This weekend saw a flurry of stories about how easy it is for us to take and share video of each other, with the predictable result of destabilizing carefully constructed public images. Here are two out of many.
technorati tags:privacy
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"British news reports say insurgents are using Google Earth to pinpoint vulnerable targets within bases in Iraq. Could Google be doing more to prevent this? Should they be doing more? They certainly could explain more."
technorati tags:netwar, google-earth
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Here’s my understanding of how this works: the founder created his own telephone company in Iowa. Iowa is apparently the only state taking advantage of an FCC kickback scheme that gives telco’s a portion of the fees generated from every inbound call to an Iowa number. So when you call the AllFreeCalls phone number, a portion of any long distance fees you are paying go to the company. The kickback is apparently authorized via the Universal Service Fund. These kickbacks are enough on average to more than cover the international outbound calling fees.Arrington admits that he hasn't quite wrapped his head around how this works. I'd be surprised (and dismayed) if it were allowed to continue for long -- that's really not what the USF is for!
technorati tags:telecommunications, universal-service, usf
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technorati tags:accessibility, design, section508
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This thin monograph, based on a 1986 paper, examines the concept of "bullshit" to attempt a definition. It's unclear how tongue-in-cheek the monograph is, but if we take it at face value, we can see it as a capsule of some of the problems and conflicts going on in philosophy.
the contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things really are. These "antirealist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. (pp.64-65)Frankfurt is of course describing -- at least in part -- postmodernism and its variants. He goes on to claim that one response to the postmodernist crisis is to turn to sincerity, i.e., being true to oneself because one cannot find objective truth. He punctures this conceit and concludes that "insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit" (p.67).
Imagine that you're eighteen and in your first semester at the University of X. You've made some fast friends in your dorm, and one night, after watching the midnight film in the student union and drinking too much Mountain Dew, you hang out and talk philosophy. You warm up over head-scratchers such as "If God is all-powerful, can He create a weight so heavy He can't lift it?" Whoa. Talk about expanding your consciousness.
The target audience of God's Debris is people who enjoy having their brains spun around inside their skulls. After a certain age most people are uncomfortable with new ideas. That certain age varies by person, but if you're over fifty-five (mentally), you probably won't enjoy this thought experiment. ... If you're twenty-three, your odds of liking it are very good. (pp.ix-x)
words such as dimension and field and infinity are nothing more than conveniences for mathematicians and scientists. They are not descriptions of reality, yet we accept them as such because everyone is sure someone else knows what the words mean. (p.21)
for the knowledge economy set. The blog is terrific, and I've picked up several ideas and examples from it myself. But of course these ideas and examples are fleeting. Will the bright idea of hacking a Yahoo Calendar feature be useful next month? Will this virtual screen software be useful once the next version of OSX comes out? Probably not. For that reason, one would think that a book based on this sort of blog would have the half-life of polonium.Wikinomics looks like an interesting book:
In the last few years, traditional collaboration—in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center—has been superceded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.
Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics explains how to prosper in a world where new communications technologies are democratizing the creation of value. Anyone who wants to understand the major forces revolutionizing business today should consider Wikinomics their survival kit.
technorati tags:wikinomics, knowledge-work
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technorati tags:iphone, accessibility, tactile
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Submit a few paragraphs to the Finder which searches for clichés listed in the Associated Press Guide to News Writing. Even if your clichés are few and far between, the Cliché Finder will light up the various and sundry overused phrases beyond the shadow of a doubt and shatter your blissful ignorance like a bull in a china shop.
technorati tags:cliches, writing
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The Volt has a battery-powered electric motor that can run the car for up to 40 city miles on a single charge. Beyond that, a gasoline-powered, one-liter, three-cylinder engine can generate electricity to power the car and replenish the battery, with a range of up to 640 miles, GM said.It's styled like a Murano.
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technorati tags:municipal, wifi
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Over the break, I visited my parents and my mother, becoming nostalgic, pulled this document out of a file cabinet: my grandmother's reading list.
Sorry about the blurry photo -- my cameraphone is not good at close quarters. The journal lists the books that my grandmother read over her lifetime, and the tabs index the books alphabetically.
When I say "lists the books," that's it: just titles. Not authors, publication information, the date she read them, or any notes on the contents. Still, I was struck that Grandma had her own reading list, and I suddenly felt as if I were carrying on a family tradition that I didn't know we had.
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just sounds fun to read.technorati tags:repelling-alien-invasions
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As manufacturers start incorporating this memory into devices, a tiny musicphone will be able to hold more data than most desktop computers could only a few years ago. Aside from the interface, the only remaining question at that point is whether cell service carriers will allow these phones the same degree of freedom and versatility that made the computer such a success.
This seems sensible to me. It reminds me of one of the few episodes of The Apprentice that I have watched, in which the two teams competed to create a line of clothing that accommodates mobile technologies. Both teams came up with an item with a smallish pocket "for your iPod or phone." When the judges asked one team which tech would be more important, the team leader replied without hesitation: "The iPod." The judge's scorn was palpable -- appropriately.
technorati tags:mobile, phones, ipod-killer, apprentice
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, and imagine how he must have regarded the Koran as a cultural document rather than a holy book. Still, big points for Ellison's political agility.technorati tags:keithellison, koran, thomasjefferson
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Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over.
The author speculates that tying social networking to mobile numbers might change things -- but right now, social networking profiles are like clothes, temporary ways to craft temporaryThis attitude contrasts sharply with those of adults, who are more interested in creating coherent online identities.
Although I doubt they meant it in this way, it strikes me that teen behavior here could function as a protective adaptation, alllowing them to avoid the consequences of earlier identity choices. When people try to maintain a coherent online identity, they become accountable to the statements and positions that they take over the course of their life. But if they change accounts -- and identities -- several times in the course of their life, there's no clear trail to follow and it's obvious that their statements are things they are simply trying on.
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technorati tags:enduserprogramming, web2.0
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So I've been trying out two new tools for this new year. One, as you can see, is Blogger. My first blog was on Blogger, but I moved it to the CWRL servers because I wanted to have more control over it. But now I'm contemplating moving back to Blogger for various reasons, including the fact that it makes less sense to maintain my own blogging software than it does to let the professionals do it. We'll see how this works.
The other new tool is Flock, the browser based on Firefox. Flock's hook is its integration with web services. So for instance, I can use Flock's interface to manage my bookmarks in del.icio.us, my photos in Flickr, and my blog posts in Blogger, rather than having to (a) manage local versions of each or (b) use the interfaces for each service. I tried Flock about a year ago and it wasn't ready for prime time, but it seems to be doing quite well now.
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technorati tags:projectmanagement
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From the UK, an interesting-looking paper on how social software might impact learning. The emphasis on collaboration is appropriate, but they don't cover the vital issues of project and task management that are raised by an increase in collaboration.
Social software and learning: An Opening Education report from Futurelab
By Martin Owen, Lyndsay Grant, Steve Sayers and Keri Facer
Futurelab - Research - Publications - Social software and learning
technorati tags:knowledgework, education
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Originally posted: Sat, 30 Dec 2006 05:48:25
Over the holidays, I looked through some of my keepsakes and visited my parents. So I'm in a nostalgic mood. And in that mood, I began thinking about some of the books I read in the first fifteen years of life. I was a voracious reader, although unfortunately I tended toward pulpy science fiction and fantasy novels. But some texts really stand out -- not necessarily the ones I read most often, but the ones that had a lasting impact on me. Here are ten books I read by fifteen:
One of my older siblings probably was the original owner of this annotated hardcover edition of Jules Verne's classic. Annotated is the key word here: the margins were filled with footnotes about the inventions and the geographical and natural features encountered in Verne's fictional travelogue, and those footnotes both helped me to understand the text and sustained my interest in it. When the text talked about a narwahl, the annotations described the creature and provided an illustration; when the text described light bulbs, the annotation explained that they had not yet been invented and discussed Verne's uncanny ability to extrapolate inventions from current trends. I remember how proud I was to finish the text (I was seven) and how interested I became in hard science fiction after that.
Verne's novel was a real travelogue: The narrative (the narrator is captured by a megalomaniac who has built a submarine and uses it to sink ships) is a thin premise on which the author hangs a series of descriptions of undersea life, sunken cities, and icebergs. For a seven-year-old, the clash between the narrator's egalitarian perspective and Captain Nemo's aristocratic one) was fascinating and useful, and the fact that the narrator was nearly brought under Nemo's thrall was especially instructive.
Interestingly, I was not nearly as enchanted with other science fiction from roughly the same time period. Edward Bellamy's utopia Looking Backwards was creepy, with its description of a lockstep society. HG Wells' The First Men in the Moon was even more creepy: I had trouble digesting the fact that one character was actually enchanted by the moon civilization's regimented, genetically controlled organization. And of course The Time Machine was especially creepy: I found no one to root for. Looking backward (pun intended), I realize that science fiction is less a prediction of the future than it is a commentary on the present; Verne's hard science fiction was an optimistic commentary that was given the certainty of concrete technological innovation, while Wells and Bellamy employed transparently flimsy plot devices to describe futures in which genuine human dialogue and conflict had been squeezed out -- sociological, "soft" science fiction. I preferred the "hard" science fiction, and in later years I read Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, and others in that vein.
Incidentally, we didn't have Wells' The Invisible Man, but we had Ralph Ellison's. That was an extremely confusing book for a seven-year-old, and I didn't finish it until much later, in college, I think.
New American Standard Ryrie Study Bible
I was raised in an evangelical household -- not the stereotypical kind that you see on television that shouts Hallelujah a lot and handles snakes, but the kind that takes the Biblical text seriously and seeks to understand its historical and cultural context. The Ryrie Study Bible, heavily annotated by Charles Ryrie of Dallas Theological Seminary, was de rigeur: nearly every verse had an annotation that explained controversies, gave alternate translations from the original Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic, pointed to non-Biblical sources, and described archaeological findings that helped to put the text in context. Every book had a half-page introduction that summarized and dated it. And even the dreariest passages in Leviticus were enlivened by discussions of the cultural context in which they were followed. Between this text and Verne's, no wonder I like footnotes so much.
I read the Ryrie Study Bible cover to cover at least a few times, a chapter a night, after my normal reading. Doing this certainly did not make me more virtuous, but it did instill an appreciation of the book that has most deeply impacted Western culture. And Ryrie's annotations helped me understand from an early age that reasonable people could disagree about given texts and interpret them differently based on various types of evidence. On the other hand, Ryrie never questioned the inerrancy of Scripture, and consequently he went through some really complicated acrobatics in order to reconcile passages with each other and with archaeological evidence -- something to which I was not sufficiently sensitized at the time.
On the other hand, I was skeptical of this 1972 book from the beginning. I remember reading it and similar books that had been handed down from older siblings (we had an enormous bookshelf at our house) and also watching the documentary based on Von Daniken's "research." Von Daniken postulates that the Earth had been visited by ancient astronauts who were or were not our ancestors -- he's not always clear on this point, and based on the variety of evidence he provides, the Earth looks like a busy crossroads for UFOs. That evidence, however, is transparently contradictory and often transparently ripped from its context. Before I knew what the term "Occam's Razor" meant, I was already applying it to this pseudoscientific text. (I was probably eight or nine.)
People forget what sort of impact this book had, though. Six years later, science fiction writer James P. Hogan put forth a much more plausible scenario of ancient astronauts in Inherit the Stars, as if to say, "Look, Van Daniken, here's how it's done." Later still, The X-Files and Stargate picked up the thread. Meanwhile, I continued reading lurid books along the same lines, such as Von Daniken's Gods from Outer Space and Fanthorpe's The World's Greatest Unsolved Mysteries, laughing up my sleeve -- but secretly wanting to believe.
Speaking of wanting to believe, I was a huge Star Trek fan as a kid. And although the show had been off the air since before I was born, I always hoped they would find a way to bring it back. Reading this book, a nuts-and-bolts account of the show's genesis and operation as well as studio politics, made me really interested in the whole enterprise of developing and maintaining a fictional world. It also cleared up a lot of mysteries. (Why did the Enterprise have a transporter? Because they couldn't afford the special effects it would take to land a spaceship every week.) I memorized Star Trek trivia from this book like sports fans memorize sports trivia. On one level, it was an enormous waste of time -- the book was published between the second and third seasons, so it had an optimism that I knew from the beginning was misplaced -- but on another level, I learned early about the complex collaboration and the enormous coherence issues involved in a large, er, enterprise such as this one. Let's face it, it's probably a good thing to understand how your fiction is manufactured.
Barlowe's guide to extraterrestrials
And yet, it's also fun to pretend that all the fiction that takes place in different worlds can be brought together in one place. That was the premise behind Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials, an illustrated compendium of "great aliens from science fiction literature." If you want to see a stunning portrait of Arthur C Clarke's Overlord, Larry Niven's Puppeteer, or Frank Herbert's Guild Steersman -- along with detailed annotations and a scale chart -- well, here you go. The appendix includes process sketches as well. This book led me to read a number of others, just to see what the aliens were like in context. (I found that Barlowe often took considerable liberties with the sketchy descriptions.) If you haven't seen this text, you really ought to take advantage of Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature and see what sorts of messed-up things I was reading at eleven or twelve.
At the time I was reading this book, Dungeons and Dragons was big, and I had the notion of using Barlowe's Guide as a sort of "monster's guide" for a science fiction RPG. Blessedly, those plans never came to fruition. Eventually, I sold this book at a garage sale, and have regretted it ever since.
I was nine or ten when my older brother gave me this book for Christmas. It was a bit adult for me -- religious fanaticism, Machiavellian intrigue, and genetic programs were probably not appropriate for a ten-year-old -- but I really latched onto it for reasons that I have discussed elsewhere. Looking back, I see that although Dune had no footnotes, it did have several appendices that were meant to make the text more real through supplemental context, just as the Ryrie Study Bible further explained the Bible with its supplemental notes on archaeology.
In later years, my older brother gave or lent me a string of age-inappropriate books, including many works by Piers Anthony (who has strikingly infantile attitudes about sexuality) and Stephen R. Donaldson (whose antihero Thomas Covenant performs relentless narcissistic handwringing in a reality that is entirely centered around him). But Dune is one of a kind -- tightly integrated, intriguingly interwoven despite its deep flaws, describing a future world in Roman decline and yearning for a jihad that would sweep away the old order and restore the vitality of humanity. If only Herbert had stopped there instead of authoring and coauthoring an endless stream of derivative sequels.
Larry Niven represents a melding of the two science fiction traditions that have their roots in Verne and Wells respectively: on the one hand, the "hard sf" that relies on plausible extrapolations, and on the other, the more sociologically concerned science fiction that postulates how societies change in contact with new technologies and new civilizations. Ringworld is not Niven's best work, but it leverages Niven's "Known Space" stories to present a compelling vision: a massive artifact left behind by an unknown race, so large that it has more livable space than any race would ever need, so ancient that its denizens had forgotten it was an artifact. This wasn't an entirely new idea, and in fact Tony Rothman did something similar in far more obsessive detail the next year with his interesting, but far less compelling, The World is Round. (Nor was it as well fact-checked.) But its combination of sheer scope, inventive technology, and sociological observation -- and its sly references to other "Known Space" works -- made it a remarkable book that spawned a number of imitators.
I was probably 13 or 14 when I picked this book up, either at a garage sale or a used bookstore. It looked intriguing -- and turned out to be really strong, despite some flaws. Sapir's protagonist works his way up from slavery to become a free man and the premier gladiator in Domitian's Rome. After disgracing Domitian, he is marched up to the frozen North and, er, frozen, only to be discovered and revived in the late 20th century. (This device is not very plausible, but at least it's more plausible than the device in Bellamy's classic utopian novel Looking Backwards, in which the protagonist is hypnotized to sleep and revived a century later!) In any case, the gladiator's story is told as a series of flashbacks interspersed with stories from a variety of perspectives: a Texan geologist working for the oil company that finds the frozen gladiator, a Russian doctor who is the foremost expert on cryogenics, and a nun who happens to be fluent in spoken Latin. I'm not sure which was more intriguing to me: the Roman flashbacks, which were quite detailed, or the gladiator's coming to grips with a modern world that seems both bizarre and strikingly familiar to him.
I'm pretty sure I read 1984 in 1981, when I was eleven, in anticipation of the upcoming date. (The novel was arbitrarily set in 1984 because Orwell was writing in 1948.) 1984 is a classic, of course, and certainly in the H.G. Wells dystopian mold. But it was also deeply disturbing to me: the pervasive surveillance, the control over language that was meant to yield the control of thought, the constant tailoring of history, and eventually the psychological breaking of the protagonist. When confronted with his deepest fear, he cracks, and at the end "he loved Big Brother" -- with no God to appeal to, no heroic sacrifice to make, no hope and no escape. Of course, reading this in 1981, I was also reading it through the lens of what I knew about the Soviet Union, so it was scarily real. And that brings us to the next and last book:
Although I had read plenty of dystopian novels by the age of 15, and heard plenty about the travails in the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago -- which I primarily read at endless swim meets during the summer of my 15th year, I recall -- really brought the horrors of the Soviet experiment home to me. Like 1984, Solzhenitsyn's descriptions of the secret police, show trials, and labor camps were told without hope of appeal or justice. But whereas the secret police of 1984 were psychological surgeons, the Stasi were butchers, interested not in assent but in convictions and punishment. The dry, pervasive fear that Solzhenitsyn described stayed with me, and is brought back forcefully whenever I read biographies of Bakhtin or Wertsch's account of double consciousness -- or whenever I read about activity theory's development in the Soviet Union.
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Originally posted: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:12:11
Experience Research and Social Change: Methods Beyond the Mainstream, 2nd edition
by Sandra Kirby, Lorraine Greaves, Colleen Reid
Amazon lists this book title as Experience Research and Social Change, but on the cover it's simply Experience Research Social Change. I think someone at Amazon was attempting to make sense out of an unparseable title, one that's repeated frequently in the book with no explanation. How can we sensibly parse it? Are these three concepts mashed together? ("Experience! Research! Social Change!") Is experience a noun, an adjective ("Experience research"), or an imperative verb ("(you should) experience research")? So many questions, but no answers in the text.
So the title is frustrating, but no more so for me than the book in general.
For one thing, it's advertised as accessible for undergraduates, but the language is fairly dense and seems theoretically advanced -- and the actual methods discussions seem too sketchy for an introductory text, meaning that it would have to be used in conjunction with a more detailed how-to.
Another issue I had was that the book really doesn't live up to its subtitle, "methods beyond the mainstream": the methods generally amount to the well-worn trinity of interviews, observations, and artifact analysis that have been with us lo these many years, and never reach the more innovative work done with participatory design, user-centered design, or related methodologies. The thing that pushes these methods "beyond the mainstream" is the commitment to coparticipation, which may have been radical when the first edition came out but no longer is. The closest the authors get to going beyond the mainstream is in their discussion of "other approaches" in chapter 7 -- and that discussion takes place in a series of gray boxes deliberately set off from the main text.
A third issue I had with the text is its mistaken belief -- unfortunately all too common in action research and related approaches -- that one must identify with the participants and commit to their aims in order to engage in coparticipant research with them. In practice, this can amount to avoiding genuine dialogues and instead using research participants as mouthpieces for one's own beliefs. The authors do engage with this problem to a very limited extent, asking with Katherine Borland, "What should we do when we women disagree?" and following up with an account of an interview in which an informant turned out to be antisemitic. They don't provide much guidance here beyond the uncomfortable recommendation to "acknowledge differences." But of course these differences -- large and small -- will turn up when interviewing any population. Women don't all think alike -- no population does, unless you're investigating incredibly constricted questions with a very small population, and even then it's questionable. I'd argue that action researchers should instead take a page from the ACLU, which finds common ground in the most unlikely places -- joining hands with the KKK to defend free speech rights, for instance, although the two organizations agree on little else. A less evangelical, more ecumenical approach could provide more insights -- and could lead to some innovations that are truly beyond the mainstream.
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Originally posted: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:35:15
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today
Max Boot, a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, really has the perfect name for a war historian. (I expected his dust cover photo to look like Nick Fury; instead, he looks like a bookish Cary Elwes.) He also has a strong background for the work: senior fellow in national security studies at the Council for Foreign Relations, advisor to the DoD on transformational issues, lecturer at military schools. And here, he pulls off the impressive feat of writing nearly 500 pages (not including footnotes) on war history and making it both interesting and accessible to lay readers.
Why would lay readers be interested? More specifically, why would scholars in rhetoric and technology studies be interested? Yes, the book is certainly about warfare, something that affects us all. But more broadly, it's about the relationships among technology, organization, and society that have been debated in fields such as science and technology studies (STS). Boot provides a short discussion of technological determinism, but the real contribution is in the examples he draws from 500 years of warfare, which demonstrate that superior technologies don't usually carry the day -- they have to be mobilized with appropriate organizational structures, deployed with appropriate doctrines, strategies, tactics, operations, and logistics.
Such changes have quickened considerably. At the beginning of the history Boot presents, technological and organizational changes were slow: the British used "Brown Bess" muskets for 150 years, for instance. But the pace quickened considerably: not surprisingly, half of the book is devoted to the changes in the last 50 years, and three chapters recount just the last 15 years. For those who have been following current events avidly, these chapters are fascinating, providing a detailed and even-handed analysis of how the military has been transformed to meet different threats.
In particular, Boot points out that the United States' current military research budget is larger than the total budget of any other country, and argues that the current unparalleled supremacy of the US military is what makes the global economy possible, by ruling out most conventional warfare and therefore giving people faith in the stability of nations, national relations, and infrastructure. But Boot also warns that, as he showed earlier in the book, military and technological supremacy can be easily undermined by new technological, organizational, tactical, and strategic developments. He points to al Qaeda as one example, and China's "unrestricted warfare" as another. And he drives home the lesson of Iraq: a military that is configured to win conventional wars may not be well adapted to win asymmetric wars.
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Originally posted: Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:04:06
Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design
by Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi
Activity theory is complex, intricate, and often difficult to understand, and until now, no full-length text has managed to provide a good solid understanding of what it entails. That's especially problematic since AT has been adopted by people in so many fields and used to do so many things, leading to some conceptual drift. When I taught a graduate course on activity theory and human-computer interaction a couple of years ago, I ended up using Nardi's Context and Consciousness and excerpts from several other works, but students rightly objected that the threads of AT had not been brought together in a coherent way.
If I were to teach that course again, I'd use this book. Kaptelinin and Nardi have worked hard to develop a single text that lays out AT for those without much background in it, and in general they do a really fine job. In particular, the chapters that summarize AT's principles, development, and treatment of objects are all quite strong. The case studies, which are largely based on published articles, are also valuable but are sometimes not well integrated with the overview and theory chapters. But that's okay -- the authors do a great job of referring to external AT studies and resources, so readers can easily find additional, relevant articles and cases.
So what does the book say about AT? The authors emphasize AT's coherence and its emphasis on human intentionality, themes that contrast with the characteristics the authors see in rival frameworks such as distributed cognition and actor-network theory (see, e.g., p.10). They also discuss how AT's new interest in Bakhtinian dialogism and multivocality (p.23) help to position it to study recent changes in work, since "work is more distributed, more contingent, less stable" (p.26). In fact, in their chapter on objects, they do a really nice job of discussing "polymotivation" (p.138), a key move in addressing the issue of networked work organization. And their chapter discussing AT's development and discontinuities is tremendously helpful for anyone who has wondered how AT relates to Vygotsky and Leont'ev and Bakhtin, or whether Engestrom's triangles are an essential part of an AT analysis, or why they're called "objects."
The authors also discuss AT in relationship to other postcognitivist theories in Chapters 9 and 10, particularly actor-network theory and distributed cognition. Bonnie was kind enough to let me review draft copies of these two chapters, and also kind enough to cite my work in them. My reaction, then and now, is that these chapters do important work -- but they tend to take AT's goals as the gold standard for comparison and criticize the other approaches for falling short of those standards. Since ANT and DC have very different objects (to use AT's terms), of course they fall short. I should say here that I consider myself an activity theorist, and I have a strong interest in individual human activity, development, and ingenuity (as the authors themselves point out by kindly citing my work). But I do think that other projects can be pursued and that examining their separate objects could have produced a more amicable comparison.
Despite that wrinkle, the comparison is tremendously valuable, especially in Chapter 10, where the authors compare treatments of agency. When activity theorists criticize how symmetrical approaches handle agency, the obvious counterclaim is that in emphasizing individuals so strongly, activity theorists actually ignore the incredibly important concept of mediation developed by Vygotsky. Isn't one obvious implication of mediation that cultural activity is mediated activity, i.e., activity that only exists because heterogeneous elements such as workers, practices, artifacts, and material objects form assemblages that mutually change each other? That is, doesn't AT point to a form of symmetry?
Kaptelinin and Nardi, anticipating that counterclaim, furnish what is perhaps the most important new development in the book. They produce a typology of agents (p.244), breaking down the concept of agency into several subtypes and demonstrating how these are operationalized differently through different agents. For instance,
This really is quite brilliant, as it nails down some of the slippages in the term "agency" that have allowed actor-network theorists to claim agency for things. For instance, Latour argues elegantly that speed bumps have agency just as much as people do, since these "sleeping policemen" are delegated the responsibilities that human policemen have, and often discharge those responsibilities more faithfully. But no, this chart says, Latour is confusing two very different types of agency. We all intuitively know this, the argument goes, but now we can point to exactly where the confusion is and we can avoid that mistake. Or so the argument goes; I'm still processing it.
Well. As you can tell, I'm really quite impressed with this smart and timely book. Although I've spent a bit of time in this review questioning assumptions in a couple of the chapters, partly because I've been so engaged with them lately, the book overall is a huge contribution to the AT literature. I'll certainly refer to it, cite it over and over, and think hard about its implications.
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Originally posted: Sat, 04 Nov 2006 10:02:30
Interactive Qualitative Analysis: A Systems Method for Qualitative Research
by Norvell Northcutt, Danny McCoy
We've seen a lot of research methods and methodologies recently that involve collecting and analyzing data along with research participants. Participatory design, action research, and contextual design are three examples. The latter, in fact, borrows much from TQM methods such as the K-J Method and affinity diagrams. Interactive Qualitative Analysis draws from the same well, outlining a systematic qualitative approach to collaborative data analysis that leverages those TQM methods and strives for true mutual participation in data analysis.
Written by two researchers associated with the School of Education here at the University of Texas, the book describes Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) in detail. IQA is based in systems theory and dialectics (p.xxii). In fact, they approvingly quote Engels' laws of dialectics in their description of IQA (p.14). In fact, they get quite carried away with dialectics throughout, making the same sorts of overreaching claims about is that Engels likes to make: "This ebb and flow is the result of the dialectical nature of both history and reality itself" (p.102). (They also use the dialectical ground to take some potshots at postmodernists, although they make conciliatory noises as well.)
Essentially, IQA is a phenomenological approach in which focus groups produce affinity diagrams describing a shared phenomenon, an affinity that involves both open and axial coding. This coding leads to interview protocols, which in turn guide individual interviews. The interviews and affinities then lead to mindmaps, or systems diagrams that describe the phenomenon.
The authors illustrate IQA by applying it to an IQA course -- an extremely confusing example, because it's very difficult to tell when the authors are talking about IQA and when they are describing what students said about IQA. Really, this was a bad move for the authors to make, and they compound the problem with too many stories, transcripts, and lists. They also compound it with distracting and generally unsuccessful attempts at humor. (One footnote reads: "The interviewer was, of course, one of the authors, but he could easily have been the other one" (p.423).)
That's really too bad, because IQA is in many ways an intriguing approach that complements the other approaches I mention above. Although it does not appear to support observational work (being primarily phenomenological), it does pose some interesting possibilities for those who do phenomenological work, particularly in its adoption of TQM techniques and its stance in favor of co-analysis with participants. The use of mindmaps is also intriguing, although the authors appear to overrely on them and equate them with mental models (always dicey when you're talking about more than one person).
In summary, IQA is a really interesting and potentially useful method for qualitative analysis carried out with the participants. It's more focused on rigor than contextual design is, but it's also far less modest in its claims and far less observational. If I were to use it, it would be either for strictly defined phenomenological work or as a component of a more integrated study, and my claims would be considerably more hedged than the ones the authors present in their examples.
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Originally posted: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:59:23
Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
In 2002, Lawrence Lessig argued before the US Supreme Court that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act should be declared unconstitutional. He lost the legal argument. This book, essentially, is his response: a policy argument that attempts to rectify his loss of the legal argument.
So what's the argument? Lessig describes the problem: Copyright, which originated as a strongly limited right to one's own work over a relatively short period, has been progressively extended in a number of ways. Most obviously, Congress has enacted a series of rolling extensions that, as long as they continue, will result in de facto permanent copyright. But copyright has also been extended in other dimensions, due to changes in distribution systems (video, radio, electronic). Additional restrictions have been built into software, and the act of circumventing copyright protection itself has been made illegal. Lessig argues that these changes, in total, mean that an increasing amount of our cultural heritage is being taken off the table and commoditized -- and worse, works that cannot be commoditized, that will not pay for themselves (e.g., less popular Laurel and Hardy films), are decaying for lack of funds to covert them to more permanent media. One big problem is that there's no central registry for copyright holders, so it's sometimes impossible to determine who holds the copyright and thus impossible to get permission to use their work.
Lessig responds with a suggestion for a compromise: make copyright a fixed 50-year term, then extend it via a nominal fee (say, $1 a year) that involves registering the copyright holder.
I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. But as a policy issue, several things occur to me. I'm no legal scholar or policy expert, but I suspect copyright has not evolved enough to keep up with various sorts of changes in how works are designed and produced, and I further suspect that Lessig's proposal only exacerbates these problems:
Anyway, the book is fascinating and, as you can tell, thought-provoking.
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Originally posted: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:10:24
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
This book is pretty light reading, but also quite interesting. Although the book is mainly about Google, Battelle starts far pre-Google to discuss search algorithms, Internet startups, and ad pricing structures, and he manages to do all of this quite compellingly. If you've wondered just how Google gets those results, this book provides a pretty good lay introduction. And if you are not quite sure how Google makes money off of a free service, you should definitely take a look.
On the other hand, this sort of book has a very short shelf life. Battelle's speculative chapter about the future of search seems alternately dated and oversold, and his afterword barely mentions the groundwork that Google had already laid for moving into office software for small businesses. But what he does discuss gives us an idea of how Google will continue to strategize, particularly in the small business market. Check it out if you'd like to get a quick understanding of search and what it means.
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Originally posted: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:51:21
Coming off of a very busy couple of months, and with the Net Work manuscript complete and being reviewed by a couple of good friends, I've finally been able to get back to my readings.
They start with the latest TCQ, which is quite a good issue.
Zachry, M. (2006). An interview with Bonnie A. Nardi. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4):483?503.
Mark Zachry's interview with Bonnie Nardi is really interesting to me, not just in terms of her research trajectory and her development of activity theory, but also in terms of her thoughts on methodology -- something that is fresh in my mind, since I taught a qualitative research seminar this spring and have been developing methods sections for various grant proposals over the summer.
In terms of qualitative research, Bonnie says:
Qualitative analysis for me is a very open-ended
kind of enterprise. So, what I usually like to do is get my interview text and my field notes in front of me in some reasonable form where I can kind of read through them, like a novel. And I don?t look for metaphors or anything else. I just read them and hope that things are starting to work in my unconscious. And then I go back and do something much more systematic where I look for themes, or metaphors, or whatever kinds of constructs that I think are really important.
And a moment later:
No, I am not that systematic. I am a very old school anthropologist. I don?t use computer-based analytical tools. I don?t count very much. Sometimes I count things, but mostly I am looking for the themes and the sensibilities that I find in the transcripts, or in my field notes, or on the websites.
This is indeed old-school anthropology, the sort of intuitive work that hearkens back to ethnography's roots in travel writing, and that has been critiqued by later methodologies that focus on analytical rigor through strict analytical tools and procedures (e.g., grounded theory). Nevertheless, Bonnie's work has considerable analytical rigor -- as we'll see in a moment -- that is perhaps intuited and perhaps guided by her theoretical rigor.
Bonnie's rigor comes partially through immersion, and at the time of the article she was immersed in World of Warcraft, which she characterizes as an introductory step to global collaboration:
And, although it is only a game, certainly, I am interested in the fact that people are learning to interact with people that they don?t know, and that they are never going to see. It is interesting that they learn how to get along with these other players and organize themselves and do things together. I think this is really going to be important in the future because I think we are going to be doing a lot more of that. All the problems we?ve created, many of which come from technology, are global in nature, and we can?t solve them in our own little neighborhoods and our own backyards. We have to collaborate with other people.
She goes on to discuss the implications for networks, and particularly for "placeless organizations," which are "organizations that have a transformative object and which do work in shifting multiple sites." And "what really grabbed my attention was the fact that people are trying to create either national or global change through these placeless organizations, and they are placeless because the world is a big place and if you only pick one place, you can?t effect the kind of change necessarily that you want to."
Which brings us to the next reading:
Nardi, B. A. (In press). Placeless organizations: Collaborating for transformation. Mind, Culture, and Activity.
Bonnie was kind enough to share this manuscript with me; it'll be published in early 2007. Here, she elaborates on the concept of placeless organizations, which are characterized as "sites and generators of learning at a large scale." The concept here -- which goes a long way toward studying transformative global net work -- hinges on starting with the object (in the activity theoretical sense) rather than with organizational boundaries. The notion is somewhat similar to actor-network theory's dictum to "follow the actors," but more focused in that objects are a bit better defined in the activity-theoretical sense (although Bonnie acknowledges that the term still has a lot of slippage). One important deliverable in this article is a detailed taxonomy of different types of organizations, including placeless organizations, distributed teams, virtual organizations, corporate hierarchies, knots, communities of practice, and social movements.
I don't want to say too much about an unpublished article, but I look forward to reading and citing the final version when it comes out.
Engestrom, Y. Current State and Future Strategy of the Center
Speaking of these sorts of organizations, I was interested to see what's happening at the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research in Helsinki, where researchers have been developing third- and fourth-generation activity theory to deal with the sorts of distributed organizations Bonnie talks about above. This PowerPoint presentation outlines the Center's recent strategic focus and its possible foci through 2011, and may provide an interesting glimpse into what's coming next. What strikes me is that these issues primarily deal with how to develop activity theory to address a globally networked world in which traditional organizational boundaries are insufficient to characterize human activity. In particular, the Center will be studying issues such as
These themes complement the work recently coming out of the Center, focusing on horizontal learning.
Horizontal learning has become a really interesting focus in recent "third-generation" activity theory, primarily because work organization is changing: "the world of work is is increasingly organized in ways that require horizontal movement and boundary crossing." No longer is the focus on learning exclusively vertical, that is, a progression within the bounds of a single activity or discipline. Increasingly, we learn across overlapping activities. To explore this issue, Engestrom turns -- as he so often does -- to a comparison with another construct, examining how it handles the issue theoretically and methodologically, then discussing how it can inform activity theory. Talk about "learning by expanding." Engestrom sees cognitive trails as an empirically useful construct, in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari's construct of "rhizomes," which he critiques for being too metaphorical to be applied in empirical research.
Sun, H. (2006). The triumph of users: Achieving cultural usability goals. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15(4):483?504.
And that brings us back to the issue of TCQ that I have been reading. Based on Huatong Sun's award-winning dissertation, this article uses activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies to examine how Chinese and US phone users enact text messaging. (British cultural studies -- particularly articulation theory -- owe a debt to Deleuze and Guattari and their notion of rhizomes.) If you've read her dissertation, this article won't be news to you -- but if you haven't, start with the article first, because it provides a cogent summary of the dissertation's themes and underscores how far ahead Huatong is in terms of understanding how intercultural communication issues interact with usability and technology.
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Originally posted: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:15:09
by Jon Lebkowsky, Mitch Ratcliffe
I've been delaying blogging this book review because a decent review would take more time than I think the book is worth -- and because my colleague Mark Longaker has already written an incisive review that will appear in Technical Communication Quarterly in a few issues. But I'll summarize my impressions here.
This collection, written just before and just after Howard Dean's implosion in the 2004 primaries, varies in quality even more than a normal collection does. Some chapters, like Clay Shirky's, are really smart and insightful. Others, like James F. Moore's "The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head," are just awful in their reductionism and naivete. Still others present interesting case studies of community-based technologies, especially Drupal, which was used to power many of Dean's community sites.
The book itself is essentially a print version of a collection of online documents, and that leads to some charming formatting and copyediting mistakes. Often block quotes are not set off from the rest of the text, so we have to guess who's actually speaking at any point. Hyperlinks are formatted as underlined, but of course without the actual links, leading to sentences such as "See this about Allbritton's breakthrough."
Overall, the collection is so situated in its originating time period that it is dated; only a few pieces manage to escape that situating and become more widely useful.
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(2003)Network (2008)
Topsight 2.0 (2018), in print and Kindle versions.
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