Back from RSA

For the last few days, I have been at the Rhetoric Society of America conference, conducting a workshop on visualizing activities in digital workplaces with Bill Hart-Davidson (Michigan State) and Mark Zachry (University of Washington). These are two of the smartest people I know, and it was a real pleasure to present and workshop with them, explaining our visualization models to the participants, and seeing the participants develop their own applications.

Now I'm back, just in time to conduct the workshop again - this time, for my undergrads. My Summer I class has just finished data collection on their field studies, and now they're absorbing these models to make sense of the data. I really can't wait to see what they come up with.

Mark and Bill will be conducting a similar workshop at SIGDOC 2009 this fall. I won't be able to make it, but they're going to do a fantastic job - if you're at all interested in this sort of work, please do join them.

Street texts

I've been telling students in my field methods class that we're so surrounded by texts, we don't even notice them. I've suggested that they take a walk around their neighborhood and notice the texts - and think about how different the neighborhood would be without them. Normally I think of street signs, street numbers, and other permanent texts.

But the other day I was walking in my own neighborhood and saw these temporary texts spray painted on the street. One looks like it has something to do with a telecomm company; another seems to delineate property lines and/or water meters; the third, I'm not sure. They're not meant for the general public; they help some service workers navigate the streets to do their work. I'm constantly intrigued by little traces like these, little traces that indicate other overlapping activities of which we know little.

From Austin snapshots

From Austin snapshots

From Austin snapshots

Reading :: Worst Enemy

Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military
By John Arquilla

“For David Ronfeldt,” reads the inscription on this book, “visionary, colleague, friend.” Arquilla and Ronfeldt worked together for many years at RAND, and many of the themes they developed during that time made their way into this book, which is all about transforming the US military to meet future demands. Arquilla, who went on to teach at the Naval Postgraduate School, has thought a great deal about the challenges and implications in such an undertaking.

His analysis is even-handed and complex, as he demonstrates beginning in the Preface. “In this book the reader will find [former SecDef Donald] Rumsfeld an elusive, complex character, right on the big issues about military innovation, tragically wrong about both the idea of invading Iraq and the manner in which the campaign there was conducted” (p.xi). Rumsfeld's vision of a more nimble, more networked, more agile military contrasts with the vision of a political rival who usually comes off better in such accounts: “our adherence to a military philosophy of overwhelming force – the so-called Powell Doctrine – seems exceptionally ill-suited to our time, guaranteeing staggering expenditures, major collateral damage inflicted upon innocents, and growing global resentment of the United States”(p.xi).

We can take Rumsfeld and Powell as figures for two possible pathways for the US military and armies in general. On the one hand, the Powell Doctrine pushes us towards massed forces, a larger army, more extensive and expensive weapons systems, more aircraft carriers, more command and control, and conflicts that minimize risk to US soldiers – by maximizing risks to civilians. As Arquilla points out, throughout military history, massed forces have had their day, then suffered from nimbler, more innovative forces: the phalanx fell to the legion, the massed infantries fell to the German stormtroopers, and more recently the US has had its hands full dealing with decentralized terrorists (p.11). In the latter example, the Powell Doctrine has led to maximizing troop safety by maximizing civilian risks, most obviously in airstrikes, and the resulting collateral damage has provided arguments for recruiters for terrorist networks.

On the other hand, the approach that Rumsfeld (imperfectly, intermittently) took involved smaller, nimbler forces, a smaller army made of smaller networked units, lighter weapons, more decentralized decision-making and initiative at unit level, less centralized control, fewer if any aircraft carriers and fewer expensive weapons systems. Arquilla approvingly cites Rumsfeld's “A-Teams” of commandoes whose partnerships with tribal Afghanis made Operation Enduring Freedom such a success (pp.40-41; see also p.87). Arquilla says the Army “should become a force of the 'many and small,' not the 'few and the large'” (pp.45-46). Remodel the Army along the lines of the Special Forces, he says, with as few as 100-200 troops per unit (p.46). Realize, as Rumsfeld belatedly did, that conflicts are more likely to be netwar conflicts in the future (p.161), and that we must prepare military leaders to confront networks as well as nation-states (p.166). Arquilla points out that Rumsfeld initially favored an “Afghan approach” to Iraq, but encountered sharp opposition from the Pentagon and compromised, leading to the massive Iraq invasion (p.216) – and he also argues that the more recent success in Iraq had less to do with the surge and more to do with small, dispersed garrisons (p.217).

Indeed, Arquilla argues that better organization and communication could give an advantage to low-tech dispersed solutions. For instance, he argues that proven, inexpensive WWI-era biplanes and distributed one-gun batteries could be deployed to great effect (p.52), as could drone JetSkis (p.78) and surveillance blimps, if the Air Force controls the skies (pp. 102-103). Compare these, he invites us, to the aircraft carrier – a recurrent symbol of what's wrong with the traditionalist military thinking that Arquilla warns “is leading us toward disaster” (p.24). Aircraft carriers are protected by traditionalism and budgetary inertia – “they represent the largest single line items in the defense budget” - and face no clear rivals on the seas (p.59). Yet they are large, relatively slow targets representing a “big, single 'point of failure'” (p.69), the epitome of massed forces. Meanwhile, the Chinese are working on a “sea power without a navy” (p.63), remote warfare based on supercavitating torpedoes, supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, and “brilliant” seagoing mines with limited maneuverability (pp.63-64). The US armed forces have been slow to innovate in the face of such developments, Arquilla points out.

Arquilla also weighs in on nonlethal weapons, an issue that has become more central recently. These include infantry weapons, and he discusses the Intifada in this context, but it also includes electronic warfare; he argues strongly for a move to a strong encryption regime for the military and the government (p.128).

Arquilla's chapter on influence operations, which clearly shows the mark of his work with Ronfeldt on noopolitik, is also valuable. Influence operations are more than propaganda: they are perceptions management (and in that sense, rhetorical) (pp.132-133). And he argues that they must be better integrated with miilitary concepts (p.133). He reviews the existing principles for influence operations: (1) Don't use them on US citizens; (2) Avoid lying; (3) craft the message and repeat it often (pp.134-136). But, he says, two problems mar this concept of influence operations: (1) “it undervalues listening,” and (2) “it rules out the idea of making concessions in order to induce others to change their behavior” (p.136). While our influence operations have been bogged down, he says, al-Qaeda's have been successful because “they are well suited for exploiting our own 'scaling problem.' They can mount just a few operations and yet be able to count on the Americans having to respond in costly, balky ways,” responding in entire divisions geared for conventional, symmetrical warfare (p.151). Arquilla counsels that instead we “go small,” relying on influence operations more and on conventional methods less (p.153).

And that brings us to the concept of netwar. I've reviewed netwar concepts elsewhere on the blog, mostly in Arquilla and Ronfeldt's writings, but Chapter 7 is a good overview for those who are less familiar with the concept. One key sentence: “Netwar has a postmodern quality, one that takes advantage of the tendency in our time to view the actual fighting in any conflict as a backdrop to the more important 'battle of the story' about why the war is being waged in the first place” (p.162). That's partly why influence operations have become so important. As we see the crisis in Teheran unfolding over YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, shortly after the 20^th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, we are seeing an example of netwar in which the regime and citizens battle for control of the story.

So what are the implications for our armed forces? Let's start with a surprising one. Arquilla wants to bring back the draft. The problem with the volunteer army, he says, is that volunteers come disproportionately from specific regions, religious backgrounds, and political affiliations, so the armed forces have come to represent a narrower slice of the citizenry. The results have included instances of overt politicization, undue religious influence, and socioeconomic segregation. Reinstating the draft “would remind all Americans of the implicit social contract that runs from citizen to government, and to one's compatriots” (p.195).

At the same time, Arquilla wants a much smaller armed forces: he wants to reduce active duty forces by three quarters while enlarging the reserves to provide more flexible, scalable forces (p.226). He wants to keep elite forces elite and focus on small, dispersed field units (p.226). Most of all, he wants to see the armed forces phase out the enormous, centralized aircraft carriers in favor of smaller ships, and he wants to see outer space kept for intelligence support rather than advanced weaponry (p.226).

Arquilla's book is a well-written, thought-provoking argument. I'm not qualified to evaluate it as a blueprint for the armed forces, but it has analogical implications for other large organizations. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets

Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation
By Peter F. Cowhey and Jonathan D. Aronsen with Donald Abelson

Drucker wrote at the end of World War II that massive organizations such as the corporation, which had been nearly nonexistent at the beginning of the 20^th century, had become the dominant feature of mid-century life. At about the same time that he made that observation, an information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure had begun to grow, creating the beginnings of today's global information technology (Cowhey et al. p.1). And that new infrastructure involved a “radically different model for competition and public policy for this infrastructure ... that is far sounder than its predecessor” (p.1). In this book – available in hardback or as a free download – the authors examine that model, discussing the “inflection point” (p.3) that we face today, sorting through policies and policy implications, and making what they consider to be generally optimistic predictions about how ICT policy will develop over the next few years.

The authors define “inflection point” by quoting former Intel chairman Andy Grove: it “'occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new'” (qtd. p.7). At this inflection point, “ICT technology is becoming both modular and radically cheaper” and at the same time “ubiquitous wired and wireless broadband can meld these ICT capabilities together” into powerful, placeless applications (p.7). “Modularity and broadband mean that convergence of services and equipment will defy traditional market boundaries,” they explain (p.7). Yet public policy has been slow to adapt to this new reality. “This challenge raises the central question we address in this book: How can national and global policies best fulfill the promise of this inflection point in the global ICT infrastructure?” (p.8).

It's an exceedingly important question since, as the authors demonstrate, public policy can have enormous impacts on technologies and thus on the sorts of commercial, civic, and private possibilities they allow (pp.9-10). (That's what drew me to the book, even though I find public policy discussions to be very tough sledding in places, and this book is no exception.) As the authors note, “in today's world many different private interests back different visions of the public interest” (p.10) – and the way the US in particular balances such visions will be crucial, since “we argue that until about 2025 the United States will be able to lead, but not to dictate, the world's choices about future policies” (p.10).

So what changes are involved in this inflection point? First, ICT changes lead to lower entry costs and more competition over smaller market segments: market leaders are less secure and markets themselves can easily change (pp.11-12). Second, “the inflection point breaks ICT out of geographic and functional boxes”; IT can expand horizontally, out of offices, as well as vertically, up and down organizations (p.12).

ICT infrastructures, the authors argue, are inherently political – and its policies and politics are inherently global (p.13). “There are at least four reasons why the domestic governance of ICT infrastructure depends on global arrangements,” they tell us:

• “network externalities ensure that networks are more valuable when they connect more users” (p.13).

• “economies of scale still apply in similar ways to the engineering and the economics of networks,” so suppliers have influence on infrastructure across borders (pp.13-14).

• Because of the features of network economics, “the pricing for connecting domestic networks internationally often displays unusual characteristics that matter to many political stakeholders” (p.14).

• The public holds government ultimately responsible for the quality of the networked infrastructure, so network performance becomes highly political (p.14).

The US has been and (the authors anticipate) will continue to be pivotal in developing global ICT policy, so in Chapter 2, the authors review the history of ICT in the US. After discussing the development and breakup of Bell, the authors argue that three features of the US political system are relevant to communication policy:

• division of powers

• majoritarian electoral system

• federalism

I won't discuss these in detail, but I'll note that the authors weave these into their analysis as they examine the post-Bell landscape, particularly the delegation of much discretion over telecomm policy to the executive bureaucracy. Some of the resulting choices had real impact. For instance, when the FCC designed the wireless market system, it anticipated 4-6 competitors per market, none dominating a given market; it mandated low wireless-wire interconnection charges. Later, the Democrat-dominated FCC of the Clinton era interpreted the 1996 Telecommunications Act as calling for “strong interconnect obligations for the Bells at long-run incremental costs” (p.37). In an adjacent telecomm industry without a monopoly history, cable television and satellite TV networks fragmented broadcast markets, shrinking mass audiences and leading to a post-2000 restructuring of the content industry (p.40).

Meanwhile, modularity is also impacting ICT development: modular services and modular broadband have led to geographic distribution of infrastructure, services, and sales (p.54). The web browser has become the common interface, while transparent APIs have led to modular, mashed-up content and developer communities (p.60). “Modularity and interoperability of capabilities signal the demise of the utility model that depends on quasi-monopoly or duopoly in major software and service platforms” (p.65). Heterogeneous services mean that service providers agree on interoperability standards, and as a result different services are substitutable – modular – meaning that a market leader can't leverage its lead in neighboring market segments (p.68). The long tail (p.76), the ad-supported “Cheap Revolution” (p.77), and emerging personalized network platforms (p.84) all emerge from these qualities. And the authors argue that “the availability of ample network broadband is indispensible to fulfilling the inflection point's potential” - yet the spread of broadband in the US is “deplorable” (p.89). The authors explore the current situation and the US' leadership in more detail that I care to summarize here – it's good reading, but thick.

Wireless infrastructure is also examined – a tremendously important discussion, since in the US, the number of mobile lines overtook fixed lines in 2002 (p.178), and mobile lines are increasing rapidly across the world. Internet governance also comes in for discussion, with a detailed history and explanation of its current form (Ch.9). And the authors wrap up with a detailed set of summary and conclusions.

My conclusion? The book is thick and jammed with information. As with many policy instructions, it's hard to get through. Yet it's rewarding. If you're interested in ICT policy, or just curious to see how infrastructure might evolve, take a look at the table of contents or index. If you have a serious scholarly or public policy interest in these issues, read it cover to cover.

Upcoming workshop: Visualizing Patterns of Group Communication in Digital Writing

So Mark Zachry, Bill Hart-Davidson and I will be presenting our workshop at Penn State next weekend. Essentially, we'll be working intensely with a small number of participants to teach the visual models I've been teaching my undergraduate students. It's going to be exciting, I think. If you're one of our attendees, I can't wait to see you there.

Reading :: The Logic of Care

The Logic of Care: Health and the problem of patient choice
By Annemarie Mol

A few years ago, I posted a glowing review of The Body Multiple, Annemarie Mol's book about how atherosclerosis is constructed across the multiple perspectives in hospitals. Mol is an engaging writer as well as a sharp ethnographer and theorist. Even though her books are translated from the Dutch (partly by Mol herself), Mol's enjoyable writing style comes through – she often brings up an observation early on without comment, drops it as she develops the piece methodologically and conceptually, then offhandedly recalls the observation – which suddenly is nudged into a more layered, more multidimensional sense. Then she does it again. It's rather like watching someone laminate a picture under many layers.

Mol continues this writing style, but whereas The Body Multiple is a more or less standard ethnography interpreted philosophically, The Logic of Care is a philosophical argument that draws from Mol's ethnographic data as well as her own experience as a patient seeking care for a chronic condition. This argument is about two logics: the logic of choice that dominates the public and administrative discourse about health, and the logic of care that infuses (some of) its (best) practices (p.11).

Simply, the logic of choice takes individual choice as an ideal – yet this ideal often does not lead to the best results. “I do not question choice in general, but rather the generalisation of choice,” Mol insists in a characteristic chiasmus (p.1). This logic of choice, which is embedded deeply in market capitalism, involves presenting health practices as a choice for the consumer; but some scholars have noted that “making people long for choices and invest a lot in making them, is a disciplining technique”(p.4; cf. Devo, “Freedom of Choice”). And in medical decisions, choice can overburden people, leading to poor choices – and extraordinary circumstances, in which people are not equipped to make choices, are not so extraordinary in medicine (p.6). It's not about whether people can choose, she argues, but rather about situations of choice, in which a specific mode of organizing and interpreting can be applied. And she doubts that the resulting, organized world - “infused with what I call the logic of choice” - actually “offers a way of living superior to the life that may be led in a world infused by the alternative that this book seeks to articulate: the logic of care” (p.7). This second logic does not construct patients as passive: “they do not primarily figure as subjects of choice, but as the subjects of all kinds of activities. The logic of care is not preoccupied with our will, and what we may opt for, but concentrates on what we do” (p.7).

Mol draws contrasts between the two logics, starting with one customer contact point: advertisements. In the logic of choice, the market demands a product: “The market requires that some product (device, plus skills training, plus kindness and attention) is delineated as the product on offer” (p.18). But “Care is a process: it does not have clear boundaries. It is open-ended. ... care is not a (small or large) product that changes hands, but a matter of various hands working together (over time) toward a result” (p.18). Care is not a transaction, but an interaction (p.18). So the logic of choice yields products that people can delineate and purchase as solutions; the logic of care sees such products as embedded in evolving practices that involve fine-tuning, tradeoffs, and continuing results. And about those results: in the logic of choice, if someone rejects a product, they are no longer considered part of the target market; in the logic of care, the caregiver keeps trying (p.22).

So that's the market version of the logic of choice. But there's also a civic version, that which casts patients as citizens able to “vote” on their care: “the relationship is moulded in the form of a contract” (p.30). But Mol critiques this analogy because a citizen can control, tame, or escape the body politic, but a patient can't control, tame, or escape her own body (except, I will add, in the colloquial sense that we “escape” our bodies during death, a figure of speech that may not translate from the Dutch) (p.31). Rather, Mol suggests “patientism,” an analog of feminism in which patients-living-with-disease can constitute a standard rather than being seen as diverging from a standard.

The logic of care, then, might cast patients as customers or as citizens. But in both variations, choice is seen as a matter of balancing values based on fact (p.42). Mol critiques that stance. For instance, suppose that a patient is trying to keep her blood sugar levels below 10 mmol/l. In the logic of choice, patients attempt to achieve that normative fact, keeping their levels around 10mmol/l and often feeling failure when they cannot. But “within the logic of care, identifying a suitable target value is not a condition for, but a part of, treatment. Instead of establishing it before you engage in action, you keep on searching for it while you act” (p.46). And “what follows is that for the logic of care gathering knowledge is not a matter of providing better maps of reality, but of crafting more bearable ways of living with, or in reality” (p.46).

Another difference is in how the two logics handle collectives. The logic of choice understands collectives as markets or as voting, both of which involve the aggregation of individual choices. But the logic of care starts with the collective, recognizing that we can't separate the patient from her or his collective – family, friends, other support systems, all of which have to conform a bit in order to make care work. The logic of choice involves value-laden judgments, but “In the logic of care, the crucial moral act is not making value judgments, but engaging in practical activities” (p.75).

As I said, I like Mol's work very much, and I really like how she plays with different frames or articulations here. Much of her work in this book has direct applications to rhetoric. At the same time, I think she sometimes assumes remarkably credulous consumers (p.28), weak-willed patients (p.48), and professionals whose self-evaluations amount to simple self-praise (p.87). Consequently, the contrast tends to be a bit overdrawn in places. Yet the book overall is solid and thought-provoking. Definitely pick it up.

Reading :: The "Virtual Corporation" and Army Organization

The "Virtual Corporation" and Army Organization
By Francis Fukuyama and Abram N. Shulsky

This 1997 RAND research report examines the trend toward flat, virtualized organizations in business and asks how that trend might be applied to Army organization. As the authors describe it, “the economy is moving from an industrial-age model, in which machines and natural resources are used to produce material product, to the 'information-based organization' that produces goods or services through the use of human capital”(p.x). They point out the consequences for commercial organization: the need for faster information exchange leads to smaller organizations; flatter hierarchies and/or networks of agile firms; the continued devaluing of low-skilled labor; more self-organized teams replacing individual effort; and more flexibility, learning, and adaptability to address the more chaotic environment (p.x).

Yet centralization has its advantages as well. Centralized organizations can often move more quickly and decisively and can leverage scales of economy. “A military organization seeking to accomplish a specific goal in the near future needs centralized command authority; a military seeking to adapt to a fast-changing and uncertain external environment needs a higher degree of decentralization in order to adapt adequately” (pp. X-xi). The authors argue that the US Army is in the latter situation.

So they anticipate several organizational changes for the Army. They anticipate a smaller number of echelons (p.xiii); smaller size, yielding easier logistics (p.xiv); more innovation in procurement (p.xiv); and working to keep experience distributed throughout the argument rather than pooling, so that soldiers can be better prepared to take initiative and responsibility (p.xiv).

The authors walk us through the established ground here, distinguishing among hierarchical organizations, virtual or “flat” organizations, and networks (p.5). The latter two are distinguished in that the flat organization still has a hierarchy, but the network doesn't. Consequently, the network really isn't applicable to an army with a focused objective. “Successful networked organizations ... constitute a framework within which their individual members can operate” (p.19).

The authors claim that armies are actually leaders in flat organizations due to the critical problem of operating in the face of inadequate information (p.28). Flat organizations, due to their nimbleness, often result in tactical successes that spark strategic overextension (p.39) – examples of which include Napoleon and the Wehrmacht. But flat organizations also pose another danger, the “CNN Effect,” in which pushing discretion and decision-making to lower levels results in newsworthy incidents; a “zero-defects” mentality reinforces a strict, and slow, centralized hierarchical structure (p.49). “It is impossible to routinize error-free flat organizations; when errors occur in a politically sensitive environment, there is a tendency to recentralize authority” (p.50). The authors urge instituting a “freedom to fail” (p.77), recalling the Web 2.0-era mantra to “fail faster,” although they don't delve into how much failure can be tolerated when failure is measured in, for instance, civilian casualties.

Overall, this report is a well developed treatise that identifies different organizational structures and thinks through how they can be applied to the Army. It's thought-provoking and really complicates some of the simplified distinctions from, say, The Starfish and the Spider.

Reading :: The Starfish and the Spider

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
By Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

The Starfish and the Spider has gotten a lot of press and attention since it was published in 2006. As the subtitle states, it's about leaderless organizations and how they function. It's a quick read – I finished it in two sittings – and turns out to be a good entry-level text for understanding the difference between hierarchical and networked organizations. Like most such popularizations, it loses a little in the translation, and those who have read more complex texts on networks (such as Castells or Arquilla & Ronfeldt or, ahem, Spinuzzi) may feel like they're playing in the shallow end of the pool. But for those who are just getting into the literature or who want to get the concept and apply it rapidly, the book is definitely a good place to start.

The metaphor in the title refers to two organisms that are superficially similar, but organized differently. If you destroy a spider's head, you get a dead spider; if you cut up a starfish, you get two starfish. Since starfish are decentralized, they are more resilient and better able to recover from shocks that would kill more centralized organisms.

The authors apply this metaphor in a number of comparative cases – the Aztecs vs. the Apache, Napster vs. eDonkey, and classifieds vs. Craigslist, for instance – and abstract a number of principles that describe decentralized organizations:

1. “When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and decentralized.” (p.21)

2. “It's easy to mistake starfish for spiders” (p.36) – i.e., decentralized for centralized organizations.

3. “An open system doesn't have central intelligence; the intelligence is spread throughout the system” (pp.39-40)

4. “Open systems can easily mutate” (p.40)

5. “The decentralized organization sneaks up on you.” (p.41)

6. “As industries become decentralized, overall profits decrease.” (p.45)

7. “Put people in an open system and they'll automatically want to contribute.” (p.74)

Some readers will recognize many of these principles from different sources, but they're well summarized here. On the other hand, the summaries tend to be a bit uncomplicated – networked organizations are sometimes decentralized operationally but very centralized doctrinally, such as Aum Shinrikyo, for instance – but the principles are a good overall sketch.

The authors spend most of their time describing such organizations and discussing how to make them work better. But they also offer advice for combating decentralized organizations:

1. Change their ideology (p.144)

2. Centralize them by centralizing key resources (p.151)

3. Decentralize yourself (p.155)

In a later chapter, the authors discuss hybrid organizations, organizations that are either “a centralized company that decentralizes the user experience,” such as eBay (p.164) or “a centralized company that decentralizes the internal parts of the business” (p.175). This is a good move, although it does not exhaust the dimensions along which companies can be centralized or decentralized. I was left wanting more of these dimensions and deeper discussion of them.

Finally, the authors outline the “new rules of the game.” I won't list the many rules here except to say that they follow naturally from what the authors discuss earlier; the chapter has the feel of a summary for those who have skimmed the book.

So would I recommend the book? I already have to at least one person, and I will to others. The book is a nice introduction to those who want to work up to more complex texts, but it also works well for its intended audience – C-level execs – and for undergraduates. Check it out.

Smart Mobs, seven years on

Speaking in Amsterdam, Howard Rheingold discusses his book Smart Mobs and how it's held up after seven years. If you haven't read it yet, here's the link to Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Internet access for the homeless

Castells discussed the danger of "black holes" in our urban areas, places that are outside the major flows of capital and information and that do not allow people to escape. But those who are determined to escape have begun to find ways to recapture the flows of information:

"You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper," says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. "But you need the Internet."

The homeless in San Francisco, accordingly, spend some of their meager resources on Internet access, picking up netbooks or older laptops and using free wifi.

This story reminds me of one I linked to a while back, on homeless people relying on mobile phones in lieu of fixed addresses. As wifi-enabled smartphones become more common, perhaps we'll see pay-as-you-go, peripheral-ready smartphones that can better serve the needs of low-income and homeless people, bringing some light to these black holes.

Reading :: Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing

Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The Next-Generation Internet's Impact on Business, Governance and Social Interaction
By J.D. Lasica

So here I am at the coffee shop, typing away on my new netbook, still trying to decide whether this particular machine will work for me. But I'm doing all my work using the same tools that I use on my Mac laptop: GMail, GCalendar, GDocs, and of course Blogger. To a great extent, cloud computing has already been widely adopted and has enabled greater device independence, greater portability, and greater opportunities for interconnection and collaboration.

We don't need a report to tell us that - but this report looks ahead to the implications of cloud computing for "business, governance, and social interaction," as the title states. The report reflects the conversations of a roundtable convened in 2008 at the Aspen Institute of "28 leaders from the ICT, financial, government, academic, and public policy sectors" (p.vii). The principals see cloud computing as an important shift: "Like the migration of electricity in the early 1900s from local generation to an electrical grid with metered service, the cloud signals the movement of hard and soft functions such as storage, software applications and services to an off-premises service industry" (p.vii). And in light of that shift, "What control do we have over our identities, security, and privacy? How will it change economic and business models? What are the implications for governance and cyber-security?" (p.vii). The report reecommends "that a user-centric open identity network system is the right approach at this point" since it could allow people to manage their own identities, customize them, and make identity scalable across the Internet (p.viii).

The report starts by asserting that "digital natives" increasingly see no gap between online and offline lives, asserting that "I am whatever I say I am" (p.1). It was not always thus, Lasica reminds us: not that long ago, it was common to assert that on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. But now identities are much more articulated, defined, and tied to each other as well as offline presence. The roundtable sees this trend continuing and deepening in the future (p.2).

One consequence of increasing cloud computing is that capacity can be distributed. When corporations run their own server farms, costs are unsustainable, "with server resources often idle eighty-five percent of the time" (p.11). Not surprisingly, companies are moving toward "virtualization -- using someone else's computer to do the heavy lifting for you" (p.7). One example is Animoto, "which scaled very quickly from 50 to 3,500 servers" (p.11), and was able to rent appropriate server space as needed. And this nimble approach means that "when companies adopt virtualization technologies and thus lower on-site energy consumption, IT's footprint should go down dramatically" (p.12).

The report quotes Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco Systems, as foreseeing three stages of cloud formation: first, companies offload their IT to private clouds; second, common standards enable companies to move information from private to external enterprise clouds; third, a public or semipublic "inter-cloud" where entities can share and mash up data (pp.13-14).

All three articulations of the cloud, particularly the third one, have implications for identity. "When the Web first became a mass phenomenon around 1993, we were all free to take on whatever persona appealed to us" (p.15), but social networks began to change that, and "Facebook became a game-changer, kicking off anyone who refused to use their real names. On Facebook and a new breed of copycat social networks, identity is front and center, grounded by real biographies, real friends and real media" (p.16). But this sort of identity is quite restrictive. The roundtable participants predict a "third incarnation of online identity - call it identity in the cloud" (p.17). And "this new system would recognize that eaqch of us has multiple identities. We will be able to spoon out bits and pieces of our identity, depending on the social or business context we find ourselves in" (p.17). An open identity system might reveal only the parts of the identity necessary to a particular transaction, working as a trusted intermediary in the same way eBay intermediates between buyers and sellers (p.18). Multiple identities become necessary and manageable, with business, health care, singles, and virtual world profiles, for instance (p.18). This "identity layer resides not in a governmental or company database but in the cloud" (p.19).

The roundtable participants contrast this notion of a cloud identity with Microsoft Passport, the abandoned plan to create centralized identities (p.19). "The course correction came about not because of a newfound altruism but because of the companies' recognition of a new kind of ecological capitalism, where their business interests were intertwined with the interests of customers, suppliers, and even competitors. Competition has evolved beyond a multiplayer zero-sum game into a more complex, cooperative exchange where mutually advantageous outcomes depend on a new kind of rationality in a wider ecology of players" (p.20).

The participants also discussed how these changes could result in new concepts of money, with information replacing money for many purposes (p.27). We already see this tendency "as instant global communications make possible bartering not only for tangible goods but also for text minutes, airline miles, virtual world currency and other non-physical assets" (p.27). In China and India, people already use prepaid mobile phone minutes as an alternate currency (p.32). To scale, such systems need better website reputation systems, systems that can't be gamed (p.31).

The roundtable "identified twelve ways the cloud will transform business":

1. Greater global reach
2. Greater customization
3. Reduced barriers to entry
4. The end of scale
5. Easier entry into adjacent markets
6. Greater specialization
7. Greater innovation and experimentation
8. Greater information transparency
9. Greater organizational complexity
10. Faster turnaround times and greater speed to market
11. Greater competitive intensity and disruption of existing markets
12. A shift from marketing push to customer pull (p.34)

Briefly, scale "is no longer an integral pillar of the new economy" (p.38). People's contributions will become more narrow and specialized across a range of markets, since greater connectivity means finding more precise fits rather than turning the employees in one's proximity into generalists; employees will no longer be units of one, but "fractions," hired for specific tasks (p.39). "Companies no longer pay for employees; they pay for solutions, essentially fractionalizing the employee into ever smaller and more productive slices of labor by enabling co-location in a virtual way through technology" (p.40). And "relationships come together based on a particular product or project and then disband at the end" (p.40). (Longtime readers of this blog will recognize this theme, which runs through my second book and my investigations of freelancers and coworking.)

At the same time, the roundtable anticipates scalable learning across the organization (p.42) and greater organizational complexity (p.44). In this environment, "the real impact of cloud computing may be this: in the future, everyone becomes an entrepreneur" (p.71).

The report concludes with a lengthy list of U.S. policy proposals, including formulating an identity agenda, modernizing the national energy grid, and deploying world-class broadband (pp.73-74).

All in all, this report seems like a strong summary of the issues facing identity in the future. I'm not sure I was really surprised by any of the report, but these threads were brought together well and succinctly, and in language that is easily absorbed. I'd recommend this report to C-level execs and academic departments.

Reading :: Emergence of Noopolitik

The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy
By John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt

This RAND report is an earlier, longer version of Arquilla and Ronfeldt's FirstMonday article "The Promise of Noopolitik." Like that later article, this report argues that strategists need to shift the US' grand strategy away from realpolitik and toward noopolitik: "the form of statecraft that we argue will come to be associated with the noosphere, the broadest informational realm of the mind" (p.x). "Noopolitik is foreign-policy behavior for the information age that emphasizes the primacy of ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics - it would work through 'soft power' rather than 'hard power.' Noopolitik is guided more by a conviction that right makes might than the obverse" (p.x). And noopolitik involves more than state actors: "While realpolitik tends to empower states, noopolitik will likely empower networks of state and nonstate actors. Realpolitik pits one state against another, but noopolitik encourages states to cooperate in coalitions and other mutual frameworks" (p.x).

Arquilla and Ronfeldt go on to carefully discuss these ideas, acknowledging that realpolitik and noopolitik will coexist for decades (p.5), but also pointing out that "realpolitik, which stresses the hard, material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of world order," makes less sense in a world in which states are not dominant (p.29). The US is actually well positioned to lead in the noosphere, they argue, since "the new organizational ecology is richest in the United States" (p.7). That's important, since the growth of the noosphere depends not only on increased flows of ideas and ideals, but also growth in the stocks of ideas and ideals to which people subscribe" (p.23), and therefore open systems are essential for a global noosphere (p.23). And as systems increasingly become more open, and as these flows and stocks increase, states decline in relationship to nongovernmental agencies, complex transactional interconnections, and global issues (pp.30-31).

In fact, realpolitik is at odds with five trends: global interconnection, growing strength of global civil society, the rise of soft power, the importance of cooperative advantages, and the formation of a global noosphere (pp.35-44). The authors review these in detail, then summarize: "Realpolitik is typically about whose military or economy wins. Noopolitik may ultimately be about whose story wins" (p.53). Noopolitik, that is, is thoroughly rhetorical.

This text, as usual, is full of insights that won't be a surprise to Arquilla and Ronfeldt readers (or Castells readers, for that matter). But the authors carefully develop these ideas, yielding intriguing insights and predictions. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: The Innovation Acid Test

The Innovation Acid Test: Growth Through Design and Differentiation
By Andrew M. Jones

Drew Jones is one of the coauthors of I'm Outta Here!, a book on coworking. When he mentioned he had written another book, I asked him for the name so I could look it up. Not long after that, this book showed up in my inbox gratis. Thanks, Drew.

In any case, it's an interesting book. Like many such books, it discusses case studies from several companies (in this case: Southwest Airlines, Google, Whole Foods, SAS Institute, Starbucks, Innocent Drinks and Shanghai Tang) (p.12). But Jones goes on to examine innovation in those companies, arguing that the "emerging disciplines of innovation" include ethnography, architecture, and design (p.14). (Jones is an anthropologist by training.) These disciplines, centered around design, focus on building the unknown; they contrast with the dominant troika of mathematics, economics, and psychology, which focus on managing the known (p.20). And he argues that shifting from the old to the new paradigm will be crucial to attracting GenX and especially GenY employees (p.23). These new employees should be "T-shaped," that is, empathetic enough to reach across disciplines (p.24; search my blog for "boundary crossing" for some similar thoughts).

In the following chapters, Jones explores the three new disciplines with case studies, then concludes with thoughts about moving toward the new paradigm. The case studies are very business school-ish, relying mostly on C-level interviews and public company data; ironically, they're not ethnographic.

The book, I think, is valuable for thinking through what organizational innovation means. I really prefer ethnographic investigation to interview-based cases, but I see the value in these cases as well, and I certainly see value in thinking through the paradigm Jones outlines here. I expect I'll return to this book frequently as I continue to develop my own ideas about changes in work.

Reading :: The Myth of Leadership

The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations
By Jeffrey S. Nielsen

On Amazon.com, Jeffrey Nielsen's The Myth of Leadership currently has ten five-star reviews and one one-star review. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to go with the one-star review.

Nielsen's book is ostensibly about how to break away from hierarchical, leader-heavy organizations and instead create peer-based leaderless organizations. Unfortunately, he never actually defines "leadership" except in terms of formal rank, assuming that flattening rank is equivalent to removing leadership. Of course, this approach is really not tenable, so after railing against leadership for 141 pages, on p.142 he introduces the "strategy of rotational leadership" (p.142).

That's an emblematic example of how problematic the book is. But it's not the only example. Frankly, the book's cartoonish depiction of hierarchies troubles me. Nielsen argues that "genuine communication occurs only between equals" (p.4) because "you tell those above you only what you think they want to hear, and you tell those beneath you only what you think they need to know" (p.5) - a statement that is not borne out in my research, certainly, and that I suspect doesn't describe the general workforce. Nielsen builds on this false premise - for starters - by arguing that "secrecy frequently breeds corruption and abuse of power" (p.4). In fact, in the next few pages, he makes incredible, irresponsible leaps:

• "If the rank-based context of leadership is a primary cause of unhealthy and joyless business organizations..." (p.6);
• "Whenever we think in terms of 'leadership,' we create a dichotomy: (1) leaders, a select and privileged few, and (2) followers, the vast majority" (p.6);
• the term leadership "produces a privileged elite who, no matter how sincere they are, will eventually be seduced by their position" (p.6);
• peer-based organizations involve "no thought of leadership because there is no thought of ranking" (p.7).

These are oversimplifications, but they are also - particularly the last one - empirically wrong across organizations. Nielsen backs up this last point with an anecdote about a pickup game of football that completely undercuts his point. Although we do see where he gets his claim about people becoming sychophants in organizations, since he describes himself becoming a sychophant in a pickup game with an assertive leader (pp.7-8).

Nielsen name-checks Foucault, Gladwell, Castells, and of course chaos theory, without much indication that he understands any of them. He barely touches on some organizational forms (tribal, institutional, networked), but he barely touches on their historical development and he doesn't mention one of the most important factors - the plummeting cost of communication - as a key factor except as an afterthought at the end of the book (p.163). Instead, he portrays hierarchical organizational structure as an inexplicable accident that brings out the worst in people.

In the latter half of the book, Nielsen attempts to articulate some principles and practices for leaderless organizations (including the aforementioned "rotational leadership"). But by then, I had lost faith that he (a) knew what he was talking about and (b) would give a fair shake to criticisms of his ideas. By the time Nielsen lurched to a stop, with the claim that democracy is inevitable (p.165), I had given up on insights and simply decided to finish the book.

I can't recommend this book.

Reading :: Beware the Hubris Nemesis Complex

Beware the Hubris Nemesis Complex: A Concept for Leadership Analysis
By David F. Ronfeldt

I've been really enjoying reading David Ronfeldt's work, which mostly comes to me by way of RAND research reports. Ronfeldt is intellectually curious and roving, rushing ahead at high speed across disciplinary boundaries in order to collect new insights. In this way he seems a bit like Yrjo Engestrom. And like Engestrom, Ronfeldt is working on a grand social theory. For Engestrom, it's activity theory. For Ronfeldt, it's his TIMN framework and his Space-Time-Activity (STA) analysis, about which I have previously blogged.

Ronfeldt is currently retired from RAND, but in this 1994 publication, he was very much involved in thinking through national security problems. One problem is as fresh today as it was in 1994: what personality characteristics are shared by many of the dictators who deliberately and consistently provoke the United States in order to benefit domestically? Ronfeldt has Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein in mind, but we could update it by adding Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Dipping into Jungian psychology, Ronfeldt argues that such leaders represent an "extraordinary dynamic," the fusing of hubris ("a pretention toward an arrogant form of godliness") and nemesis ("a vengeful desire to confront, defeat, humiliate, and punish an adversary that may itself be accused of hubris") (p.5). Put succinctly, for people who hold the hubris-nemesis complex, their hubris involves becoming a nemesis to some other entity's hubris.

In a unipolar world, that other entity is usually the United States. And in setting out to punish that entity's hubris, the actor takes the mantle of "high ideals and a moralization of violence" (p.7). Such leaders tend to become maximalist and pragmatic, Ronfeldt says (p.13), picking their battles in order to strengthen their domestic and global positions.

Analyzing this type through his STA framework, Ronfeldt argues that hubris-nemesis leaders, unlike narcissists, have a keen sense of history (p.27) and have long time horizons - but use crises to "transform the meaning of past, present, and future and break through to a new kind of time" (p.34).

In the last chapter, Ronfeldt acknowledges that his focus on individuals as the kernel for national action "bother[s] social theorists who believe that mankind's history is driven far less by subjective conditions than by objective, material, and structural conditions ... [they] want concepts like the hubris-nemesis complex to be nested in a convincing discussion of the degree to which psychological and other subjective conditions matter in the first place" (p.40). Right, that's a pretty good description of my perspective. But I can also see how Ronfeldt is onto something. As I was reading this report, President Obama had just come in for substantial criticism because he had been photographed smiling and shaking Hugo Chavez' hand. Against this outcry, military historian Max Boot told Obama's critics:

All Obama did was shake the guy’s hand, and offer him a smile. Far from being a disaster, this could actually be a smart strategic move. Chavez, after all, derives much of his demagogic appeal from his claim to be an inveterate enemy of Uncle Sam. He thrives off provoking us and using the resulting reaction to “prove” that we are as bad as he claims.

Obama is a lot harder to demonize than George W. Bush, however, and by shaking hands with Chavez the president may be undercutting his appeal more effectively than anything Bush did. [My emphasis]

In other words, Pres. Obama seems to be in consonance with Ronfeldt's advice on how to handle such personalities. Interesting.

"In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008."

Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist at Amazon, discusses the implications of user-created content.

Technological Ecologies & Sustainability

Technological Ecologies & Sustainability is the name of a new open-access, on-line scholarly book published by Computers & Composition Digital Press. It's a multiauthored, multimodal composition. I haven't gotten to review it yet, but I wanted to put the link out there.

The newspaper bailout?

Leena Rao of TechCrunch has a thoughtful post on the possibility of a newspaper bailout. (No word on bailouts for the buggy whip industry yet.) In addition to the practical issues, TechCrunch identifies the following ethical issues:

• Under one proposal, newspapers would be prevented from making political endorsements. On the face of it, perhaps this seems like a good idea - after all, newspapers could endorse candidates that had voted for the bailout - but as Rao argues, this measure would constitute an unwelcome First Amendment restriction: "Political endorsements by newspapers and media organizations are a very essence of freedom of speech."
• But of course, this leads us to the second issue. "The second ethical question is whether journalists will be able to deliver unbiased reporting of the very people and institutions that are helping to subsidize their jobs."

Yes, these are the horns of the dilemma. I suspect that a bailout will spell not only ethical problems but also perception problems with newspapers. They need another way out.

Hnadling plagiarism

Things have been busy around here, but I wanted to throw out a link to Stepcase Lifehack's short post on handling plagiarists. Specifically, the article is directed partially to plagiarists, talking about how to handle their discovery and recover with some shred of dignity.

CFP: Writing Research Across Borders 2011

I'm excited to be involved with WRAB 2011 - it's a great conference with an international crowd discussing writing research. Here's the CFP:

Call for Proposals: Writing Research Across Borders II

George Mason University

February 17-20, 2011

Proposal Deadline May 3, 2010

As societies become more knowledge-intensive and communication technologies draw us more closely together, the importance of writing in economic, scientific, civic, personal, and social development becomes more apparent. Correspondingly, the imperative to conduct research on writing in schools and the workplace, in relationship to learning and development, and in all aspects of our lives has invigorated work among scholars in all regions of the world. The conference Writing Research Across Borders II will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their findings and set research agendas for the coming years.

Continuing the success of the three previous international research conferences held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the 2011 Writing Research Across Borders II will be held at George Mason University in the Washington D.C./Northern Virginia area. We invite proposals that will continue to deepen the cross-disciplinary, international dialogues across the many different domains of writing research.

As in past years, this conference will focus on writing development across the lifespan, including the impact of new technologies on learning to write, early acquisition of writing, writing across grade levels (K-20), writing in the disciplines and professions, and writing in the workplace or other community and institutional settings. We invite proposals presenting research in these areas. We also invite proposals on any other areas of writing use and practice, such as writing in progressive or large scale educational programs, or proposals that link writing research and policies. We welcome papers raising methodological issues about researching writing. We invite work from any research tradition that is grounded in the tradition’s previous research and pursues the methodical gathering of qualitative or quantitative data appropriate to its claims.

Proposals should identify the format preferred (panels, roundtables, individual presentations, and poster presentations). Individual or poster proposals should be a maximum of 500 words. Proposals with multiple presentations (panel and roundtable) should contain a short overview statement and then no more than 400 words per speaker. Proposals should specify the relevant research literatures, research questions, methods, data, and findings, as well as the scope and duration of the research projects.

The deadline for proposals is May 3, 2010. Please submit proposals in .doc or .rtf format by email attachment to <writing@education.ucsb.edu>. Also, be sure to include a title for your proposal and each speaker’s individual talk, as well as contact information for each individual presenter.

Conference information will be available at http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/wrconf11/