneutic dance" in more than nomenclature. This "dialectic of resistance and accommodation" sounds very familiar to me, pragmatist in fact, and Pickering makes the pragmatist connection clear in Ch. 6 -- although I think he drops the ball by criticizing Donald Davidson's take on incommensurability without understanding that Davidson, whose work underpins Kent's, wrestled with the same basic problem and came up with the same basic answer. So do the actor-network theorists in much of their work, and Lucy Suchman, and others -- as Pickering acknowledges. So what is the ground-breaking significance of the mangle? I'm really not sure, and I confess that I'm not sure whether this is because I'm being thick or because Pickering is overselling his work. I lean toward the second interpretation, though, especially when Pickering explicitly tries to turn the mangle into a "theory of everything" in the last chapter. My note on p.203 reads: "Gee, the mangle does everything."

Although I'm critical of the totalizing claims of the mangle, I respect the degree to which Pickering has theorized and categorized the "dialectic of resistance and accommodation." All in all, this book is really valuable -- which is why I spent so much time reviewing it, of course -- although that value tends to be more in the critique than in the general solution.

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(New online book: Extreme Democracy)

Originally posted: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 18:47:26

Those who are interested in politics and technology might be interested in the new online, er, book Extreme Democracy. The book, which is still being put together, has a foreword by former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi -- which should tell you what you need to know about the enthusiasm and attitude in the collection. I'll try to review it soon.

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Reading :: Building Accessible Websites

Originally posted: Fri, 06 Aug 2004 17:25:59

Building Accessible Websites

by Joe Clark

The first book on web accessibility I ever read, Slatin and Rush's Maximum Accessibility, was a life-changing experience. It knocked me out of my comfort zone and made me realize that even my Spartan, text-only, fast-loading pages were a nightmare for people with visual disabilities or repetitive stress injuries. In fact, I'll be using that book in the fall, so I'm sure I'll review it soon.

That lightning bolt moment typically happens only once. So when I read Clark's book, which was recommended by a CWRL staffer, it was with some existing awareness of accessibility challenges. Building Accessible Websites didn't change my life, but it did help me to think about accessibility in different ways. Like Maximum Accessibility, it explains the reasoning behind Section 508 and WCAG 1.0 guidelines and shows how to conform to them. But unlike that book, Building Accessible Websites takes a very critical stance toward the authors of these standards, a stance that I'm sure Clark characterizes as "irreverent" but that I would call "frequently vicious." Clark is quite free in pointing out what he considers to be the stupidities and shortsightedness of the existing guidelines and tools. Although this attitude can be wearing, it does highlight the divergences between principles and execution, and helped me to critically review the results of the accessibility checkers I've been using.

This book would perform a helpful but limited service if its main function were just to criticize standards. But Clark goes farther, showing other ways to ease compliance. The most helpful section for me was on navigation: Clark discusses how web designers can take advantage of different layouts, different HTML tags, and different CSS features to ensure that those with visual or motor disabilities can still navigate one's pages easily. This practical advice was given with clear caveats related to different browsers and their different levels of support for the current HTML and CSS standards. In fact, this realist back-and-forth between HTML standards and actual browser capabilities is something that shows up throughout the book and that makes the book especially valuable.

The book comes with a CD-ROM for those who want to access exercises, examples, or (more to the point) the text in an electronic, screen-readable form. It could have benefited quite a bit from heavy editing -- Clark has the habit of making indefensibly strong statements, then qualifying them in a flurry of metadiscourse, and I get the impression that the book was written during a manic phase -- but it reads quickly. Check it out.

Clarification (2007.01.10): "Manic phase" is an overstatement, as Joe points out in the comments. The writing is exuberant, moves quickly, and ranges far.

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(John Fund on Trippi and Hewitt)

Originally posted: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 03:28:23

A few days ago, I reviewed Convio's white paper on Howard Dean's website. It turns out that Joe Trippi, Dean's onetime campaign manager, has written a book about the campaign's use of the Internet. So has Hugh Hewitt, a radio show host and blogger who is a bit to the right of Dean. I haven't read either book, but the Wall Street Journal's John Fund reviews them both.

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Reading :: The Companion Species Manifesto

Originally posted: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 07:45:04

The Companion Species Manifesto

By Donna Haraway

If you're like me, as you examine the literature of technoscience, sometimes you pause in your office or library carrel and ask yourself questions.

Questions such as "Are there any scholarly treatises in the humanities that include lengthy descriptions of dogs engaging in oral sex?"

And after a moment's thought, you probably concluded: no, I suppose not.

Well, my friend, you would be wrong.

You would be wrong because Donna Haraway, that iconoclast, has authored another manifesto. Her Cyborg Manifesto was a brilliantly iconoclastic piece of work in which Haraway ruthlessly interrogated allies as well as enemies, relentlessly probing Marxists, feminists, and socialists as well as taking shots at capitalists, paternalists, and the Right. That manifesto presented a figure or trope that could be used to describe the mixed, intertwined, inseparable relationships among people, nature, and technology.

Haraway takes up this agenda again in The Companion Species Manifesto, a slim pamphlet published by Prickly Paradigm Press. Here, she turns away from the figure of the cyborg to that of the dog, using this new feature to address the issue of "natureculture" discussed in more depth by Latour in his latest book. The dog, she concludes, is the right figure for this: they aren't "furry children," they're actually companions and partners with their own talents, agendas, and places in the family. Dogs become part of vital natural-cultural ecosystems, no more and no less important than human beings.

Well, now you don't have to read the pamphlet. In fact, I can't recommend it. Like Haraway's last book, it's terrifically self-indulgent in style, pacing, and subject. I tired quickly of the uninspired wordplay, with words like "dogmatic" and phrases like "going to the dogs" repeated too often to seem clever. And like Latour's entry in this series, the argument is edited with a light hand, so it tends to be undisciplined and flabby. If you want the sense of the argument without the flab, take a look at Haraway's chapter in Chasing Technoscience.

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Reading:: The Discourses

Originally posted: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:14:11

The Discourses

By Niccolo Machiavelli

Machiavelli, as I've noted earlier in this blog, is a major inspiration for actor-network theorists. Latour cites him in his earlier works, and Callon, Law, and Rip make him the central figure in their introduction. This has led critics to accuse ANT of double dealing, of claiming that power is distributed while positing Machiavellian princes who actually control the political landscape. That criticism is suspect even when reading The Prince, and dissolves when considering Machiavelli's text on the workings of republics, The Discourses.

The Discourses are, in fact, discourses on how republics work, just as The Prince provides a discourse on how principates work. Machiavelli underpins his discussion of republics with Titus Livy's history of Rome, his ideal republic. By closely reading Livy, Machiavelli develops a set of principles that he argues govern republics; he confirms his principles by testing them with recent and contemporary events. It's evident that Machiavelli relishes this work, partially because he believes republics to be superior to principates. At several places, he argues that even though the populance often chooses leaders by gossip, reputation, and prejudice (p.496), nevertheless the populance makes fewer mistakes than do princes (p.500). The populance is more reliable than are princes (pp. 252-257). Freedom results in better conditions across the board (p.280). Defenses should be distributed rather than centralized, the populance should be armed (p.359). Contrary to popular opinion, Machiavelli evidently believed that one can distribute decision making and power and come up with a better republic.

The key, of course, is that we are talking about republics here. Machiavelli argues early on that republics, aristocracies, and tyrannies tend to follow each other in an inevitable cycle. The Prince gives us "best practices" in a tyranny, while The Discourses gives us "best practices" in a republic. Nevertheless, many of these "best practices" are the same. And, I think, Machiavelli's response to the charge leveled against ANT would be that, yes, there are great men and women who have disproportionate impact on a society -- but their impact is in how they are able to coordinate and persuade others, not in their will alone. Machiavelli talks quite a bit, for instance, about how a good general leads by drill, preparation, and example before the battle so that the army can take care of itself during the battle (pp.491-492).

Let's discuss Machiavelli's investigation for a moment. After reading this book, I was better able to understand why Callon, Law, and Rip praised Machiavelli as an ethnographer (of sorts) who did not let anything get in the way of his investigation. Machiavelli plainly admires Livy, but is free in disagreeing with Livy when the evidence supports a different interpretation. Similarly, he clearly despises particular actions, but still tells us how the actions are accomplished and what "best practices" underpin even them. He generally does not hold with conspiracies, for instance, and says that they almost always fail, but then he carefully discusses how they might succeed (pp. 398-432). By being able to become detached enough to analyze, Machiavelli produces a generally clear-eyed and measured analysis of the principles he's laid out. It's worth examining in methodological terms, and it's worth remembering as we continue to read the ANT work drawing from Machiavelli.

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Reading:: "The Power and Politics of Blogs">

Originally posted: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 09:07:36

The Power and Politics of Blogs

By Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell

Blogs are coming under increased scholarly scrutiny. A collection on blogs and rhetoric, Into the Blogosphere, just went online. Our very own white papers series at the CWRL has a paper on blogs and pedagogy. Of course, Drezner and Farrell's paper is a bit different from these. For one thing, both authors are political science professors; for another, they both produce well-trafficked blogs. These two factors give them a somewhat unique view of the blogosphere as they try to answer the question: "Why do blogs have any influence at all" in politics?

Good question. Drezner and Farrell provide statistics that suggest exactly how few people read blogs for information and opinions (only 4% of online Americans). Yet blogs demonstrably affected media coverage in everything from the Trent Lott scandal to the current scandals involving Sandy Berger and Joseph Wilson. Why? Among other factors, Drezner and Farrell argue that

blogs have the comparative advantage of speedy publication -- they have a first-mover advantage in socially constructing interpretive frames for understanding current events. As a result, political commentators will rely on blogs as sources of interpretive frames for polticial developments. Under a specific set of circumstances -- when elite blogs concentrate their attention on a breaking story or an underreported story -- the agenda-setting power of blogs may create focal points for general interest intermediaries. (pp. 4-5)

The authors go on to offer up a network analysis of the blogosphere -- not the Latourean kind with which I'm familiar, but the kind that takes statistics. I barely passed statistics, so let's skip a bit and home in on a point that's more interesting to me. Specifically, the blogs that are most influential to politics are those that influence the mainstream media -- and those blogs are often written by people who are (socially) networked with the mainstream media. Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, James Taranto, and others come to mind here. And just as politicians have learned to deal with the mainstream media through tactics such as leaks, they are beginning to learn how to limit blogosphere damage by watching for indicators and moving quickly to deploy their own frames of reference in the mainstream media first. Politicians can't get in front of the blogs, but they can beat the blogs to the mainstream media.

All in all, an interesting read.

Caveat: Drezner says this is a "first draft," although the name of the PDF is "blogpaperfinal."

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Reading:: Using the Internet to Raise Funds and Mobilize Supporters

Originally posted: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 07:52:00

Using the Internet to Raise Funds and Mobilize Supporters: Lessons Nonprofits can Learn from the Dean For America Campaign

By Convio

My wife went to a talk on this topic yesterday and sent me the link afterwards. As some of you might remember, Howard Dean did surprisingly well in opinion polls leading up to the Democratic primaries. After a surprise third-place finish in Iowa, though, he made a fatal misstep in front of the TV cameras that led people to doubt his ability to be president.

This white paper, written in December 2003 -- in the halcyon days of the Dean campaign, before that fatal misstep -- discusses why the Dean campaign was so successful in fundraising, grass-roots organizing, and getting the message out. There were various reasons, but this paper points to the role Convio played.

A largely unreported story is how the organization is using Internet software and online marketing tactics to democratize American politics -- enabling "average" people to participate as never before. This approach, based on "viral" marketing or the "ripple effect," allows the campaign to provide supporters with the motivation and online tools to touch the people they know, and on and on for a continuously growing support base. (p.2)

As you might expect, this is partially hype and partially the line taken by the Dean campaign at that point: the theme that average people are locked out of political participation was central to the campaign, and Convio integrated that theme fully into its materials. But there really is a phenomenon at work here, one that Zuboff and Maxmin hinted about in their book , although they didn't do it justice either. Essentially, the Dean campaign was able to form an online community in which people could make personal contacts, share information and opinions, and build support networks. When you get a fundraising letter from your local politician, you may cut her a check because you believe in the cause. When a Dean supporter got an email requesting donations, though, s/he cut a check because s/he had made friends online, had become part of the movement, and had even contributed to the online materials through reports and threaded messages. They had actual investment.

Sort of. To put it another way, the Dean campaign discovered that the key to fundraising was to make sure people could participate in the campaign while sitting in their own chairs at home, drinking Mountain Dew and scratching themselves in their underwear. That is, the allure of the Dean campaign is the same allure that causes people to write book reviews on Amazon or swap tips on customizing their cars. Yes, you believe in your candidate and cause, but you also have a ready-made community you can access anytime, a community to which you can make visible contributions. No wonder the white paper suggests that other nonprofits do what the Dean campaign did:

Dean created an ongoing dialogue with constituents through online surveys, polls and petitions, as well as online forums (Web logs, also known as blogs) to allow constituents to voice their opinions, make suggestions and communicate with other supporters. (p.5)

Dean and Convio did Field of Dreams one better: they understood that if you give them tools, they will build it.

Ironically, the same viral, participatory environment hastened Dean's collapse. Hours after the Iowa concession speech, through the magic of apple's GarageBand, parodies began making their way into people's email boxes and bloggers picked up on the story. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

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Reading:: Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

Originally posted: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:25:00

Rhetoric and the Arts of Design

by David S. Kaufer, Brian S. Butler

I first read Rhetoric and the Arts of Design in fall 1999, and was inspired to do so again after talking with Dave Kaufer at this spring's RSA conference. Particularly after Dave pointed out parallels between it and my own book.

What has always interested me about this book is that it puts together such a careful, ordered model of rhetoric. The book takes the Lincoln-Douglas debates as an extended example, dissecting them in terms of the different components in each speaker's arguments. These arguments, Kaufer and Butler assert, are actually designed, and that's important:

The public would like, collectively and as individuals, to live with sturdier bridges, safer buildings, more reliable computer programs, and easier to read manuals.

Rhetorical design should be no exception.

You can see why I'd be intrigued. Kaufer and Butler likens rhetoric's relationship with literature to graphic design's relationship with the fine arts: in both cases, the former is practical and oriented to action. And in this book, they argue at length for seeing rhetoric as a design art that, once understood in that way, can be examined and taught more systematically. Their system is rooted in blackboard architectures, "a well-known cognitive science paradigm" that is

especially robust for modeling systems, like design, that where a task requires the opportunistic application of many heterogeneous "experts" all looking at the same problem (represented ina common workplace called a "blackboard") but with each expert looking at the problem from a specialized set of competencies and goal priorities. (p.267)

In Kaufer and Butler's scheme, these "experts" are "modules," particular rhetorical strategies mobilized in service of the emerging argument design. The most relevant modules are plans, tactics, and events. Kaufer and Butler tend to anthropomorphize these modules as experts in some places. For instance, this (initially) disconcerting passage appears on p.151:

Douglas' dilemma was skillfully crafted to make Lincoln say something that would force an inconsistency in his Plans. The Plans module, knowing nothing about the rhetorical situation, would have no awareness of the tactical threat against it. Indeed, if the Plans module were able to understand Douglas' questions, it would have no idea how to respond, for it knows only how to tell what is predictably true and false about the social world. It is left to Lincoln's Tactics to deal with the dilemma, and the Tactics module understood there is pressure to answer a question even if the answer causes further problems down the road. Lincoln's answer, because it shares the same structure as plans, throws a wrench into the Plans module. When Lincoln's Plans module next sampled the design structure, it finds a structure like "I do not pledge to the Republican platform at Springfield" in the midst of its public module, seeming to disenable Lincoln's organizational authority. Plans had no idea where this type of structure comes from but it does understand that the structures create personal inconsistencies in the public model, and that the inconsistencies need to be reconciled if the rhetor is to continue to tell predictable truths and falsehoods about the social world. (pp.151-152)

Kaufer and Butler admit to "partial anthropomorphizing" (p.263) like this, but they do it in service to the blackboard architectures approach they're pursuing. And although this sort of anthropomorphizing sounds suspect -- reminding me of Hutchins' critique of cognitive psychology in Cognition in the Wild -- it begins to make a lot of sense if understood analogically. In short, Kaufer and Butler aren't proposing homunculi, they're proposing a heuristic model, and that distinction is vital to understand if the book is going to make sense. Once I got that distinction, Kaufer and Butler's modules turned into powerful categories for examining public debate; I found myself applying them with great success to the current political debates in this current, superheated primary season.

What Kaufer and Butler are after, essentially, is a model of public rhetoric as conscious design. At times I found myself thinking of similarities with Latour's sociotechnical graphs, which also attempt to model statements -- and Freed, Freed, and Romano's Writing Winning Business Proposals, which continues to be one of my favorite heuristic approaches to argumentation. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design takes its place next to these as an enormously useful resource for understanding and modeling public rhetoric. But what struck me as I read this book was that it doesn't address the sorts of things I've tried to address: the materiality of rhetoric, its ad hoc and convergent nature in private and semipublic practice, and particularly its use outside of argumentation and debate. Which is to say that Kaufer and Butler have set themselves a task that is separate from mine. But they've provided tools and an example of modeling that will be enormously useful to me as I proceed.

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(Moving to Drupal)

Originally posted: Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:28:46

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I have been disappointed by MovableType in many ways: the fact that SixApart has begun charging for it, the slowness, the limitations that come with using a stripped-down content management system (which is what a blog is). What's been holding me back until now has been the difficulty in migrating. Moving a year's worth of book reviews is not something one does through cutting and pasting.

Drupal provides several ways to migrate, but they all involve hacks, and they present multiple other problems. Finally, I did this:

1. I set my old blog's RSS feed to show all my archives in their entirety.
2. I pulled the feed into Drupal's aggregator.
3. I fired up mysql, figured out what table held the aggregator data and the blog data, and dumped the aggregator table into a SQL file.
4. I then hand-edited the SQL file to move the data into the blog table.
5. Finally, I edited the blog module (written in PHP, I think, with added SQL statements) so the blog would display in reverse chronological order rather than in order of nodes (don't ask).

Drupal people: It shouldn't be that hard to write a decent converter. Come on.

Anyway, this is the third blogger package I've used. (The original blog was on BlogSpot). Hopefully I won't have to migrate again.

Finally, an update. I have ordered a horrendous number of books from Amazon, so expect a flood of reviews soon. Currently I'm working through Kaufer and Butler's Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, to be followed by Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Machiavelli's Discourses.

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Reading :: The Variables of Composition

Originally posted: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 02:45:20

The Variables of Composition: Process and Product in a Business Setting

by Glenn J. Broadhead, Richard C. Freed

When I began my studies at Iowa State, one of the first classes I took was a proposal writing class with Rich Freed. (I got a B.) Freed's book Writing Winning Business Proposals, which I've raised often enough, was in draft form at that point. That book was (and is) full of insights and heuristics, and remains one of the more valuable practical aproaches to argumentation I know. Later, I found out that the book had been preceded by a scholarly monograph Freed had written with his then-office mate Glenn Broadhead. That monograph, of course, was The Variables of Composition.

Reading this monograph nearly twenty years later, I find myself taking a trip down Memory Lane. The Variables of Composition is a product of the mid-1980s interest in process and in close textual analysis. So we get to read a lot about T-units and incremental changes to drafts, all in the context of the "seven variables of composition." Broadhead and Freed allow that their method of exhaustively coding every word in multiple drafts of long documents is somewhat time consuming. No kidding.

What really interested me here wasn't the intricate coding scheme, nor the seven variables, but the discussion of the organization and contexts in which the authors wrote. This is the part that seems the most consequential for me and the most far-reaching in its implications -- and coincidentally the part that later became the foundation of Freed's Writing Winning Business Proposals.

But I was also interested in the computer analysis of texts. Their technique -- transcribe the text into a text file, assign a long code to each line, and run the whole mess through a series of scripts -- is actually still viable, even though a variety of qualitative research packages have been developed to make things easier. We've come a long way, but perhaps not as far as we could have.

>

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Reading:: The Support Economy

Originally posted: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 17:55:29

The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin

Shoshana Zuboff's last book was In the Age of the Smart Machine, a really remarkable text that drew on several studies of workplaces to discuss essential shifts in work introduced by the computer. The point, despite the title, was not that "the computer changes everything" -- an overreaching claim that is sometimes made by more wild-eyed technology theorists -- but that automation has wrought some key changes in management and labor. Smart Machine is practically required reading for anyone interested in computers in the workplace.

Then there was a long, long hiatus. Zuboff, by her own account, held off on writing a second book until she could coherently discuss some phenomena that weren't adequately addressed by her first one. Now, she says, she can. Hence The Support Economy, written with her husband James Maxmin.

Zuboff is a professor of business administration at Harvard and Maxmin is a CEO, so it's not surprising that the book is very business-oriented and very concerned with the shape of business in the near future. It's also not surprising that this book is part of a larger effort that involves speaking engagements and consulting. What is surprising is the sheer scope and vision of the book, which attempts to predict and define a fundamentally new stage in capitalism.

Really. Zuboff and Maxmin claim that we are on the cusp of a genuine paradigm shift, a true realignment of thought that takes place at most once a century. The last time this happened was the birth of managerial capitalism at the turn of the 20th century, when Henry Ford realized that you could satisfy consumers by making lots and lots of the same thing, as long as you made it very very cheap. The essential enterprise logic led to the split between ownership and control: ownership was distributed across many shareholders, while control was concentrated tightly in the hands of CEOs. This led to what Zuboff and Maxmin describe as a "solar system" in which the company is at the center of everything; suppliers are in orbits farther out; and at the outermost reaches of the solar system are the customers. Customers might be given lip service, but ultimately they are forced to "contort themselves" and conform to the company's demands because, under this enterprise logic, the only way for the company to get ahead is to give everyone the same experience and to continue reducing the costs associated with that experience.

Zuboff and Maxmin, however, see the beginnings of a "Copernican revolution" that will reorient this solar system, placing the customers at the center. They envision a distributed capitalism in which control will be just as distributed as ownership -- distributed across the customers, that is. Digital technologies are a necessary but not sufficient condition for this Copernican revolution; other conditions include the individuation of consumption (i.e., the desire for unique identities and unique experiences), the consequent rise in relationship value, and the desire for deep support (i.e., stable beneficial relationships among consumers and producers that support these individual experiences). In this support economy, the existing enterprise logic is inoperative; supply chains are dismantled; professional relationship workers called "advocates" assemble temporary "federations" of suppliers for each individual transaction; and nobody gets paid until the customer pays. The last point is especially important because it is what ensures that control is distributed across the system and the customer remains the center of the new "solar system."

That summary doesn't do justice to this complex and well developed vision, and I encourage anyone to read through this book and see what you think. Especially the last three chapters, where the vision is clearly laid out. Bottom line, I had very mixed feelings when reading The Support Economy. On one hand, it does a remarkable job of pulling together and coherently discussing things that others have been discussing piecemeal: the individuation of consumption (Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, some of David Sless' work in Australia); Internet technologies meant to foster civic engagement (Spinuzzi, Bowie, Rodgers, and Li; Zappen); open systems meant to allow people to expand information systems (Spinuzzi and Zachry; Spinuzzi, Tracing Genre through Organizations); complex problem solving (Barbara Mirel's work, including her book); the question of how workers from different organizations form relationships and alliances (Nardi et al.; Engestrom et al.). Or just look at the rise of content management systems and other ways of customizing experiences and distributing control; the proliferation of ATMs; the tendency for large churches to place recordings of sermons online. Something is happening here, something big, and Zuboff and Maxmin give us an explanation of what it might be.

But on the other hand, their description of the support economy sounded like science fiction. In fact, it sounds a lot like a Bruce Sterling novel I read a while back. The underpinnings, the moorings of this new economy, seemed curiously two-dimensional. Maybe that's because, although Zuboff and Maxmin may be describing their ideal new economy, it doesn't sound very attractive to me. Consider the following:

1. The death of privacy. Our privacy, in tatters as it is, would disintegrate completely in this new economy. The thing about being at the outer reaches of the "universe" is that you can hide; in the support economy, everyone wants, needs, and shares your information.
2. The death of small business. Remember the cardinal rule that nobody in the federation of service providers gets paid until the customer releases the payment. Larger companies can get away with this because they have large budgets. Small businesses, which often ask for money up front and mark up the services of others in the supply chain, will get squeezed out. In fact, although the book provides numerous examples of small businesses finding niches that presage the support economy, they are absent from the description of the realized support economy and the illustrative examples of it. That's sort of a big deal in the U.S.
3. Smothering customers with kindness. A key member of the support economy is the "advocate," the person who forms and maintains long-lasting relationships with customers and who coordinates these ad hoc "federations" of suppliers. In one of the unintentionally disturbing passages of the book, Zuboff and Maxmin point to a real-life advocate, a woman who worked for an airline company and who was well known for going above and beyond the call of duty -- and was repeatedly disciplined for it. She would stand in the rain with tickets for customers who were running late; she would page customers with information about changes in their flights; she even visited a customer in the hospital during his cancer treatments. She, Zuboff and Maxmin tell us, is a forerunner of the advocates they envision being a key to the new economy. Am I the only one who finds this to be creepy? To me, this person came off as a bit unhinged and more than a little needy, and I shudder to think of an economy filled with them. Zuboff and Maxmin, by the way, tell us that people often prefer to deal with ATMs and e-commerce rather than human beings because they have been treated poorly by the managerial economy. That seems too pat. My pharmacist is a great guy who always remembers my name and my wife's, makes sure to have our prescriptions ready for us, and even tells me when he'll need to renew the prescription with the doctor. The service is really remarkable, and he's not needy at all. But I would replace him with a vending machine in a second if I could; I'd rather my transactions be quick, impersonal, and entirely controlled by me.
4. The centralization of functions. The federation model means that companies essentially split into modular units that concentrate on what they do best. Such a thing would be unthinkable in the managerial economy because it would require each group to have its own apparatus for accounting, payroll, and other managerial functions. But in the envisioned support economy, companies would outsource those services to other companies. In other words, functions that are now integrated within each enterprise would be consolidated and offered as services to each enterprise. That would squeeze a lot of redundancy and waste out of the system -- but paradoxically, it would mean more centralization rather than decentralization for those sectors. In the wake of Arthur Anderson's recent troubles with Enron, I worry.

I'm sure that Zuboff and Maxmin have answers to all of these objections, but in too many spots the future vision seems like handwaving. And in too many spots, the case against the old economy seems overmade. For instance, at one point, Zuboff and Maxmin make the point that women have been disadvantaged in the managerial economy. That seems pretty obvious. So why follow it up with page after page of statistics? Slimming these down might have shaved 30% off of this behemoth.

Enough. I've spent a lot of time on this review and discussed many objections simply because I think that this book is too important to ignore. You really ought to read it and see what you think. Whether you totally agree with it or not, you'll find a lot that sounds familiar, and you'll get used to that "a-ha" moment happening over and over again.

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(Yes, more comments)

Originally posted: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 06:10:37

Since moving to Drupal, I've reactivated comments. The new system requires you to register and log in to post comments -- which is a pain, I realize, but it should stop the shadowbloggers.

Please feel free to create an account, and certainly feel free to make it anonymous if you like.

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Reading:: Toilet Training in Less than a Day

Originally posted: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 10:00:55

Toilet Training in Less than a Day

by Nathan H. Azrin

You can tell what we're about to start doing. This is not a book that I picked up with enthusiasm, but shortly after I began reading it, I became engrossed. After all, it outlines a methodology, and I'm fascinated by methodologies of all shapes.

Like most methodologies, this one is at its core quite simple. Based on learning theory and validated by empirical studies, the approach works by modeling, repetition, and validation. I can't speak yet to its effectiveness -- we implement it in a few weeks -- but I fervently hope it lives up to its claims.

Now for a little cultural commentary. The book was published in 1974 and uses a style that would be quite comfortable in 1954 -- heavily dependent on housewives' testimonies in the first chapter and heavily didactic in later chapters. The text and illustrations inevitably show the training as being implemented by the wife, with the father being regulated to the role of exemplar and validator. The illustrations were a bit startling to me: thirty years ago I suppose that couples bore children earlier, but the mothers depicted seemed to be at most 19 years old. Children having children, I thought. And it seemed to me that the reader is sometimes treated as not more advanced than a child. In the narrative at the end, for instance, the mother gains the respect of her neighbor and the book describes in great detail the immense pleasure she gained from this. Something tells me the child isn't the only one being trained and validated.

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(What I'm NOT Reading)

Originally posted: Wed, 09 Jun 2004 18:40:22

For every book that appears on this list, there are two or three that I pick up, skim, read a chapter or two, and abandon. So here's a sample of the books I'm not reading -- ones that have interested me in the past year, but that I haven't finished:

Wireless nation : the frenzied launch of the cellular revolution in America. / Murray, James B. / Cambridge, Mass. / 2001

Art of war. / Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469-1527 / Chicago / 2003

TnT : texts and technology. / Walker, Janice R. / Cresskill, N.J. / 2003

Toward a philosophy of the act. / Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975 / 1st ed. / Austin / 1993

Picturing texts / Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchik, Cynthia Selfe / 2004

The one best way : Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency. / Kanigel, Robert. / New York / 1997

Capital. / Marx, Karl, 1818-1883 / London. / 1957

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(One-Year Anniversary)

Originally posted: Fri, 04 Jun 2004 17:57:07

One year ago today, I began reviewing my readings on this blog. It doesn't seem like it's been that long!

Events My first review, of Latour's Pandora's Hope, was posted to the BlogSpot blog I had set up on the evening of June 4, 2003. A few months later, I moved the whole thing to the CWRL server and migrated it to MovableType. Since then, I've been busy blogging almost everything of consequence that I read, searching the archives whenever I need to review a reading, using posts as first drafts for chapters and articles, and of course deleting innumerable spambot comments.

Side effects One of the unanticipated side effects is that I read more books and fewer journal articles now. I think I trend toward books because they now seem like bigger accomplishments and more significant to blog. But I have also blogged some clusters of articles in mini-framework essays. I should do more of that. Perhaps that will be my resolution for this upcoming year.

Another side effect is that it allows me to "keep score." I tried to keep a tally of books at TTU for a while, but it wasn't very successful. But the blog has allowed me to track what I read. (Disturbingly, however, it doesn't seem to count them for me. How many books have I read this year? A lot.)

Circulation. I've been really surprised at how many people have mentioned the blog to me at conferences (like RSA, last week) or over email. I don't currently have access to server stats, so I really have no idea how many people are reading it, but I'm starting to get used to people casually remarking, "as you say in your blog..."

The blog now appears on a number of blogrolls. Rudely, I have not reciprocated. It's not that I don't read or respect other blogs, but I want the Reading List to be insular -- pure scholarship, not remarks on current events, wry quotidian observations, political screeds, or speculations on technology. I always liked the idea of the Reading List as a semi-private set of notes on the books I read, as my first post stated. So my apologies to those who have linked to my site.

What's next? Since MovableType has gone to a pricing structure that the CWRL can't pay, I'll likely have migrated this blog over to other software by this time next year. (Any suggestions? Obviously I'd like something that makes it easy to migrate from MT.) Either way, I'll keep the current entries in the blog so I (any anyone else) can review them.

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Reading:: Chasing Technoscience

Originally posted: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 17:57:16

Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality

by Evan Selinger (Editor), Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering

A while back, I noticed that Amazon.com kept recommending this book to me. Then a good friend asked me if I had read the interview with Latour that appears in it. Later, someone at UT's School of Information asked whether I had read the work of Andrew Pickering, who figures prominently in this book. So when I came across this book in the library while searching for an entirely different book, I had to pick it up.

I'm glad I did, although it's not going to change my life. Chasing Technoscience grew out of a technoscience research seminar at Stony Brook University, Don Ihde's home university, and about half of the chapters appear to be written by Ihde's graduate students in philosophy. The other half, of course, are Ihde, Haraway, Latour, and Pickering, all of whom are well known in technoscience studies. Here, they all publish original essays on their own work next to interviews with them conducted mostly by the seminar's participants.

(I should add "apparently" to that last sentence. This is the first I've heard of Don Ihde.)

Of the 14 chapters, the ones that interested me the most were the four interviews. They gave some interesting insights, and the interviewers didn't pull any punches. Since three of the interviewees are not trained philosophers and most of the interviewers are, we get an interesting interdisciplinary dialogue in which these famous technoscience theorists are held to philosophical standards with which they are not always familiar. That's not entirely fair, but it is fascinating. Pickering fares the worst in these terms, I think, but all acquit themselves fairly well.

We also get gems like this one. Latour is asked about Clifford Geertz's opposition to the critical studies mode of fieldwork and advocacy of a more hermeneutically sensitive mode. The interviewer describes the latter to Latour.

BL: Yes, that is a minimum definition of fieldwork! Does he mean that cultural studies people don't do that?

RC: Yes, that's what he says.

BL. This is very mean. (p.21)

Mean indeed. A lot of criticism leveled against the four principals is revealed in the interviews to be based on disciplinary differences and differences in programs. That is, Latour, Haraway, Ihde, and Pickering have managed to spread so widely and influence so many people outside their home disciplines that they are now having to keep their work coherent by shoring up their programs across disciplinary and national boundaries, making their warrants explicit, surfacing their assumptions, and rearticulating the principles of their frameworks within the different disciplines. It's the sort of problem most ambitious scholars would love to have. And in the end, I think that's the most interesting aspect of the book: it allows us to reflect on the practical consequences of interdisciplinarity in technoscience studies, and it thus allows us to reap lessons for similar interdisciplinary fields such as technical communication, computers & writing, and computer-supported cooperative work.

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Reading:: The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

Originally posted: Wed, 26 May 2004 09:22:51

The Art of War

by Sun Tzu

A brief review for a brief book. Sun Tzu's book is a mere 60 pages, but it's a terse set of maxims that have been justly passed on through the centuries. My brother read it in ROTC, I think. It's very applicable to military strategists. And it's an interesting contrast to Machiavelli.

Machiavelli's why I picked up this book: I was searching for his book of the same title when I came across this one. Both are interested in strategy, both are ruthless. But Machiavelli's book seems more broadly focused on political power and governance. Tzu is a general, period.

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Reading:: Fast Food Nation

Originally posted: Tue, 25 May 2004 19:09:23

Fast Food Nation

by Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation is an interesting book and a quick read. It provides some really relevant examples of the deskilling and efficiency focus discussed by Harry Braverman and feared by Ehn, Kyng, et al. But for all that, I found the book to be a bit forgettable.

Why? Maybe because although there were interesting anecdotes and sometimes horrifying facts, there really weren't many surprises here. Yes, fast food is terribly unhealthy and makes people fat. Yes, McDonald's exploits its workers. Yes, slaughterhouses are unsanitary and unsafe. Yes, family farmers are finding that their trade is about as economically viable as cobbling. And yes, fast food restaurants are trying to market directly to my two-year-old. I knew all that, although I didn't know some of the particulars.

But fast food and the mass production system that coexists with it have lowered the price of food enormously: Poor people in the US are more likely to be overweight than emaciated. But the outbreaks of disease documented at fast food restaurants are pretty tame compared to the public health challenges faced by the WWI generation or indeed the current highway system. But marketing to children, although it sounds insidious, seems clumsy compared to the sorts of ideological indoctrination that socially conscious parents often worry about, and doesn't seem to work all that well anyway.

What really struck me about the book, though, was that the author seems so preoccupied with authenticity. He talks in great detail about how artificial scents and smells are formulated, about how kids in Colorado Springs no longer wear cowboy hats as the "real" Coloradans did, about how chains actually got started compared to what is said in their literature. Maybe it's because I'm GenX, but I really don't have the preoccupation with authenticity that Schlosser does. Of course these restaurants are selling a brand, a mood, an experience. So do universities and churches, often with the same level of conscious cultivation.

I'm using FFN as the reader in my first year composition course this summer. The simple stories have clearly defined heroes and villains, which I think will please the class very much. I was a bit disappointed with that simple underlying story, though, particularly in how it (in my view) misread politics. In the Afterword, the author concedes that the villains are usually Republicans, not Democrats, and admits that he could have made much more of President Clinton's ties to Tyson Chicken. But, he adds, Republicans have far more often deregulated the food industry and supported meatpackers in their efforts to evade legislation on fair working conditions and on sanitation and health. When it comes time to explain why, Schlosser sort of shrugs his shoulders and says that if the Democrats were to do the same things, he would condemn them as well. I suspect the split has more to do with geography and region than party: Clinton's Arkansas is largely rural, like most of the "red" states, and rural areas are more likely to house meatpacking plants, more likely to have Republican constituencies, and more likely to subscribe to the do-it-yourself ideology that drives deregulation. No wonder Arkansas Democrats "act like Republicans" when it comes to food issues (those are my scare quotes, not Schlosser's) -- all politics is local, as someone famously said.

Schlosser attempts to inoculate himself from charges of political bias by pointing out that Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, led the fight to pass key meatpacking regulations and wishes that contemporary Republicans would take up the charge. Roosevelt's Republican party was largely Northern and urban, of course, again suggesting that party labels have less to do with the issue than region. So I wish Schlosser had gone ahead and checked that thesis rather than subscribing to the all-too-common bifurcated view of political parties.

In any case, the book is a good read. But I had the urge to buy fries everytime I picked it up.

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Reading:: The Prince

Originally posted: Mon, 17 May 2004 19:00:07

The Prince

by Niccolo Machiavelli, David Wootton (Editor)

Whenever anyone wants to criticize actor-network theory in general or Latour in particular, the most popular line of attack is to call the theory and the theorist Machiavellian. After all, the foundational work on ANT in the late 1970s and early 1980s drew explicitly from Machiavelli to provide a political-rhetorical account of science, an endeavor that had typically been seen as neither political nor rhetorical. Callon, Law, and Rip, for instance, praise Machiavelli in their 1983 collection Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology as a sensible ethnographer who recorded what was rather than what should be.

The charge has stuck, partially because early ANT work has tended to foreground the political-rhetorical expertise of individuals (such as Louis Pasteur in The Pasteurization of France) and partially because, as Latour notes in Science in Action, rhetoric is a despised discipline. Activity theorists have been quick to pick up on the accusation. For instance, Reijo Miettinen claims that the early focus on Machiavellian princes works against the principle of symmetry, while Engestrom et al., Engestrom & Escalante, and Nardi et al. all point to Machiavellian princes and their manipulations in their critiques.

But if you actually read Machiavelli's The Prince, his most famous work and the one to which critics most frequently allude, you'll find that the picture is more mixed. Despite what his critics have said, Machiavelli is not amoral, nor does he focus exclusively on retaining power through manipulation. Rather, Machiavelli recognizes that leaders, citizens, and countries continually form alliances and find ways to advance their own interests -- princes or not -- and the book aims to provide insights and instruction useful for surviving in such a variable and treacherous environment. The point is not to manipulate and betray, it is to find settlements that will satisfy the greatest number of stakeholders and provide the most durable networks.

In that sense, later ANT work -- particularly Latour's -- is if anything more Machiavellian than the earlier work! The original references to Machiavelli may have been dropped -- a politic decision -- but the concern with settlements, stakeholders, and durability continue, as does the impulse to portray things the way they are rather than the way they should be (p.48).

Interestingly, Machiavelli points to a methodological problem faced by actor-network studies and descriptive studies in general. As David Wootton points out in the introduction, Machiavelli attempts to write a how-to, a set of guidelines that distill his experience and insights into prescriptions. But time and again Machiavelli admits that decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis. The calculations are too complicated, the knowledge is too tacit. Machiavelli rarely succeeds in moving easily and unambiguously from description to prescription. The same can be said of ethnography.

The Prince deals primarily with lands accustomed to dictatorial or monarchal rule. I understand that his Discourses deal with his preferred governmental system, the republic. Perhaps I'll read them next.

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Reading:: The Languages of Edison's Light

Originally posted: Wed, 12 May 2004 18:55:19

The Languages of Edison's Light

by Charles Bazerman

At the recent Bakhtin-Vygotsky SIG, I chatted with Chuck Bazerman about my current project and its use of activity theory and actor-network theory. "I do that a bit with my latest book," he told me.

I had skimmed that book -- The Languages of Edison's Light -- about a year earlier, before my current ANT binge began, and had missed the undertones of ANT and AT. So I just finished rereading the book. It's not surprising that I had missed those undertones before, since the story is foregrounded and the theoretical framework is not explicated until the conclusion. Nevertheless, now that I knew what I was looking for, I could find the connections quite easily.

The Languages of Edison's Light is in many ways quite similar to Bazerman's superlative Shaping Written Knowledge: a meticulously researched historical account of changing communication. Languages, however, is more focused on a shorter time frame, a more bounded organization, and particularly a single charismatic leader. That leader, Edison (who sometimes sounds like a cult leader, frankly), is portrayed as creating "a bramble of overlapping claims" (p.90), material claims that took the form of technologies as often as they did paper or speech. In fact, one of the real advantages of the book is its thoughtful examination of nontextual artifacts as arguments, and the ways they become rearticulated (in both senses of the word: respoken and relinked) as they move into different nodes/activities. As Bazerman concludes in Chapter 5: "When the light got beyond the laboratory, it became other things, to be talked about in other ways. It no longer needed people hovering over its flickering beginnings figuring out how to make it robust and steady" (p.84). Once the electric light became a tool rather than an object (to use activity theory's terms) -- or once it became a boundary object (to use actor-network theory's term) -- it could move into different activities and begin to make different meanings. Bazerman explores some of these meanings in the last chapter, which describes how consumers received the light.

Of course, the "bramble" of claims served Edison's work to develop a practical, mass-marketable light system -- the emphasis being on system, the real object being centralized power systems that would continue to provide revenue for Edison's companies. The electric light was merely the "killer app." And the claims included "languages" as diverse as patent applications, lawsuits, experimental notebooks, public and private demonstrations, and economic transactions (for, as Bazerman reminds us, all economic transactions are rhetorical [p.141]). These many claims -- and Bazerman focuses mainly on the textual ones, you'll note -- create value by not only constituting the technology but by defining a place for it (p.142) and creating the values associated with it (p.143). As technology becomes a unitary social fact, Bazerman asserts, it aggregates its own core of meanings, drawing discursive systems into a new formation (p.144).

The story Bazerman tells is generally intriguing, although it sometimes gets bogged down in the details with long quotes from various correspondence -- often block quotes are typeset opposite a reproduction of the source correspondence, which seems rather redundant. One of the things that makes the story so intriguing, of course, is that Edison seems so Machiavellian: he sets up conditions, creates a "bramble" of claims, confounds his enemies, manipulates his shareholders, coopts his critics, lies blatantly to gain market advantage, sets up a lab that runs primarily on his own personal charisma. It's not surprising that when you turn to the Works Cited, the only books from actor-network theory -- Latour's Science in Action and The Pasteurization of France -- are from Latour's early period, in which he drew explicitly from Machiavelli to provide accounts of scientists who were master rhetoricians and master political manipulators. In his later work, Latour moves toward a more symmetrical account, although he continues to acknowledge that the political-rhetorical work is often attributed to central figures.

In general, as I've indicated, the theoretical and analytical framework of the book is not foregrounded. We get to glimpse it in the conclusion, in which Bazerman talks a bit about activity systems, but I wanted to see more. For instance, Bazerman talks about the extensive networks in which discourse circulates (p.336) and the material accountability that discourse must provide (p.340), but we don't get a firmer understanding of how those networks are composed and linked. He points out, sensibly, that it's not enough to amass allies as Latour describes, the kinds of connections are important too (p.343); but the point could have been more explicitly developed. He notes that "programs, concepts, or technologies become transformed as they move from forum to forum" while the representations and the project remain coherent (p.343), and the book provides several strong examples of that point, but I wanted more discussion of how this occurs. Basically, I wanted Bazerman to discuss activity networks, and I shouldn't fault him because that really wasn't his project.

A few more notes. Bazerman mentions genres in an offhand way but doesn't theorize them. He uses the term "dialectic" several times, which (as I've noted elsewhere) drives a significant wedge between AT and ANT; I plan to work out the issue of dialectic in my own project. He does a great job of explaining material nondiscursive rhetoric, although his focus is mostly on texts. And he points me to Hughes' Networks of Power, which I shall have to read soon.

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Reading:: Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Originally posted: Wed, 05 May 2004 19:19:42

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

by M.M. Bakhtin

Bakhtin's often hard to read, and this book is harder than most. A mix of published essays, previously unpublished work, and notes found in schoolboy notebooks rotting in rat-infested storage rooms, the collection is rather uneven. At the same time, even at its most uneven, it's brilliant. We get to see Bakhtin debating with himself, going over themes that he's discussed many times only to rethink them once again in different ways. Whereas works such as The Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics provide us with a more or less finished (stabilized-for-now?) view of Bakhtin's work, this collection sometimes provides a sense of the working-out that was involved.

One of the arguments that Bakhtin has with himself, of course, is the nature of the novel. In "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin argues that "secondary (complex) speech genres -- novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary, and so forth -- arise in more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written) that is artistic, scientific, sociopolitical, and so on" (p.62). Such secondary genres absorb or "digest" primary (oral) speech genres, bringing them into a heterogeneous mix. So heterogeneous, in fact, that Bakhtin is moved to remark in "From Notes Made in 1970-71" that "the novel, deprived of style and setting [i.e., removed from the predetermined settings that define primary genres], is essentially not a genre; it must imitate (rehearse) some extralinguistic genre: the everyday story, letters, diaries, and so forth" (p.132). Is it or isn't it a genre? This is the question with which Bakhtin wrestles, and the answer is so elusive precisely because the novel is relatively new, it is removed from recurrent settings, oriented toward writing rather than speaking, meant to travel widely and to furnish its own world to readers.

Personally I don't give a flip whether the novel is a genre or not. I'm much more interested in some of the other secondary genres Bakhtin lists: scientific research, commentary, etc., the results of highly organized written communication. The same question obtains. Are these genres? They incorporate rather heterogeneous primary genres, genres that have emerged in very different settings, activities, or spheres, using different styles, representing different world views. Primary genres have histories and logics of their own; do secondary genres, or do they become anachronistic as they bring these heterogeneous elements into dialogue?

Those of you who have been following my blog probably know where I'm going next. When we begin thinking of scientific research as a secondary genre, we are reminded of the very similar discussions going on in science and technology studies about actor-networks. Indeed, the early ANT work often involved examining scientific reports as networks in which references linked to other actants (both textual and other). Later ANT work drew on Deleuze and Guattari's work with rhizomes to explain how these actor-networks were able to splice together disparate, heterogeneous elements. A rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari tell us, is an anti-genealogy. And genres are nothing if not genealogical! So a secondary genre is restless, seething, trying to keep a lid on a boiling pot; it attempts to bring stability to a sometimes volatile mix of genres. (Stability is not D&G's forte, nor is it ANT's.) Secondary genres, I speculate, do have a line of development, but that line emerges from the dialogue of primary genres within them; the assembly work of the novel/report has a past and can be used again in the future. This notion of "digestion," as unpalatable as the metaphor is, provides the stability and developmental perspective that rhizomes lack.

"Digestion" involves dialogue. Dialogue, which is the major theme of this book, results from the juxtaposition of two (heterogeneous) speech works (p.118). But juxtaposition does not mean resolution or finalization -- quite the opposite, since resolution or finalization results in a monologue. It's instructive to look at Bakhtin's elusive pronouncements on dialectics.

"Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness--and that's how you get dialectics" (p.147). This somewhat enigmatic pronouncement is probably Bakhtin's most direct attack on dialectics. Elsewhere he's more moderate. In "Methodology for the Human Sciences," he says that "dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)." And a few paragraphs later, he constrasts dialogue with "a mechanical contact of 'oppositions'" on a merely formal level. "If we transform dialogue into one continuous text, that is, erase the divisions between voices (changes of speaking subjects), which is possible at the extreme (Hegel's monological dialectic), then the deep-seated (infinite) contextual meaning disappears (we hit the bottom, reach a standstill)" (p.162). Finally, in "The Problem of the Text," semantic relations among texts are parenthetically termed "dialectical" (p.106), while extralinguistic aspects are parenthetically termed "dialogic" (p.109). Even near the end of his life, after Stalin was dead, in his own notes, Bakhtin could not be any more direct about critiquing dialectics. But we can get a sense of what he disliked: dialectics insists on abstraction (or: returning to dialogue "at a higher level"), finalizability, the settling of a conversation. Dialogue does none of these; it insists that diverse voices be allowed to sound, being heard but not necessarily resolved. It's a more heterogeneous vision.

There are dozens of other insights in this book, but I won't be able to get to them all today. So let's cut this, er, monologue short.

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Reading:: Complexities

Originally posted: Sun, 02 May 2004 02:52:24

Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices

by John Law (Editor), Annemarie Mol (Editor)

Here's another useful book full of studies of knowledge. Mol and Law, you will remember, are currently in a "post-actor-network-theory" stage. Suitably, most of the essays in this book draw only glancingly from ANT in a direct sense, but underneath, almost all are heavily in debt to it. Here you'll find elephants, roads, aircraft, atherosclerosis, and other phenomena talked about in really interesting ways that highlight the construction of knowledge among multiple heterogeneous stakeholders. Some of these are really interesting and inventive. For instance, Andrew Barry examines how the EU works hard to maintain and extend its networks despite its status of relative powerlessness; Laurent Thevenot examines how roads are not only constructed through arguments but become parts of those arguments; Charis Thompson discusses how elephants and their relation to the environment are variously constructed by different stakeholders.

Sadly, my copy has a printer's error, which means that the essays by Thompson and by Mol are present only as fragments, and Michel Callon's essay is entirely omitted. A shame. All of these looked interesting, but I don't have enough to evaluate Mol's or Callon's work. Hopefully Duke University will send me a replacement copy soon.

Nevertheless, the collection is worthwhile, though not life-changing or substantially revelatory.

Update: The good people at Duke University Press replaced my copy of Complexities with a new one. No printer's errors in this one. Which means that I was able to read Michel Callon's essay "Writing and (Re)writing Devices as Tools for Managing Complexity." This essay was easily the most relevant for me and perhaps the best one in the collection -- not just because it focuses on writing (my main concern) but also because it considers the question of how texts mediate activity in a different way. In this formulation, texts aren't merely scripts, narratives, or documentary reality (although all of these functions are performed at various points). Rather, the texts Callon studied -- the manuals, questionnaires, and collateral materials employed by a cruise line -- serve to weave relationships between individual actors and collectives. (It hardly needs to be said here that Callon means both human and nonhuman actors here.) They translate the actors in such a way as to define them and to facilitate smooth, predictable relations.For instance, the detailed questionnaires given to customers define those customers through series of trials, just as Latour alleges scientists define phenomena through series of trials. What is iron? It's an element with this tensile strength, that melting point, that many protons, etc. What is a customer of this cruise line? It's a person who belongs to this demographic, who likes to travel to these areas, who wants cleaner toilets but who thinks the buffet is quite nice as is. Callon further alleges that writing helps to manage complexity in increasingly complex markets through such definitions: the bewildering range of customers can be reduced to customer types served by niche cruises, the bewildering array of detailed procedures can be reduced to principles. Narratives make actions and their unity compatible; they manage the multiplicity that comes from splicing together actors in an assemblage. This splicing work, Callon says, always involves negotiations. There are, of course, direct implications for my current project.

Since I'm discussing Complexities again, I should mention another essay in this collection. Laurent Thevenot's "Which road to follow?" examines how artifacts can be said to participate in the moral world. In the case that Thevenot studies, the road doesn't just provide a setting, it embodies an argument -- that is, it results from protracted moral and political negotiations and it continues to participate in them. From a symmetrical perspective, it becomes an actor itself, an artifact that is just as much a moral artifact as the wills and expressions of the humans involved in the activity. I find this notion of artifacts as arguments intriguing, of course, extending as it does the role of rhetoric to design.

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