Administering "paternity tests" in qualitative research: or, creating a rigorous account of lineage that would convince Maury Povich's audience

So I got into an online discussion a while back on the question of whether coworking can trace its lineage back to other forms of loosely organized work. It's an open question, though I am skeptical. The comments on that post became really interesting, surfacing differences in assumptions and proofs. And the discussion got me thinking about how qualitative researchers establish such lineages -- an important discussion in itself, especially for people who do the type of work I do, examining workplaces, workplace development, and workplace contradictions.

Unfortunately it looks like the last four comments in the thread were lost. Rather than trying to reconstruct the conversation, I want to take the opportunity to explore the question: how can qualitative researchers establish developmental lineages? Or: How do we test for paternity? And to focus the discussion, how might a paternity test look for coworking? (The last question is not just abstract, since I'm planning to study coworking this summer and fall.)

Let's put the abstract question this way:

Does phenomenon B descend from phenomenon A? That is, did A develop into B? Did A cause B? Are they genetically related, with a specific lineage?

Here are three examples:

• Coworking (see the blog post). Does modern coworking trace its "lineage" back to pre-industrial forms of work? Is it descended from those forms of work, now reemerging? Or is it actually a different, unrelated phenomenon developing from more current work forms?


• Interface elements (See Tracing Genres through Organizations). Did elements of a modern interface descend from previous, pre-automation genres?


• Objectives (See Network). Can we trace current understandings of "universal service" back to previous understandings? Can we relate these to changes in markets and regulations?

How can we answer these questions?

• One common-sense impulse is to look for resemblance. (A and B have these things in common.) But resemblance isn't enough. The obvious rejoinder is to point out dissimilarities. (A and B also have these enormous differences.) After all, resemblance is often coincidental - and often in the eye of the beholder. (That's the tack I began to follow in my first comment on the coworking post.)
• Another common-sense impulse is to look for chronology. (B came after A.) But by itself, this is post hoc reasoning. I was born after JFK, but that doesn't mean JFK was my father. Mayan writing developed after Phonecian writing, but that doesn't mean that Mayan writing originated in Phonecia. Coworking came chronologically after other work that occurs among independent workers sharing a space, but that doesn't mean it descended from that work.

So we get a sense of why these two approaches are shaky. How do we get to a less shaky, more verifiable argument for paternity? Here's an analogy.

Analogy: Who's the Father?

Suppose you're watching a daytime talk show, like Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. The theme -- a recurring theme -- is: "My baby's father won't admit he's the father!"

You may be familiar with how this episode goes, because they all go basically the same way. The couple argues:

• The baby does/does not resemble the accused father. ("Look, he has his father's eyes.")
• The baby's conception does/does not fit the chronology. ("We got together and nine months later the baby was born.")

Oh, and the couple leans heavily on ethos. ("I would never do that." "I swear on my life that that never happened." "Believe me, I know!")

But the audience isn't credulous. They listen to these arguments for entertainment, and they have their favorites, but they know the question will be settled at the end of the episode -- with a paternity test. Without it, these arguments don't settle anything.

Conducting Paternity Tests in Qualitative Research

So, by themselves, resemblance and chronology don't constitute a paternity test. What does? How do we get to a rigorous explanation of paternity?

The question is important because research is itself an argument. And as with any other argument, you have to play the believing-doubting game in order to make that argument solid: you spend some time believing your emergent argument, then you doubt it and push yourself to find evidence that can turn back those doubts. A worthwhile audience will be skeptical -- and speaking as someone who reviews a lot of journal manuscripts, I am always skeptical of the methodology, no matter how banal the conclusions -- so you must be skeptical first and deepen your argument as much as you can. That skepticism, applied methodically, produces rigor. As my colleagues and I put it in a recent article, "Healthy research and a healthy disciplinary matrix for research involve developing a coherent and densely textured argument as a symbiotic cluster; it involves creating rhetorical rigor" (Fleckenstein et al. 2008, p.411).

So let's go back to my first book, Tracing Genres through Organizations. There, I was trying to establish the lineage of interface elements. So how did I test the paternity?

I went back to the basics: I triangulated different data sources in order to validate and deepen my analysis.

1. Artifacts. I started with the artifacts - the interface elements of GIS-ALAS (maps, menus, and dialog boxes), PC-ALAS (menus, dialog boxes), and Mainframe-ALAS (punchcards, printouts), as well as pre-automation forms and reports. I put these in chronological order and looked for similarities - but I went farther by rigorously examining dissimilarities. By doing this, I was able to
   
   • establish a set of unchanging and changing characteristics.
   • establish similarities with other preexisting artifacts (e.g., interface elements such as dialog boxes)
   • construct a reasonable story of how and why characteristics were mingled as new interfaces were developed (e.g., they had to break up this printed form's questions into two dialog boxes in order to make it work in a dialog box format)
   • establish not just a chronology or similarities, but a chain of custody in which characteristics were passed from one interface to the next.
   
   That gives us a decent story, but the story needs to be tested.


2. Documents. I then went to any documents I could find that could shed light on the transitions between interfaces. These included software manuals for the three computer programs, but also newsletter accounts, written records of the development, and in the case of GIS-ALAS, the thesis and the drafted dissertation of the developer. Doing this allowed me to
   
   • validate my reasonable story of the transitions (and in some cases, correct and deepen it)
   • gain insight into the specific decisions that led to adopting characteristics
   • validate the chain of custody of characteristics
   
   Okay, but I like to verify my verifications. So I took the obvious next step: I asked.


3. Interviews. Finally, I talked to people who had been involved in the activity and, when possible, the development of the different systems. Doing this allowed me to
   • gather more documents (see step 2), allowing me to further validate the record
   • gather unwritten history - although recollections are variable and always have to be triangulated, they can shed new light on how pieces of the documented history fit together
   • validate my reasonable story of the transitions (and in some cases, correct and deepen it)
   • gain insight into the specific decisions that led to adopting characteristics
   • validate the chain of custody of characteristics

At the end of the process, I had a verifiable story. Each part of the story, each transition - that is, each assertion I made about the lineage - was supported by at least two and usually three types of data, triangulated so that I could really pin down what happened. And the parts that I couldn't verify, I either left out or hedged so that readers knew where the weak parts of the chronology were. Based on that study, I was able to establish that some of the interface elements were actually hybrid genres, i.e., text types that could trace their lineage back to two or more separate texts originating in two or more separate activities.

In other words, I had a paternity test -- and more than that, I was able to establish the entire family tree.

Lineages and Rhizomes

Now, paternity tests and lineages are fairly restricted ways of thinking about these issues. Sometimes people enact work or organize themselves or use tools based on experiences that they idiosyncratically transfer from one focal point to an entirely unrelated one. Imagine, for instance, someone using a disused software manual as first base in an impromptu softball game -- or someone being unable to interpret a GIS-ALAS map properly because they think of the dots on the map as separate pushpins.

Issues like these are what pushed me toward looking at rhizomes in Network. Rhizomes are "anti-genealogies," as Deleuze and Guattari put it: they constitute associations, sometimes entirely idiosyncratic ones and sometimes ones that form interferences with each other. These interact with the "paternity tests" in definite and observable ways - they are often implicated in discoordinations and breakdowns, for instance - but they don't constitute lineages in themselves. (How can they? They're "anti-genealogies"). John Law does a great job of discussing rhizomes and the problems they pose for research in his book After Method, a book that has become very familiar to my grad students.

Rhizomes seem to completely destabilize lineages, and therefore "paternity tests." Think in terms of Ulmer's "chora," or resonations among entirely different meanings for the same word. Or in terms of "genre ecologies" in Tracing Genres through Organizations, in which a given text can represent a hybrid of two or more different genres, each with its own logic, assumptions, and associations. Or in terms of "splicing" in Network, in which whole activities are sutured together to form new, destabilized and dynamic ones. But in all these cases, unless they're completely tacit and idiosyncratic, these associations can be isolated and traced through some careful interview work and the right analytical technique -- grounded theory, for instance, excels at building a picture of a loose, slippery concept. That doesn't mean that everything can be simply reduced to a line of development, especially since qualities emerge from the interplay/hybridization/splicing among different lines of development. But it does mean that the careful researcher can still tease out these lines of development and build a case for each, separating the historical-developmental characteristics from the emergent/dynamic ones.

Giving Coworking a Paternity Test

So let's apply this approach to the case at hand. Can we give coworking a paternity test?

Sure. We can determine possible lines of development by looking at similarity and chronology, and we can verify those lines through our paternity test, careful triangulated research.

One obvious way would be to interview the coworkers. For instance, in I'm Outta Here, the authors interview people who were involved in the early coworking movement, turning up a number of precedents. These precedents don't stretch back to trades and guilds, but they do make definite connections to mid-20th century experiments in artist collectives. Interviews like these might at least establish some perceived lineage. Of course, you have to be careful to avoid feeding answers to your informants, who might be eager to see connections to older forms of work and who may express affinities or ideas rather than actual lines of development. "We're like a clan of nomads" is very different from "coworking can trace its lineage directly to nomadic clans."

If the interviews suggest a lineage, we could then try to establish a line of cultural development for that lineage. For instance, if a participant claims that he sees coworking as developing from artist colonies and collectives (I'm Outta Here p.20), how did that development work? Can we establish that an art collective turned into a coworking site, or its members migrated to that site, or its principles migrated to a professional organization to which workers belonged before they started their own coworking site? If a participant claims that coworking is the descendant of guild work, can we establish that guilds' tools, principles, or ideas survived in (say) workers' unions and were revived when union members became coworkers? Do these ideas, tools, or organizational structures have a traceable chain of custody? Or are they just similar, but developmentally separate, solutions to similar problems?

Finally, we could look at documents. Was the business plan of a coworking site influenced by a manifesto written by an art collective? Was the site's layout explicitly patterned on older studios?

If we can establish and triangulate evidence that allows you to clearly delineate these lines of development, their resonances and interferences, then we've successfully administered the paternity test.

Parting Thoughts

I'm really pushing here for an understanding of research as an argument, a rigorous argument that should emerge from the data and that should be hedged appropriately. That approach sometimes seems unnatural to us, especially for graduate students who are first beginning research: they know that research is unfamiliar to them, they're still working on mastering it, and they expect a lot of charity from their readers. That charity should be lent -- but only in the early stages, only by instructors who can mentor the beginning researchers and guide them into asking the proper questions. When research becomes "real," taken seriously, it also needs to be a solid enough argument to fly. And sometimes that means scaling back the scope of the research and its claims.

Certainly that doesn't mean cutting off speculation. But speculation should be clearly marked, heavily bracketed, and usually should appear in the Implications section, where the researcher can suggest it as a new research question.

But when you can, turn speculation into verification. Don't restrict yourself to saying "Don't you see his eyes? He looks just like his father!" Because you can expect your readers to be at least as smart and critical as Maury Povich's audience.

MIT Press' new digital distribution portal: CISnet

My first book is at MIT Press, and they've made the first chapter available for free online ever since launching the book. (Not coincidentally, when people cite Tracing Genres through Organizations, they usually seem to cite Chapter 1.) But MIT Press has now made that book and many others available through CISnet. This is from the email they sent me:

As part of the MIT Press’s ongoing exploration of digital publishing opportunities, we are launching CISnet, a new electronic collection of MIT Press titles in computer and information science. I write to let you know that one or more of your books is included in the collection. CISnet, the MIT Press Computer and Information Science Library, can be found at http://cisnet.mit.edu. It is the Press’s second library of e-books in a single subject area and follows the model of CogNet, our popular online collection in the cognitive sciences. CISnet currently contains about 170 titles hosted in PDF by technology partner Tizra, Inc. It offers the ability to read these books from any Web-enabled computer and to search within them as well as across the collection.

I've cruised through my book online, and it looks pretty good. They're shooting for institutional subscriptions, but you can buy individual ones too. Check it out.

Reading :: Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (7th Edition)
By Joseph M. Williams

A short review. I still have the third edition of this book, which I used in a technical editing class (I think) in my MA program. It had a big impact on my writing style. The seventh edition is similarly illuminating, and it's also genuinely pleasurable to read.

On the other hand, Williams' own style is a bit talky for me. I lean toward much more spare prose, and I take a harder line against expletives. That hard line probably stems from my tech comm training and orientation.

In any case, a great book. I'm about to take a look at the short version, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace (3rd Edition).

Reading :: The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive
By Peter F. Drucker

I've linked to the latest version of The Effective Executive on Amazon.com, but I reviewed the 1967 version. That's right, this version was written the same year Cream released Disraeli Gears and the same year Star Trek aired its most respected episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." I bring that up because, like those two examples, this version of The Effective Executive is firmly situated in its time, yet surprisingly relevant.

On one hand, The Effective Executive occupies a world in which the executive is always male and usually assisted by female secretaries as he steers the course of large manufacturing corporations. This world seems increasingly irrelevant in 2009. On the other hand, the executive is a prototype knowledge worker, someone who contributes to analyzing information and developing ideas - someone whose contributions cannot be easily monitored or counted in the sense that scientific management had enabled managers to monitor and count manufacturing output. Now that world is very relevant in 2009, and its problems are fresh and largely unsolved. The two world collide continually, as in this sentence early in the book: "The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness." (p.4).

When you read this book, then, think of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, in which a spacegoing society uses what appear to us to be relatively backward computer and communications technology while managing casual space travel and faster-than-light jumps. Ignore the 1967-era language and examples, and you'll see a lot of contemporary, even forward-looking concepts. In fact, you may find that The Effective Executive is the Big Bang of popular management books. Here's Drucker's list of the five practices of the effective executive - along with more recent books that pick up and extend each practice.

1. "Effective executives know where their time goes." (p.23 and Chapter 2) - See David Allen's Getting Things Done


2. "Effective executives focus on outward contribution." (p.24 and Chapter 3) - Again, see David Allen's Getting Things Done


3. "Effective executives build on strengths - their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do." (p.24 and Chapter 4). See Marcus Buckingham's Go Put Your Strengths to Work


4. "Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results." (p.24 and Chapter 5) - See Jim Collins' Good to Great.


5. "Effective executives ... know that [making effective decisions] is, above all, a matter of system - of the right steps in the right sequence" (p.24 and Chapter 6) - See any text on project management, especially Scott Berkun's The Art of Project Management.

In many ways, these other books have simply taken and developed the principles that The Effective Executive listed in 1967. Since knowledge work has spread much more widely, the book still seems fresh in parts in 2009, and maybe even more relevant. In particular, Drucker points out that "in a knowledge areas there are no superiors or subordinates ... yet organization requires a hierarchy," and in this contradiction, "the knowledge worker ... is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair" (p.173). And therefore "the position, function and fulfillment of the knowledge worker is the social question of the twentieth century" (p.173). Knowledge workers need not just economic rewards, but also achievement, fulfillment, and values (p.174). Still true, perhaps more so. Also true - more true than ever - is Drucker's assessment that education and effectiveness are the only competitive advantages that the United States possesses over other nations (p.5).

On the other hand, I don't think that Drucker in 1967 anticipated the effects of widespread knowledge work coupled with loose networked organizations. His focus is on the executive who can shape the organization around himself [sic] and who can strategically plan over decades of engagement. So in the end, The Effective Executive can only point us to further development and evaluation of its principles for the light networked organizations we are starting to see. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it.

Newspapers as nonprofits?

Don't hold your breath. The third paragraph is the important one:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs.

Sekai Camera is coming to Android

Tonchidot unveiled Sekai Camera for iPhone last year, a social tagging application that uses the iPhone's camera to view the world with tags overlaid over the camera's image so that you can see how others have tagged your environment. It was a big hit. But it was only for the iPhone, and the iPhone doesn't have a way to detect where the camera's pointing, so the tags can't be associated with a specific orientation. You go to the tagged spot, then flick your finger to hunt through the tags associated with that spot.

Soon afterwards, T-Mobile's G1 was unveiled, and one of the first applications we could download was Wikitude, a sightseeing application that grabs your location (from GPS) and orientation (from the compass), then overlays the camera image with information about points of interest. For instance, if you're in my front lawn and you point your G1 south-southwest, the screen overlays the live image with points indicating the University of Texas and the Elisabet Ney Museum - and tells you how far away they are. Great for sightseeing and orienting oneself, but too large a scale for doing what Sekai Camera is trying to do. But notice that the orientation problem is solved due to the G1's internal camera.

This week MobileCrunch reports that Sekai Camera is releasing a version for Android - and it takes advantage of the internal compass. That's great. But - if the majority of tagging is done through the iPhone, I don't think that those tags will be captured with an orientation.

2009: Coworking's year of explosive growth?

Noting signals that coworking is gathering steam, Todd Sundsted predicts that coworking spaces will grow from 70 in 2008 to over 200 by the end of 2009. The reasons are two sides to the same coin: real estate is suddenly easier to negotiate and big companies are laying off.

"Ditch the Valley, Run for the Hills"

... was a South by Southwest Interactive panel in which panelists discussed startups in Silicon Valley vs. Austin, Shanghai, and elsewhere. Austin Startup has a nice summary.

Coworking in Austin: Launchpad Coworking + Cafe

After the Future of Work Salon, Michael Funk of Launchpad Coworking + Cafe took some of us on a tour. Launchpad Coworking has been in the works for a while, but the current credit crunch has made it very difficult for this space to get finished out. It's about 90% done; most of the remaining work will involve finishing out the space - flooring, furniture, etc.

The three coworking spaces in Austin are aimed at very different demographics. Launchpad Coworking is aimed at a high-margin demographic: corporate accounts, for instance. And the environs reflect that. Launchpad is on the ground floor of 800 Brazos, with condos upstairs, and they expect that they will attract people who live downtown and work at Launchpad Coworking. They also expect to pick up some foot traffic: during open hours, an enormous door slides open to reveal a coffee bar with wifi - and beer and wine will be available.

At the coworking space, a concierge will watch over 30 desk spaces. Peripherals such as mice, monitors, and chargers will be available for checkout. The space will also include a server room, printer, fax, copier, whiteboard, and corkboard.

Launchpad Coworking will also include seven meeting rooms: a "treetop" or boutique meeting room accessible via a spiral staircase; three small meeting rooms; three large ones. Each meeting room has own fridge and "green" bottled water in addition to tables, chairs, and large flat-panel monitors. One meeting room is soundproofed; they envision supporting video and audio podcasting as well as voice-over work (easier than flying to LA).

Michael explained that community is not where you are, but who you're with. "You don't force community," he said. So how to facilitate a coworking community at a new space? Launchpad Coworking's approach is to create the right space, leading to an unforced community. They've been working for two years to develop the right space.

Despite the dismal credit environment, once they obtain funding, Launchpad Coworking estimates two months from funding to opening. I hope the funding comes through soon: Launchpad Coworking looks like a fantastic place to work, and it serves a very different segment from the other two coworking spaces in Austin.

For more on Launchpad Coworking, including their own pictures, see Launchpad Coworking's blog.

To see my own (poor) pictures of the space, see my photostream. And to see Launchpad Coworking on the map, see my map of alternative work spaces.

The Future of Work Salon: An account and some thoughts

The Shift101 Future of Work Salon was held March 6. Shift101 is a consultancy based in Australia, focusing on outworking solutions (teleworking, coworking, alt-work communications applications, etc.). Drew Jones and Todd Sundsted of NotAnMBA.com have recently joined Shift101 and are conducting salons in Austin, New York, and Sydney.

Drew Jones invited me to serve on the respondent's panel, which also included Bruce Eric Anderson of Dell (who runs the Digital Nomads blog) and John Erik Metcalfe of Conjunctured. Todd Sundsted presented on behalf of Shift101.

We had a light crowd, but a good one: Representatives from Launchpad, Conjunctured, The Creative Space, and Dell - and the University of Texas, I suppose, since I was there.

The presentation
Drew opened the session by discussing trends they had seen. He sees shifts in performance management, security, flexibility, and work-life balance due to demographic changes: the rise of Gen Y and the approaching retirement of the Baby Boomers. Those shifts point to the increasing popularity of "outworking" as people move from the corporate environment to other spaces.

This trend is not exactly making the office obsolete. But a generational transition is the elephant in the room. As Drew pointed out, we have 70 million Gen Ys. Ten thousand Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day. The two trends constitute what Drew calls a "demographic transfusion." And Gen Y brings in different values: they want individual, meaningful work.

Todd followed up by starting the presentation, entitled "Bold Moves." The 2008-2009 recession, he said, can be the great business school of the modern era.

Todd noted several "forces" that characterize the current moment and the near future:

• Increasing unemployment
• Corporation natural selection wiping out companies
• Workforce will get both older and younger - deferred retirement - but then much younger.
• Huge chunk of Gen Y
• Laptops, wifi, secure networks -> mobility

These have consequences:

• Executive: compensation more tightly coupled to performance, especially long-term
• Results: focused environment -> advantages of full-time employee under scrutiny
• Companies must justify growth of staff size, addition of full-time employees. Must justify $ of desk, office for each employee. Real estate utilization is about 40% in an office.

In 10 years, Todd added, 50% of the workforce will be Gen Y.

Todd thinks we're facing a fundamental shift on the scale of the last century's shift toward scientific management. He expects 5-10 years of innovation in the next round of work. In particular, outworking will become not just tolerated but necessary, due to the costs of commuting coupled with costs associated with maintaining underutilized buildings.

At this point, John Erik added: His generation is used to measurement in terms of video games and grades. Now they want that feeling back. (I understand this to mean that he wants clear measures of achievement coupled with autonomy in maintaining that achievement.)

Todd added that new work will involve new management skills:

• Managing remote teams becomes a necessary skill.
• Managing multiple generations, perhaps up to 4 generations - never before.

So he predicts Bold Moves:

• Companies must get by with fewer, more productive employees
• Companies will exit lease obligations, reduce real estate expenses
• Companies will develop robust methodologies for managing employees and contingent workers
• More teams will be allowed and encouraged in outworking
• Performance-based management will replace subjective measures (e.g., face time)
• Effective corporate leaders must become masters at framing, defining distribution. Innovation -> growth.
• Companies must pay more attention to workspace design as a factor in recruitment, retention, and productivity

John Erik adds here that Conjunctured (the coworking space) is a "loss leader" for Conjunctured (the design firm). Conjunctured functions as a brand - a company with many possible employees working in the space - and John Erik functions as an account manager. Drew adds that such distributed organizations rely on trust and nimbleness, and speculates that peer-to-peer banking will be the next necessary step. Privately, I wonder: are such organizations necessarily business-to-business?

The dialogue
And at this point, I lost track. I presented some of my own work here on federations - if you went to ATTW or CCTE, or if you're going to IA09, I covered the same ground as here - and we talked about the differences and similarities between my Gen X participants and Gen Y participants. We also had some great discussion with Cody Marx Bailey and Roby Fitzhenry of The Creative Space, a College Station-based coworking space, about their different perspective on outworking. The most important takeaway was that Cody and Roby didn't worry at all about facework the way that my Gen X participants did: they said they were entirely transparent about their lives and work, and didn't want to work with clients who didn't respect that.

Bruce Eric Anderson at Dell then talked about Dell's efforts in this space. Dell is concerned with recruitment and retention of Gen Y, but also lost work time during the commute, carbon footprint, and similar factors. They believe that "digital nomads" will become more prevalent, particularly in some highly desirable knowledge leadership positions, and they want to make sure they can support such work and evolve with it. Bruce also brought a prerelease netbook that Dell will soon release. Nice machine.

My thoughts
I left the salon thinking that Shift101 and the respondents have done some good thinking. But many questions remain about the future of work. I see the following additional trends:

• Mobile work accelerates.For instance, I strongly suspect that in knowledge work sectors, the mobile phone, home broadband, and smaller prosumer computing will continue to enable and accelerate the trend of mobile work. (The three technological trends are collapsing, and I expect smartphones+peripherals to take over basic email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations in the next couple of years.)


• New standards develop for distributing work. As work becomes more mobile and distributed, I also expect to see much more outsourcing and attempts at modularization in the corporate sector. But that's a very complicated and messy proposition, and to make it work, we'll probably see a lot of sub rosa workarounds and growing pains. Trust and accountability must be distributed too, and those mechanisms will be hard to lay out and enforce across an increasing number of subcontractors. So we'll see a proliferation of answers to that problem, probably including (a) rebounds: bringing subcontracted services back in house; (b) trade standards: articulation and voluntary policing of trade guidelines; (c) APIs for making work transparent across elements of emerging federations; (d) redundant subcontracting, leaning toward spec work. It will take a while for these innovations to settle down.


• Social media become essential communication services. I further expect that the use of social media for b2b contacts will continue and increase. I won't be surprised to see not just b2b versions of popular services (e.g., the corporate services that mimic Twitter, currently cropping up) but also b2b features of existing services (e.g., b2b features built into Twitter or layered over the Twitter API). OpenSocial and others in this space will become increasingly important. So will web-based collaboration services, which will increasingly depend on corporate accounts for revenue.


• Your social graph becomes your resume. Social media and collaboration services will return value for these corporate accounts by suggesting subcontractors, a really critical aspect of distributed work. They will increasingly include reputation systems, which have mostly been applied to products and sellers, but will increasingly be applied to service providers and independent contractors. Reputation systems of some kind will have to perform the same service that merit reviews do within organizations.


• Strategic planning becomes very difficult, then very easy. Transitioning to radically distributed organizations means a period in which getting a strategic overview becomes very difficult. This, by the way, is something that has bothered me about Zuboff and Maxmin's envisioning of federations: since federations are essentially project-based, with the federation dispersing at the end of the project, time horizons are very short and the federation is essentially tactical and reactive. I don't know that the business community currently has the tools to perform strategic planning in such an environment. But as subcontractors begin generating relatively stable social graphs, I expect a new equilibrium to be developed, meaning that strategic planning will become much easier - particularly as gobs of data become more available and aggregated.

If these trends are on the money, short-term winners include Google and Facebook (who are pushing APIs to connect different social networks); broadband providers; and nimble organizations. Long-term, the more stable and rich social networks become more valuable. I envision the day when people's social graphs are traded in portfolios - though I don't endorse that move.

Anyway, the FoW panel was great. I don't think Shift101 has plans for another one in Austin soon, but if they do, I will encourage everyone I know to go!

A map of Austin alternative working spaces

So I've been visiting coworking spaces in Austin. At this point, I've visited Soma Vida, Conjunctured, and Launchpad Coworking. (For writeups, just check out the "coworking" label to the right.) I'll be visiting other places this spring and summer, including Jelly meetings at Cafe Caffeine and Cupprimo.

And as I do, I'll be updating this map of Austin alternative working spaces. Take a look - the differences among these spaces are fascinating. I've included links to the sites' URLs and to my own photos of the spaces.

And if you can think of other spaces - coworking spaces and Jelly spaces in particular - drop me a line at clay.spinuzzi@gmail.com.

Reading :: Go Put Your Strengths to Work

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance
By Marcus Buckingham

Go Put Your Strengths to Work comes from the coauthor of First, Break all the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, neither of which I have read. I strongly suspect that they cover very similar ground, which can be summed in this passage:

The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence by studying failure. This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence. (p.5)

That is, Go takes the position that studying failure teaches us a lot about failure, but not much about excellence. That, the author says, is like diagnosing health problems but never learning how to exercise (p.11). Rather, the author says, we should study our own strengths and figure out how to reconfigure our jobs, organizations, and lives to leverage them. The alternative is to spend our time working on our weaknesses - that is, to work on becoming uniformly mediocre rather than excellent in a few areas.

If this sounds a lot like Drucker, it should: Drucker made this argument long ago. But Buckingham develops a set of heuristics for helping individuals determine their strengths. ("What does one of your strengths actually feel like to you?" asks one heuristic, and answers it with a set of bullets, p.90). Buckingham exhorts us to take charge of our own time, to stop feeling like victims (p.208), and to make our work revolve around our strengths rather than conforming ourselves to the work we're presented. Yes, he makes it sound easy. But at the same time, he acknowledges that reconfiguring our jobs could be really hard to achieve, and he suggests several persuasive strategies for working through this reconfiguration with superiors and subordinates.

So does Go read like a squishy self-help book? Sure, in spots. But those books have their uses. The heuristics help to put this book ahead of others I've seen, and I think they could be really useful for people who are still trying to figure out their place.

Reading :: I'm Outta Here!

I'm outta here! How coworking is making the office obsolete
By Drew Jones, Todd Sundsted, and Tony Bacigalupo

I've mentioned my fascination with coworking and related outworking practices, but I've also complained that I can't find much in the way of serious publications about them. I'm Outta Here! is not exactly a scholarly publication, but as Drew Jones told me, it's a sort of downpayment on the more serious work his group has been developing. Their more conventional book should be out in April; this one is more like snapshots, pensees, "101 stories about coworking." And it's valuable in its own right: although it's not detailed, it captures the zeitgeist of coworking by collecting quotes and documents from a wide range of coworking sites across the world.

In telling these stories, I'm Outta Here! provides a first cut at the many motivations and opportunities represented by different coworking sites. As the authors explain in the Introduction, people work from home, motivated by flexibility, convenience, and autonomy. But working from home often means working alone, without "human interaction, support, structure, and often balance" (p.1). In the many stories they have collected from coworkers and proprietors of coworking spaces, they flesh out some of these many motivations and factors. The stories are human and the wide range of spaces is represented. Some of the history is told here too.

Most importantly for people who are interested in coworking, the book functions almost as a Rolodex of coworking spaces. The authors have visited many spaces and have included contact information of even more. So it shouldn't be a surprise that my copy is heavily annotated. I'll be going through that Rolodex this spring and summer as I continue to get my head around this phenomenon. If you're interested in doing the same, do pick up the book.

Reading :: Digital Korea

Digital Korea: Convergence of Broadband Internet, 3G Cell Phones, Multiplayer Gaming, Digital TV, Virtual Reality, Electronic Cash, Telematics, Robotics, E-Government and the Intelligent Home
By Tomi Ahonen and Jim O'Reilly

This book is being reviewed by Huatong Sun in my upcoming JBTC special issue on social software, so I won't provide a deep review here. It's an interesting book, though, more in terms of trends and implications than depth or analysis or data collection (most data comes from newspapers and trade sources). Like the authors' blog Communities Dominate Brands, Digital Korea provides an overview of how mobile and digital technologies are changing some basic aspects of how people interact - in this case, people in perhaps the most wired nation on the planet, South Korea.

"To be South Korean means to be connected," the authors state (p.5). Conscious of the high pace of digital change, the authors caution us that this 2007 text will be out of date by the time it hits print - and they note that the iPhone was just about to hit the market, to give you an idea of the changes involved - but they want to chronicle the trends that collectively characterize "the 'Connected Age,' the new wirelessly connected society which has moved beyond the 'Networked Age' of the 1990s" (p.5).

The authors identify several factors. For instance, "Generation-C" (the "community" generation) is constantly connected through mobile phones, particularly text messages; a third of SK students sent over 100 text messages per day in 2006 (p.17). Mobile phones are "umbilical cords" that bind youth, allow them to consult each other immediately before and after purchases, and link them constantly - they even take phones to bed and sleep with them (not on the bedside table as we aging Gen Xers do). They haggle with five car dealers simultaneously over SMS (p.19). As the authors state in a section title, "Adults don't get it" (p.21). (Incidentally, perhaps Twitter has taken off for adults recently in part because it folds SMS into a more familiar, less immediate medium?) Texting is preferred over email, which is characterized as communication for the boss (p.22). The mobile phone "is seen as a major element in the definition of a young person's emerging persona" (p.23).

Since youth overwhelmingly own mobile phones in SK, the authors state, they will not answer the home's landline. By definition, the call isn't for them, and they don't see a reason to take messages (p.25). In a related trend, the authors quote Mizuko Ito's research of Japanese youth, in which she notes that "it is common to send text messages before phone calls, to 'schedule' the time for a voice call" (p.30). (I thought this was brilliant, and I wish more people would do it.)

Paying for goods and services by mobile phone is common in SK, and this means that the mobile phone is the first credit instrument (p.31). Mobile phones also introduce youth to other adult practices, for instance, through simulated boy/girlfriends so that youth can learn social mores involved with dating (p.52), dancing classes delivered over the phone, and phone-based karaoke.

Moving along, the authors note that mobile-delivered full-length television programs were common in SK in 2007, making TV-watching mobile but also intensely personal (p.78). MMORPGs were common as well. Digitally delivered music outsold physically delivered music by a wide margin, with mobile phones and MMORPGs being the main delivery networks.

Digital Korea is an interesting read, although it's not a scholarly text and doesn't really pretend to be. It does get fairly breathless, and I had trouble figuring out how broad-based some of the conclusions were. It also tends to paint a very rosy picture of SK's governmental decisions and involvement; see Castells for a more critical view. But if you want a bloggish overview of different technologies and their potential to remake how we live and work, pick up this book.

"What Makes a Digital Nomad?"

An intriguing whitepaper whose crowdsourcing was orchestrated by Bruce Eric Anderson at Dell. Looks fascinating, but I'll have to print it out to read it properly.

CCCC2009 theming contest: Congratulations and certificate

Some of you may remember that I ran a theming contest for CCCC2009 last year. CCCC's call for papers was about to come out, and I had found previous years' themes ("Making Waves"; "Taking it to the Streets") to be maddeningly vague and insufficiently creative. So I called for people to tweet their suggestions for CCCC2009 conference themes.

The results were creative and outrageous. I had trouble picking a winner, but in the end my committee (which had a total of one member) selected what we thought best epitomized a conference theme. James Ford, a grad student at UC-Santa Barbara (and, coincidentally, one of my former MA students at Texas Tech) came up with the winning entry.

I plan to present him with a certificate. But I also wanted to share it with the world. So here it is. Brilliant work, James. I foresee a bright future for you as a conference committee member.

"This is exactly how an ideologically-oriented newsgathering operation / noise machine / echo chamber should work."

Manuel Castells argues in The Power of Identity that since democracy is now mediated through electronic media, to gain a groundswell of the vote, parties veer toward the political center. In the absence of sharp policy differences, scandal becomes the mode of differentiation.

We've seen our share of scandal in the last several electoral cycles, and certainly in the last one, in which thinly-sourced charges of racism, sexism, and even false pregnancy were leveled. Writing for The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini argues that Republicans have fallen behind in the muckraking as left-leaning bloggers work on "taking out" rising Republican stars before they can aspire to national office. And lest we misunderstand him, he sets us straight:

In case you're expecting me to bemoan this as the birth of left-wing hack journalism, that's where I part company. This is exactly how an ideologically-oriented newsgathering operation / noise machine / echo chamber should work. The real threat here is not what all of you were booing in Tucker Carlson's speech at CPAC. The New York Times is merely marketing refined gasoline at the pump. The place where it's being drilled, refined, and transported is in the blogosphere, where the likes of Daily Kos and TPM [Talking Points Memo] tease out initial leads that are too hot for the NYT.

The joke here is that the right is supposed to have an apparatus that does exactly what TPM does on the left.

The problem with legitimizing scandal as a tactic for decapitating political parties, of course, is that it discourages normal, well-adjusted personalities from running for national office.

Question and answer: Will phones be the new laptops?

Mark Cuban asks if phones will replace laptops, and speculates on how this might be possible: wireless keyboards and monitors designed to interact with the little processor on your phone.

Of course, this is not an entirely new direction, and it makes total sense for those who mostly use their computers for communication, office software, and web surfing. (It makes less sense for resource-intensive applications.) Indications are that the phone and desktop will continue to converge, especially given that Nokia's dipping its toe into the laptop business. Android is also migrating to netbooks. Look for more of this in 2009-2010.

Interactive Austin 2009

I'm excited to be speaking at Interactive Austin 2009, a conference whose goal is "to explore how social media enhances business and marketing strategies and adds to the bottom line." Austin's social media community is vibrant, and I think this event is going to showcase that fact nicely.

If you're in Austin or plan to be, please do check it out. Monday, April 27, Norris Business Center. I think it's going to be a blast.

I'm Outta Here - is here

The book I'm Outta Here, about coworking, is now for sale at Lulu.com.

Crowdsourcing for tips

A few minutes ago, Twitter informed me that someone named bountystorms had begun following me. I clicked through to the stream, then to the listed website, BountyStorms.com.

The basic idea behind BountyStorms should seem half-familiar to anyone reading my Twitter feed or blog. When I wanted a good popular-oriented name for my new project, I crowdsourced it: I gave my followers the parameters, then invited them to submit their own ideas. I didn't come up with this idea, but I've found it to be really handy for generating ideas than I never would have produced on my own.

BountyStorms is a site for submitting ideas to be crowdsourced. Unlike run-of-the-mill crowdsourcing, though, BountyStorms involves paying a cash prize for the winning idea. That is, it connects a network of BountyStorms readers with people who need a service - and are willing to pay (paltry) cash for it. Skimming the site, I see requests for "Product name for a leading edge energy appliance" ($20), "Creative Ideas for Valentines" ($5), and "Catchy title for Work Life Balance/Resilience workshop ..." ($20). Some of these problems are traditionally those of PR or marketing firms, while others are more along the lines of self-help.

Will the service take off? This is the sort of service that could take advantage of stray minutes in people's lives. If it can attract enough clever readers, it might become useful. So far, though, the number of people weighing in on each idea is fairly small.

Thoughts on how the economic downturn will reshape the world

We're all talking about the impact of this economic precipice, right? Instead of venturing my own analysis, let me point to two analyses that are very different but have similarities.

One is Richard Florida's analysis in the Atlantic, entitled "How the Crash will Reshape America." Many in my Twitter stream have pointed it out. Florida sets up his argument this way:

In his 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman argues, essentially, that the global economic playing field has been leveled, and that anyone, anywhere, can now innovate, produce, and compete on a par with, say, workers in Seattle or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But this argument isn’t quite right, and doesn’t accurately describe the evolution of the global economy in recent years.

In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine (“The World Is Spiky,” October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy—and the competitive advantage of the world’s most successful city-regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it’s important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more.

Florida goes on to argue that we'll see some real impact shear at the level of region and city, not nation, and that the disadvantaged will be those regions and cities that lack dense social connections. That doesn't do justice to Florida's argument, but I want to note that this analysis is at least somewhat consistent with Castells' argument.

The other analysis comes from a paper that David Ronfeldt posted, along with its responses. Ronfeldt dusted off and reframed a paper from a few years ago, suggesting that we start thinking in terms of the "network-state." In the comments, one person suggests that we're on the cusp of radical decentralization in favor of rhizomatic constructions - and that the result will be less effective asymmetric warfare (e.g., terrorism) since the disappearance of state centers will mean lessened asymmetry. Another points to the response of the P2P Foundation, which pushes farther along the lines of "peer-governed civil-society networks," which are described as "the great innovation of the last decade."

Update on titling my new project (bumped to top)

Originally posted 2/9/09; update below.

A few days ago, I invited people to suggest titles for my new project, a popular text (blog, book, probably both) about loose work arrangements in Austin. So far, the entries have included the following:

• cgbrooke: Attack of the Telecommutants!!
• spinuzzi: adhocracy
• spinuzzi: "the pick-up economy"
• billhd: Quirk* *(Co-Work, really fast)
• johnmjones: "The Clay Spin Zone."
• aprudy: Ac-knowledging Austin
• johnmjones: 'The Funtastic Workatoriums of Dr. Clay'
• billhd: Austin's "Invention Class"
• mkgold: Working Out: How Social Networks Reshape Organizational Structures
• jdhancock: "The Clay Spin."
• honeyl: Ambient Workability
• honeyl: Office Dispersion
• honeyl: Atelier Diaspora
• siquecountry: alt!Office
• siquecountry: teleCommune: jellys, conjectures and other alternative workspaces
• cgbrooke: Smart Jobs
• cgbrooke: The Workplace of Crowds
• ifss: http://is.gd/iwdO
• ifss: Cutting Loose in Austin: How the Live Music Capital became the Web Worker Capital
• socialtechno: CrowdWhoring
• socialtechno: MeLancing
• socialtechno: DeliWorking
• socialtechno: CrunkArbeit
• siquecountry: Business Casual
• siquecountry: Co-Work: Using loose places and Jelly spaces to work, freelance and connect.
• jcsalterego: The Untold Stories of Digital Nomads
• jobsworth: weird work
• jobsworth: wrok
• jcsalterego: Digital Nomads

There are some real gems in here. Do you have a favorite -- or do you think you have a better idea? Why don't you tweet with the hashtag #spinuzzi-project and I'll add your feedback to the list. If you don't have a Twitter.com account, feel free to drop your suggestions here in the comments. Looking forward to seeing what you think.

Update 2/15:

• People have added the following entries:
• spinuzzi: Spliced
• averysmalldog: Work 2.0
• twitt_ercoryb: the real cloud computing
• spinuzzi: hyperworkspace
• @spinuzzi "adhocracy"
• djteknokid: office 2.0
• djteknokid: workspace 2.0
• spinuzzi: So close in, yet so far out
• spinuzzi: Work on everywhere
• spinuzzi: Outer workspace
• johnmjones: Jelly
• cwood: Working Where You Work Best
• jade_girl work space
• spinuzzi: work, spaced

These are some great suggestions. But reading through them, I'm having trouble finding a direct hit, and I think that's because the project is still too underdefined. So I'll let this cook a while longer, define it more carefully, and move from there. Thanks so much, all, for some great suggestions.

Twitter, the Google of right now

TechCrunch has a good post today on the significance of Twitter. Erick Schonfeld points out that a datastream like Twitter provides "a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine." And the information returned by such as search is very different from that returned by Google, in which information is privileged by number of incoming links (among other factors, of course -- I don't want to oversimplify Google's algorithm).

The difference, Schonfeld argues, is that Google captures people's intent. Twitter captures trends ("what people are doing or what they are thinking about").

That, he says, is why Twitter has merited another round of funding. And if I can inject my own analysis here, this is also why social media types have gone crazy over Twitter and its potential: Google is for marketing with SEO, SEM, and paid search, but Twitter is for detecting trends and holding conversations in real time. Unbelievably, Google can now be considered the king of the "slow" media.

But so far Twitter has not done much to capitalize on its search potential: Summize, which is now search.twitter.com, is still a fairly rudimentary search engine. Let's hope that this new round of funding is applied to cracking that nut.

Homeless teens need cell phones too?

That's what Jeff Perron argues. Homeless teens have no fixed address (obviously) and no way to be contacted, which makes finding a job very difficult; mobile phones allow employers to contact them. Perron argues that mobile phones also allow agencies to mass-text health information and services information.

Perron makes a pretty good argument, one that will sound better as mobile service costs drop (assuming they actually do) and especially if SMS costs drop. I'm interested in how this argument seems to be a continuation of universal service (in its second aspect, that of providing inexpensive access to all interested households).

"I'm Outta Here!"

The new book on coworking, I'm Outta Here, is going to launch soon on Lulu.com. Cruise by the website to learn more about it. I've been watching chatter about this book on Twitter and NotAnMBA, and am really looking forward to seeing it.

Reading :: Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day

Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
By Dave Evans

I'm not terribly familiar with marketing, but I know that some social media marketers were fairly forward-thinking regarding the broad social implications of social media. The Cluetrain Manifesto was an early contender, but many others have followed. And they've built their arguments on the same essential insight that Cluetrain provided, which is that social media entails a shift from broadcast to dialogue, impressions to conversations, and information to participation. Many fields and disciplines are feeling the effects of social or participative media on their own practices, most obviously marketing and advertising, but also journalism, education, and of course my own subfield, technical communication.

Turning these disciplinary ships takes a long time, so the message bears repeating and developing. And that's where Dave Evans' Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day comes in. Evans has been in marketing for a long time and has done much of that work in social media, so he has developed a fuller understanding of the media's permutations and how to operate in them. Here, he supplies background, operating frames, and even exercises and worksheets to get marketers up to speed on the new landscape. He starts with the basic message of The Cluetrain Manifesto -- becoming a proper social media marketer means giving up control and instead participating in conversations in order to build up the social capital that affords influence in that space -- and develops that message in terms of practical applications. For instance, he extends the traditional funnel model into a social feedback model, taking into account the lateral communication among purchasers and potential purchasers. In this new space, he says, marketing efforts are less about what the marketer has to say and more about what the consumer needs to know now (p.86).

The social web, he points out, is being reorganized around connections between sites rather than around specific sites (p.265).

With these lessons in mind, he develops metrics for social media marketing, crystallizing around content, relevance, and impact (p.295).

Although the book is for social media marketers, I see many potential lessons for other content providers such as technical communicators. In particular, holding conversations with users, facilitating their connections, and reorganizing around web services rather than tightly controlled sites are all steps that could be productively implemented in formal documentation. I hope they will be - and Evans' book is a good place to begin thinking about what this would entail.

Un-Googling

When I am trying to figure out a particularly difficult question, I reflexively think about how to formulate Google queries. But how would you formulate a Google query for a question like this one?

What the resteraunt that has peacocks walking around on the lawn. It's near downtown in a old mansion type building?

That question came from someone I follow on Twitter. I supposed he could have Googled for "austin restaurant peacocks" and sifted through the results. Instead, he tweeted it. And within five minutes, he had the answer ten times over.

This incident is a nice example of how crowdsourcing can provide an alternative to search engines, or more accurately, how the ongoing differentiation of our online space can lead to the development of different information niches.

You can also see why relating status messages to geolocation can open up new possibilities for archiving and extracting this sort of local knowledge for such questions. Yet another reason why Google might be interested in that application space.

Title my new project

So I've been working on a new project here in Austin, based on recent work but ideally slanted toward a more popular audience. I'm interested in how people are using looser work arrangements in order to perform knowledge work in Austin.

And I need a great title for the blog, book, or whatever comes from this project.

I'll be

• Visiting coworking spaces and interviewing their proprietors and customers
• Visiting Jelly locations and interviewing people who work there
  
• Visiting and interviewing freelancers, contractors, subcontractors, and sole proprietors
• Visiting and interviewing people working in loose arrangements within the tech industry
• Visiting and interviewing telecommuters

I'll be examining how they get their work done, how they replace organizational resources with their own, how they share resources, how they network, and how they socialize. Based on Manuel Castells' studies, I think that Austin is one of the leading edges of development of these alternate working arrangements. It's a fascinating story that needs to be told, and I'm interested in telling it.

But I need a title! Think along the lines of something Clay Shirky or Malcolm Gladwell might use. Punchy, relevant, expressive, interesting to a popular audience.

Have something in mind? Tweet me your suggestions.

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I'll credit the person whose title I use.

More background here:

• Castells and work structure
• Zuboff and Maxmin and federations
• Coworking
• Knowledge work

Jaiku is gone, but Google unveils location-based service that does what I thought Jaiku would do

I predicted several times in the run-up to the Android launch that Jaiku - which combined the microblogging of Twitter and the location-based service of BrightKite - would be a key part of the launch. I was wrong - Jaiku never did come out of closed beta, and now has been turned into an open-source project unsupported by Google.

But functionalities tend to flake off of these acquired projects and float into other Google projects. Today, Google announced Google Latitude, which floats on top of Google Maps for desktop and mobile. As Google's "About Latitude" page states:

With Google Latitude, you can:

• See where your friends are and what they are up to
• Quickly contact them with SMS, IM, or a phone call


• Maintain complete control over your privacy

Enjoy Google Latitude on your phone, PC, or both.

It rolls out for Android, Blackberry, and WinMo phones that run GMaps 3.0, and for the iPhone and Sony Ericsson phones soon.

Not just owning two phones simultaneously - using them simultaneously

That sounds extreme even for me, but apparently it's becoming more common. Phones are

Optimized for one-handed operation. It means we can rather easily learn to use two phones in two hands. This gives the mobile a powerful advantage over other digital mass media, whether the PC or Playstation or Digital TV - we tend to only consume one of those at a time. But we can rather easily consume two distinct mobile phone based services - on two separate phones - from two competing networks even - simultaneously. Or, we can consume mobile services while we are supposedly paying attention to the other older media such as our broadband internet (sixth mass media) or TV (fifth mass media) or a video game (ie recordings, the second mass media channel).

"Who's Undercutting Obama?"

My spotter sent me this article in which a journalist complains that Obama's press office is not providing customary access to journalists. He complains:

I have called 202-456-2580, the main number for the White House press office, going back to the Nixon administration. Never has anyone in the press office declined to spell his name, give his job title, or hung up, even after the kind of aggressive exchanges that used to be common between journalists and flacks—and between journalists and high government officials, for that matter.

And he points out that while the Bush administration edited briefing transcripts, the Obama administration has gone farther, only posting snippets. He sees these as indications that Obama's promise of a more transparent White House is being undercut. He continues:

Politicians make choices and have to live with them. How they deal with journalists—especially whether they are candid and direct about dealing in facts—sets a tone that will influence the administration’s ability to communicate its messages, especially those Obama messages that run counter to deeply ingrained cultural myths about the economy, taxes, and the role of government.

Talking to working reporters is not the only way to communicate with the people. The Obama administration seems to be embracing direct delivery of its messages via the whitehouse.gov website and YouTube. They seem to be saying “We don’t need the press to communicate our messages to the people. We can talk to the people ourselves.”

Okay, so let's unravel this a bit. Journalism has lost a lot of traction because, in effect, everyone has a printing press: electronic distribution is fast, inexpensive, and distributed, meaning that individual journalists don't have the advantage of positioning themselves at one end of the media pipe. So journalists aren't accorded the respect or level of access they were once given, simply because the White Househas other, more direct ways to get their message out. I'm not surprised that the Obama administration has figured this out, as the Bush administration did, nor that the Obama administration is going farther along this path.

On the other hand, when journalists lose their near-exclusive access to the upper administration, they don't get to ask tough questions directly to those administration members. Right now, the new media don't either. The new, distributed media architecture means that everyone can be an op-ed columnist or beat reporter, but it also means that individuals don't have enough individual influence to force their way into policy discussions. (That is, media has become "flat," but government is still hierarchical.)

So perhaps we're coming into an interregnum as old media power arrangements collapse but new media arrangements have not yet coalesced. The result, under these conditions, will most likely take the form of White House broadcasts (via YouTube and the official website) along with aggregation of feedback channels (e.g., comments, blog trends). This is quite potentially a recipe for poll-driven propaganda.

I'm hoping that we will quickly see other permutations. One possible model is that of the star blogger who has built up an enormous audience via network effects. Obviously this model, still under considerable development, has drawbacks as well as advantages.

"Not a stupid idea"

Actually, I thought it was a smart -- but obvious -- idea: A dock for your smartphone that allows it to extend its capabilities to the desktop. That only makes sense as smartphones become more powerful and the processor overshoots the capabilities of the built-in peripherals. What I don't get is how something this basic can get patented.

Reputation Systems

Randall Farmer and Bryce Glass are authoring their book on reputation systems in a wiki. Right now most of the chapters are summaries, but keep coming back and you'll see the book in process. Looks great - reputation systems and other forms of social evaluation are going to be critical in the near future, and they've been underexplored, so this book is really timely.

Fannie Mae narrowly escapes devastating logic bomb

Moral: If you're going to fire a sysadmin, escort him/her out of the building immediately.

Economy analytics

If you're one of the 900,000 people using Mint to track your finances, your (anonymous) data are being used to examine the economy. Another example of how ubiquitous, detailed data collection is being used to provide new analyses.

Asymmetry in Davos

And by "asymmetry" I mean the issue that Latour points out. In many endeavors, success is attributed to individuals while failure is attributed to the system, or society, or culture, etc. According to Bill Taylor, that trope perseveres:

[Daniel Gross'] dispatch captured the glaring (and self-serving) intellectual blind spot among the participants. Here's how he put it: "At least with regard to finance and business, the consensus [at Davos] seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system."

In his dispatch, Dan nicely captured the contrasting treatments of success and failure. One lunch, he said, celebrated the "transformative power of the individual," shining a spotlight on the work of Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus. Yet when CNBC organized a discussion of the financial crisis, there were three questions on the table: Which policy assumption failed? Which regulatory failure was the biggest shock to the system? Which market failure was worst?

Notice the difference in cause and effect: "Just as financial markets in the United States privatize profits and socialize losses," Dan comments, "Davos and other conferences privatize success (by chalking it up to individuals) and socialize failure (by blaming it on large systemic problems)."

Taylor concludes, "Welcome to the no-fault economy!"

Discipline and punish

http://www.wouldyoudothatifbarackwaswatching.com/question.html

Reading :: End of Millennium

End of Millennium: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume III
By Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells' End of Millennium is the third and final book in his series The Information Age, following The Rise of the Network Society and The Power of Identity. Whereas the other two books covered the transformation of capitalism into informational capitalism and its effects on individual and collective identities, this book focuses on the crisis of statism. The book has a sense of urgency and doom that was muted in the other two books, and I wonder if it has anything to do with this passage in the Acknowledgements: "I would like to thank my surgeons ... whose care and professionalism gave me the time and energy to finish this book" (p.xiv). Indeed, the book seems not just more passionate but also more loosely edited and less economical than the other two. (Castells, incidentally, appears to be still alive and publishing more than any ten scholars.)

Castells argues that the changes surveyed in the book have precipitated a crisis of statism. Beginning with an in-depth analysis of the Soviet Union, Castells argues that industrial statism is threatened by the network society. The fourth world, he argues in Chapter 2, is rising. To make this argument, he draws a distinction between processes of social differentiation. On the one hand is distribution/consumption, characterized by inequality, polarization, poverty, and misery. On the other hand is production, characterized by the individualization of work, the over-exploitation of workers, social exclusion, and perverse integration.

The individualization of work involves "precarious" labor relations. Labor is defined in specific terms for each worker and for each of the worker's individual contributons, "either under the form of self-employment or under individually contracted, largely unregulated, salaried labor" (p.72). Over-exploitation involves discrimination against categories of workers (p.72). Under social exclusion, certain individuals or groups are systematically barred from positions that would afford an autonomous livelihood (p.73). Perverse integration involves labor process in the criminal economy (p.74).

The ascent of informational global capitalism, Castells argues, is characterized by simultaneous economic development and underdevelopment, inclusion and exclusion. Certainly these conditions affect whole countries -- Castells points to the predatory states that have developed across Africa (p.96) -- but they also affect patches everywhere, such as US inner cities (p.134), which have been hard-hit by the deindustrialization of the US and the placing of workers into individualized working conditions where they are left to their own individual fates (p.135). The extraordinary diversity of labor arrangements leads to a premium on workers with unique skills (p.135), skills that may not be available to vast numbers of workers. "Informationalization spurs job growth in the higher tiers of skills in America while globalization offshores low-skilled manufacturing jobs" (p.139). Consequently, "black holes" of social exclusion are manifested throughout the planet, not just in sub-Saharan Africa, but in every country and city (p.165). Such areas are termed "black holes" because it's almost impossible to escape them.

Castells next turns his attention to international criminal networks, which follow the organizational logic of the networked enterprise. They subcontract each other so that they can operate on each others' turf and share capacity (p.169). I can't do justice to the chapter in this brief review except to say that criminal networks appear to be increasingly independent of states.

In Chapter 4, Castells details the Asian market crisis of 1997-1998, a crisis that sounds very familiar as I look at the headlines of 2008-2009. It involved the "loss of investor trust and the sudden lack of credibility of Asian currencies and securities in global financial markets" (p.209). The penetration of global financial flows led to an addiction to massive short-term borrowing, leading to vulnerability to the reversal of investment flows (p.211). As our Congress contemplates a "stimulus package" of over $800b -- produced via short-term borrowing -- reading about the effects of the Asian crisis was sobering and depressing.

Chapter 5 addresses the European Union, which was incipient at the time of writing but which Castells envisioned as a possible "network state" (p.331). Such a state would be characterized by the sharing of authority along a network (p.352). A decade later, I think the jury may still be out on how the EU functions.

Finally, we get to the Conclusion - which, being the end of the series, summarizes the major themes of that entire series. Castells argues that this new world we are facing is the result of the coincidence in the 1960s-1970s of the IT revolution, the economic crisis of statism and capitalism, and the blooming of cultural social movements (p.356). Capitalism has been transformed, and now thrives as a global informational capitalism with a largely common set of economic rules (p.358). In this new capitalism, we face a structural transformation in relations of production, power, and experience (p.361).

In terms of production, productivity is driven by innovation and competitiveness is driven by flexibility. IT is essential for these. A new split is realized between self-programmable labor (in which education allows people to continually redefine and access skills for a given task) and generic labor (programmed by others, predictably transforming defined inputs into defined outputs, and consequently able to be outsourced or automated) (p.361). Flexibility "requires networkers, and flextimers"; the variable geometry of working arrangements leads to the coordinated decentralization of work and the individualization of labor (p.362).

Global financial markets colonizer the future via speculation. These are the actual collective capitalist. Global financial networks are the nerve center of informational capitalism (p.363).

If innovation is the main source of productivity, knowledge and information are the essential materials and education is the key quality of labor (p.365).

Under these conditions, we find a more complicated mechanism than under industrial capitalism. Employment relationships are tendentially individualized. Increasingly, producers control their own work processes and enter into horizontal relationships as individual producers. Earnings flow into global financial markets, making these producers collective owners of capital (p.366).

These conditions also introduce social cleavages: information producers vs. generic labor; exclusion of segments of society whose value as workers/consumers is used up; and a separation between market logic of global networks and the human experience of workers' lives (p.366).

Finally, in the new networked state, we find a new structure of power dominated by the network geometry, in which power relations are specific to given configurations of actors and institutions (p.367). "There are no more stable power elites," Castells declares, since power lies in networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation (p.368).

Castells ends with several predictions, which turn out to be largely correct a decade later. These include a rise in terrorism, multilaterial decision-making, and the more belligerent rise of Russia as a reconstituted power.

As with the other books in this series, this one was fascinating to me. It does not increase my confidence in short-term global fortune, but it does help me to think through some of the things I'm increasingly seeing in my studies of work and work organization.

Reading :: The Power of Identity

The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II
By Manuel Castells

Castells' The Rise of the Network Society was an enormously influential book in terms of understanding the emerging information economy (or whatever you like to call it). Its follow-up, The Power of Identity, was less influential - my colleagues who have started it have given up on it. For me, though, it continued to fascinate. And depress.

Whereas The Rise of the Network Society focused on the changes in work organization and structure precipitated by a number of factors, The Power of Identity focuses on how those factors are affecting social movements and politics. The network society is characterized by "the globalization of strategically decisive economic activities"; "the networking form of organization"; "flexibility and instability of work, and the individualization of labor"; "a culture of real virtuality"; and "the transformation of material foundations of life" (p.1). This transformed capitalism has been accompanied by "widespread surges of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalization and cosmopolitanism on behalf of cultural singularity and people's control over their lives and environment" (p.2). Between these two trends, the nation-state is called into question, precipitating a crisis of political democracy (p.2).

Castells pledges to take an analytical view of these changes, not a right/wrong or progressive/regressive view (p.3), and for the most part he keeps that promise, though in some cases he cannot restrain himself from making value judgments. More on that in a bit.

To start his analysis, Castells outlines three types of identity: legitimizing identity, which is "introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination vis a vis social actors" and generates a civil society; resistance identity, which is "generated by those actors that are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination" and generates communes or communities; and project identity, which comes into play "when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure" - producing subjects, i.e. collective social actors (pp.8-10). The subject, he argues, is no longer built on civil society but instead on communal resistance (p.11). One form is fundamentalism, in which collective identity is constructed by "the identification of individual behavior and society's institutions to the norms derived from God's law, interpreted by a definite authority that intermediates between God and humanity" (p.13, his emphasis).

Fundamentalism -- and Castells examines it in Islamic and US Christian contexts -- is seen in this analysis as a reaction to the threat of globalization and the concomitant threat to paternalism (more about which in a moment) (p.25). Fundamentalism constructs social and personal identities on the basis of images of the past, projected into a utopian future (p.25). Similarly, nationalism in the networked society has become detached from the state (p.30); nations are "communal cultures constructed in people's minds and collective memory by the sharing of history and political projects (p.51, his emphasis - he really likes italics). Such cultural communes are "the main alternative for the construction of meaning in our society"; they tend to be defensive, culturally constituted, and reactions to social trends (p.65).

Castells explores social movements more deeply in the next couple of chapters. In Chapter 2, he discusses how globalization and informationalization result in sudden changes, resulting in resentment at the loss of control. He examines three disparate movements -- the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the American militia, and Aum Shinrikyo. The first is, of course, a case study for netwar. The second is an entirely networked movement made possible through Internet connections, incoherent in ideology but united in distrust: as he argues, the FBI searches in vain for an organized conspiracy connecting these groups, because the actual "conspiracy" flows in and emerges from the information networks (p.92). The third, Aum Shinrikyo, formed a shadow government to oppose a united world government (p.100). Despite their extreme differences, the three movements have crystallized around a common adversary, the new global order. Each movement opposes to a specific principle of identity: Zapatistas see themselves as oppressed citizens fighting for their dignity; militia members see themselves as original citizens fighting for their sovereignty; and Aum Shinrikyo see themselves as a reconstructed spiritual community (pp.105-106). In all three cases is an appeal to authenticity (p.106). And in all three cases, weapons are not owned for their own sake, but as signs of freedom and as event-triggering devices (p.106). New communications technologies are fundamental conditions for these movements to exist (p.106): "The revolutionary cells of the information age are built on flows of electrons" (p.107).

In Chapter 3, Castells performs a similar analysis of the environmental movement, creating a typology of identity, adversary, and goals for segments of the movement (p.112). He argues that environmentalism introduces a new concept of time to the global discourse - glacial time - as well as a new identity for human beings (as a component of nature within that glacial time) and a new enemy (state nationalism, which asserts control over territories) (p.126). The movement is different from those studied in Chapter 2, but the characteristics of the movement are quite similar.

Chapter 4 brings us to the crisis of patriarchalism. Castells argues that patriarchalism, a global phenomenon, is built on the patriarchal family - and that family is fundamentally challenged by the transformations of women's work and women's consciousness, transformed by factors such as the rise of the informational economy, technological changes in reproduction, and of course the surge of women's struggles (pp.134-135). Gay and lesbian movements have of course been devastating because they fundamentally challenge the molar unit of patriarchalism (p.137). These factors combine to form, not the end of the family, but the end of the family as we know it (p.139).

In particular, the network society demands more flexible workers, and women are disproportionately supplying this labor due to residual patriarchalism among other factors. This flexible labor takes the form of part-time, temporary, and self-employed work (p.173). Women bring wages and therefore more bargaining power into their households, and men lose their justification not to help with home care and childcare (p.173). In the larger trend, marriages become more egalitarian -- or break up. Castells helpfully provides a typology of women's movements (p.195). But he waxes most poetic when discussing gay and lesbian movements, which he links to the trend toward economic independence from large-scale organizations (p.205) among other factors. "The power of identity seems to become magic when touched by the power of love," he enthuses (p.221), breaking his pledge to take a strictly analytical view of identity changes. I think I can find it in my heart to forgive him.

Castells ends with a discussion of the future of the family. Men tend to fall in love romantically, he argues, whereas women engage in more complex calculations (p.230). He sees the salvation of the family in raising boys to become responsible fathers and raising girls to be able to love husbands (p.234). Marriages become reconfigured as egalitarian if they are to survive at all.

In the wake of the breakup of patriarchalism, "new personalities emerge, more complex, less secure, yet more capable of adapting to changing roles in social contexts" (p.240). Coincidentally, this profile matches the ideal knowledge worker, continually engaging in learning, continually interfacing with different workers across borders, and without hope of lifetime employment or career.

In Chapter 5, Castells turns his attention to the state. The state's days as autonomous entities, he says, are over. Economies are too deeply linked, and the only measure that can keep currency markets stable is supranational coordination -- meaning that individual states lose control over fundamental elements of their economic policies (p.245). Even US economic independence, he says, is an illusion: "likely to dissipate in the future when living standards will reflect competitiveness in the global economy" (p.246). Similarly, the nation-state is increasingly powerless in deciding budgets, organizing production and trade, collecting corporate taxes, and providing social benefits (p.254). The globalization/localization of media is tantamount to de-nationalization and de-statization of information (p.259). Crime becomes globalized (p.259). Even in terms of projecting force, the most militarily independent state -- the US, due to its independent production of warfare equipment -- is not independent in terms of committing forces abroad (p.264).

Based on these trends, Castells expected the year 2000 to be a crisis of government along small-government lines: economic populism, political isolationism, and the rejection of governmental interference in private lives (p.290). (In reality, 9/11 appears to have reversed these trends, at least in the short term.) Castells also argued that nation-states' power is threatened by the diffusion of surveillance capacity and the potential for violence outside state institutions and borders -- both of which appear to be true. We generally don't have to fear Big Brother, but we do have to worry about a crowd of Little Sisters gathering unprecedented amounts of information on us (p.300). Rather than centralizing control, the trend is toward decentralizing surveillance, leading to a surveillance society rather than a surveillance state (p.301). "In historically relative terms," he argues, "today's state is more surveilled than surveillant" (p.302).

Furthermore, the nation-state has lost its monopoly on violence to transnational terrorist networks and communal groups (like Aum Shinrikyo) resorting to suicidal violence. The state is caught in a double bind: if it doesn't use violence, it fades, but if it does, it precipitates an endless emergency, leading to fading legitimacy (p.302). (This should sound very familiar to anyone who has examined the Threat Advisory or heard speeches on the War on Terrorism.) The new power system, Castells argues, is characterized by the plurality of sources of authority and power (p.303). Nation-states now compete with the international polity as well as networks of capital, production, communication, crime, international institutions, supranational military apparatuses, nongovernmental organizations, transnational religions, and public opinion movements (p.304).

This leads to Chapter 6, the question of the crisis of democracy. To sum it up quickly: democracy is now mediated through electronic media, particularly broadcast media. To gain a groundswell of the vote, parties veer toward the political center. In the absence of sharp policy differences, scandal becomes the mode of differentiation. "With political parties fading away, it is the time of saviors," Castells concludes, daydreaming of President Colin Powell (p.349).

In sum, Castells is attempting an enormous job in this series, and he consequently covers a great deal of ground in his discussion of identity. This book was not as interesting to me as the first one, but it's still a crucial piece of the larger argument, and it gave me insights into how people are developing, self-representing, and interacting in the network society. Give it a read.

Reading :: Writing the Economy

Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre And Technology in the World of Banking
By Graham Smart

Graham Smart conducted an ethnography at the Bank of Canada spanning two decades (1984-2004), and the result is this book, which uses events over those two decades to develop genre theory within the context of activity theory. Smart agrees with McCloskey that economics is rhetoric all the way down (p.22), and accordingly his rhetorically-oriented ethnography examines how the BOC performs its three functions in its monetary policy: knowledge-building, policy-making, and external communications. During his exploration of these functions, Smart develops extensive lists of oral and written genres.

He also develops and adapts tools for analyzing them. After surveying the landscape of analytical tools that attempt to link assemblages of genres, Smart adopts three: genre sets for describing "a provisionally stable discursive system for creating, negotiating, circulating, and applying specialized knowledge" (p.12); genre systems for describing "an inter-organizational realm of discourse comprising genres used by two or more organizations to interact communicatively and develop knowledge mutually relevant to them" (p.12); and genre chains for describing "sequences of genres that exhibit what Fairclough refers to as 'systematic transformations from genre to genre'" (p.12).

The organization Smart describes changes relatively slowly: "relatively new" genres have "emerged in the last decade" (p.141).

What emerges from this is a fairly detailed understanding of the BOC's practices and how genres mediate them. Just as importantly, Smart moves toward a more integrated framework of analytical tools for genre, a timely endeavor.

Public rural broadband

techPresident has a story on the proposed public rural wifi initiative the new administration is pushing: "the build out of high-speed Internet in unreached parts of the U.S. to the tune of about $6 billion." This is a fairly large initiative at a time of economic hardship. On the other hand, Internet access is the lifeblood of the knowledge economy, and spreading access across rural areas should accelerate the trend of individuated, flexible labor in knowledge work. More on this later, maybe.

States can employ netwar too

In Arquila and Ronfeldt's book Networks and Netwar and Castells' The Power of Identity, among other sources, the Zapatistas are singled out as an example of how a militarily weak force can leverage non-governmental organizations and public media to forestall crippling attacks by state armies. That is, a networked organizational structure can successfully prosecute asymmetric war against a state by stringing together other actants.

One particular state - Israel - has been active in leveraging this networked model for their own advantage. Wired's Noah Schachtman chronicles how Israel has been using digital video to document their operations "to defend themselves in the court of public opinion" -- for instance, by documenting the presence of anti-aircraft cannon inside mosques that they subsequently bombed. To distribute the video, they circumvented the established media and set up a YouTube channel.

We'll see more of this across conflicts, I think, as global information and monetary flows increasingly bind states and make "the court of public opinion" more critical for states' military operations.