Kazys Vernelis on today’s network culture

Steven Shaviro’s analysis of network culture, published in 2003, seems already behind the times. Kazys Vernelis writes a comprehensive analysis of what’s obsolete about old views of network culture, and what’s salient about network culture today.

The Vernelis article describes a network culture that succeeds postmodernism. The dystopian worlds Shaviro analyzes are the projections of “late capitalist” postmodernism as described by Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. Those worlds were characterized by corporate dominance, image and simulation, fragmentation, hallucination, social isolation. The network, in Shaviro’s world, is a solvent dissolving bonds to any real experience or connection.

Vernelis sees the network reconnecting: “today connection is more important than division. In contrast to digital culture, in network culture information is less the product of discrete processing units than of the networked relations between them, of links between people, between machines, and between machines and people.” He envisions new economic, esthetic, and social patterns, driven by peer production, remixing, and networked micropublics.

I think his analysis of the changed nature of the identity and the public sphere is spot on. Varnelis writes “the contemporary subject is constituted within the network. Instead of whole individuals, we are made up of multiple micro-publics, inhabiting simultaneously overlapping telecocoons, sharing telepresence with intimates with whom we are in near-constant contact… today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.” This is very different from the isolated, hallucinating, insane individuals in Shaviro’s world.

I think Vernelis’ model of the characteristics of network culture is strong, and addresses the way the postmodernist dystopias feel out of date. But I and don’t completely agree with his view of the consequences, or in some cases he would be inconclusive where I have an opinion.

Vernelis writes that in the new network culture “privacy is unimportant. Self is undone in the network, vs. self is conceptualized in the network.” I don’t think this is quite true. I think that defaults and assumptions are shifting, and that new notions of “publicy”, as articulated by Stowe Boyd and others, will rise to the fore, in which people consider, act, and develop more tools that facilitate faceted sharing according to social context; only a small amount of which will be hidden to the point of invisibility, and a larger amount will be localized by context, new norms of urban ignoring, and the need for everyone to maintain signal to noise sanity.

And on that subject, Vernelis shares the lament that “A Blackberry or telephone constantly receiving text messages encourages its owner to submit to a constantly distracted state”. He does not yet take up the insight advocated articulately by Howard Rheingold, and as I just discovered Tikva Morawati in her NYU thesis, that attention is a cultural practice amenable to wisdom; that we can learn a range of strategies of attention literacy that allow us to become smarter by participating in flows, and preserve focus by learning to turn them off. Also Vernelis sees the networked self as “an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others, a switching machine.” I see additional opportunities; personal, business and art forums of curation to actively organize flows and their elements within publics over time.

Vernelis I think rightly observes a change in the public sphere. He cites Habermas on the 20th century decline in the public sphere, in the face of mass media and privatization. Vernelis sees that the 21st century is experiencing a revival of networked publics, in the form of interest communities, forums, newsgroups, blogs. There are also characteristic risks, as observed by Clay Shirky and others, of power laws that act naturally to concentrate power, and what Robert Putnam calls cyber-balkanization that breaks apart opinion into a million isolated ineffective microcommunities. There are also new opportunities posed for organization across the network, integrating the network, physical communities and the physical world, and opportunities for enhanced practices of deliberation and action. But we as a society may or may not take these opportunities and make effective use of them.

In the realm of esthetics, I don’t think Vernelis is quite right. He identifies a “new realism in which art becomes a background to life,” I think this trend is right on, with the maps like those of Stamen Design as a exemplars of the overlay mashups of this sort of art. But he’s also ambivalent about the nature of remixing and peer production in culture. Vernelis quotes Bourriad observing that, like DJs or programmers, these artists “don’t really ‘create’ anymore, they reorganize”. Just because I have Winterjazzfest still on the brain, there’s a generation of musicians whose work is quite different in style but aligned in sensibility, where historical and contemporary materials are not just reorganized but synthesized into work that I think is really interesting, emotionally affecting, good art.

Vernelis expresses a concern that fan media may simply merely represent the colonization of everyday life by capital. I doubt it this is true. There is plenty of content that is derivative (though I would argue that derivative folk culture still has merit over a culture with a few superstars and a large number of passive consumers), and there will also be some subcultures and works that will have genius, depth and lasting value.

So, I think Vernelis has identified many salient characteristics of the new network culture, and poses an interesting framework for thinking about the attributes of our current world.

Cross-gender song covers, Romeo and Juliet

A little while ago, I had a Twitter conversation with Tracy Ruggles, Thomas Vanderwal, and Alan Lepofsky about gender and songwriting. One of the topics was how a song sounds different, depending on the gender of the singer.

Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls does an excellent cover version of Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet. As a lesbian, Amy Ray carries the passionate declaration of love for the female lover. In the live version in the link, she also makes a clever, subtle tweak in the chorus to change the power dynamics in the song’s story.

The “movie song” alluded to in Knopfler’s lyrics is “Somewhere” from West Side Story, in which Juliet expresses a plaintive hope that somewhere, there is a place and time for the star-crossed lovers.

Knopfler adapts the phrase for his Romeo, who’s been jilted by the Juliet in his song’s story: “When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong”. Knopfler’s phrasing comes across as arrogant and perhaps sexist – Romeo knows what the relationship means better than Juliet does.

Amy Ray sings the line differently in each of the three repetitions of the song’s chorus: “One day I’m gonna realize / One day you’re gonna realize / One day we’re gonna realize” … it was just that the time was wrong. In Ray’s version, the changed understanding would need to come from each and both of them.

She also does the same pronoun shift with the reference to West Side Story. Instead of giving Romeo sole ownership of insight that the lovers’ situation is “like the movie song”, Ray’s Romeo says “you know the movie song” and “we know the movie song” – Ray’s version is a plea for shared understanding of the situation.

p.s. Another strength of the cover is that Ray doesn’t just steal Knopfler’s phrasing which is definitive and hard to shake. Ray also takes advantage of her ability to sing more notes than Knopfler can. And she doesn’t try anything fancy on guitar which is just as well.

p.p.s. By contrast, the Killers’ cover clones Knopfler’s vocal phrasing, the National-like sound, and the guitar outro off the album. If you’re going to try and carbon copy why bother? And even Knopfler doesn’t copy himself – he does the ending solos different live instead of copying the album, here’s one or try some other live version from youtube.

p.p.p.s I was reminded to write this down after listening to a very very different take on Somewhere by Vijay Iyer’s jazz trio.

Connected, or What it means to live in the network society

Connected by Stephen Shaviro attempts to explicate the network society, through the perspective of postmodern theory and works of science fiction in literature, film, and music.

In his introduction, Shaviro cites Deleuze’s idea that philosophy can be seen as a type of science fiction. The thought-provoking and fun aspect of the book is the way that it fleshes out the connections between ideas in speculative fiction and other art, the ideas as expressed in theory and philosophy.

Using these techniques, the book explores a range of ideas and themes that shape experiences and perceptions of the networked world:

  • The network as a world of simulation, through images of Philip K Dick and William Gibson, and ideas of Berkeley, Nietzsche, Baudrillard
  • Distraction and information addiction, as in Transmetropolitan, di Fillipo’s Ciphers, and other works
  • Alienation in a world of images and microfame per Warhol
  • Cyborgism, the merging of human and android, in Gibson, the Matrix and other works
  • Corporate capitalist domination, where all relations are monetary and all beings are slaves, in Jeter’s Noir, Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Gibson
  • Complete surveillance and self-surveillance, Foucault realized and dramatized
  • Hedonism in sex drugs and violence, Jeter, Transmet, Ballard

Shaviro’s picture of the networked future, as read through his sources, is a noirish, dystopian, kitsch-and-rubble-filled wasteland. The simulations of the virtual world has replaced anything that might have been construed as real, the solvent of capitalism has destroyed anything that might have been construed as relation. And Shaviro’s view of the past eliminates any illusion of nostalgia.

There is no human connection in this world of the network, only isolation. Leibnitzian monads are the model for individuals. The role models for identity and relationships are Andy Warhol and his coterie, who live lives self-defined by image and emptiness. The psychology in the book focuses on the solitary and noncommunicable experiences of hallucinogenic drug. Love and sex surely don’t provide any source of connection – choices include pornography, anonymous sex with sensorily augmented robots, femme-fatalism and horror-fiction nightmares where lovers turn into puddles of pulsing goo.

Corporations are supervillains. From Ballard’s Super-Cannes, “A giant multi-national like Fuji or General Motors sets its own morality. The company defines the rules that govern how you treat your spouse, where you educate your children, the sensible limits to stock market investment.” Describing the world of Jeter’s Noir, Shaviro writes that “Corporations are not subject to “the same rule of survival” as individuals; their struggle is a Neitzchean one to increase their dominance, rather than a Malthusian/Darwinian one just to survive.” Of course, the population of the Fortune 500 changes regularly – corporate empires rise and fall.

Now, these imaginary worlds are well-formed extrapolations of visible trends. There is artistic, intellectual, emotional, psychological merit in taking such trends and stretching them to fill an imagined world. That’s what science fiction does. KW Jeter’s Noir takes capitalism to its extreme; death is no escape from creditors, IP piracy is met with a fate worse than death; and advertising has moved from screens into neural synapses.

But, in reading the science fiction as theory, and the theory as explanatory of the fiction, Shaviro misses a few things. He describes how noir is an esthetic choice. “The allure of today’s retro noir stylization is that it makes even tho most intolerable situations bearable precisely by estheticizing them, by making them beautiful. But he also inhabits this choice, moves in, goes native, portraying this esthetic as the inevitable consequence of the properties of the networked world.

By inhabiting his sources, he is vulnerable to the fate that befalls science fiction commentary on its presence, which is to say swift, personal jetpack-style obsolescence. The swift obsolescence plays out esthetically – Shaviro uses 90s electronic music and music videos for stylistic atmosphere; this becomes a timebound soundtrack; think of images of Bjork androids singing and making love.

This also plays out in already-passe forecasts of technical trends In a work published in 2003, he highlights the dystopian nightmare of universal digital rights management, and misses the apparent victory several years later of unencrypted mp3s. In his attraction to the dystopic vision, he takes the conservative point of view that there is a binary choice: piracy or control, and misses the economic trends that Cory Doctorow saw at the time more clearly, that the enemy of most artists is obscurity not piracy, and the more a work is pirated, the more purchases there will be.

Shaviro is fond of pessimism, and this leads him to some distorted conclusions. He compares the network, which is dependent on external sources of energy, with a junkie addicted to heroin. But he misses the point that the network that requires energy input is all of life itself (11). Shaviro cites a scientific paper that you cannot get ride of information without dissipating energy in the form of friction or heat. Then he connects this physical observation directly to the problem of information overload (141). But he brings no evidence from neuroscience that cognitive problems caused by a profusion of digital messages are actually related to the physics of information storage. After all, our senses take on much more data than our mind observes already, and if the problem was the physical energy cost of discarding data, our minds would have melted already.

By inhabiting the fictional world, Shaviro also misses the ways that the dystopian worlds are an expression of fears. The book uses sources who are paranoid (Philip K Dick) or sociopathic (Burroughs) or otherwise mad (Nietszche); people whose entire worldview may have been consumed by pathology; but the creative works of the insane do not prove that sanity doesn’t exist. Several of the authors cited in the book (Gibson, Delaney) are apparently off the center of the bell curve but sane, at least to casual observers of the biographies and twitter feeds of living famous people.

Now, I like dystopian science fiction. My dad is a World War 2 refugee and my mother’s parents fled pogroms; my childhood nightmares featured the end of civilization. The end of the world is plausible and worthy of fear. But that’s not a proof that civilization is ending at any given time, with any specific apocalypse. Philosophers and theorists have articulated ideas about alienation and illusion and science fiction writers have illustrated them in dystopias, but that doesn’t make them inevitable.

Given the last decade’s focus on social networking, it’s particularly interesting to see utter absence of the social in Shaviro’s network. Shaviro concludes that the consequences of the network society is isolation, because everything is connected to everything else. But the lesson of social networking is that everything is not equally connected, there are tide pool-like social micro-environments even in technically open networks.

The gap, when you leave the social out of the network, is basic psychology. Shaviro quotes Burroughs: “if the biologic bank is open, anything you want, any being you imagined can be you. You only have to pay the biologic price.” Not in human society you can’t, murder and suicide have social consequences.

On the lighter side, Shaviro envisions the Experience Music Project as the epitome of network experience alienation, but already today, participants might be connected via their mobile phones across the exhibits.

Extrapolating a world of pervasive social networking, one might see different trends:
* echo chambers and re-created village social pressure
* surveillance images not as voyeurism but as social-network performance and stalking
* in place of alienated suburbia, neo-urbanism with social overlays in augmented reality
* in addition to the the distortions of physical space by cyberspace, new distortions of time with realtime streams

Perhaps these works of science fiction have been written already, recommendations welcome.

Social Technology Use and the Lifestage Fallacy

A number of years ago, research studies were published showing that teens were heavy users of instant messaging, and more likely to use IM and less likely to use email than adults. A very brief search shows that teens’ preferences for IM were observed in studies from 2005 and 2001 These results are often cited as showing that there are generational differences in social technology use – youth preferred synchronous communication, and email was going to inevitably decline.

This past weekend, the New York Times published an article quoting very recent work by Larry Rosen, a professor at California State University, showing continued differences between teens and twenty-somethings, in which teens use more IM, and the young adults use more email. Dr Rosen believes that these teens will have a persistent desire for instant response: “the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less.”

But wait. The people who are twenty-somethings now were teens not long ago. What has happened. Is there a longterm trend, with a progressive decline among age groups in the use of email, and a progressive rise in the use of IM? Or is it the case that twenty-somethings have entered the workplace, and now need to communicate with older people who are still stuck with email. Or is it the case that as adults, the twenty-somethings find that they have more need for asynchronous communication that does not disrupt the other person?

The data (or at least the reporting of it) isn’t clear. To assess technology preferences by generation, it’s not enough to survey teens and show that that they are different from adults. There need to be studies that cover a population over time showing whether technology preferences are stable by generation, or whether preferences shift by life stage , in the same way that other socialization practices change when people mature from their teens to adulthood.

It might be that there’s a longterm shift toward instant communication, among progressively younger people. But these studies don’t yet prove it.

If you’ve seen a time series that has evidence one way or another, please comment.

Reading the Rabbis: The Talmud as Literature

I read David Kraemer’s earlier book, the Mind of the Talmud soon after it came out in the 90s, and loved it. For those not familiar with it, the Talmud is a strange work. Nominally a large repository of Jewish law, it is a miscellanous compendium that also includes snippets of stories, commentary, philosophy, history, and other types of writing according to our categorization. Instead of a single threaded, logically developed argument, the Talmud is structured as an edited record of conversations that derived from an oral tradition.

Kraemer’s “The Mind of the Talmud” analyzes the distinctive literary forms of the Babylonian Talmud for what these forms reveal about the philosophical approach of the rabbis of the Talmud. Kraemer argues that Talmud’s methods reasoning with debates, stories, and interpretation posed a deliberate alternative to the hierarchical categories of Greek rationalism. His take on the Talmud is distinctively postmodern – he identifies ways that the Talmud’s multiply-voiced rhetoric destabilizes nominal authority structures.

A follow-up to the earlier work, Reading the Rabbis has Kraemer doing a close reading of a number of sections of the Babylonian Talmud from a literary perspective. Traditional approaches to the Talmud focus on nuances of the way that it constructs legal arguments. Modern scholarly approaches have look at the document from a historical perspective, and attempt to identify the historical strata within the edited text.

In Kraemer’s literary approach, he takes the compositional unit as a whole. He looks at the choices the editors made in assembling the materials into the published whole, the structure and rhetoric of the section. The book promises to generate new insights by using this method. But after reading the book, the insights seem less dramatic to me.

In the first sections of the book, Kraemer, who is a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Rabbinical training ground for the Conservative movement, looks at a few topics that are common in Conservative movement ideology.

In Chapters 3-5, the book examines three sections that discuss the relative authority of earlier and later sources. The authority structure of talmud is traditionalist, giving more authority to earlier sources – the 5 books of Moses have more authority than later biblical texts, the Mishna (an early compilation of Rabbinic writings) has more authority than the Gemara (a compilation of commentary by later Rabbis).

Kraemer does a close analyses of three sections, one about whether it is permissable to write scrolls with subsections of the bible (Gittin 60 a-b), one about whether the biblical passage about “an eye for an eye” is to be read literally or in reference to monetary damages (Baba Qamma 83b-84a), and third about laws that seem to have no source in scripture (Hagigah 10a-11b). Based on close analysis of the rhetoric of the text, that the later authors, in the way they analyze and draw conclusions from their source material, actually assume for themselves the responsibility to interpret and decide: “what appears to be a conservative submission to the word of God turns out to be a confident assertion of the authority of the living word of God’s earthly teachers.” (50).

This conclusion that later authorities have precedence in practice (though not in theory) supports the ideology of the conservative movement, which holds that innovation is not only possible, but traditional, within a context that is centered on tradition. This contrasts with the Orthodox ideology that “there is no innovation in Torah”, and ideology in Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism holding that tradition is not binding.

In Chapter 6, Kraemer looks at the Talmud’s assessment of the differing legal opinions between the Rabbinic schoosl of Hillel and Shammai (Yevamot 13b-14a). Following Kraemer’s analysis, the Talmud goes out of its way to leave clear openings for differences in community practice – there are a small number of core principles, and beyond that, plenty of leeway for local opinion; and even tenets that appear to be core principles may be subject to variation on close reading. Congregationalist pluralism is a hallmark of the Conservative movement governance, and this interpretation supports that principle.

In Chapters 7 and 8, Kraemer reveals additional ways that he is situated within a sociological and ideological context. Chapter 7 is entitled “Women Categorized.” It explores the nuances of the ways that the Talmud categorizes the obligations of women in Jewish observance. In traditional interpretations of Jewish law, womens’ exclusion from roles in communal decision-making and synagogue leadership derive from womens’ lower level of obligation. In Kraemer’s close reading, he observes that the Talmudic Rabbis are extremely suspicious of categorization itself, and progressively undermine the categories they set up. And he finds alternative sources and interpretations that could make a strong case for alternative conclusions.

However, in the title and the structure of the chapter, Kraemer raises no protest against the seemingly obvious sociological problem in the structure of the discussion. In my copy of Reading the Rabbis, I was unable to refrain from annotating the title, “Women Categorized By Men”. In a power structure that consisted of men analyzing source materials and creating categories (however ambivalent they are about categorization), it is clearly problematic that the structure of categorization places women as exceptions to rules, and in the company of other lower-status members of society. Kraemer doesn’t take this on at all. He is willing to read the sources with an eye toward using traditional resources to remedy the discrimination of women, but not to make a radical critique that the structure of the argument is flawed by its social power structure.

In Chapter 8, Kraemer does a similar analysis about circumcision, which differentiates Jewish men from non-Jews and from individuals with ambiguous biological sex characteristics. Once again, Kraemer draws subtle conclusions from the nuances of the rhetoric, but does not do any significant critique of the categories themselves. Kraemer’s traditionalist approach does not go so far as to openly question the category structure he has to work with. There is no shortage other contemporary Jewish thinkers –Rachel Adler among many Jewish feminists who criticize the traditional structures because the tradition was written by men, Daniel Boyarin among other scholars who analyzes concepts of Jewish masculinity. Kraemer does not do radical analysis. He does close analysis to find room at the edges, but leaves the frame of the structure he finds.

My favorite chapter of the book was Chapter 9, which analyzes a section in Berachot 5a-b on Rabbinic approaches to human suffering. This is a topic that Kraemer has studied in depth and written a book about. In the section, the Talmud brings a large number of arguments showing that suffering is a valuable gift from God, like a parent’s valuable correction of a child. These arguments are undermined, at the end of the section, by a series of stories that show Rabbis discussing their own experiences of suffering and declaring that they didn’t find the suffering to have value and contain its own reward (p. 135). Hearing this, the Rabbi who is listening heals the sick person.

The text includes a statement that is even more radical than the ones that Kraemer highlights. When R. Yohan visits R. Eleazar on his sick bed and asks the sick man why he is crying, R. Eleazar replies, “I am crying on account of this beauty that will rot in the earth.” Not only do the stories undermine the ascetic message of the previous section, but the emotional heart of the story supports a shockingly Greek-sounding message of nostalgia for the loss of physical beauty instead of any moralistic lesson.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. I appreciated the process of walking through Kraemer’s close readings of the texts, and seeing how Kraemer built his analysis by parsing out the rhetoric of the sections. But the selections of the sections, and the conclusions Kraemer draws from the analysis, read like fine and familiar JTS-style interpretive sermons. This is a valid practice by someone who is, afterall, a professor and community teacher based at JTS. But I didn’t find the book to be as thought-provoking and insightful as The Mind of the Talmud. – I need to go back and reread the book to see if it remains as impressively insightful to me.

Cory Doctorow’s Makers

One of the things that I liked about Cory Doctorow’s Makers is that he didn’t write for the screen. Sometimes perfectly fine novels include chase scenes, combat with vehicles, emotionally resonant moments with interesting landscapes, ensemble dramatic climaxes, and other gratuitous moments seemingly designed with a film advance in mind. Doctorow’s Makers avoids these cliches. The structure sprawls, and several climactic moments happen over un-filmable email and online chat.

The sprawl of Makers is mostly a strength. A classic story has a setup, dramatic middle, and resolution. The dramatic arc of Makers takes its characters – a team of technology entrepreneurs and the journalist who helps to publicize and create the market for their innovations – through a couple of boom and bust cycles, and back again to the creative impulse that got them started. The emotional arc of the story seems to come from the experience of having lived through the dotcom boom, and subsequent boom and bust cycles in the tech and overall economy. As a novel of ideas about the evolution and integration of promising technologies, the book rejects the beginning-middle-end structure that is misleading in the context of a longer trajectory. Technology changes, business cards change, business models change, but people’s motivations and tensions replay in each cycle.

Doctorow’s future scenario has emerging technologies paired with business process innovations. Makers imagines a boom in micro-fabrication, accompanied by quickly-assembled networks to produce and distribute the innovations. After a bust in the microfab market, there is a boomlet in theme parks built on the detritus of the first boom. The theme parks are built and re-assembled by microfab robots, collaboratively designed with open source, crowd-sourced processes. The fun of the book is the way the book pictures the crazy particulars of this future – a car being driven by a set of robots assembled from parts of Elmo dolls, a narrative story that starts to emerge from the flow of a collaboratively created amusement park ride.

In Makers, the social, economic and legal trends remain fundamentally the same while technology changes. The US remains on a downward path toward away from first world status, with growing gap between rich and poor. One of the big opportunities for the microfab market is cheap products for the growing market of people who live in shantytowns. Cheap space for startup businesses is found in abandoned malls and big box store buildings around the country left behind by the early-century real estate bust.

The social and legal stasis in the world of Makers is particularly interesting. Consumer brands retain great power to create images and to market products, even as the power to make things decentralizes. At the beginning of the story, the Disney Corporation, and the legal defense of old business models of IP protection remain in place. Large corporations retain power, are still slow-moving and bureaucratic, and absorb the innovative products and creative energies of entrepreneurs who sell to them.

Perhaps this telling represents pessimism about the slower change of social structures in the face of technical change. At the least, it is a dramatized argument against the techno-deterministic viewpoint that technical change will inevitably lead to social and political changes.

Makers focuses on several trends, and doesn’t develop other trends that could be powerful forces in the coming years. The book only barely touches on energy and material resource issues. The communications technology seems like a straight extrapolation of a couple of years ago. Characters remain dependent on email. Twitter is a continued presense, but social networks don’t play a major role in communications. It’s fine by me that Doctorow varies some factors in his future scenarios and leaves others constant – there is plenty of fodder remaining for future books!

While the book’s richly-imagined, evolving future scenarios belie simple techno-deterministic models, the episodic structure and sprawl also shows some signs of attention deficit. The microfab boom, like the dotcom boom, ends in a spectacular crash. The explanation is that the transformative technology couldn’t generate hoped-for economic returns. But the internet revolution also left behind slower but far-reaching change. Markets for travel, maps, books, news, music, voice and other information-rich services are fundamentally different and still changing fifteen years later. Makers does a less good job of imagining the ways that things get fundamentally different after the microfab revolution, and the ways the economy might be different if more economic activity could be performed by quickly-assembled small networks of workers.

One side plot is the emergence of “Fatkins”, a boom in biotech-fueled weight loss that creates a new class of formerly fat people who pursue hedonistic lives with their new slim bodies. But the book doesn’t follow through broader themes of body transformation that might have occurred given the same technology revolution. Another side plot is a subculture of “goths” who are the target market for a subdivision of Disney, and join the open source ride revolution when it happens. These are two intriguing examples, but the book doesn’t deeply follow through the concept of cross-geographical lifestyle tribes.

Basically, it’s easier to brainstorm and imagine a few entertaining outcomes of a promising idea than it is to fully develop the idea’s consequences. The book displays on a larger canvas the esthetic manifested in the Boing Boing blog that Doctorow has co-edited for years – it is an imaginative, relentlessly miscellaneous compendium of novelties. It illustrates trends but is inconsistent in exploring them.

The previous Cory Doctorow novel I read was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I enjoyed the book, but thought its treatment of ideas was somewhat shallow, and its plot and characterization were more shallow. I thought that book would have been a lot better if Doctorow had spent many times longer writing and editing it.

Makers has much more of an emotional core – I found some of the key moments really moving. The characterization isn’t Shakespeare but is much more interesting than the earlier book. And Makers does a good job of imaginatively envisioning potential consequences of current trends. It still seems to me that with his talent, activism, and globe-trotting life, Cory Doctorow can get away with publishing books that would be even better if he edited them more.

The book’s not perfect, but I liked it a lot, I recommend it, and I’m enjoying the author’s maturation as a writer.

Rybczynski’s chairs – on architectural layers in social design

One of my favorite pieces of writing on design is the section in Witold Rybczinski’s Home on the history of the chair. Comfortable, cushioned sitting tools are a relatively recent development in human history. Chairs didn’t start with the goal of comfort. In ancient times, rulers sat upon thrones, and “during the middle ages, the prime function of the chair was ceremonial. The man who sat was important – hence the term chairman.”

Comfortable chairs, says Rybczinski, as well as other elements of furniture design and layout for comfort and relaxation, were pioneered in eighteenth century France. “Sitting was no longer only ritualistic or functional, but became a form of relaxation. People sat together to listen to music, to have conversations, to play cards. A new sense of leisure was reflected in their sitting positions: gentlemen leaned back and sat with their legs crossed–a new posture– and ladies reclined.” To support these social practices, movable chairs and tables were developed to support varying “informal groupings, around a tea table, or in groups for conversations.” (This is the root of the French word for furniture, “meubles” or “movables”; contrasting with earlier fixed-design seating that was chosen and located by the architect).

In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand elaborates on the notion of different layers of physical design that have different levels of flexibility. Decorations like pictures and lamps and pillows are easiest to modify, followed by furniture, then things like paint and wallpaper and rugs, then doors, indoor walls, windows, then outdoor walls and foundations. Some layers change very slowly (over decades, or even centuries), while other layers may change every 5 years, and some every year or two, or even months depending on the decorating zeal of residents. Buildings evolve to keep up with the needs of their inhabitants, and are designed with these different layers that are relatively more or less easy to change. (The materials vary depending on economic circumstance but not the fact of changeability, for example, used milk-crates are at the low-cost level of modular design).

Physical social design has come up recently in a few social contexts. A set of people was seeking a space for an enjoyable group discussion. The place we chose had comfy chairs, a long, low table, several little movable stools, and a mid-volume level of background noise. It was clear from the physical design that there would be conversational clumps at either end of the long table, and there were going to be several conversations, rather wasn’t going to be one conversation. As people gathered, I moved the little stools around the long table so there could be a few clusters of conversation, at each end and in the middle. The decorators of the room created a space that would be easier to use for some purposes than others. Then, as a facilitator of conversation, I moved chairs around to help foster interchange.

A few weeks ago, I facilitated a public session that was structured as a panel – but I wanted a very high degree of interactivity. I set up the open space as a broken circle – the “panel” as an shorter arc in the front, and the “audience” as three longer arcs completing the circular form. This supported the format I wanted to set up, with the panel “privileged” to get first crack at the discussion topics, but the overall group facing each other, for back-and-forth interchange, in which “audience” members, including individuals who were steeped in the topic, were expected to be providing alternative answers and points of view, not just asking questions of panelists as the designated experts in the room.

The social experience of the get-togethers I just described is influenced, but not determined by the furniture and the layout of the furniture.

The first get-together had congenial, slowly-shifting conversations, shaped by existing connections, interpersonal discovery knitting together new relations among people linked by multiple-second-degree connections, sets of common interests, and shared patterns of conversation. As a co-host I tried to very lightly encourage the formation of new connections by introducing people and gradually getting out of the way, and focusing myself on newer connections. But the same furniture layout would also support more animated, mobile conversation among a group of students at one-stop in a several-stop social evening, or conversation that is more personal, but more formal among a set of couples where some of the partners know each other barely; or intimate coded exchanges and intermittent high-voltage friction among family members gathering at a ritual time; or any number of other possible social patterns in the same set.

The second get-together successfully achieved a highly interactive, back-and-forth group discussion in a group of about 40 people. People were quite eager to contribute; as a facilitator, I tried to draw out the connections between different comments, and to help get people expand on the ideas and feelings they expressed in their comments. Other possible outcomes with that same format might have been a passive audience, with facilitators striving to draw out participation; or contentious group exchanging highly argumentative opinions; or a situation where anti-social members attempted to dominate speaking time or attack other participants. A more traditional panel format would have had brief presentations from each speaker, then panelists responding serially to questions by a moderator, then short time remaining for questions, where the audience addresses their questions to the panelists as designated experts.

Above the layer of the physical design, there are layers of social circumstance, of the temperaments and interests of participants, of cultural and subcultural social norms, of shared social practices such as social-host introductions, panel structure and meeting facilitation, practices for handling disputes and social boundaries. And then there is the conversation itself, that combination of ritual and small-talk gestures, interpersonal dynamics, and complex improvisational exchange of thoughts and feelings that creates the one-time and irreduceable experience.

Conversations about design; whether physical design or online design sometimes short-circuit the role of the designer, making assumptions that the design itself determines the social experiences within the constraints of the physical or virtual space. My recent post on platforms for change is only one example of the argument that architecture and design determine experience. This is a fallacy – there are layers of context, social practice, and social interchange above the physical or virtual design that create the experience.

Design, whether physical or virtual, influences social experience, but doesn’t determine it.

Platforms for change

Yesterday at TEDxSV, Reid Hoffman spoke about the opportunity for low-cost, highly-scalable internet platforms that can engage millions in social change. These platforms, Reid envisions, will take advantage of the ability of open source projects to self-organize to harness small contributions to make a large difference. Examples included Kiva.org and Facebook Causes. Hoffman is currently a VC at Greylock partners, was an early PayPal employee, founded LinkedIn, and (disclosure) was an early investor in Socialtext.

The trends Hoffman described are interesting and promising, but they are not enough. As an example of the failure of large-scale internet activism, think of the trend for users to turn Twitter avatars green in support of people in Iran protesting the election. The green avatars raised awareness outside Iran but had negligable impact on what happened in Iran.

The next presentation from Stanford Professor Clayborne Carson revealed several layers that were missing in Hoffman’s talk. Carson is best known for his work editing the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, but he got his start researching the work of Bob Moses, whose pioneering community organizing with SNCC enabled poor black folk in Mississippi to build courage, skills and leadership abilities. The charismatic leadership of Dr. King inspired millions to protest segregation and press for civil rights; the less-glamorous, on-the-ground work of developing local participants and leaders laid the foundation for longterm transformation; and the disintegration of SNCC into violent spinoffs made King’s emphasis on nonviolence seem more prophetic in retrospect.

Hoffman’s vision of a platform for change is missing the layers of inspiration and organizing. Tools can lower the cost of coordinating and taking action. But tools themselves do not inspire people with the vision and hope to make a change. And tools themselves do not provide the organizing methods to give courage and leadership skills among people in the community. There is a layer of inspired leadership above the tools. There is a layer of organizing above the tools.

The well-known example of the Obama campaign’s use of social networking for fund-raising and organizing supports this distinction. The campaign used its social networking and campaign data tools well, but it was Obama’s inspiration and the fear of Bush administration failure that provided the drive, and the community-based, personalized, and highly-co-ordinated organizing methods that enabled large numbers of people to take effective advantage of the tools.

There are a few additional elements in the layers above the tools. First is the design and leadership of self-organization. Reid Hoffman talked about the ability of open source projects to “self-organize” and break work up into many small contributions. But in the Obama campaign, and in large open source projects such as Linux and Apache, there is substantial human effort involved in coordinating project roadmaps, making technical decisions at many levels, coordinating code integration, and more. From a distance, it looks like open source projects are “self-organized,” and contributions flow to the project like streams to the Amazon to the ocean. Closer in, there are sophisticated practices of governance that are different from the centralized processes of traditional corporate development, but that still require human effort.

Second is the connection of online to offline. Hoffman was particularly skeptical about this element, seeing that offline connections add friction to otherwise simpler, more viral on-line only programs. But in order to catalyze real change in the world, there needs to be connection to people’s real world social networks, and to the levers of power that operate in the real world. Without this offline connection, we are often left with ineffectual green avatars and no change in the world.

In summary, Reid Hoffman’s presentation sketched a vision of internet-powered, low-cost, scalable platforms for self-organized change. As Silicon Valley tech innovators, we are often tempted to consider technology as the determining factor in social change. But the change enabled by new platforms is likely to be trivial without the presense of other layers of practice above the tools that long predate the internet: visionary leadership, grass-roots organizing to empower participants, effective co-ordination of decentralized action, and connection to realworld networks and actions.

FB new privacy settings – a contrarian positive view

Facebook’s privacy changes are drawing a lot of fire, but they work pretty well for me, and are at bottom a positive change. But the way Facebook presents these changes is untrustworthy, and makes the company seem even more untrustworthy than they are being.

Facebook now makes it easier for you to share information with the world, and to make that choice on a post-by-post basis, and to share posts with a specific set of people. In the past, I didn’t share much on Facebook because the conversation would be walled off – no discovery, no memory. Now it will be more appealing to share discussion topics.

Many people perceived Facebook as a comfortable space where they could share private thoughts, but that has never been true for me. My Facebook friend set is a weird mix of family members, high-school/college alums, political folk, business contacts, and personal friends. There aren’t many topics that I want to share with all of those audiences, and it wasn’t possible to target a post to a particular set.

Facebook’s new post-sharing mechanism is a couple of excess clicks away from being brilliant. For each post, you can choose to share a post with a specific friend list – so I can send a message to political friends, or family, or music fans, etc. The only problem is that it takes too many clicks to do this. The option is a bit hidden – then the top level of the option set is the abstract “friends, friends-of-friends, networks” – only at the third level is the choice to target a post to a list.

All together, the ability to share openly, plus a greater ability to target posts to lists, make Facebook a much more congenial place for me to share information and start conversations.

The one thing I hate is their mandated sharing of information with applications. This is a consumer rights problem, an incentive not to use Facebook applications – and call for protest.

A lot of the to-do is in the change of expectations – Facebook’s model was socially construed to be about privacy, while Twitter’s model was socially construed to be about sharing – so people have a strong emotional reaction about the change in model – even if the underlying capabilities still allow a lot of privacy – and allow *more* control over what you share to whom.

And a lot of the to-do is in the obnoxious and clumsy way that Facebook presents the changes – it encourages people to open everything up all at once. It’s still hard to understand, and comes with the kind of smarmy, it’s in your own good language you expect from corporations that are imposing sneakily anti-customer policy updates on customers. Facebook does not come off as very trustworthy, even as they are making underlying changes that make the product better.

Facebook has a large enough audience and stickiness because of the people, that people will stick around to adapt to the changes, and Facebook will become more useful as a result. I still dream of the day when we will have truly decentralized social networks, where individuals manage their own information, and share as they please, without being sharecroppers to a social network plantation, where our identity and information is the product being grown and sold.

Talk to each other – moderation in public forums

Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates maintains a consistently lively, interesting, respectful discussion section on his blog. The combination of substance and civility is maintained with a firm hand on moderation – people who don’t follow the rules are out. He posted his moderation policy, in response to an influx of new readers. In the policy, Coates called out an item that seems striking in our culture of conversation. Coates insists that his commenters actually talk to each other.

When a commenter responds to another participant, he or she must respond to what that person actually said, not a straw man version of it. A commenter who makes straw man arguments in bad faith is quickly banned. A commenter who misreads someone else’s point, out of passion, speed, or misunderstanding, is coached to respond directly, and to quote the person to ensure they are responding directly.

This practice of talking to each other runs counter to the norms of much of our culture’s public discourse. Anyone who has media training knows that in public forums, you plan your points ahead of time, and then repeat the points you planned, matching those pre-planned points as close as possible. Given the characteristics of mass media, where soundbites will be taken out of context, a speaker needs to be extremely polished and prepared to reduce the likelihood of being mis-interpreted. Also, in a political context, extreme positions are used to stake out debate turf, and addressing a point directly can give credibility to a bad frame. By saying “I understand that you doubt human-caused climate change, but the evidence is clear” – you re-iterate the opponent’s point. There are good reasons, in political discussions, to speak over the heads of the immediate people you’re talking to to reach a broader audience. Similar techniques are used in a business context, where someone representing a company is expected to stay on message.

Even in more informal, less risky settings, such as a collegial panel discussion at a conference, people tend to start with talking points. In response to an overall topic, each panelist will recite talking points. A follow-up to another panelist will be in terms of one’s own talking points. Creating an original response runs the risk of sounding unpolished or incoherent, so speakers take the safe route and repeat programmed answers. Facilitators are accustomed to move topics along, so they don’t often ask follow-up questions to clarify and expand on the initial point.

I had this discussion in the last week with folk including Kevin Marks, Jeannie Logozzo, Adrian Chan and Heather Gold in response to some panel discussions at the Supernova conference, where informed, thoughtful facilitators and panelists still held discussions that sometimes contained more fragments of speeches then current engagement with new ideas and with each other. Heather is leading a series of workshops to help people get beyond soundbites to authentic engagement in public forums.

The concept of actually talking to each other – in an in-person public forum, or an online forum such as a high-profile blog discussion, is so out-of-character to the norms of our public discourse that the proposed alternatives seem shocking.

Moderation in general is critical for a good public discussion. See this piece from Sarah Granger about the dangers of ignoring the need for moderation. The comments section in a post expressing political opinion in the San Francisco Chronicle quickly devolved into trolling, and comments were shut down. The Chronicle has had a lax moderation policy, and its comments sections frequently resemble Lord of the Flies.

In software, some basic tools are needed to enable moderation and facilitation. In safer intranet environments fewer explicit features are needed. Large public forums with many strangers need much more explicit tools. Over an above the features, we need to have practices and norms of facilitation and moderation. Starting with the strange concept of actually talking to each other.