Reflections Beyond Technology

January 13, 2007 (3): Decisions!

2009-06-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

It all began when one of my colleagues and I parlayed the insights of knowledge management into an attempt to identify the role of communication and understanding in corporate decision-making. This began to take the form of a critique of decision support technology or, more properly, the ways in which that technology has now been appropriated by more recent enterprise software; and, with my tendency to always “push back to basics,” I found myself asking more general questions about the current state of decision theory and how consistent it is with decision practice.

There was a real irritant in asking these questions, however; and it seemed to lie in how “understanding,” as we were trying to study it, serves to “inform us to make informed decisions” (allowing for a circular turn of phrase). Well, for a start, what is it that we need to understand? The answer to that seems to be that we need to understand the situation (i.e. state of affairs, where I am choosing that word “state” because this involves taking a flow of events and relationships in which we are embedded and rendering it as something static) in which one or more actions need to be taken; and those actions need to be selected on the basis of one or more decisions. In other words, as any number of philosophers probably discovered long before I did, any theory of decision making must rest on a foundation of understanding the situation.

At this point I have to share some frustration with a book I am trying to read: Narrative Policy Analysis by Emery Roe. At the very least this book should wean me away from too much indulgence in postmodern deconstructionism; but, putting aside his stylistic preferences (obsessions), Roe is reluctant to come right out and say that he is trying to explore how narrative can serve explanation. This is not an unreasonable point to make; but for anyone of a philosophical bent it opens a real can of worms (if not several).

The most important can of worms is the very nature of explanation itself. I had A9 do an exact phrase search on “nature of explanation;” and the Amazon.com frame came up with 1355 books. My guess is that most of them have their roots in analytic philosophy, all sharing a positivist streak that can be traced back to Hempel (or someone who inspired Hempel). In my own intellectual development this is basically the pile of manure in the barn that convinces me that there must be a pony somewhere in the vicinity (but not in the pile of manure)! All that means, though, is that I am still looking for the pony.

However, finding the pony is only part of the story. Once you home in on the nature of explanation, you still have to worry about communicating an explanation to others. In other words you have to account for an explanation, and usually we do this by articulating it through text. This is another can of worms, since we now encounter all the subtleties associated with different text types and how we arrive at communication and understanding through those text types.

On the other hand, if we go back to Ancient Greece (well, if we go back to either Plato or Socrates as Plato tried to represent him), we discover that the two cans merge into one. The label on that can is the Greek noun λόγος, which means all sorts of things that, taken together, seem to orbit around the concept of an explanatory account rendered as text. (This is why “ology” is such a great suffix. The validity of the explanatory account is not necessarily part of the story. So “scientology” involves λόγος as much as “neurology” does!)

The good news is that, with all my experience in writing, I am never afraid of text. Furthermore, as my own blog header tries to proclaim, I do not try to hide from uncertainty or complexity behind fear, superstition, and/or pettiness. However, this may be an occasion to reflect on some wisdom of Richard Feynman:

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

Thus, I am beginning to feel that just about any action we take (not to mention the decision-making preceding that action) cannot help but be “surrounded by uncertainty;” and all we can to do manage is to keep expressing ourselves through texts that we utter and/or write, knowing full well that they will never be clearer than our all-too-muddled thoughts! In other words the final say goes to one of Feynman's most honored predecessors, Niels Bohr:

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.

January 07, 2007: Everything is no Longer Beautiful at the Ballet

2009-06-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

Regular readers, as well as those surveying my current Tag Cloud, have probably detected my interest in opera; and, here in San Francisco, that interest is well satisfied by the San Francisco Opera. As is often the case, our Opera House divides it time, roughly equally, between the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet. So I am frequently asked if I spend as much time at San Francisco Ballet performances as I devote to the Opera. I have answered this question in the negative so many times that I think I am now well-enough rehearsed to express it in text!

Those who know more about my than Google is ever likely to reveal know that, back when I was working on my doctoral thesis, I was fanatical about the dance, writing regularly for Boston After Dark and sending dispatched from Boston to Dance Magazine. New York was the place to be for such fanaticism, but Boston was not that bad. In fact, it was in a used bookstore in Boston (one of the best places to gather material about dance history) that I first met Leslie Getz, who probably had the most awesome collection of dance-related literature I had ever seen, all in an apartment in Palo Alto! Leslie was the one who taught me the aphorism of dance history that shaped much of my personal aesthetic: Fokine was the Father, Balanchine was the Son, and Ashton was the Holy Ghost. Two other choreographers eventually shared close proximity with this "holy trinity:" Anthony Tudor and Merce Cunningham.

On the popular front this was a time when Jerome Robbins was attracting a good deal of attention, particularly after the impact of West Side Story. He came up through the ranks of the early efforts in American ballet choreography; and, at a time when I would drive from Boston to New York every chance I had to catch the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater, his "Afternoon of a Faun" was a fixture in the company repertoire. Similarly, Ballet Theater would do his "Les Noces" regularly. With all this as context, Robbins decided to "return to his roots" by introducing "Dances at a Gathering," a near-epic setting of Chopin piano music, complete with an on-stage pianist. (If imitation is the greatest form of flattery and parody the highest art of imitation, then the greatest honor to Robbins' effort came when Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo added "Yes Virginia, Another Piano Ballet" to their repertoire!) I was never particularly happy with Robbins working at this scale (I was even less happy when he tried to take on the "Goldberg Variations"); but this was where the "buzz" was (even if we did not use that noun in those days).

Run the time-line closer to the present when I discovered that San Francisco Ballet was going to include "Dances at a Gathering" in one of their seasons. My wife had never seen it; but she was curious about the company and had a lot more enthusiasm for Chopin than I usually do. I had not seen the company since 1967, when they had visited Jacob's Pillow; and they had gone through a lot of changes since then. So we went, and I am afraid that it did not take me long to start grumbling. What I began to realize was that the days of my fanatical interest in dance were actually the "twilight period" of the "good old days;" and it was unclear when the sun would next rise.

Back in those days, of course, one could not live by Balanchine, Ashton, Tudor, and Cunningham alone; but the alternatives could be pretty disappointing. Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino tended to have the strongest hold on consistently putting out disappointing stuff. Time magazine may have been excited about Joffrey's "Astarte;" but all I ever remembered was the way in which the cyclorama had an erection! Nevertheless, even the most rabid fans would still go to see the Joffrey Ballet because they performed "The Green Table;" and they did it very well, probably because the original choreographer, Kurt Joos had an active had in its reconstruction. Also, when we could not go to "live" performances, we would seek out movie revival houses, not just for old ballet films but for Hollywood musicals with "real" choreography in them. Balanchine frequently confessed to being a great admirer of Astaire, and you do not have to watch many of the RKO films with Ginger to see why.

So why is there now such a long dark night of an art form I once loved so passionately? The best explanation I can give is that it all comes down to energy. From the evidence I have gathered, "The Green Table" is a perfect example because Joos understood the role of energy in both theory (some of which he apparently got from Laban) and practice. Both Astaire and Kelly were masters of energy control; and, in Astaire's case, that came in through his very conception of choreography. Every now and then I see a choreographer (such as Forsythe) who seems to understand the role of energy; but that understanding does not matter very much if the dancer's can't "get it." Here in San Francisco I really could not fault the local company on any of the steps in "Dances at a Gathering" (particularly since, given the volume of them, my memory was not that strong); but my grumbling all had to do with the fact that I experienced no sense at all of how to control energy in order to turn the steps into dance.

Will this trend change? That is impossible to predict. When Balanchine came to the United States, no one expected that American ballet would rise to a level that had been associated almost exclusively with its Russian heritage; but, between Lincoln Center, City Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York could justifiably claim to be the Dance Capital of the World. Perhaps it will regain that title. Perhaps San Francisco will make a serious play for it. More likely, however, we now live in a digital culture with far less admiration for such performing arts, which means that the best we can hope for is that any records we have of any of those art forms be properly preserved for posterity!

January 02, 2007: Augustine on (in?) the Brain

2009-06-25T12:49:00.000-07:00

For me the most fascinating part of Augustine's Confessions is his attempt to come to terms with the concept of time. From the very beginning he makes it clear that he is up against a serious challenge:

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence.

Ultimately, he can do little more than clarify his terminology, anticipating Wittgenstein by concentrating more on how the terms are used than on what they mean or are:

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation.

What has interested me the most is the extent to which our increasing knowledge of the physical brain has turned out to align nicely with Augustine's metaphysical soul-concept. The "present of things past" anticipated that engram that Lashley invested so much of his life in trying to find without success, although within the last ten years in appears that Richard Thompson and his colleagues at USC have managed to associate it with a localized region in the cerebellum. Meanwhile, we have Gerald Edelman to thank for demonstrating that the "present of things present" is actually a "remembered" present. New BBC NEWS has reported results from Washington University concerning the "present of things to come," presenting evidence that this, too, is localized, in this case in the left lateral premotor cortex, the left precuneus and the right posterior cerebellum. It is nice finally to home in on some good news at the start of a year that began with so many ill omens!

December 29, 2006: Organizational "Health Maintenance"

2009-06-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

I would like to continue to explore the point I raised on December 26 to the effect that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Obviously, if an organization is in a pathological state, then that pathology needs to be treated; but there are (at least) two aspects of health maintenance that are likely to facilitate treatment.

There is the need to cultivate an awareness of pathologies, since, as if often the case with human patients, it is often (frequently?) the case that the organization does not know when it is in a pathological state.
There is also the need to cultivate preventative measures: An organization that is aware of a potential pathology is better equipped to "nip that pathology in the bud," dealing with it before it has a serious impact.

So how do we implement such measures for an organization? In medicine we know about the physical examination and the frequency with which it should be performed (having now "graduated" to an age where I have to have mine annually). However, this time scale is to coarse for the world of business. An enterprise functions on the basis of ongoing business processes, and those processes need to be monitored in the course of their functioning. IT is now in a position the make sure that such processes are running reliably and accurately; so this is the first step towards making the health maintenance metaphor "work."

However, such monitoring cannot be conducted for its own sake. The data generated by monitoring drives the formulation of hypotheses that address detecting, diagnosing, and treating pathologies. Some rather interesting visualization technology has gone into "driving" dashboard displays that deliver monitoring data; but the hypothesis data generated by managers at all levels of the enterprise are equally important to health maintenance. When a hypothesis is posed, it will (almost?) always need to be vetted by several managers throughout the enterprise; so we need some kind of "dashboard visualization" to provide awareness of the current "state of the hypothesis space" and facilitate the vetting process.

How can all of this take place? In his book Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan addressed this question by bringing another metaphor into play:

The formal analysis and diagnosis of organizations, like the process of reading, always rests in applying some kind of theory to the situation being considered.

In other words the real purpose of visualization, of both monitoring data and hypothesis spaces, is to enable managers to read their organization, a concept that inspired the subtitle of James Taylor's fascinating book on organizational communication. I would further argue, to draw upon another previous discussion, that we are talking here about a literary approach to reading, rather than any kind of objective or analytic one. In the context of another favorite theme, managers should be able to think about the people in an organization as subjects rather than objects. The danger of visualization is that it serves up abstractions that entail excessive objectification, but this danger is more likely to add to any looming pathologies than to deal with them.

This then leads to my final point, which is the recurring question of whether or not tools such as Wikipedia and Google are eroding our skills for being critical readers, whether of texts or of organizations. We are more interested in tools that deliver answers, and reading is not necessarily about delivering answers. As I previously suggested, sometime one has to go "roundabout" the questions; and literary reading enables such "roundabout" thinking. This may take more time that finding an answer from a search result or a Wikipedia entry; but, where the health of an organization is concerned, getting to the most effective answer is more important than getting there "efficiently."

December 28, 2006: On Tags

2009-06-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

I was glad to see Yahoo! 360° introduce a tagging feature for blog entries. Given that I cannot really count on the Search tool for anything useful, tagging is the next best thing. Readers may even recall that I started experimenting with using Flickr for the images I was incorporating in order to tag those images (many of which were not photographs). However, once I hit the maximum number of images I was able to store without charge, I decided that I was not getting enough benefit to justify paying for an upgrade. So over the last couple of days I have been adding tags to all of my blog entries, drawing upon the tags I had assigned to the images where appropriate; and, so far at least, I have been relatively satisfied with the results. (Among other things, they helped me to find the proper destination for the above hyperlink!)

Having said all that, however, I should make it clear that these are my own tags for my own use purposes. I do not expect them to be of much use to anyone else unless I tell someone to look at a collection of entries associated with a specific tag. In this respect I subscribe to one of Wittgenstein's fundamental precepts: Words only convey meaning in the context of how they are used. I know my own contexts of use well enough to use my own tags; but I doubt that any amount of my reading of anyone else's texts will provide me with a use-model that will allow me to negotiate that persons tags for my own use-purposes. To put this another way (and draw upon a past discussion), tags are a highly impoverished "solution" (which is why I am using scare quotes) to the problem of description. This is because, at the end of the day, description is most effective if it is recognized and rendered as a literary form, far more subtle than we tend to take it to be. We tend to associate description at its best with well-written fiction; but, to reflect on a recent discussion, the well-edited review is also, by its very nature, an excellent example of good descriptive writing. My great fear is that our increased immersion in the use of "rich media" may eventually erode the talent of skilled literary description, and we may be left with little more than increasingly sophisticated tagging systems. This will erode not only our literary capabilities but our very capacity to make ourselves understood.

December 27, 2006: Identity Meets the Cluetrain Manifesto

2009-06-25T12:34:00.000-07:00

What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? This injunction (shameless appropriated from Shakespeare's Hamlet) applies not only to actors but to all of us in the “roles” we play (our “presentation of self,” as Goffman called it) in everyday life. However, there is also a grander scheme of things that I introduced some time ago. This involves what I feel is the most important lesson from Plato’s “Theaetetus” dialogue. This is that, while none of the four definitions of knowledge considered can survive Socrates' critical examination, Socrates does demonstrate how the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to three other key concepts: memory, being, and description (λόγος).

I would now like to pick up where my last discussion left off and examine the concept of “Being.” I would argue that this concept needs to be sorted into the being of objects and the being of subjects, i.e., the agents who engage with objects; and this latter class of being has to do with identity. In other words any inquiry into the nature of identity involves pulling at a thread that is tightly woven to many other critical threads, including the thread of knowledge itself!

These couplings have been particularly well appreciated by George Herbert Mead, particularly in his exploration of the concept of symbolic interactionism. I like to say that the motto of symbolic interactionism is: “No perception without personal interaction.” For my money this is the underlying premise without which the assertion that “markets are conversations” cannot make any sense. Indeed, it is also the premise behind Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which argues that “communicative action” (as Habermas defines it) is the fundamental prerequisite for understanding. Since it seems valid to assume that markets can only operate effectively within a context of understanding between buyers and sellers, Habermas’ theory ultimately explains why markets are conversations; but I am afraid that this kind of foundational thinking has gotten lost amid the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto!

December 26, 2006: "Clinical" IT

2009-06-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

I would like to continue my thoughts on the question of whether or not there is a suitable academic foundation for "service science" as inspired by my reading of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. This time I would like to begin with a question posed to me last October by a friend working at Accenture: He wanted to know what Accenture could do to make IT organizations better at what they do. My point of departure for answering this question involved an analogy from medical practice, viewing the IT organization as responsible for the "health" of the organization. I argued that IT developers needed to take a clinical approach to "taking the history of the patient," who comes in with some set of possibly pathological symptoms. I then extended the analogy by arguing that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Ultimately, this conversation did not progress, possibly because the analogy was too much of a departure from the "normal practices" (as in "normal science") of both Accenture and its customers.

Imagine my surprise then in discovering that Keen and Scott Morton proposed a "clinical" approach to the development of decision support systems! What was particularly interesting was that they recognized two different levels of diagnosis that need to be performed by IT developers. The primary level of diagnosis relates to what I called "taking the history," identifying what needs to be changed and how IT can facilitate that change. However, they insisted that it is also important to diagnose symptoms of resistance to change, because, if the resistance is not "treated," it is not going to matter very much how effective the proposed solution is. The forces of resistance can undermine even the best of ideas, no matter how well they are implemented!

I then noticed in the Bibliography that Keen had been advocating this clinical stance since 1975, when he wrote a Sloan School Working Paper on the subject. That means that the idea has been around for over 30 years but has never really "taken" in the world of enterprise software. I suspect one reason for this is that this kind of thinking does not fit into the specializations found in most academic curricula. One does not go to business school (or, for that matter, computer science departments) to learn about "the socio-technology of diagnosis," let alone the intellectual skills required for such diagnosis, such as an understanding of the subjective (as well as objective) motives behind speech acts or the use of narrative as a tool for "thinking in time." As a result, Keen's insights seem to have faded into obscurity.

Meanwhile, the history of attempts to make IT useful to the enterprise continues to repeat itself. As Marx said, what is tragedy the first time around becomes farce with the next iteration. However, he did not say anything about any subsequent repetitions!

December 23, 2006: What Business Schools SHOULD Teach about Service Science

2009-06-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

During this week's escape to Death Valley (where even a dial-up connection to the Internet is not very reliable), I took along my used copy of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. The more I looked into this "time capsule" from the mid-seventies, the more I realized that the service science evangelists were doing themselves a great disservice by ignoring it. The authors even go so far as to say that decision support technology should not be viewed as a product that a technical team installs and then goes on to the next client. Instead, the team has a service obligation to the client to familiarize the client with the technology, bring the client up to speed on how that technology may best be used, and even update the technology to accommodate newly discovered client needs. Could it be that we knew more about service 30 years ago than we do today (and may I be contentious enough to suggest that we owe our "acquired ignorance" to the social beings we have become by virtue [sic] of the Internet)?

One passage in the final chapter of this book has stuck with me with regard to all the quibbling over creating an "academic discipline of service science." It is in a paragraph in which the authors discuss how those managers who are most likely to benefit from decision support technology should learn about that technology:

The best education for them is the building of a relationship with an effective DSS developer and, most importantly--the insistence on being committed and involved in the design an implementation process. A skilled manager who has flexibility of mind can and almost certainly should play a major role in the design of any DSS that she or he sponsors.

In other words what counts most on the managerial side is that "flexibility of mind" that will support a rich and profitable engagement with the developers trying to bring a new technology into play. This is as true today as it was thirty years ago. You would think we would know this by now; but, as the cliche keeps saying, "The Internet changes everything." Perhaps that crack about "acquired ignorance" has more to it than fiesty contentiousness!

December 18, 2006: Another Triumph for Virtuality

2009-06-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

It would appear that Time has now lined up behind all of the other lemmings trying to escape reality. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of Web 2.0 propaganda and named as Person of the Year the new Digital Everyman who locks out reality with his iPod earbuds, neverending cellphone activity, and a desperate search for companionship on Second Life. To reflect on a much older cover of this magazine, the question is not whether God is dead but whether, at least in the Time view of the world, reality is dead!

December 14, 2006: An Economist for the Age of the Service Economy

2009-06-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

As we continue to debate the question of whether or not service is a "science" and what sort of academic curriculum (if any) provides the necessary foundations for study we would do well to check out the resume of Deirdre McCloskey in Alan Ryan's New York Review article about her recent epic volume, The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey is, in Ryan's words, "a professional economist, trained in the Chicago School;" and, back when she was Donald McCloskey, he was one of the key economic advisers to the Reagan administration. (The "pronoun shift" was documented in her book Crossings, briefly cited by Ryan and excellently reviewed by Maxine Kumin in the November 14, 1999 New York Times Book Review.) With both Ronald Reagan and a sex-change operation behind her, McCloskey is now a distinguished professor of economics at both Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a professor of rhetoric and English and has published knowledgeably in the areas of history of ideas, social theory, and philosophy. Given that both the theory and the practice of economics now has to contend with the rise of the service economy (not to mention globalization), I can think of no better combination of academic disciplines to meet this challenge!

December 13, 2006: World Bank Optimism

2009-06-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

Some (all?) stories are best read in context. Today's Financial Times ran a story under the headline "World Bank offers robust global outlook." Here are the lead paragraphs:

The World Bank's annual global economic prospects report, released on Wednesday, is a rare thing these days: a study glowing with optimism about the future for globalisation.

The report not only says that the global economy should do well in the next two years, but that globalisation between now and 2030 will proceed apace.

This is one of those articles I had to read all the way from beginning to end, just to see if anywhere in this rosy account was any column space devoted to the more pessimistic account from the World Bank's own independent assessment arm. Sure enough, any evidence of the World Bank's own exercise in self-criticism was missing from this story; but then that assessment was yesterday's news (actually from December 8)! Have we come to the point where the annual report from the World Bank is about as credible as the annual reports from Enron used to be?

Alternative, it this just evidence of the extent of our addiction to optimism? The other day I was watching La Haine on the Sundance Channel. There is a running gag about a guy who has been pushed off the roof of a skyscraper. As he passes each floor, he says to himself, "So far, so good!" The punch line is: "It's not how well you fall but how well you land!" The independent assessment of the World Bank seems to be asking questions about how this institution will land, but the annual report would rather talk about how well they are falling!

December 10, 2006: Two Banks

2009-06-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

In one of those rare ironies of coincidence, the Nobel Peace Prize was just presented to Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in the wake of a report highly critical of the World Bank released by its own independent assessment arm. Here are some specific numbers from the account of this report in Friday's SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 saw reductions in poverty between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, while the other 14 suffered the same or worse rates over that term. The group said the sample is representative of the global picture.

It is easy enough to be glib about the fact that Grameen is doing everything right and the World Bank is doing everything wrong, and that would obviously be a specious generalization. Nevertheless, it might be worth considering what differentiates these two lending organizations besides the magnitude of money involved. I would like to propose the hypothesis that, because of its magnitude, the World Bank operates on an institution-to-institution basis (a generalization of the B2B concept that has become part of our technical jargon). Grameen, on the other hand, was conceived by Yunus to operate on an individual-to-individual basis. It is only by thinking of a loan applicant as an individual person (subject) that one can consider the value of advancing a $2 loan (an example given on the radio the other day). This is not to say that the world would be a better place without institutions, since there are clearly situations in which we benefit from them. However, poverty and related disasters, such as flood and famine, are, as I have previously tried to articulate, problems of individual subjects; and institutions that can only deal with those people as objects inevitably make matters worse, just by virtue of that institution-to-institution thinking. Since I am still basically a Hegelian, I would certainly like to see a dialectical synthesis of these two perspectives; but I doubt that we can arrive at such a synthesis before beefing up the individual-to-individual side of the argument. Also, while there is no doubt that Yunus' efforts have advanced the cause of peace, the Nobel Committee could have made an even more powerful statement by also awarding him the Economics prize!

December 06, 2006: The Digital Highway just got more Hazardous!

2009-06-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

Last month it was motorists wearing iPod ear buds while driving. In the American tradition of one-upmanship, we now have a CNET report of a motorist in Washington tapping into his BlackBerry while driving on Interstate 5 (presumably at Interstate speeds). Paying more attention to the BlackBerry, this motorist failed to notice that the traffic in front of him had stopped. Caroline McCarthy delivered the punch line for CNET News.com as follows:

The result was a five-vehicle crunch that included a 28-passenger Community Transit bus and a car that was carrying a woman and her 5-month-old son.

As of this writing, seven indignant comments have already come in for Ms. McCarthy's report; but one has to wonder how many of those indignant writers are fully focused on driving when they are behind the wheel!

December 02, 2006: Psychoanalysis at the Opera

2009-06-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

Following the final matinee of their current production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut, the San Francisco Opera is joining forces with two members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute & Society, Linda Lagemann and Milton Schaefer, for "an exciting psychoanalytic discussion" of the opera. Now I am in favor of anything that helps opera audiences to pay more attention to what is happening (either on the stage or in the pit); so I would have preferred such a discussion to take place before the final performance. However, where this particular opera is involved, it is worth asking these analysts just whose psyche they plan to analyze.

Opera fans know that two operas in the standard repertoire have been written about Manon. The really rabid fans probably also know that Puccini's publisher went to great lengths to make sure that Puccini's project would be substantially different from the earlier opera by Massenet, since that earlier production had become a major hit in the opera world. Anyone with this background probably knows that Manon was the creation of the Abbé Prévost. What is probably less well known is that the "novel" Manon Lescaut is actually Books V through XI of Mémoires d'un homme de qualité qui s'est retiré du monde. I have never encountered this work in its entirety, nor met anyone who has done so. I am not even sure of the total number of Books in it, but I think I found one source that said it was twelve. The general consensus it that the whole thing is a rather tedious autobiographical meditation (confessional?), which would have been totally forgotten had not the Manon portion been extracted and become one of the most heavily-sold books of all time in France.

This is where things get interesting. First of all it would appear that Manon is based on one of Prévost's own (probably unhappy) memories. She may even have been the reason he decided to withdraw from the world. Secondly, Prévost's text, because it is autobiographical, is a first-person narrative. The account of Manon is told by the young "man of quality" who was smitten by here, the Chevalier Des Grieux. So, if we are going to talk about psyches, the first question we need to ask is whether or not Des Grieux is a reliable narrator. My guess is that he is not. I would bet that Prévost lusted after some peasant girl in his callow youth, never mustered up the courage to talk to her, and wove an elaborate story around her instead. In other words Manon stands in relation to Des Grieux/Prévost somewhat the way Dulcinea stands in relation to Don Quixote. However, Prévost is more interested in the primrose path to perdition than in chivalry; so Manon becomes the instrument of his cautionary tale.

I would now guess that Puccini never bothered to think about such details. Indeed, the documentary evidence seems to indicate that he was a smitten with Manon and Des Grieux was. So here he is taking on the fictitious product of an unreliable narrator (and, while this was one of his earlier works, I find more depth in the music than in his more warhorse-like operas). So who belongs on the analyst's couch?

Puccini is my number-one candidate. Anyone who can get that wrapped up in an imaginary character has got to have a psyche worth investigating! I would even argue that, at the end of the day, Puccini is probably a far more interesting figure that either Des Grieux or his creator Prévost. Indeed, if we could get to the bottom of Puccini's obsession with Manon in youth, we might have a better understanding of why, at the end of his life, he decided to take on the suitor-killing Turandot!

December 01, 2006 (2): The Fear Factor Compounds

2009-06-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

The impact of the "imams on a plane" story is still being felt. Reuters began a story with a Washington byline this morning as follows:

When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The story then went on to describe a depressing sample of callers who reinforced Klein's suggestion in any number of vindictive ways. After an hour of this, Klein let the cat out of the bag:

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

As far as I am concerned, responsibility for this culture of fear lies primarily, if not entirely, with our Federal Government, particularly in the Executive Branch, which has probably done more than any previous administration to achieve results through fear. Any number of analysts have discussed the extent to which this administration was planning its moves according to the Nazi playbook, but that kind of analysis tends to be too abstract for the general public. Klein had the guts to move from the abstract to the concrete, but it remains to be seen whether or not his demonstration will have any impact.

December 01, 2006 (1): It's the People, Stupid!

2009-06-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

Elise Ackerman has a great article in today's San Jose Mercury News, now available through E-Commerce Times. It is basically a "report from the trenches" on how Google Checkout is being received as a potential threat to PayPal. One of the major punch lines has to do with what happens when things go wrong. Dallas comedian Amelia Klaymann hit one of those speed bumps and ended up getting charged five times for a computer monitor. Needless to say, she responded with a sense of urgency, only to discover that there was no help desk she could call: all communication was conducted through electronic mail.

Now, in all fairness, if Google Checkout is providing electronic mail communication with customer support, then at least they are ahead of Amazon.com in this game, who only provides you with a rather limited form to fill out. If you have a problem with Amazon.com and you have screen shots to support your claims, there is no way you can pass that information to them. So, if Google Checkout lets you send "real" electronic mail, complete with whatever attachments may be useful, such as screen shots or scans of paper receipts, they are at least better than some of the other players.

However, the other punch line has to do with how Ms. Klaymann finally managed to communicate with Google. She wrote up her experiences in her blog. More specifically, she wrote, "It turns out Google does not have anyone you can talk to in real life -- only via e-mail;" and, as fate would have it, a Google manager happened to read her blog (which happened to be hosted by Google's Blogger service). So Ms. Klaymann ended up getting the $20 incentive credit for using Google Checkout in the first place and had all five charges voided, meaning that she got her monitor for free.

Before we write this off as a happily-ever-after story, though, we should ask a couple of questions:

If Ms. Klaymann had not used Google Blogger for her blog, would any Google manager has seen it? (Hint: I have given the URL for this blog to Google Blog Search and have yet to find anything on it with their search tool. So much for me keeping my blog in "enemy territory!")
Has Ms. Klaymann's experience had any impact on Google Checkout operations; or, for that matter, has Ms. Ackerman's report of those experiences had any impact?
When will the purveyor's of e-commerce recognize that there are all sorts of things that the "e" can facilitate; but, as soon as things go wrong, people want to talk to people willing to take the time to listen, understand, and act?

November 30, 2006: Does Music Have a Future?

2009-06-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

I decided to do a Google phrase search on "future of music." I got 1,970,000 hits. Pride of place under the current page-ranking algorithm went to the Future of Music Coalition. These guys have a manifesto, which was written and published on June 1, 2000. It starts off with wonderful manifesto-like language, which we do not encounter very much these days:

The history of the American Music Industry is a disheartening one, which largely details the exploitation of artists and musicians by opportunists and those without the musicians' best interests at heart.

For too long musicians have had too little voice in the manufacture, distribution and promotion of their music on a national and international level and too little means to extract fair support and compensation for their work.

So what we are really talking about here is the future of the music business, particularly the commercial survival of people wanting to make a living as musicians. This is also the focus of a recent book entitled The Future of Music. The cover is pictured above and is hopefully clear enough to show that this book also calls itself a manifesto; and its manifesto is also about music as a business.

Now I do not have anything against professional musicians (particularly since my kid brother is one). However, all this trafficking in manifestos probably needs to be examined in the context of my recent attempt to get below the surface of the iPod phenomenon. See, as soon as the manifesto writers get on the bandwagon of a digital future (which is definitely the case with the aforementioned book), then it is not long before the iPod is paraded out as the wave of the future. At this point it is important to remember that iPods now provide content other than music, so any examination of the technology must take content such as video and podcasts into account. Consequently, if we buy into the argument I have been trying to promote, which is that the iPod is, above all other things, a convenient mechanisms for detaching from reality, then the fact that it provides music as content becomes relatively incidental.

At the end of the day, if there is a "digital music revolution," then it has precious little to do with music; and the primary reason for this is that the technology behind this revolution is solidly locked into what Noam Cook and John Seely Brown call an "epistemology of possession." The iPod is a handy little toy that provides us with a new way to acquire and manage old possessions, and it delivers those possessions as a cocoon to protect us from the cruel world out there. However, if we want to talk about music, we have to recognize that music (as opposed to the music business) is more about practice than about possession. Those practices involve not only making music (composing or performing) but also going to performances and playing recordings. Cook and Brown argued that talking about practice requires a different epistemology from talking about possession; and they envisage a "generative dance" that engages both epistemologies.

My fear is that if the only talk we hear about the future of music has to do with possession, then practice may drop out of even our peripheral vision of the world of music. Unfortunately, I am "old school" enough to believe that you cannot have music without practice. Thus my choice of headline: If we embrace the manifestos of the "future of music" with too much enthusiasm, the consequence may be that music has no future at all!

November 28, 2006: Terrorism 101

2009-06-24T14:11:00.000-07:00

One of the things that makes Max Rodenbeck's essay on terrorism for the November 30 issue of The New York Review so compelling is his choice of introductory quotations. The one from Clausewitz could be expected: where else would we turn when having to confront the fiasco of our own military adventurism. However, it is the perceptiveness of the second quotation that is far more fascinating:

The actual reason for the failure of the US policy in its political field and international relations is their lack of information regarding the world's realities and also the enclosure of the decision making people of that country in their own fabricated and false political propaganda.

It would not be hard to imagine these words coming from the apologetic mouth of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, but that guess would fall about as far from the mark as one might imagine. No, the author of that sentence is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and the text is an entry from his personal blog written after his visit to New York this past September. Of course one of the ways in which we all deprive ourselves of "information regarding the world's realities" is through our assumption that those who disagree with us substitute fanaticism for reflection; and, as far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, the media (with the possible exception of Mike Wallace), do a very good job of fueling that assumption. I suspect that Ahmadinejad's blog is written in a language that I cannot read very well (if at all); so I have no idea how consistently reflective he is in his writing. However, Rodenbeck made a powerful rhetorical move by situating him next to Clausewitz as the "voices of reason" that preface his analysis.

His next rhetorical move resides in his choice of language to describe the current "state of play" in those military adventures:

What has happened … is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration's reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

At the end of the day, it is not a matter of the illogic of White House rhetoric about democracy. Instead, it is about a "mental construct," "fabricated" (to use Ahmadinejad's language) by virtue (sic) of "lack of information regarding the world's realities." We can, of course, address the question of whether this lack of information had to do with the willful decision to sublate information in deference to faith; or we can flip the coin around and blame it on the myopia of those "dogmas" of Western civilization that sublate other cultural perspectives in deference to "scientific" thinking. Whether we followed the faith-based path of fundamentalism or the rationalist path that consumed McNamara, we blundered badly; and there is a supreme irony that a blog entry by a supposed faith-based fundamentalist should reveal such reflective insight into our blunder.

Most of Rodenbeck's article has to do with why it took so long for the general American public to recognize this insight; but he never really factors in the role that media play in shaping public opinion (or the role that the White House played in controlling those media). Instead, he writes about books that will probably never come to general public attention. The core of the article focuses on a "Terrorism 101" textbook entitled What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat:

One of the best [recent explanatory books] is by Louise Richardson, a Harvard professor who not only has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, but brings the experience of an Irish childhood, including youthful enthusiasm for the IRA, to understanding the phenomenon. As she explains, she had always thought it wise for academics to stay out of politics. The sheer boneheadedness of Washington's incumbents, who have ignored decades of accumulated wisdom on her subject, prompted her to write a belated primer.

Nevertheless, we can see the problem in getting out Richardson's message when, at this point in the article, Rodenbeck's rhetoric fails him. He decides to outline a dozen points from the book, and I believe that contemporary rhetoric would do well to acknowledge the cognitive impact of honoring "Miller's magic number" (seven plus or minus two). The Macarthur Report on media literacy makes a similar rhetorical blunder; but, while each of the Macarthur items can be distilled down to a relatively manageable phrase, each of Rodenbeck's points involves (at least) one paragraph of subtleties that would impede such distillation. Whether we like it or not, the path to public opinion leads through quick slogans and compelling images; and there we have it. Those "boneheads" know how to play the slogan-and-image game; and, once again, analytic thinking, regardless of how powerful its message may be, is left out in the cold. Once again we must confront that postmodern world in which fiction rules with a double-edged sword.

November 27, 2006: Why Call it "Science?"

2009-06-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Over a quiet Thanksgiving meal I had the chance to vent some of my discontent with the terminology of "service science" with a friend who teaches philosophy at San Jose State. With his background in philosophy, he asked a fundamental question that I realized I had ignored: Why do its proponents insist on calling it a "science?" Giving the matter some thought, I realized that this was probably a reflection of an obsession with science that went back (at least) as far as Frederick Winslow Taylor's effort to approach management "scientifically." Taylor's intense quantitative analysis of manufacturing processes cast a dark shadow over the nature of work for most of the twentieth century, but we never seem to be able to get out from under that shadow. What was comedy in Cheaper by the Dozen has become dark farce as die-hard Taylorists reflect the behavior of the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Since Taylorism already exacted a devastating blow on the management of public education, there should be no surprise that there are those who now wish to apply its "scientific" approach to a broader range of services. Unfortunately, this is a nightmare from which we are unlikely to awaken as long as we remain under the spell of what Isaiah Berlin has called the "three unquestioned dogmas" of Western civilization. Taylorism is as much a faith as any other religious fundamentalism and can impose just as much distortion upon our view of the "real world."

November 26, 2006: Tristan "+" Isolde

2009-06-24T14:03:00.000-07:00

As may have been observed in the past, I do not mind talking about how seriously I take my Wagner (particularly this season at the San Francisco Opera, where they mounted the Los Angeles production with Hockney sets and, as usual, the Chronicle got it all wrong and the performance was riveting from beginning to end). So I was more than a little skeptical when I saw the posters and newspaper adds for a film calling itself Tristan + Isolde, which seemed to make it clear that any contribution from Wagner would be, at best, irrelevant. Nevertheless, when Cinemax decided to run the film, my wife and I figured we would give it a try. (It's a lot easier to bail on a cable broadcast than a visit to a movie theater.) As a matter of fact, we jumped the gun when we saw that it was available through the Comcast On Demand feature prior to its first airing. Like acts2120, whose review appeared on the IMDB page, we were more than pleasantly surprised.

Nevertheless, I can see why this movie left San Francisco almost as soon as it arrived (and probably did not even arrive in many other cities). Even if this is one of the most highly-charged stories of sex and violence (not to mention one of the earliest), it is hard to imagine any telling of the tale "making it" as a "teen flick;" and teens constitute the market the dominates the logic of film distribution, if not conception and production. Most important is that this particular telling is not that all transparent. As a matter of fact, its greatest appeal may be to Wagner-lovers for the way in which it fills out the back-story. We see how Tristan came to be part of Marke's household, and we learn about Isolde's betrothal to Morholt. We also see the blood-and-guts (and lots of dirt) battle where Tristan slays Morholt and is wounded so badly that he is taken for dead. Like that of any dead hero, his body is placed on a boat and floated out to sea. It then washes up on the Irish coast and the story goes pretty much the way Isolde tells it in the first act of the Wagner opera (with one interesting exception, which is that it is Isolde who gives a false name, calling herself Bragnae, rather than Tristan).

Another problem involves sorting out the characters. Since most of the performers are pretty unfamiliar, it is too easy to confuse Morhold with Kurseval, which is a pretty drastic confusion! Also, Marke ages by cutting his hair almost to the skull, making him hard to recognize when we move from the scene in which he adopts the child Tristan to the time in which most of the story takes place. On the other hand Rufus Sewell portrays a Marke who is far from over the hill and could have been an excellent match for Isolde.

By the way there are no magic potions here. Isolde is an herbalist (and, interestingly enough, so is Morholt). Her passion for Tristan is a natural one, and in this telling she keeps it pent up far longer than Wagner's Isolde did. (Well, "pent up" was probably not in Wagner's working vocabulary!) The result is that her first serious tryst with Tristan makes for the sort of earth-moving encounter that the legend wants it to be.

Finally (and this may be the real reason why this movie had no chance of grabbing the teen market), there is a certain "meta-level" to the way in which the legend is told. It is as much a reflection on a familiar tale as it is a telling of that tale. Since the teen market does not go to the movies to reflect, my guess is that the studio bean-counters knew from the start that this was a losing prospect.

This last problem has been sticking in my mind now that I have read Daniel Mendelsohn's New York Review piece on Marie Antoinette. It almost seemed as if Mendelsohn was taking Coppola to task for not being reflective enough about her familiar subject. However, since Coppola is no stranger to that "Hollywood logic," you have to wonder how much she deserves to be Mendelsohn's target, even if it is her name on the credits. I have no trouble imagining that most of the things Mendelsohn disliked most about the film were actually committee decisions, where the bean-counters had the strongest voices, in which case it may be better to wait to see if a "director's cut" version ever gets released on DVD.

November 25, 2006: Imams on a Plane

2009-06-22T17:01:00.000-07:00

Today's Chronicle ran a follow-up to the story of the six Muslim scholars who were removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. One of the imams was from Bakersfield; and yesterday, shortly after noon, Associated Press ran a story about his arrival at his final destination. The bottom line was that it took him 27 hours to get there, and one of the reasons was that US Airways refused to let any of the six men board any of its flights. I continue to read this as evidence of the culture of fear we have created. I know from my own experience how fear can breed anger (on both sides of the coin); so I have been particularly depressed by this particular item and the way things have been proceeding.

November 24, 2006: New Advances in Embryonic Photography

2009-06-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

When the National Geographic Society is not indulging in right-wing politics (which turned me away from them in my student days), they can do some really wonderful things. My wife and one of my closest colleagues were both addicted to the Pete's Pond webcam when it was active. Now they have become the platform for the release of some of the most sophisticated (color) photographs of embryos that we have yet seen. This has attracted a fair amount of Web buzz, but I fell that Spiegel Online provided one of the better combinations of reporting and photography. While "commonplace book" entries have traditionally been photographs, today I feel obliged to include what I feel was one of the most striking images from the Spiegel site.

November 23, 2006: Tracking Down a Source

2009-06-22T16:56:00.000-07:00

It began when I found the following quote attributed to Plotinus:

Τό γάρ ϊχνος τόυ άμόρφου μορφή

I had two problems:

I wanted to track down the translation
I wanted specific source information

The Perseus online Greek dictionary helped me with the first. Once I got from ϊχνος to "trace," I was able to home in on a translation of the phrase: "Form is only the trace of that which has no form." I also had a specific location in the Enneads: VI, 7, 33. The only problem was that the phrase was not in my copy! It was only after a Google Book Search led me to Plotinus Or the Simplicity of Vision, by Pierre Hadot, that I was able to track the source to a specific line. I then discovered that, while my copy had the same translator that was cited for the phrase (MacKenna), that copy was a newer translation. In the new edition the phrase came out as: "Shape is an impress from the unshaped." I do not think I could have solved this problem with Google, but it was still a tough fight!

November 21, 2006 (2): The Hazardous Digital Highway

2009-06-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

Today's E-Commerce Times includes an article by Christine Laue of the Omaha World-Herald explaining that iPods are becoming as big a road hazard as cell phones due to the increasing number of motorists wearing ear buds. Maybe it is time for us to take stock of what is really going on, whether it is on the sidewalks or the highways. What cell phones and music players have in common is how convenient they make it for their users to detach from reality (and, given its connotation in the drug world, the noun "user" seems more appropriate than ever). This, of course, goes hand-in-glove with the related attraction (addiction?) to virtual social environments, such as Second Life. Where this all points is to a "community" of individuals who cannot take their reality any more, whether it is too much traffic, pedestrians trying to cross the street where they want to make a turn, or just too many people in any setting. We have now provided these individuals with a means to "turn off" reality, just as Chance (with his television addiction) tried to do in Being There (a subtly ironic title for anyone who has read Heidegger). People who drive under such an "influence" are as dangerous (if not more so) than those who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Do we have to wait for another incarnation of MADD before anyone does anything about this; and, if we go after the "dealers" where drugs are involved, should we not consider doing the same with these technologies?

November 21, 2006 (1): The Culture of Fear

2009-06-22T16:50:00.000-07:00

The real story behind the incident at UCLA's Powell Library is the way in which it demonstrated how successful those in power have been at turning American society into a culture of fear. Anyone considering denying this proposition should consider a breaking story from Associated Press concerning the removal of six Muslim scholars from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. Here is how Associated Press reported the grounds for the removal:

A passenger raised concerns about the imams — three of whom said their normal evening prayers in the airport terminal before boarding the Phoenix-bound plane, according to one — through a note passed to a flight attendant, according to Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways.

The Council on Islamic-American Relations has called for an investigation, and I hope they get a good one. As is the case with the UCLA story, we are in no position to judge the merits of this case on the basis of what the media feed us. Nevertheless, I am sure it will not be long before the Internet is flooded with expressions of mass indignation on both sides of the story.

November 19, 2006: Rush to Judgement?

2009-06-22T16:38:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday night an Iranian UCLA senior, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, declined to show his identification to UCLA police officers when requested to do so after 11 PM in Powell Library. According to his attorney, Stephen Yagman, and as reported by the Los Angeles Times, he "declined because he thought he was being singled out because of his Middle Eastern appearance." The Times continued the account as follows:

The lawyer said Tabatabainejad eventually decided to leave the library but when an officer refused the student's request to take his hand off him, the student fell limp to the floor, again to avoid participating in what he considered a case of racial profiling. After police started firing the Taser, Tabatabainejad tried to "get the beating, the use of brutal force, to stop by shouting and causing people to watch. Generally, police don't want to do their dirties in front of a lot of witnesses."

He said Tabatabainejad was hit by the Taser five times and suffered "moderate to severe contusions" on his right side.

The Web page for this story, filed the following Friday after Tabatabainejad had retained Yagman's services, also included a link to a YouTube site with "video evidence" of the incident. This site has attracted considerable attention and provides links to several supposed "on the spot" recordings, one of which is also available on Truthdig. As of this morning, this particularly video has been viewed 344,777 times and accrued 2976 comments. The comment count at Truthdig is only up to 46 but is more "on topic" than the YouTube comments (such as "Worst camerawork I've ever seen, even for a citizen journalist..."). However, it is because I agree with this particular comment that I put those scare quotes around the word "evidence." At the end of the day, there is far more audio than video here; so one can assume that, should this matter ever come to trial, there will be justifiable debate over whether it would be legally admissible as evidence. (For that matter I can imagine the judge asking which members of the panel from which a jury was selected have seen any of the YouTube videos.)

The Truthdig comments exhibit an extremely passionate reaction to the incident. From my vantage point in the grand scheme of history, I was almost immediately reminded of when the National Guard fired on protesting student at Kent State and the rhetorically passionate photograph taken of the consequences. In the wake of yesterday's musical reflections, I was also reminded of when and why Coltrane composed "Alabama." However, it is important to remember that rhetoric is not logic (and, for that matter, that legal decisions are not necessarily made on the basis of either logic or rhetoric). Therefore, in the wake of all this passion, I feel a need to reproduce my own contribute to the Truthdig comments:

About ten years ago there was a case in Northern California involving environmental protesters getting pepper-sprayed by the police. My wife decided to give the students in her class the project of trying to interview as many of the parties involved in this incident as they could. Sure enough: both sides explained the motives for their actions clearly and sympathetically. What did the kids learn? Be very careful when the media try to get you to take sides when you do not know all the facts! Ten years ago this kind of dispute could have been settled by a good impartial judge. Today I’m not so sure ...

What I do know for sure is that there is more to this story than will ever be resolved by YouTube videos or Truthdig comments. The lesson this time around is that there is a fine line between creating forums for public discourse and muddying the waters of due process of law. I have the greatest sympathy for any judge who will have to deal with Mr. Yagman.

November 18, 2006: Bach as Coltrane; Coltrane as Bach

2009-06-22T16:35:00.000-07:00

I am in the final stages of working on the B-flat (first) partita from Part I of Johann Sebastian Bach's Clavierübung. I have worked my way through all of the "French Suites" and about half of the "English;" but these really go to the next level. What I have discovered is that, while nothing (or at least almost nothing) about Bach can ever be called "routine," there is at least a bit of predictability in the English and French suites, while the movements of the partita just keep going and going into new territory, sustaining the attention over longer intervals of time (and challenging the performer to get the mind around committing the whole thing to memory). Coltrane lovers know what is going on here. The partita movements are in the same league as (or perhaps anticipate the league of) Coltrane improvisations, based on an explicit (if not always familiar) foundation and then quickly spinning away from the foundation and orbiting around it for awesomely long periods of time. Coltrane also shared with Bach the ability to take something that was very (if not too) familiar (perhaps so much so that people had grown sick of it, as in Mary Martin singing "My Favorite Things") and turn it into something that was both the same and very much other (not to mention on a much more epic scale: the quartet performance of "My Favorite Things" recorded in Paris on November 17, 1962 clocked in at almost 24 minutes). I check into some of my Coltrane background material for any mention of Bach, but I could not find anything. On the other hand Coltrane was never one for talking very much about he did. I recall seeing Stravinsky on television the night that "The Flood" was broadcast; and, after a few routine sentences, he said, "I don't want to tell you more; I just want to play you more." Trane would have understood; and my guess is that Bach would have, too.

November 11, 2006: Why I am not a Positivist

2009-06-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

Once again, David Cole has written an excellent book review for The New York Review. The last time he came to my attention, he was writing about terrorism; this time the issue is the constitutional foundation of our legal system. The book under review is Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, by Richard Posner (pictured above as rendered, with at least two meanings intended, by David Levine). What is at stake is Posner's legal philosophy, which basically reduces judicial ruling to the mechanics of cost-benefit analysis.

While Cole does not mention it explicitly, this kind of positivism-with-a-vengeance actually recalls Bertrand Russell's internationalism, where Russell envisioned a single government for the entire globe that would resolve all disputes by invoking the machinery of an appropriately designed logical calculus. Cole does an excellent job of challenging this vision. For me the most compelling passage of his text is a quotation of a 1961 dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan concerning the nature of due process:

Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.

While the focus of Posner's book and Cole's challenge involves the relationship between the current executive and judicial branches of the Federal Government, reading about the subtleties of due process reminded of when, about five years ago, John Seely Brown enjoined me to drop everything and read Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code (dragging me to a bookstore on Maui in the process). Revisiting the index of that book, I discovered only one entry for "due process," that being in a paragraph on page 7 that reviews the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That neglect for one of the most important elements of our Constitutional process can perhaps explain the sort of position that Lessig tried to take in his book:

Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.

This, again, is positivism-with-a-vengeance, guided possibly by a calculus more sophisticated than one Russell could have ever imagined, but (in Harlan's language) a "formula" nonetheless. Today we may be more conscious of the judicial issues that have been arising in the way of American military adventurism. However, those issues are also likely to arise in other more mundane aspects of our lives; so we should all be aware of the cautionary arguments that Cole has articulated so excellently.

November 06, 2006: What's in the Script?

2009-06-22T16:27:00.000-07:00

JP Rangaswami seems to be having a good time exploring the analogy between film-making and software development; and I am glad to see that one result of this exploration is the assertion that "the script is central." However, I see this as a point of departure, rather than a conclusion; and the direction in which we must depart is that of a more rigorous epistemological and ontological consideration than those emerging from JP’s efforts to develop his analogy. Most important is that, to invoke my favorite language, we need to honor the fact that a script is fundamentally a dramatistic (rather than scientistic) artifact (which entails the corollary that software development is also more dramatistic than scientistic, that being what JP really means in his related proposition that software is about stories). (Needless to say, neither filmmakers nor most parties involved in software projects, including the customers, are particularly interested in either epistemology or ontology; but we need them to keep our own thoughts in order!) As regular readers should know by now I have decided that Kenneth Burke’s pentad provides a useful grounding for both epistemology and ontology.

Lest anyone think this is just a philosophical exercise in abstraction, I have now performed an initial exercise at putting it into practice. The exercise is based on what is probably now a “classic” case study in the first chapter of the Decision Support Systems text by Keen and Scott Morton. The study concerns a manufacturer of laundry equipment dealing with forecasting sales and then projecting requirements for manufacturing. This case study concerns the “real world” (albeit a bit dated) of decision-making, rather than the world of support software; so, in spite of the fact that it reflects an earlier business era, I find it a good way to focus on those stakeholders who are not fixated on things like software artifacts.

The problem can be cast in the ontological categories of Burke’s framework as follows:

* Acts (what takes place)

o Manufacturing “sells” consumer products to Marketing
o Marketing prepares sales projection
o Manufacturing prepares requirements for manufacturing and inventory
o Marketing-planning manager resolves conflicts between salesforecast and production forecast

* Scenes (situation in which it occurs)

o Negotiating parameters for sales forecast model: Marketing manager ↔ Marketing-planning manager
o Negotiating parameters for production model: Marketing-planning manager ↔ Production manager

* Agents (who)

o Profit centers

. Marketing
. Manufacturing

o Planners

. Marketing-planning manager
. Marketing (sales) manager
. Production manager

* Agencies (means or instruments)

o Sales forecast based on computer model
o Forecast of manufacturing and inventory requirements based on computer model

* Purpose (why)

o Project sales for next twelve months

o Manage production consistent with sales projection

. Work force levels
. Production schedules
. Inventory management

o Define pricing and merchandising strategies

In this framework the key problem comes down to whether or not the agencies are doing a good enough job to facilitate the resolution of conflicts between the sales forecast and the production forecast. To invoke language that JP holds so dear, this involves facilitating conversations that work, where much of the “work” has to do with aligning the agencies to the motives of the agents (in this case both individual and institutional), in order that the negotiation “scenes” are furnished with the necessary information. The punch line is that the dramatistic stance allows us to examine the nature of negotiation through the subjective lens of motivated action, rather than trying to see the world in terms of the objective numbers (whether or not they are visualized in “dashboards”) compiled by the bean counters who drive the enterprise software.

Final disclaimer: This exercise is far from cast in concrete. I just decided it was time to start trumpeting the virtues of Kenneth Burke by anchoring his stuff down to a concrete example. All sincere efforts to refine the details of the exercise will be most welcome!

November 02, 2006 (2): The Unbearable Being of Silence

2009-06-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

Last night Peter Serkin gave a recital of the works of Toru Takemitsu preceded and followed by a single composition by J. S. Bach. Takemitsu was one of those composers who drew your attention to sounds, rather than notes. I first encountered this when I heard a recording of "The Dorian Horizon." The one chance I had to hear this work performed live, all the subtlety of the sounds was crushed into dust because UCLA had engaged a publicity photographer to shoot during the performance. Every click the camera made destroyed the mood that Takemitsu had labored to create.

Yesterday I wrote about John Cage, who did more than any other composer to try to teach us how to listen to silence. Unfortunately, too many of the people in Serkin's audience never learned this lesson. The sad truth is that there is something about silence that brings out the urge to cough or sneeze or break the silence, one way or another. Perhaps too many of us are just frightened by the absence of sound the way we are frightened by the absence of light. Nevertheless, Serkin did not do a bad job of training his audience. He he could not always keep them quiet while he was playing, his stillness at the end of each piece at least kept them from applauding until he relaxed his pose. One way or another, he was going to make his audience listen to the silence, even if it was not always the silence embedded in Takemitsu's score!

November 02, 2006 (1): Validate Your Assumtions!

2009-06-22T16:22:00.000-07:00

As if there have not been enough entries today, here is an entry for the commonplace book from the interview that Mohammad Khatami gave to the BBC:

Democracy is not something to get exported.

November 01, 2006 (2): Tell it Like it Is, Matt!

2009-06-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

Once again, Rolling Stone has made its mark in quality political journalism, again thanks to the perceptive writing of Matt Taibbi! This time Matt has decided to take on "the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week," where Bill O'Reilly (in Taibbi's usual colorful language) "ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass." The point, however, is that this was the full extent of Taibbi's celebration of this event, because, at the end of the day, there really was not that much to celebrate. His point is that Letterman and others of his ilk (meaning those media "performers" who only recently have begun to reverse their position on the Iraq war) really deserve no praise for what amounts to taking forever to recognize the baldly obvious. Here are Taibbi's words again (in language that, this time, may be too colorful for some readers):

What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

This all reminds me of a lecture I heard John Cage deliver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time in the vicinity of 1974. On that occasion Cage chose to read an acceptance speech he delivered for some award he had recently received (which may very well be the first time he had been acknowledged with any such prestigious award). Since those of us who actually knew Cage are declining in our numbers, I have to explain that Cage was probably the closest approximation to a saint I had ever met (although, if one could call him a saint, it would have to be a Buddhist saint). The number of times I ever heard him break with his serene equanimity and voice anything like a complain could be counted on one hand. So it was quite a surprise to discover that the message of this particular lecture (and, for all I know, he delivered it while holding the award just given to him) was, "Where were you when I needed you?" Both John Cage and Merce Cunningham spent more years than any of us would wish to number on the brink of poverty, wondering where the next meal would come from, just because they wanted to be true to their ideas of how music and dance should be made. (Cage even told the story that, when Cunningham received his first serious grant award, someone asked him what he would do with the money; and Merce answered immediately, "Eat.") For all that serene equanimity, Cage could not forget persevering the poverty when finally awarded the fruits of recognition.

Nothing has changed. Attention was not paid to John Cage and Merce Cunningham when they were struggling to make their voices heard. Attention was not paid to those few to dared to speak of the folly of going to war in Iraq when the question was still being debated in the Congress. Today also happens to be the day that Nelson Mandela was capable of offering up a few kind words for P. W. Botha. When will the United States of America come to terms with the concepts of Truth and Reconciliation? When will we accept responsibility for our mistakes of neglect?

November 01, 2006 (1): PowerPoint Rhetoric

2009-06-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

It must have been about ten years ago that I was sitting in a meeting at which John Seely Brown talked about the "new genre of rhetoric" that PowerPoint was imposing on our discourse (not to be confused with Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric"). In spite of my agreement with John, I was still not prepared to read an article in today's New York Times that was basically about a PowerPoint slide (reproduced above). Quite honestly, I am still not sure what to make of it. I suppose my most negative reaction is that this may be the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of "dashboard thinking," that notorious fad of so much enterprise software, which, by reducing the complexities of a situation to a display of a few quantitative parameters, tends to be little more than a crutch for avoiding more serious thinking. However, there is also a positive side, which is that, if words fail to convince, the best alternative is a "killer picture;" and this picture is about as "killer" as you can get. At the end of the day, I think I prefer the positive side. After all, it was the "killer pictures" of Thomas Nast that eventually brought down Boss Tweed (who actually called them "damned pictures") and his corrupt establishment at Tammany Hall. If this is what it takes to convince our Administration and the general public of the extent of the failure of our "adventure" in Iraq, then I suppose I have to subscribe to the pragmatic philosophy that you go with what works.

October 30, 2006 (2): The Socially Illiterate Society

2009-06-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

I realize that my recent attack on Henry Jenkins' Macarthur Report is not so much about "media literacy" as it is about "social literacy." It is bad enough that questions about the nature of social literacy and how it may be achieved are ignored by the media literacy camp, that seems to lose touch with what it is that media are mediating. It is more serious that they should be ignored by champions in the social software camp, such as JP Rangaswami; but what is “social literacy” if not an intuitive awareness of and sensitivity to concepts like “connectedness,” “belonging,” “sharing,” and “bonding,” which seem to figure so fundamentally in JP's rhetoric? Unfortunately, there seems to be no place for social literacy in today’s classrooms (at least in the public school system in the United States), since that is just not part of the accountability equation that the government has forced on those classrooms. Thus, the question of whether or not those classrooms have computers is ultimately a distraction from the real issue, which concerns how the next generation of pupils will be conducive to having relationships at all, whether or not those relationships are mediated by computer technology.

October 30, 2006 (1): The Final Steingart Installment

2009-06-22T16:08:00.000-07:00

Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE provided the final installment in the translations of excerpts from Gabor Steingart's Weltkrieg um Wohlstand ("war for wealth") book. Once again the title is as provocative as it is relevant: "Twisting the Knife: Consumers Are Killing the Welfare State." This one actually makes an excellent companion piece to the Book TV broadcast of a lecture that Joseph Stiglitz recently gave to the World Bank to discuss his new book, Making Globalization Work. Stiglitz is the perfect antidote to anyone who has had too much over Tom Friedman's cheerleading, and he even took Friedman on by using the guy's own language. I cannot duplicate the words exactly; but what Stiglitz said went something like "Not only is the world not flat, but it is getting less flatter every day." This then gave him an opportunity to discuss the unpleasant consequences that may ensue from a Digital Divide which is growing larger, rather than smaller.

Unlike Friedman, Steingart is not concerned with the mission of making us feel good. He writes about German consumers; but he could just as well be writing about consumers in any industrialized and Internet-rich country:

The normal shopper at a German department store like Karstadt, wholesale retailer Metro or grocery discounter Lidl is a downright globalization fanatic. He compares prices and services but not nationalities or their social security systems. He wants his rebates and does not want additional charges. He is interested in the good deal, not in the dirty business already going on elsewhere in the world.

Even if he considers himself a romantic, he is actually a materialist by the book. It is only outside of business hours that he occasionally entertains idealistic doubts. And only then does he start to ask himself how it can be that he can obtain such large carpets so cheaply or why the prices on computers and mobile phones these days are so low.

This eventually leads him to a punch line that is not unfamiliar but still bears repeating at every opportunity:

What is important at this juncture is simply the realization that the global labor market, as we have invented it up to now, has created a unified sovereign territory for goods producers. The demand for labor now moves from one land to another, and naturally prefers those states with the lowest possible supplementary social costs.

Many who considered the social market economy to be the final stage of history are now being forced to admit they made a colossal error. Capitalism has, thanks to a global labor and finance market, increased its range, while the social safety net has lost ground. The market has gained power, speed and apparently also inevitability. But the social triumph of yesteryear has faded. Indeed, capitalism is going back to its roots.

I suppose I have enjoyed reading these essays because Steingart follows a path that I have tried to advocate for some time, the path of reasoning about consequences. In all fairness to the average consumer, it is not easy to reason about consequences when your finances demand that you get the best price for every purchase you make. So perhaps Steingart has been a bit extreme in picking on those consumers, but whom should he target? It is all very well and good to say that governments ought to deal with long-term questions of economic viability; but what are any of us to do when a government shirks that responsibility? Passionate talk of revolution is no solution, since the odds are not good that the resulting system will be any more conducive to long-term thinking. Unpleasant as it may sound, we may all have to face up to being responsible for our own assets and apply those assets towards building a safety net that can withstand future abuses from the movers and shakers of the global economy.

October 27, 2006 (2): Jenkins' List

2009-06-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

As a result of my regular reading of Confused of Calcutta, I found myself looking at the Executive Summary of the Macarthur Report, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," written by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues at the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. The basic thrust seems to be a shift of "the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement." In other words it is all about "social skills developed through collaboration and networking;" but what are those skills? Here is the list that the Jenkins group compiled:

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

What fascinates me about this list, however, is how asocial, if not antisocial, it is. I do not see anything in the list that explicitly addresses the ability to engage in intersubjective communicative actions. Put another way, everything on the list (including Negotiation) is basically content-based. (Yes, that also includes the reduction of Play to problem-solving.) After all, if we are going to be talking about "media literacy," we have to remember that the "media" are just that: the channels through which communication, in all of its intersubjective glory, may be allowed to take place. Somehow or another, we need something on the list that honors Isaiah Berlin: Differing opinions should lead to dialog, but dialog does not have to lead to convergence of opinion. The intersubjectivity is a matter of each side reaching enough understanding to acknowledge, if not honor, the other’s point of view. This is the ultimate social skill for which we must all strive in an age of too many trigger-happy people with the power to end it all with a bang (not a whimper)!

October 27, 2006 (1): "Death" of a "President"

2009-06-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

Speaking of fiction, The Raw Story ran the German Press Agency item about the limited-release opening of Death of a President in the United States. The byline was Los Angeles, but the film has also opened here in San Francisco. The Chronicle ran their review under an interesting headline: "Bush is murdered in tasteless, creepy 'Death.'" Well, as a long-standing John Waters fan, who was one of the first kids on my block to see a midnight screening of Pink Flamingos, I figure that I have earned myself the right to make my own call on tastelessness! On the other hand the Germans seem to agree with the creepy part, describing the assassination itself as "a chilling approximation." Meanwhile, as of this writing, The Raw Story has harvested 31 comments; and, without wading through all of them, there seems to be a strong faction that want to see this film in order to indulge in their favorite fantasy. I would probably find that even more creepy, were it not for the fact that I was living in Marina del Rey when Platoon came out; and there were movie theaters you wanted to avoid, because the veterans had chosen them to be the places where they would gather to relive their personal horrors while engaging in "dialog" with the images of the actors on the screen. So I guess the only lesson from all this is that, whenever we think we have a working definition of "creepy," something creepier comes along to raise the bar.

So, do I want to see this film? Notwithstanding any definitions of taste, I am always interested in anything that is called provocative, just to see to what extent I am provoked. Will I go to a theater to see the film? Well, this is opera season, not to mention the Symphony, and new new play just opened at Berkeley Rep. Usually I wait for these things to show up on cable. Perhaps I should worry that Comcast will block it, but I would be inclined to believe that they will just wait for a reasonable period of time to lapse after the election.

Meanwhile, just to remind us that irony never died, the front page of the Chronicle Datebook section allocates most of its space to a review of The Bridge. This documentary is real, not "faux," to use the word from the German Press Agency. For those of you unaware of this film, it is a documentary that shows (real) people taking a suicidal plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge and even interviews a survivor of one of these attempts. The Chronicle reviewer was full of praise for this one, but I am going to think a lot harder about whether I really want to see it than I shall over Death of a President. That kind of reality may just be too much with me.

October 26, 2006 (2): The Best Government Money can Buy?

2009-06-22T15:59:00.001-07:00

Reuters just announced that Mohammed (Mo) Ibrahim will use his self-made millions to back an annual $5 million prize to be awarded to former African leaders "who had demonstrated excellence in government." Given the problem that Ibrahim is trying to solve, he should definitely be lauded for coming up with a new strategy. However, it revives an old joke that was very popular when I was a kid: Do we have to pay governments to be good, or should governments be good for nothing?

October 26, 2006 (1): White Trash Comes to Europe

2009-06-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

SPIEGEL ONLINE is continuing to run English-language excerpts from Gabor Steingart's Weltkrieg um Wohlstand ("war for wealth") book. The title of today's essay is "White Trash, Fast Food: How Globalization Is Creating a New European Underclass." This is a must-read for all zealots who see globalization as the instrument of spreading the American value system around the world. If ever there were a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, this is it!

As others have pointed out, there is not questioning the ways in which things have gotten better. Where the questions arise concerns the consequences of those improvements and whether or not things are getting worse at the same time they are getting better (and we simply choose not to look in the places where they are getting worse). Here is an excerpt from the argument of this particular essay:

We know, for example, that today's proletariat is richer than the worker of generations past. Indeed, with a little skill, he can tap into the coffers of the state's social safety net, which provides him with access to an income comparable to those of police officers, warehouse workers and taxi drivers. Thus, it is not material poverty that separates him from others.

Rather, what stand out are the symptoms of intellectual neglect. The poor of today watch television for half the day. These days, television producers even refer to what they call "Underclass TV." The new proletariat eats a lot of fatty foods and he enjoys smoking and drinking -- a lot. About 8 percent of Germans consume 40 percent of all the alcohol sold in the country. While he may be a family man, his families are often broken. And on Election Day, he casts a protest vote for the extreme left or right wing party, sometimes switching quickly from one to the other.

But the main thing that sets the modern poor apart from the industrial age pauper is a sheer lack of interest in education. Today's proletariat has little education and no interest in obtaining more. Back in the early days of industrialization, the poor joined worker associations that often doubled as educational associations. The modern member of the underclass, by contrast, has completely shunned personal betterment.

He likewise makes little effort to open the door to the future for his own children. Their language skills are as bad as their ability to concentrate. The rising rate of illiteracy is matched by the shrinking opportunities to integrate the underclass. The Americans, not ones to mince words, call them "white trash."

So, once again, the story comes down to education, this time in the setting of that condition of anomie that so occupied Émile Durkheim. Now the debate has to move beyond the question of whether or not we are teaching things of lasting value. Now we have to address whether we are succeeding in teaching anything at all. Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair!

October 25, 2006: The Ultimate Fiction of Value

2009-06-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

One way to reflect on the implications of postmodernism and its foundations in fictions is to consider some of the articles Gabor Steingart has been writing for SPIEGEL ONLINE (available in English). The one with the greatest impact was filed today with the full title: "Playing With Fire: America and the Dollar Illusion." This is an excellent follow-up to yesterday's article, "A Superpower in Decline: America's Middle Class Has Become Globalization's Loser." Given how hard it is to count on any American news source these days (even the so-called "public" sources) and the accusations of bias now being levelled at the BBC, it is probably quite valuable that Der Spiegel has chosen to support an English-language on-line edition. Even more important is that both these articles are excerpted from a book: Weltkrieg um Wohlstand: Wie Macht un Reichtum neu verteilt werden (which translates as "War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity"). It is rare enough to find excerpts from a "serious" book in a magazine. In this case Der Spiegel has provided us with English-language content before any translated edition has been published. So, to get a feel for the economic implications of postmodern thinking, here are a few paragraphs from the "dollar illusion" article:

For capital market investors, reality isn't reality until the majority of investors are convinced it is reality and have begun reacting accordingly. Right now, everyone is watching everyone else closely. Everyone knows the dream of the stable economic superpower has ended, but everyone is keeping his eyes shut just a little longer.

Government bonds and shares don't have any objective value -- nothing you can see, weigh, taste or even eat. Their value is measured by investors' faith that the purchasing power of $1 million will still be $1 million 10 years from now, rather than having been reduced by half. This faith is measured on the markets almost every second -- and the measure used is nothing but the faith of other investors. As long as the faithful outnumber the skeptics, everything works out fine for the dollar (and the world economy). The trouble starts the day the scale begins to tip.

The process is complicated by the fact that investors aren't driven by blind faith alone. In part, it seems, hard facts also push them to extend their credit of trust a little longer. US economic growth -- an impressive figure on paper -- is an important benchmark. When it is high, investors feel reassured in their faith in the power of the US domestic economy to perform well. True, the trade balance deficit has skyrocketed since it first appeared in the mid-1970s. But the economy is growing steadily anyway, as the dreamers note with growing self-confidence. It may not be growing as rapidly as the Chinese economy, but it is growing twice as fast as the European economy.

And yet this benchmark is not as reliable as it seems. The faith investors have in the figure has actually helped create it. After all, the purchasing price of a government bond feeds almost directly into state consumption, just as the purchasing price of a share makes companies more inclined to consume. It also extends the credit basis of millions of private households -- which in turn boosts consumption. In this way, the expectations of investors -- including the expectation that the United States will continue to grow -- transform into certainties almost all by themselves.

In other words, the capital of trust creates the very growth rates it needs in order to justify itself. US economic growth, in fact, is fueled by ever-increasing consumer spending -- puzzling given that American wages are dropping as is industrial output. Still, everyone knows the answer to this riddle. The rise in consumption isn't based on an expansion of production, a rise in wages or even an increase in exports. To a large extent, it's based on the growing debt. But why do banks keep issuing credit? Because they accept the ever-increasing prices of stocks and real estate as a kind of collateral. A closed circuit of miraculous money minting has been created.

So, in the language of yesterday's post, are these fictions "intended to deceive?" I would answer in the affirmative. This system can only sustain itself if you have a critical mass of agents willing to believe in it, regardless of how sound that belief is. In the postmodern fashion of warping words, trust is being melded into faith until the two can no longer be distinguished. Thus, we are no longer dealing with the ways in which shareholders speculate over their investments; we are now in the domain of those individuals who, in one way or another, agree on questions concerned with the value of currency. Steingart has a useful characterization of those players:

Everyone knows how dangerous the game is, but continuing to play it strikes them as less dangerous than quitting.

Also, as was revealed in Lulu (play and opera), the best players are rarely seriously hurt by their decisions; the pain "trickles down" to those who lack the strength to endure such hits (without whom, however, markets would not be as strong as they are).

Meanwhile, lest we think that this game is only played with the relatively virtual concept of money, the online edition of the London Times ran a story today about the latest generation of "players" in the European Union "subsidy game." Olive oil producers in Spain, Greece, and Italy have been able to net €2 billion in subsidies based on inflated crop figures; and livestock farmers in Slovenia are now playing the same game with their cows, sheep, and goats! In other words the "concrete objects" that are out there in the fields are less important than the reports that are filed about those objects; and those reports have just as much fiction to them as the economic reports used to establish currency values.

Welcome to the postmodern world!

October 24, 2006: Another Take on Fiction

2009-06-22T15:48:00.000-07:00

My head is still reeling from reading the full transcript of the Israel Lobby "debate" posted by ScribeMedia. When so much effort is expended over "facts" with so little resolution, one begins to appreciate the "security" of fiction! Therefore, I shall retreat to an observation that Michael Wood recently made in his recent New York Review article about William Gass:

Fictions are not lies, or not necessarily lies, because they don't usually try to deceive. They arrange events and feelings, in the sense of a musical arrangement. They give experience an angle or a story. Sometimes we are not sure they are fictions—we just suspect them of some sort of stylization, catch in them what Brecht in another context calls "the scent of a mythology."

October 23, 2006: Population Politics

2009-06-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

According to today's Times Online site, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has instructed the population of Iran to produce more babies with the goal of doubling the country's population to ensure its "dominance." However "voices of reason" may react to this with alarm (and however justified the alarm), we probably should recognize that this is not a new strategy. When I was working in Israel (1971-1973), while this was never articulated as government policy, just about anyone I spoke to voiced this strategy as an important element of patriotism. Even in Singapore, which prided itself on the diversity of its population, I encountered tacit injunctions to the Chinese population to make sure that their numbers would not begin to lag in the demographic statistics. Given the resources crises we face, there is, as I suggested, plenty of cause for alarm; but we also need to recognize that this "political weapon" ball has been rolling for some time.

October 22, 2006: Ian Buruma on Reality and Fiction

2009-06-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

Continuing the theme of the necessity of fiction, I found the following paragraph in an article Ian Buruma wrote about the nature of the portraits being painted in Weimar Germany:

Civilized life cannot be sustained without hypocrisy. A certain moral code, a degree of courtesy and decorum, are necessary to keep out instincts under a modicum of control The unforgettable downfall of Professor Dr. Immanuel Rath, played by Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, is a warning of what happens when all social niceties are stripped away, when a man loses all self-respect. When men and women are reduced to nothing but their lowest appetites, we live in a state of barbarism. This is what Weimar period artists painted, for this, in their view, was what society had become. Their honesty would be costly to them. When the Nazis made barbarism official, these artists were among the first ones to go—into exile, concentration camps, of "inner emigration."

Having already suggested that barbarism may have been made official over a decade ago, this observation seems particularly appropriate.

October 18, 2006: Teachers and Students

2009-06-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, CNET News.com ran a story from Washington with the headline: "Google CEO: Techies must educate governments." So much for trying to address questions of reality and fiction! Admittedly, the report does not include any direct quote invoking this language. However, it is clear that Schmidt feels that our government needs such education ("The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff"); so it seems to follow that it is up to the techies to correct this deplorable state of affairs. This is all very well and good to say from the splendid isolation of the Googleplex or the podium; but it does not seem to have occurred to Schmidt that the best education is always a two-way street. Thus, it has probably not occurred to him that it is as important for "those in the know about technology" to become better educated about the nature and working of governments as it is to inform others about the Internet's role in society. Did it even occur to him that the best teachers are the best listeners, rather than the best performers in front of a mass audience? Socrates knew this sort of thing and was very good at it, but my recent experience has shown that techies do not have much time for Socrates. If Schmidt does not watch out, he will find that the adversarial relationship in which he is already engaged will only get more adversarial!

October 17, 2006: More on Reality and Fiction

2009-06-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is not just that reality is "too much with us." Perhaps the ultimate virtue of fiction is that, at its best, it tells us more about reality than "reality itself!" Consider today's report in Assimilated Press (which, for my money, has now displaced The Onion as the best source of satirical journalism). The headline reads "Kansas Farmer See Cheney's Face In Cowpie;" and the author picks up this theme and runs with it at a breakneck pace never encountered in Swift. Like the best of satire, this reflects a reality with far more accuracy than conventional prose could ever do.

Technology has changed our perspective of reality, probably not for the better. A friend of mine used to observe that hand-drawn images in biology texts that predated the camera were almost always superior to any subsequent photographs. In this case the reason was simple: The photograph showed too much. On the other hand the drawing showed just enough to make sure that the reader saw what the author wanted him (or her) to see. So it is that satire provides the author with a better command of the reader's attention than expository prose can. Is it any wonder, then, that Jon Stewart is now regarded as a more credible news reporter than the network anchors; and, perhaps because he is more up front about his point of view and the motives behind his texts, he really is more credible!

October 16, 2006 (2): Rhetoric Redux?

2009-06-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

I was delighted to see Dominic Sayers' encomium for Edward Tufte on Confused of Calcutta, so I would like to use that opportunity to take things to the next level. I would like to argue that Tufte’s impact goes far deeper than visual literacy. Using Newton Garver’s Preface to a collection of essays by Jacques Derrida as a point of departure, I would claim that Tufte is addressing an issue that goes all the way back to the scholastic trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Our modernist thinking has made great strides in our command of grammar and logic, but it seems to have done so at the expense of our appreciation for rhetoric. Tufte’s appreciation for rhetoric is particularly evident in an interview he gave to Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls in which he discussed his book Beautiful Evidence. Furthermore, when we consider the full title of Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, we see that Tufte has a keen intuition for the literary theory of text types. This has nothing to do with how fonts are designed and used. Rather, it is an effort to classify texts (in the most general sense of the term) into the categories of argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative. Tufte’s recent concern with evidence addresses how his concerns with design impact argumentation, while Envisioning Information makes solid contributions to both description and exposition. I believe that Visual Explanations was his first serious effort in the area of narrative, although he was already addressing narrative in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

The point I am trying to make from my own reading of Tufte is that it is not only visual literacy that is at stake. Rather, it is the full scope of literacy, where rhetoric is as important as grammar and logic and where that rhetoric is exhibited in the text types of argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative, whether the “texts” are traditional documents or PowerPoint presentations. As a matter of fact, rhetoric also comes into play in the conversations we hold; so I believe that we can invoke Tufte when we deal with questions of literacy of “real-time” texts.

October 16, 2006 (1): Postmodern News?

2009-06-22T15:29:00.000-07:00

Any doubts we may have about the postmodern condition being more than a passing fad will have to confront today's press release from Reuters. I am not sure when was the last time (if ever) that Reuters released as story about itself; but it did so today to announce the opening of its "virtual news bureau" in Second Life. What is particularly interesting about this effort is the extent to which it is a dual endeavor:

"In 'Second Life,' we're making Reuters part of a new generation," Reuters Chief Executive Tom Glocer said in a statement. "We're playing an active role in this community by bringing the outside world into 'Second Life' and vice versa."

"Second Life" citizens can stay tuned to the latest headlines by using a feature called the Reuters News Center, a mobile device that users can carry inside the virtual environment. Stories will focus on both the fast-growing economy and culture of "Second Life" and also include links to Reuters news feeds from the outside world, ranging from Baghdad to Wall Street.

One wonders to what extent the "vice versa" will continue in the form of "standard" Reuters releases starting to cover events with Second Life.

So what is happening here? Do we now have a population that is so inured to seeing the world through their computer screens that "reality is too much with them?" Sherry Turkle tried to argue otherwise when the BBC ran a story about Second Life, but she may be too deep in her Life on the Screen mentality to see this in a broader context. The postmodern condition that this represents may well be a retreat into a world of fictions by those who seek a world that offers a stronger sense of empowerment and control.

October 15, 2006: Generation M Goes to Work?

2009-06-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

It looks like it is time to revisit the subject of Generation M, this time in response to an observation by JP Rangaswami cited on Cook's Collaborative Edge:

When generation M goes to work, those people will have their pens and their computers and their phones and their cameras. Not company-issued ones. And we have a job to do to pave the way for them, which is where identity and authentication and permissioning and walled-garden arguments begin and end.

My immediate reaction to this text was that we need to be less concerned with the paraphernalia that Generation M will bring with them to work and more concerned with what they will be doing at work! I believe that this is one of the key issues that came out of the Time cover story about Generation M that I discussed on September 27. As a matter of fact, I am probably most concerned with what percentage of the Generation M population will actually go to work, whether by choice or because of the prevailing unemployment figures.

I am reminded that, in the summer of 1996, I had the good fortune to be involved in an experiment that John Seely Brown had proposed. His thesis was that, if we wanted to understand the “office of the future,” we should study the kids who would inhabit that office after they finished their education. This project was a joint effort of Xerox PARC and the relatively new Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory (FXPAL), where I worked and which was the host site for the experiment. We were still new enough to have a lot of free space, which we equipped with an abundance of Macintosh hardware running state-of-the-art “rich media” software, along with one “token” Windows PC. We also had miles of butcher paper lining the walls for note-taking during daily brainstorming sessions. I think JSB’s intention was to build the ideal sandbox and then see what games the inhabitants would play in it.

Since I was the FXPAL manager assigned to this joint effort, I had to worry about what the results were and how they would be reported; and I am sorry to say that there was not much to report. As a matter of fact, looking back ten years, there are only two things I remember. One is that the only female student very quickly declared her Mac to be a “personal space” by fitting it out her her collection on miniature stuffed animals. The other is that the Windows PC became very popular, because it was the only machine running Zork Nemesis. The seven students reacted to this “scarcity” by developing social protocols for playing the game communally; and, believe me, it was fascinating to see these seven kids huddled around a single screen (one at the keyboard) playing this game as a single “player!” This may be the closest I have ever come to seeing the “wisdom of a crowd” in positive action!

The point of this story is that we ended the experiment no better informed than we began it. Meanwhile, technology barged on ahead at its breakneck pace leaving us wondering if we even had a handle on the right questions to ask. (At least today I have a question that I feel is worth asking, which is whether or not today’s Generation M could engage in the same communal approach to working with a limited resource that our kids did.) I feel as if none of us running the experiment really knew what we were doing and that all we could do was wait to see if serendipity would contribute anything (and, in my case, it did).

I have a tendency to extol the virtue of singing the old songs. In this case I think the “song” we need to revisit is Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. More specifically, I think we need to review the first six pages of his Introduction, in which he tries to scope out the nature of social forecasting while distancing himself from what, in his time, was called “futurology.” The lesson to be learned is that we should not dwell on “When Generation M goes to work” but, instead, should address the question of how our generation can “touch” them in meaningful ways, building on a comment that John Dodds made in Confused of Calcutta. This is the only way we have “to pave the way for them;” and I wish there were better ways for us to do it, since our educational institutions seem to be doing such a poor job of it.

October 12, 2006: Citizen Page; Citizen Brin

2009-06-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

Charles Foster Kane's Declaration of Principles (from a 6/19/40 revision of the script)

"I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tall all the news honestly."
"People are going to know who's responsible."
"And they're going to get the news -- the true news -- quickly and simply and entertainingly."
"And no special interests will be allowed to interfere with the truth of that news."
"I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and human beings."

It seems as if every time I make another visit to the "Ten things Google has found to be true," I keep flashing back to the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane forges his declaration in front of Leland and Bernstein. Why do I keep visiting this site? I suppose the main reason is to remind myself how such "declarations of principles" can be corrupted, as much in word as in deed. Anyone who knows the "ten things" knows that "don't be evil" isn't there; what the "thing" actually says is, "You can make money without doing evil." I am too much of a literary analyst to view this as picking nits. As a point of grammar, an injunction is not a "thing found to be true;" but it is still nice to know that, at least as far as their philosophy is concerned, Google is not trafficking in injunctions.

Citizen Kane, of course, is a study in the corruption of principles. Leland keeps a copy. When he finally walks out on Kane, we learn that he made a check on his copy each time one was violated. Will this happen to the "ten things found to be true." At the very least, we might want to reclassify them as "ten things worthy of serious debate;" but I suspect that such an attitude would not resonate with the Google lifestyle. Still, someone ought to be reflecting on that list. Maybe that someone will also be the someone who eventually does unto Google what Google is trying to do unto Microsoft!

October 11, 2006: Without a Cluetrain

2009-06-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the greatest virtue of postmodernism is that it has taught us how to combat an overly-used slogan by inverting it. Consider the Cluetrain Manifesto. It is as easy to chant "markets are conversations" as it was for Orwell's sheep to chant, "Four legs good; two legs baaad!" This is not to devalue the insight beyond all recognition. As the Wikipedia entry points out, this really boils down to a healthy historical appreciation of the marketplace. Unfortunately, cheerleading based on slogans has little time for history; which is why the cheerleads occasionally need a healthy postmodern kick in the rear.

So, consider this, conversations are markets! The lesson of history is that conversation used to be an integral part of the delivery of goods and services. While it is all very well and good to talk about the power of the Internet to enable conversations, what has actually happened is that IT has disabled conversation from the domain of customer engagement, leaving nothing behind but the linguistic deception of "customer relationship management!" Now, in fairness to the Cluetrain founders, the verb form of "engagement" does rear its head in Thesis 45. This is an appropriate and powerful Thesis, even if many of us recognize it as an "insight into the obvious." Unfortunately, in the age of the short attention span, one can only wonder how many of the cheerleaders ever get as far as Thesis 45!

The real point however is that we have become so starved for conversation that we are willing to pay more for it. We still have old-fashioned instincts that prefer dealing with a salesperson who "knows the stuff;" and that knowledge emerges from our conversations. The same goes for dealing with a service representative who can do more than read from a script. In other words the power of the Internet to enable conversations really does not signify unless we can have the conversations we need when we need them, and there is no doubt that one can build a market around satisfying that need.

October 06, 2006: There's More to Opera than the Music!

2009-06-22T15:19:00.000-07:00

For the better part of this decade the San Francisco press seems to have enjoyed invoking the term "Eurotrash" when writing about productions at the San Francisco Opera. For the most part this seems to have indicated a reactionary trend based on the precept that the staging should not get in the way of the music, particularly the performances of the singers that the public has paid good money to hear. Now Philip Gossett has written a 675-page book (Divas and Scholars) about the practice of producing opera in the first half of the nineteenth century; and Charles Rosen has reviewed the book for The New York Review. Given his background (as both scholar and performer), one can understand Rosen's inclination to place music above all; but I came away from his review feeling he might be the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Gossett seems to have tried to capture what the work practices were in the period he studied; but, since he provided more than enough musical grist for Rosen's mill, Rosen could evade any of the issues Gossett raises about the actual people who composed (and designed) and performed (and directed).

All this relates to Eurotrash, because that word seems to have become the catch-all for describing controversial stagings of opera (probably even when the director is not European, as is the case with Peter Sellars). Gossett offers a sensible comment about how Verdi might have reacted to such practices:

Verdi's reaction to any such controversy would have been to look at the box-office receipts. We could do worse.

Indeed, but Rosen is not content to leave well enough alone:

I do not think that Verdi would have found good receipts sufficient compensation for the 2001 production of Un Ballo in Maschera in Barcelona that featured the conspirators sitting on toilets and the introduction of an irrelevant homosexual rape.

To address the second point first, if the rape victim was Oscar, then I would need to know more before making a judgment call on its relevance, since there seem to be many who adhere to the idea that Oscar was sort of a Ganymede to Gustav's Jupiter. So, if we really want to portray the conspirators as bad guys (rather than, say, political dissidents), then it makes sense to give them some nasty things to do. This takes us to the first point: If they are going to do nasty things, you may as well give them some nasty settings, such as toilets. In semiotic language what we are seeing are some staging decisions that are connotative, and Rosen's reaction seems to be that we opera lovers can live on denotation alone. My own feeling is that, if a stage director knows how to use connotation effectively, more power to him!

Rosen then decides to depart from the track of Gossett's book in order to riff on da capo arias in Handel, probably because there has been an abundance of imaginative and outrageous ways to stage an extended piece of music that may or may not distract from the technical virtuosity of the singer. Since nothing matters but the music to Rosen, he is indignant that

you cannot make a "da capo" aria tell a story. Because of its formal structure, you can only impose a story on it by actions or gestures which are completely extraneous to the music: the return of the A section can be more intense, but that is not a narrative device but an emotional and lyrical one, and it requires no action or gesture but only great singing.

Again, this misses the point, because Rosen wishes to examine the aria in isolation from its context. Once we take context into account, we recognize that the aria is embedded in a narrative structure. One might say that it's function is to reflect on "where things stand" in that structure (and the text being sung is usually pretty explicit about that). Repeating the A section returns the audience from the reflection to the narrative. I would have thought that Rosen knew enough narrative theory to see this point, but he seems to have been wearing his musical blinders when he wrote his review.

This takes us to my final example, equally narrow in its scope:

A staging should arise from the music.

If an aria is a reflection on "where things stand" at a particular moment in the progress of the narrative, then a good staging can reflect on the entire narrative. In so doing it can also provide the audience with a specific point of view. Consider the Ballo example: Are the conspirators malicious thugs; or are they "freedom fighters?" Remember, the assassination of Gustav was so controversial that the libretto had to be reworked to change the setting to Colonial Boston. As a result of that revision, the leading conspirators were renamed "Sam" and "Tom." When that version is done in the United States, we have a tendency to associate those names with Adams and Paine and may not be that grieved when the colonial governor (AKA Gustav III) is assassinated. None of this ever gets translated into musical terms; but, in spite of Rosen's puritan stance, any staging that did not take problems of point-of-view into account would be lacking (or at least reduced to a concert performance by the soloists with some superfluous activity).

October 04, 2006: The Dangerous Concept of "Pattern"

2009-06-22T14:15:00.000-07:00

It may be the many of the exaggerated claims recently being promoted, whether about digital libraries or sharing poetry, all fall back on the assumption that "pattern" is a mathematical concept that can be readily manipulated by powerful software. The fact is that this is a dangerous misconstrual of the concept of "pattern," which can only impede efforts to engage software to facilitate the management of documents, whether those documents are the contents of a digital library or someone's favorite collection of poems. When a word is capable of causing that much trouble, my general inclination to be rid of it, and that is what I propose to do.

Rather than simply expunge the use of the word "pattern" from our current discourse, I would like to modestly propose that we consider, as an alternative, Gerald Edelman's concept of "perceptual categorization." This concept was first discussed at length in Edelman's Neural Darwinism and progressed to the primary leitmoitv in his study of consciousness, The Remembered Present. While this may strike some as little more than a word-game move, I believe there are significant ways in which Edelman's model of how the brain forms perceptual categories constitutes a departure from mathematical models of patterns.

Most important is that, while there are a variety of objective criteria that can be used to identify and define patterns, perceptual categorization puts the human subject (the perceiver) squarely in the middle of the loop. If document management is ultimately about supporting sharing and if sharing is to be an intersubjective activity (and what else could it be in any practical setting?), then we cannot abstract the subject out of the picture (at least, with my own personal convictions, I cannot). If we further follow Edelman’s lead, we also encounter some interesting properties of perceptual categories and how “wet brains” deal with them.

First of all, perceptual categories are fluid. Edelman firmly rejects the idea that any part of the brain is implementing anything like a store-and-retrieve memory system. Rather, categorizing is something the brain is always doing (probably even when we are dreaming); and a lot of that categorizing is recategorizing.

Equally important is the brain evidence Edelman has mustered that demonstrates that different parts of the brain deal with categories in space and time, respectively. Most pattern theories tend to assume that patterns in time are the same as patterns in space, because you can just include a time dimension as one of your “spatial” axes. However, when you bring human subjects into the picture, time is not just “another dimension.” We have known this since Aristotle (read his separate treatises on physics and memory to give your own gray cells a real jolt); and we are just beginning to discover how this plays out in our brains.

This then takes me to my third point: As I previously asserted, the discursive dimension is a dimension of performance. Because it is a dimension of performance, it is a temporal dimension and therefore firmly requires temporal perceptual categorization. (At this point you need to shift from Aristotle on physics and memory over to his “Poetics!”)

September 29, 2006: Poetry Document Management?

2009-06-22T14:11:00.000-07:00

JP Rangaswami's latest venture into social software seems to involve his love of poetry. Here is how he puts it:

What matters is whether we can use the power of many and group selection and wisdom of crowds and collaborative filtering to come up with something like this. if you liked poems A and B then you are likely to like poem C.

My initial reaction was to approach the problem through social networking. I proposed that the path to recognizing both categories of and links between “creative artifacts” (such as poems) leads through an understanding of the social networks of the creative artists themselves. Randall Collins has already pursued this line of thought in the domain of philosophy in his wonderful book, The Sociology of Philosophies. I figured one could apply the same reasoning to poets.

Very few creative minds work in isolation. (Ezra Pound has a wonderful canto about what it was like living with Yeats when Yeats was composing a poem.) I know of only two “isolationist” examples, neither of whom is a poet: Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Faulkner. (Faulkner’s dismal stint within the Hollywood system only reinforced his need for such isolation.) My guess is that the social networks of poets are not that different from the social networks of philosophers that Collins analyzed, except, perhaps, that they may not be limited to a single domain, such as poetry. Consider, for example, the social network that formed around Serge Diaghilev at the beginning of the twentieth century, which included composers, painters, and poets, as well as the choreographers and dancers of the Ballets Russes.

Then I realized (with some help from Cornelius Puschmann) that I was falling into a trap. I was thinking about JP's problem as if it were a problem in document management; and, at the end of the day, poems are not documents! The essence of (almost?) every poem lies in performance; the text is little more than an attempt to represent that performance in a static form. (The same is true of music. The music is in the performance, not in the printed notation the performer may be using.) This premise makes JP’s problem even harder, if not impossible. Having worked as a performing arts critic, I have some vague intuitions about both categories of and links between performances; but, because performances are dynamic processes, I am not sure I can articulate those intuitions very well. Once again I have found myself confront the problem of the inadequacy of applying noun-based thinking to verb-based situations!

September 28, 2006: Where it all Began

2009-06-22T14:08:00.000-07:00

Enough of Generation M and the fictions we are making up to hide behind it! Let us try to remember, for better or worse, that there is a "world of work" out there. This makes it a good time to remember that the same essay that carries Marx' wonderful assessment of religion also signals his discovery of the proletariat. This forms the basis for today's commonplace book entry:

Where, then, the positive possibility of emancipation in Germany? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional title but only a human title, which is not partially opposed to the consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, and thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere, in short, which is the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.

This seems to be where it all began, and one can only wonder if Marx could imagine where it would lead!

September 27, 2006: Generation M in the World

2009-06-22T14:05:00.000-07:00

The discussion on libraries and search continues vigorously on Confused of Calcutta. JP Rangaswami continues to champion the "unvarnished selves" of Generation M and the wisdom of crowds of such minds. Fortunately, John Dodds was keen enough to recognize the difference between unvarnished and untouched (which I think was part of the story that the above issue of Time was trying to tell). JP's response was to invoke Clarence Fischer and Judy Breck, almost as if they were cultural icons. Since I have always tried to be an iconoclast, you can imagine how I react to cultural icons! However, the stuff that Clarence Fisher does come "from the trenches;" and, to invoke Dodds' terminology, if anyone knows how to “touch” Generation M, Fisher is a likely candidate and, if I am to believe what I have read about him, one who deserves all the awards and recognition he has received. Unfortunately, he is only one person; and that has two implications:

First, I suspect that his skill in “touching” is inversely proportional to the number of people he has to “touch;” and it remains to be seen how “reproducible” (to invoke Giddens' language) that skill is.
Secondly, as my father has always delighted in saying, “One is not a statistic!”

To develop that point, I really cannot figure out, for the life of me, just how good Judy Breck’s Golden Swamp is at “touching.” I do not need to be sold on how cool it is, but that may be the problem. To invoke another metaphor, my concern is that Golden Swamp may be one of the best circuses on the Web at a time when we have all those students (and probably plenty of teachers, too) hungry for bread. (All those jokes comparing the Bush Administration to the Roman Empire are finally beginning to register with me!)

Don’t get me wrong. It is not my intention to disparage cool. However, just as there has never been a Royal Road to Geometry, there will never be a “Superhighway to Being in the World.” I am not just concerned that Generation M may be untouched by teachers who can guide without disrupting those “unvarnished selves;” I am concerned that the extent to which they perceive the world through their media experience may be leaving them untouched by the world itself!

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones includes a story about the master teacher of Zen, Gasan (an unvarnished self if ever there was one). The story goes that he was visited by a university student who brought along a copy of the New Testament and read him passages from the Sermon on the Mount. After hearing the text, Gasan said, “Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.” If we cannot communicate with Generation M through today’s classrooms, can we at least figure out how to “touch” them as the student “touched” Gasan?

September 26, 2006: The Virtue of a Ball of Mud

2009-06-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have always had a bias for writing programs in an interpreted language. Back when I taught programming, there were only two such languages that could be taken seriously. APL was the acronym for A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, the title of a book by Kenneth Iverson. The book preceded any practical implementation of the language by several years, and I think Iverson was more interested in demonstrating that a programming language could be an elegant mathematical system than in actually using that language for practical purposes. Edsger Dijkstra would later compare people so obsessed with the perfection of the system to both Catholics and Communists (probably becuase he was so delighted to get both of those nouns in a single sentence)! However, once IBM developed an implementation of APL, it was pursued with the zealous sort of utopian ideology which could easily remind one of both Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Engels.

The alternative to APL was LISP. Once you got beyond the heavy use of parentheses to structure symbolic expressions, its simplicity was one of aesthetic perfection. It was also grounded in mathematics, but it was the minimalist mathematics of the necessary and sufficient conditions for representing an algorithm. It had only two data types: atoms and the symbolic expressions that combined the atoms. It had Turing universality, meaning that it could apply its own interpreter to symbolic expressions that represented programs. Thus, it was not only stunningly simple but also amazingly flexible.

Comparing APL and LISP was a great sport back in my teaching days. I always felt the best metaphor for APL was the diamond, the ideal of a perfectly assembled structure. The problem with a diamond, however, is that you cannot change it. As soon as you tamper with the structure, you lose the diamond. So the complementary metaphor for LISP was the ball of mud. LISP would let you modify it in all sorts of ways, but it was always LISP. No matter how you push and pull at a ball of mud, it remains a ball of mud.

The thing about diamonds, however, is that they seem to have acquired their value from certain arbitrary ideological standards; but ideologists never seem to bother with balls of mud. As a result we can go to war (or even enslave other civilizations) over diamonds; but we never seem to take such extreme measures over balls of mud. Perhaps we would be more successful in our conversations if we talked more about balls of mud and less about diamonds.

September 25, 2006 (2): Libraries without Librarians?

2009-06-22T14:01:00.000-07:00

One of the contributors to the latest discussion about search on Confused of Calcutta was astute enough to recognize the value of librarians. What made the contribution so valuable was the recognition that librarians are not “repositories of information” (at least not primarily). A librarian is primarily a “point of contact,” based on the premise that a visit to a library is a social engagement. Take away the social engagement and you take away any opportunity to get at the motives on which a search is founded. Take away an understanding of motive; and it no longer matters whether or not you get an answer to, “Did you find what you were looking for?” (which, of course, is seldom a yes/no answer). In other words any conversation about "customer satisfaction" can never be anything other than vacuous.

Now I still remember that librarians were almost entirely absent from the first digital libraries conference I attended over ten years ago. It became quickly apparent to the few brave enough to attend that the discourse of the conference was not going to address any of their concerns. I do not think things have improved very much (if at all). As far as I can tell, the compensation librarians receive for their efforts is on a decline (at least relative to the general economy); and the techno-centric ideal is still trying to purge them from “the loop.” In this setting it hardly makes sense to ask if our academies are doing a good job of educating the librarians of the future. To paraphrase the ultimate bad-taste commencement joke (delivered at Stanford about five years ago), the only question graduates of such a program will need to answer is, “Do you want fries with that?”

Perhaps one of the reasons I continue to be skeptical about social software is that it continues to push away critical issues of person-to-person engagement in favor of solving the “technical problem du jour.” At the end of the day, there is not that much difference between an effective person-to-person engagement with a librarian and one with a car dealer; and, in both cases, technology seems to be doing a great job of impeding how these people know how to get the job done. Today’s San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which included a sub-headline to the effect that “we may become pets of robots.” Well, if Web 2.0 creates a world in which we can no longer deal in effective person-to-person engagements, that may be all we shall be good for!

September 25, 2006 (1): Postmodernism is Still with Us

2009-06-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

In a contribution to Confused of Calcutta, Dominic Sayers delivered a sort of "obituary" for postmodernism. Much as I sympathize with his position and enjoy his way of framing it ("we have had our playtime and it’s time to put the functional elements to the best and simplest use we can"), I would say that any announcement of the death of postmodernism is premature. Sayers wrote, "It seems to me that today you can represent yourself with humility, sincerity and openness without suffering for it." These are the words of someone with little (if any) exposure to Fox News and Bill Clinton's recent attempt to retaliate against their version of journalism.

Personally, I find Fox News the latest phase in United States' history of sustaining itself on “fictions of convenience” that reaches back way before “postmodern” entered our vocabulary. I am not sure I can easily track down its origins; but the first example that had an impact on me was Malcolm Cowley’s description of the primary narrative of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! as “a long and violent story that he regards as the essence of the Deep South, which is not so much a mere region as it is … an incomplete and frustrated nation trying to relive its legendary past.” The operative word there is “legendary,” as in the most memorable line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (hardly a postmodern classic): “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” (J. Hillis Miller actually continued Cowley’s argument by demonstrating the key role of “fictions of convenience” in the secondary narrative of Absalom, Absalom!) So, while playtime may be over in Mr. Sayers' corner of the United Kingdom (which I would be the first to applaud), the games continue over here and the stakes keep getting higher, whether you are talking about policy-making in the public sector or the conduct of business in the private!

September 23, 2006: Postmodern Thought in the "Real World"

2009-06-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

This was an interesting week of confluences. On the one hand this was the week in which I finally decided to come up to speed on my understanding of postmodernist thinking. At the same time Confused of Calcutta decided to launch an interesting discussion on the future of markets and intellectual property rights. I decided that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to try to exercise what I had been learning about postmodernism, and I shall now try to distill what emerged and demonstrate that postmodern thinking may be as relevant to our understanding of markets and intellectual property as it has been to philosophy and literary theory.

My bottom line is that postmodernism has emerged as a result of a general need to cope with uncertainty. (Think about it: what better sources of uncertainty can we find in today's business world than marketing and intellectual property?). I would argue that we cannot talk about uncertainty without recognizing that there are actually two independent concepts, both of which are instances of uncertainty:

I like to characterize the first with my favorite Henry Miller quote: Uncertainty is the “order which is not understood.” We deal with it through what I would call provisional understanding. We do this by constructing models (usually probabilistic) based on empirical data (which, hopefully, we collect through sound and disciplined techniques).

The second concept, however, is the order that cannot be understood. The best example comes from Heisenberg’s Principle about the uncertainty of measurement. This has the status of a physical law. However, I would also argue that there are social laws about uncertainty that cannot be understood, my favorite example coming from Isaiah Berlin: conflicts of value are inevitable and irresolvable because they are part of “human nature.”

Now, when we are dealing with the first concept, we can strive to reduce uncertainty through formal techniques applied to building and refining models; and, when we do this, we live by putting the theories of modernism into practice.

When confronted with the second concept, we have no such luck; and postmodernism emerged as a school of thought to comfort us in our helplessness. It all goes back to Nietzsche’s commitment to “dissolving the presumption that there can be objective knowledge” (as Simon Blackburn put it in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Nietzsche then set the stage for Isaiah Berlin being able to argue that Enlightenment thinking was as much grounded in dogma as was Catholicism, and Enlightenment dogma committed us to the belief that every uncertainty was an instance of the first concept. Once Heisenberg blew that dogma out of the water, we had to develop strategies for living with the realty of the second concept; and this is the mission of postmodernism.

Whatever may have come from twentieth-century postmodernism, my personal feeling is that the best strategy can still be traced back to Nietzsche and his conviction that fictions are indispensable for life and the actions we take in the course of our lives. So, in his meticulous and rational analysis of markets, Peter Drucker could never explain why suppliers would hang their strategies on a fiction, no matter how good he was at expounding on fundamental hard-core facts of marketing. Sometimes logic just does not cut the mustard. Perhaps, at the end of the day, marketing is one of those uncertainties that really cannot be understood; and the strategies that so aggravated Drucker just emerged as a strategy for coping with such a “second-concept” uncertainty.

Similarly, the value of a patent may also be a “second-concept” uncertainty. Here, however, I would like to propose a postmodernist take on Wittgenstein’s language games. We are all familiar with playing games in which we “make moves” as a means of “buying information.” (I guess both poker and bridge are the classic examples.) I would argue that we can do the same thing with our language games; and, in some settings, that may be the only strategy we have for dealing with “second-concept” uncertainties like the value of a patent. That is why the typology of patents now includes language that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago: offensive patents, defensive patents, frivolous patents, spam patents, and shyster patents. These are nothing more than “language game moves” for dealing with “second-concept value uncertainty!”

This takes me to my favorite topic (not to mention my advocacy of blogging): the virtues of conversation. However, if conversations are to be effective, we have to confront a fundamental question: How do we ground the concepts behind the terminology that grounds our conversations? (Habermas never got beyond postulating that conversations must be grounded on a shared terminology, but I would argue that this is only half of the problem.) Confused of Calcutta, for example, likes to have conversations about concepts like “freedom,” “the market,” and “risk;” but the answer to the question should generalize to just about any other concept, be it “love,” “art,” “community,” or what have you.

I would argue that the postmodernist answer to this question involves a synthesis of the above contributions of Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. From Wittgenstein we get the thesis that, at the end of the day, concepts are never “grounded.” They assume their semantic interpretations on the basis of the moves we make in the language games of our conversations; and, as I tried to indicate with the example of intellectual property, we actually do a lot of things with those language games. As a matter of fact, to borrow a page from Anthony Giddens, I would say that we use those games (at least) to signify, to dominate, and to legitimate. This takes us over to the Nietzsche contribution to the formula, which involves the necessity for fiction. If our conversations are motivated by our observations and our experiences, they are not limited to rendering those observations and experiences through language; they also involve fabrications, because those are “language game moves,” too.

I suppose I first started going down this path when I first encountered John Kenneth Galbraith’s treatise on money (long before I ever encountered names like Derrida and Foucault). My take-away from that treatise was that money is what it is as a product of the conversations we have over it and the exchanges resulting from those conversations. (Galbraith did not put it that way, but I do not think I have violated the basic thrust of his reasoning. Instead, I have resorted to a fabrication of my own to illustrate how that reasoning relates to the points of the previous paragraph. See how the game works?) Of course what Galbraith said about money can also be said about the underlying concept of “value” (not to mention concepts of “market” and “risk”).

Given the current state of the world these days, I think it is particularly important to explore the concept of "freedom" though such a postmodern lens. In that respect let me be bold enough to posit that Rousseau was invoking fictions in his language games about freedom long before it made sense to have a conversation about “the postmodern condition!” Thus, it is not that “second-concept” uncertainties challenge the existence of freedom in our environment but that, within that environment, both our freedoms and our chains are emergent properties of the moves we make in our language games (as they have always been?). More importantly, those language games are the primary (only?) instrument we have that can check threats to rationality, such as groupthink (and its “cousins,” such as fundamentalism).

I used to work for a company that, for a while, had adopted the slogan: Keep the conversation going! I subsequently found this slogan (in the same wording) in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. For all the virtues of rationality, we have to face up to the ways in which postmodern thinking are now confronting us. Keeping the conversation going may be the only way in which we can rise to such confrontation.

September 21, 2006: Marx on Religion

2009-06-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

We all know that Marx invoked opium as a metaphor for religion, but how many readers know the context for this metaphor? I recently found it in a review ("critique") of Hegel's Philosophy of Right that Marx had written for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Since I still find the Philosophy of Right to be Hegel at his most impenetrable (which is saying something, given all the other Hegel texts out there), I have to confess that I took a great deal of pleasure in observing Marx have a go at the text with one of his most flamboyant rants. I would not say that religion was one of the major topics in Hegel's text; and, to be fair to Hegel, Marx does not seem to lay out what it is that Hegel says about religion that he opposes. The bottom line is that, Hegel or no Hegel, Marx uses this review as an opportunity to launch a rhetorical salvo at the concept of religion that goes way beyond the metaphor we know so well. Here is the heart of it:

The basis of irreligious criticism is: man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion, indeed, is the self-consciousness and the self-esteem of the man who has not yet found himself or who has already lost himself. But man is not an abstract being crouching outside the world. Man is man’s world, the state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because state and society are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world. It is the ghostly realization of the human essence, ghostly because the human essence possesses no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The overcoming of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand that they should abandon illusions about their conditions is the demand to give up conditions that require illusions.

September 20, 2006 (3): How I Read

2009-06-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

If I am to make an issue about method, perhaps this would be a good time for me to say something about my method of reading, which seems to be my own approach to a dialectical synthesis of the physical and digital worlds. I used to apply this method to reading I knew would be "difficult" (like the aforementioned Anthony Giddens); but these days I seem to apply it to everything, even (from time to time) fiction. It all goes back to my days of writing term papers in high school, when we were taught to take notes on 3x5 cards based on all the background material we would read. I suppose there are those who tried to do this with HyperCard, but I was not one of them. No, with all due respect to the "Evil Empire" of Microsoft, it took PowerPoint to give me the sort of 3x5-card++ that I wanted, supplemented with the ability to incorporate images, tables, and (back from HyperCard days) hyperlinks.

So when I read a book that I own, there are several ways I mark up the pages and I use two colors. I use black for points of agreement and attempts to carry an idea further than the author, and I use red for points of disagreement. I underline passages that I feel are worth remembering, usually at the sentence level. I add comments in the margin space to the extent that they fit. If they require more space, I type them into Word, assign a number, which I then write into the margin, print the comment on a separate sheet of paper, and tuck it into the book at the right place. When I finish a chapter (that is the usual granularity), I transcribe everything onto PowerPoint "slides." That means that I manually type out the passages I have underlined and transcribe the marginal notes. I try to collect these in useful groups, labeled by the slide Header.

Why? I have two major reasons:

I have now created an object that can be easily searched in the digital domain; and, because I record both quotations and my own notes, I have a certain amount of control over what that search is likely to find.
I find manually typing to be a valuable intellectual exercise (just as Stravinsky claimed that he would copy out all the instrumental parts of a new composition because that was when he really began to understood what he had composed). In other words any damn fool can put marks on the pages of a book, but those marks are not necessarily indications of analytic thinking. Writing (even copying), on the other hand, usually gets beyond the damn-fool attention span and requires a more serious commitment to understanding.

Does it work? Ever since I started this practice, I have come to use the Windows Search tool more and more heavily; and I am seldom disappointed. As far as the second reason is concerned, I am sometimes cross with myself for "taking too many notes;" but I still stick with the program. Although my evidence is purely anecdotal, I feel I retain a lot of more of what I read from doing this. In invoke a metaphor introduced by Mortimer Adler, I feel it is the closest I can come to having a conversation with the author, which is quite exciting when the author has been dead for a couple of hundred years!

September 20, 2006 (2): (Anti-?) Social Software

2009-06-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

It seems as if I always have the urge to respond to one of JP Rangaswami's optimistic items about social software in Confused Of Calcutta with my own measure of pessimism. This is not (just?) that I am naturally contentious so much as that, for better or worse, I still believe in the kind of synthesis that can arise from dialectical argumentation. However, if there is a "dark side" to social software, I would attribute it to the fact that most of the products I have seen that claim to be "social" may exhibit some very clever technology but do not necessarily exhibit much appreciation for why the product deserves to be called "social" in the first place.

I realized that this was the source of my skepticism this morning while reading Anthony Giddens' introduction to the essays he collected in Studies in Social and Political Theory. The subtitle of the introduction is "Some Issues in the Social Sciences Today;" and the fact that "today" happened to be in 1977 does not make this essay any the less relevant (which probably says something about our progress). The first issue he addresses is the one that his the social software nail squarely on the head: "Problems of method and epistemology." My argument is that any "social software" product that deserves to be called "social" needs to have firm foundations in both method and epistemology; and I am just not sure that this is a realistic requirement given our current understanding.

Now an optimist might react by saying that we should not worry if the foundations are weak. We can only learn about them through our attempts to build software products. While I am not against the scientific method, I am also haunted by some Randy Newman lyrics from my youth: "Let's drop the big one./See what happens." (I assume most readers know what Newman meant by "the big one!") Exploratory experimentation is all very well and good, as long as you remember the mantra that actions have consequences! Having said that, let me return to the theme of my argument.

The epistemological problem is one that I have been exploring for several years, most recently on this blog. To reiterate the key point, the epistemology of technology products is an epistemology of nouns (or, as software developers prefer to call them, "objects"). Whatever a piece of technology may do, it is not really covered by an epistemology of verbs. It is sufficient to deal with what the technology does in terms of transitions from one state to another. In other words there is always "before" and "after;" but there is never "doing." Much of my current interest in Kenneth Burke stems from his interest in the verb-based and the fact that he actually launched a "trial balloon" for a verb-based epistemology; but, as far as I can tell, Burke is pretty thoroughly terra incognita (if not "here be dragons") in the world of software development.

That brings us to the problem of method. One of the points that Giddens tries to make in his essay is that the social sciences may not be served by "scientific method;" and, since I have tried to make that point myself, I was glad to see it! In my own remarks I dared to suggest that we still do not have methods to evaluate social software and that we may not be able to do better than collect usage anecdotes. This is fine for a first step but only if we are not deluded into believing it is also the last one.

Am I taking the fun out of social software? I hope not. For better or worse I remember the "rape in cyberspace" case history in the LambaMOO user community; so I am naturally cautious about consequences greater than what we expect. Actually, I believe that social software may eventually be beneficial because it can be fun; but it will be fun the way swimming is fun. You have to go into the water with enough sensibility to avoid things like drowning and shark attacks!

September 20, 2006 (1): Ignoring History

2009-06-22T13:41:00.000-07:00

It is time to "read into the record" those sentences from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which always seem to be ignored in spite of their value:

Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Never mind that we have yet to track down the source of Hegel's observation. We can forgive Marx the rhetorical flourish in light of the subsequent insight!

I was reminded of this remark while reading Guenther Roth's (necessarily?) massive introduction to Economy and Society, the project to translate all of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft into English. One particular sentence leapt out at me this morning:

Weber looked more closely at the consequences of the seizure of power than did Marx in spite of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; he saw that revolutionary domination can survive only when an efficient administration suppresses the expropriated former holders of legitimate power.

Can we read this sentence without thinking about Iraq? Can we think about Iraq without thinking about Marx's two-fold analysis of history: the revolutionary overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy followed by the revolutionary overthrow of Ba'athist rule? There is no doubting the general consensus regarding the tragic nature of the first phase. We have only to read the news every day to complete Marx's couplet. I suppose there is little need to comment on how much thought was given to "efficient administration" before going in with the big guns!

September 19, 2006: Did Kleist Anticipate Sokol?

2009-06-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

To call Heinrich von Kleist a strange writer is to mince around with understatement. There are too many examples of his fiction and drama that leave you thinking, "I can't believe I'm reading/seeing this!" So one has to wonder whether or not one should react the same way to some of his essays. He could have perpetrated the sort of hoax that, in our time, Alan Sokal pulled off in publishing "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the journal Social Text. As we now know, Sokal tried to "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions" and succeeded. Two hundred years earlier, Kleist published some "learned essays" on topics sufficiently odd for his time to leave the reader wondering whether or not to take him seriously.

My favorite is "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking." The basic thesis is that the thoughts we have "in our head" are, for the most part, vague and ill-formed; and it is only when we try to express them in words that they become concrete enough to be called ideas. (At this point I should not that the fact that Kleist had a thesis at all makes him more credible than Sokal. The editors of Social Text apparently did not require him to have a thesis statement, so he did not provide them with one: He wrote no abstract and avoided anything that looked like a thesis sentence in both his opening and closing paragraphs. Kleist may have decided to explore a weird thesis, but at least he told you where he was going!) After stating this thesis, he backs it up with a series of examples and concludes by reaffirming that thesis. In that respect it is a model essay.

As a matter of fact, I think everyone should read it, not only because it is a model essay but also because I think his examples do support this thesis! Why not? In his "Theaetetus" Plato has Socrates lead Theaetetus to explore the definition of "knowledge." Theaetetus proposes four definitions, each of which is deftly refuted by Socrates, leaving us at the end of the dialog with no definition for knowledge! Perhaps we have such muddled ideas about "thoughts in the head" that Kleist may be right: Those thoughts really are not there and only take shape when we try to express them. In Kleist's own more poetic language, "it is not we who 'know'; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'"

So, the next time you encounter an article that does have an authentic thesis, rather than a mere concatenation of meaningless jargon, no matter how absurd it may seem, accord it the respect of a serious claim. Then see if the author can back up the claim with an argument, making sure that the argument is not pulling off any rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If you can drag the claim through that test and it emerges intact on the other side, it may be less absurd than you thought!

September 14, 2006: Bad Ideas about Ideas

2009-06-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

I keep returning to my copy of The Sociology of Philosophies, by Randall Collins. Sometimes I discover new things in it. Sometimes I am just reminded of why I read it in the first place.

Recently I have returned to the Introduction, which is basically concerned with tearing about some straw men--misconceptions that need to be put in their place before getting on to the heart of Collins' story. My favorite straw man is the first: Ideas Beget Ideas. Here is a quote from Collins that summarizes his attack:

Ideas are not think-like at all, except insofar as we represent them in symbols written on materials such as paper, but are first of all communication, which is to say interaction among bodily humans. To enter into the physical brain (or inside the computer) is precisely the wrong way to perceive ideas; for ideas are in the process of communication between one thinker and another, and we perceive the ideas of another brain only by having them communicated to us. It is the communicative mode. There is no thinking except as aftermath or preparation of communication. Thinkers do not antedate communication, and the communicative process creates the thinkers as nodes of the process.

September 13, 2006: One More Loss

2009-06-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have to confess that, since I received all of my "serious" education at MIT, I never learned anything about Max Weber before I received my Ph.D. As a matter of fact, I remained in a state of naive ignorance until, late in my life, I finally decided to tackle Jürgen Habermas' monumental Theory of Communicative Action. What seems to have influenced me the most was a section Habermas wrote on "Weber's Diagnosis of the Times." Here is how Habermas introduced the diagnosis:

In his diagnosis of the times Weber keeps closer than usual to the theoretical perspective in which modernization is represented as a continuation of the world-historical process of disenchantment. The differentiation of independent cultural value spheres that is important for the phase of capitalism's emergence, and the growing autonomy of subsystems of purposive-rational action that is characteristic of the development of capitalist society since the late eighteenth century, are the two trends that Weber combines into an existential-individualistic critique of the present age. The first component is represented in the thesis of a loss of meaning, the second in the thesis of a loss of freedom.

This is pretty heavy stuff, even heavier when you think about how things have changed since Weber developed those theses: Under the impact of new technologies, we can hardly say they have changed for the better.

As a matter of fact, having just read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the new recent 9/11 films, I would say that we can now add a third "thesis of loss" to the list: loss of reality. This cuts deeper than the assault on meaning brought about by the Enlightenment ideals of a world united around universal truth, ideal that Isaiah Berlin attacked so eloquently. Rather, it has to do with the extent to which media have now impacted what we want reality to be. Here are two paragraphs in which Mendelsohn takes on the United 93 film:

The problem with all this realness is that the film itself—like reality—has no structure and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning [reflecting, probably unintentionally, back on the Weber thesis]. When United 93 first came out, I was struck by one enthusiastic critic's glowing comment, in a review entitled "Brilliant, Brutal and Utterly Real," that Greengrass's movie was "gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading …." But what makes Greek tragedy significant as art is precisely the way in which the foreordained trajectory of the events that take place on stage is made to seem part of a larger moral scheme; when (for instance) we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled kind at the end of Persians, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos).

All that United 93 can tell us, by contrast, is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. (Well, many American people are brave: we're treated to a scene in which one of the passengers, who has a Central European accent of some kind, urges the others to cooperate with the hijackers.) If United 93 brings to mind any genre, it's not Greek tragedy, with its artfully wrought moral conundrums, but something much tinier: the innumerable made-for-television programs available on cable TV that are dedicated to reenactments of real-life crimes, complete with phony "realism." The stylistic hallmark of these shows is the same jittery hand-held camerawork that Greengrass uses to represent the violence in the cabin of Flight 93.

Unfortunately, phony realism sells soap (and cars and cereal and drugs for everything from allergies to sexual enhancement, not to mention political candidates); so reality has now been consigned to the same ash-heap as freedom and meaning (which, without reality, is even more lost than in Weber's time). So Isaiah Berlin, towards the end of his life, declared the twentieth century to be "the most terrible century in Western history." Perhaps it is just as well that he never had the opportunity to observe its successor.

September 11, 2006: Institutionalized Mourning

2009-06-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

I am reminded that in Sartre's play Les Mouches (The Flies), it is Egisthe who declares the "National Day of Mourning" to honor Agamemnon (whose murder he perpetrated). Later, it is Jupiter who declares to Egisthe that "gods need men to believe in them." This should be a day on which we, once again, take charge of our own beliefs!

September 09, 2006: The Emotional Cost of a Town Meeting

2009-06-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

In her paper about "The Collectivist Organization" (American Sociological Review, Volume 44, August, 1979), Joyce Rothschild-Whitt cited the following study of town meetings:

A study of the New England town meeting found citizens reporting headaches, trembling, and even fear for one's heart as a result of the meetings. Altogether, a quarter of the people in a random sample of the two spontaneously suggested that the conflictual character of the meetings disturbed them (Mansbridge, 1979; 1973).

September 07, 2006 (2): It's Not What you Read but How you Read It!

2009-06-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

Harlan Ellison used to go off on these great rants about how important it is that everyone read. He would stress that what you read was less important than the fact that you were reading. (He would say things like, "You can read comic books for all I care!") This made for wonderful rhetoric; but, like all rhetoric, it needs to be put in perspective. The recognition of the need to read with perspective is what stimulated me to begin my day with that quote from Joe Conason.

The fact is that reading, itself, is only a part of the story. Reading is only important to the extent that it cultivates our ability to read critically. So, while I am firmly opposed to censorship, I still recognize that there is a lot of reading matter out there that has been either maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion or assumes a position of authority that is actually grounded in ignorance. If we lack the ability to read critically, we can be victimized by both classes of text.

I suppose the best example of the former category is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Again, going beyond all the rhetoric that has been spilled over this book, we may never know how many Jews died as a result of its publication and distribution; but, if ever there were a book "maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion," it was this one! In this respect the Internet has probably served us very well by providing resources that expose this malice for what it is. Those resources include books, the cover of one being the lead illustration for this entry.

The thing about this first category, however, is how blatant is usually is. The second category tends to be more subtle and sometimes more insidious. Let me offer up a few examples:

In 1959 Oxford University Press published a book by Deryck Cooke entitled The Language of Music. Cooke was a reputable musicologist, if not a heavy hitter in the academic league. He is probably best known today for coming out with the first performing edition of all five movements of Mahler's tenth symphony (which, if nothing else, inspired others to take on this extremely challenging task). His public reputation, however, was primarily as a broadcaster and music critic; so there was no questioning his credentials for writing about music. Unfortunately, his credentials for writing about language, not to mention the more general nature of communication, were not as impressive, if they existed at all! As a result, the book came out with some really astonishing bloopers about language and communication. Now, in fairness to Cooke, linguistics, as we know it today, was somewhere between infancy and adolescence in 1959; but, in spite of the many reprintings of this book, Cooke never seemed to want to go to the trouble of reviewing his initial Preface and bringing into a more contemporary perspective (or, for that matter, explaining why he would not try to realign his position). So the book is still available in its initial form, and Oxford now touts it as "a modern classic!"
Now, to be fair to Cooke, I do not think that there was any "hidden agenda" behind his book. He wrote about things he knew and extrapolated speculatively from there. We may not even accuse him of being too lazy to subject his speculations to critical review. The very thought of such a review may never have occurred to him. On the other hand I do not feel I can be as generous when I examine Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. Weizenbaum will probably be best known as the author of Eliza, an astonishingly simple piece of software that could carry on a conversation with a human user, pretending to be a Rogerian therapist. (Rogers' approach to psychotherapy was that the therapist should allow the patient to keep talking, contributing as little as possible to the content but just encouraging the patient to say more.) Weizenbaum's reaction to Eliza's success was a horror equal to that of Victor Frankenstein's; and he went on an ethical crusade against writing software that might be dangerously "deceptive." One can even discern in the subtext the implication that some people were too irresponsible to be allowed to write software. Now, in light of some of the software that is out there today, such as viruses, Weizenbaum could have initiated an important conversation; but he was so blinded by what he felt was an affront to his personal ethics that the soundness of his arguments was compromised.
Roger Penrose, on the other hand, seems to have had a deep appreciation for sound argument, which may be one reason why he was awarded a Wolf Prize in 1988 (which he shared with Stephen Hawking). Unfortunately, Penrose then decided to shift his attention from mathematics to consciousness; and the result, which appeared in 1989, was The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. There was no doubting Penrose's understanding of the laws of physics or the mathematical theory behind the software that computers run. It was "the middle of the sandwich" that posed the problem. Indeed, Penrose's model of consciousness was so well crafted that it took one of the most reputable cognitive scientists (Aaron Sloman) a major exertion of effort to tease out the faulty reasoning in the book. Penrose's response was to write another book (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness), which acknowledged that the logic of his first book had been challenged but never addressed the challenges!
This now brings us to the object of one of my own campaigns for critical reading: On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. This is the first time I decided to compose my text as I read the book, but it was still easy to home in the the heart of the weakness of this book. Since Hawkins tended to substitute anecdote for the logic of argumentation, my task was far easier than Sloman's.
Now I find myself confronted with Ray Kurzweil and his book The Singularity is Near. In this case I have chosen to focus my critical thinking on the ways in which Kurzweil has chosen to apply his arguments to the nature of education. Nevertheless, this book emphasizes that the need to read critically is as important today as it was in 1959!

Needless to say, this was an "autobiographical" list. For better or worse, age allows you to look back on what you have read and recognize the claptrap in some (much?, most?) of it! Unlike Satie, however, I do not feel I can look back and say that I have seen nothing. Perhaps the problem is that I have seen too much: I may never be able to sort it all out, but I sure hope that I never lose the energy or the will to keep trying!

September 07, 2006 (1): A Quote for Today

2009-06-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I created a "commonplace book" entry; but I could not pass up the opening sentence from a report by Joe Conason that I saw this morning on Truthdig:

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happened yesterday and can’t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy.

September 06, 2006: Education at the "Singularity Point"

2009-06-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

There has been a great discussion about education reform at Truthdig; but, unfortunately, there has been an attempt to hijack it by a techno-centrist with a passion for Ray Kurzweil. Those unfamiliar with Kurzweil's most recent work can start with the logarithmic plot at the head of this item. His basic thesis is that change accelerates and that, if plotted on a logarithmic scale, that acceleration is linear. In other words thing keep changing at a more and more rapid pace and it will not be long before we hit a "singularity point" at which that rate is infinitely fast. If this were just the latest bit of off-the-wall thinking from one of the more impressive inventors of our time, one could probably leave it in peace. However, like other such inventors, Kurzweil has used this as an excuse to write a book and then fill the book with implications in a variety of directions, one of which happens to be education reform.

Fortunately, Kurzweil has laid is thoughts about education on the table in an interview he gave to the ACM magazine Ubiquity:

Well, I do think that for kids (or really for people at any age) the best way to learn something is to try to solve real problems that are meaningful to them. If, for example, you're trying to create a reading machine, then you learn about optics. And you learn about signal processing, and image enhancement techniques and all of these different things that you need to know in order to solve the problem. If you really have a compelling need to solve these problems, you will learn about them. If you're trying to create, let's say, a hip hop song, well you learn about the history of hip hop, and how it emerged from other forms of music. And you learn something about urban culture. So learning things in context, where you're actually trying to make a contribution yourself, is a very motivating way to learn -- as opposed to just trying to dryly learn facts out of context and without a purpose for learning them.

There are all sorts of aggravations in this analysis; but, at the end of the day, the most important is the assumption that education is fundamentally a solitary, rather than social, pursuit. Thus, when he talks about creating hip hop, in never seems to occur to him that it might be a good idea to hang out with other people trying to create hip hop! Similarly, creating a reading machine is presented as what is sometimes called "backward-chaining goal satisfaction." (If you want to do A, first you recognize that this requires doing B and C; so you commit to doing B. Rinse and repeat.) This may be the sort of thing that a brain in a bell jar (or a computer) might do, but it overlooks the fact what lots of different kinds of reading have to take place. For example, learning about optics involves engaging with an expository text, while image enhancement techniques are involved with a more prescriptive text. Furthermore, while you might be able to do this all on your own, doing it within a classroom experience is likely to be more enriching for your command of both the theory and the practice.

So, once again, we are confronted with the hazards of techno-centrism in a setting where promotion seems to trump justification. The author of the Truthdig article bemoans "that a generation of dumbed-down products of this current system is out on the streets and doesn’t even recognize the importance of the issues I am raising." They also apparently cannot recognize when a brilliant inventor like Kurzweil is pulling a fast one on them!

September 05, 2006 (2): My Life and Hard Times in Requirements Analysis

2009-06-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

From 1978 to 1981 I worked at General Research Corporation on problems of requirements analysis for the Army. I had taught programming methodology at the University of Pennsylvania at a time when people were beginning to use the term “software engineering” instead of “programming.” The focus on methodology grew out of the recognition that the design and construction of computer programs should be as much an engineering discipline as the design and construction of bridges or electronic devices. Engineering was about building something for someone else’s benefit; and that third party needed some confidence that the resulting artifact would do what it was supposed to do, reliably and safely. How would a software engineer determine what that artifact was supposed to do? It was assumed that the party for whom the program was being written would initiate the engineering process with some set of requirements, and software engineering methodologies were concerned with how one could effectively and productively proceed from those requirements to a reliable program that would satisfy the beneficiary.

Unfortunately, the real world has never been particularly sympathetic to abstract engineering methodologies; and, where software is concerned, the problem tends to start right with that beneficiary. How does anyone, the beneficiary or any programmer, know whether or not the requirements provided by the beneficiary are an accurate representation of what that beneficiary really wants? The history of software engineering has been plagued with case studies that begin with the sad truth that requirements are actually a very poor representation, particularly if the beneficiary does not have a clear idea of what the program is supposed to do; and the lack of a clear idea is often a product of the unholy alliance of a beneficiary who does not appreciate what it is reasonable to expect and a software engineer eager to promise the world.

Thus, it is not enough for the Department of Defense to want to protect the United States from missiles with nuclear weapons on their warheads. While that is an understandable request, it is not a requirement that can be translated into the design of a computer program. Knowledge engineering operated under a similar illusion: One cannot simply identify an expert, say in the area of medical diagnosis, and “engineer” a “representation” of the “knowledge” behind that expertise. When I worked at Schlumberger, I had the good fortune to work alongside some of the best minds who knew how to interpret the complex and obscure measurements taken in the boreholes of potential oil wells; but I quickly learned that they did not live in a world of requirements and specifications, which could then be converted into computer software.

Fortunately, I discovered, essentially by accident, an alternative approach. Rather than working among my colleagues in the software systems group, I asked to have an office in the wing in which all these experts worked. Using a Xerox Lisp Machine, I would prototype programs to interpret test cases of these measurements, yielding displays of both the measurements and the interpretations. This became an excellent conversation-starter. An expert would wander past my office, see the display and come in for a closer look. Examining both the data and the results, the reaction would almost always be the same: “Why did your computer do a damn fool thing like that?” My reply was also almost always the same: “Why is that a damn fool thing? I just did what the training manuals said!” This would start an extended lecture on why what you did in the real world had nothing to do with what the training manuals taught you; and, enlightened by that lecture, I could go back to work on the program. Essentially, I had discovered a user-centered, evolutionary approach to identifying and satisfying requirements that reflected what the beneficiary really wanted. Since those days I have discovered that I am far from alone in appreciating this methodology, but my opinions are still very much in the minority.

In retrospect, however, I can appreciate why this methodology has not caught on in the software engineering community; and the reason can be traced back to that distinction, first raised in Plato’s “Republic,” between lexis (word) and praxis (act), which has become one of my favorite topics. The idea that requirements can be “represented” at all presumes the construction of an artifact that is basically a lexis structure, even if the “words” are elements of a formal language, rather than a natural one. At Schlumberger, however, I came to understand the nature of requirements by becoming familiar with the praxis of the experts who could come into my office and make fun of what my prototype programs were doing. Unfortunately, documentation is the bread and butter of engineering methods, whether they are based on natural language or some combination of formal representational systems (blueprints, flow charts, algebraic specifications, etc.). There is no place for praxis in such documentation. Indeed, as I have already observed, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have gone so far as to call those documents “Abstractions detached from practice [that] distort or obscure intricacies of that practice.”

The problem, which has been a recurring theme in this blog, is that lexis structures are static, which makes them conducive to representations, which, in turn, are conducive to analysis. Praxis, on the other hand, is, by its very nature, dynamic, making it particularly elusive to most methods of analysis. However, rather than ignoring praxis because it eludes our methods, we should be seeking out alternative methods that, to invoke the language of Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, facilitate our ability to “think in time.” This is a lesson that still continue to grow on me.

September 05, 2006 (1): The Boyg

2009-06-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

A variety of different paths have been leading me to think about the Boyg. This is an episode of a fight in the Seventh Scene of the Second Act of Ibsen's Peer Gynt play (which does not seem to get performed very much, probably become of the overwhelming demands it makes for production). (Grieg wrote music for the Boyg scene, but it was not included in either of the suites he later compiled.) According to the script, the Boyg should be realized as a disembodied voice. In my translation, Peer describes it as follows:

Not dead, not living; all slimy, misty. Not so much as a shape! It's as bad as to battle in a cluster of snarling, half-awakened bears!

As a matter of fact, when Peer tries to lunge at the Boyg, he succeeds only in cutting himself.

One of the paths that led me to the Boyg is the current Confused of Calcutta discussion about Wikipedia and "Brickipedia" (i.e. the traditional multivolume print-version of an encyclopedia). I did a free association of Wikipedia with the shapelessness of the Boyg. (By the way, Wikipedia does not currently have a "Boyg" entry!) I realize that some may argue with Peer's description, at least to the extent that Wikipedia is living, in contrast to any "dead" printed artifact; but, to my own critical eye, Wikipedia seems to have certain zombie-like qualities (although I would not accuse it of being slimy)!

The important lesson from this scene, though, is the Boyg's advice to Peer: "Go roundabout!" Peer wounds himself when he tries to confront the Boyg head-on, ignoring this advice. After that, he is more inclined to listen; and this advice turns out to impact how the rest of the story evolves. My point here is that, where information is concerned, this can also be an important piece of advice. A direct path taken through Wikipedia or Google may take us quickly to the answer to a question; but the context-free nature of that answer may end up cutting us (a bit like the joke about the Swiss Army Knife that has a tool for anything you want to do: the problem is that, when you try to get the tool, you cut yourself on one of the blades)! If there are still people out there trying to distinguish the difference between "information" and "knowledge," I would offer up the claim that, because knowledge is always intimately tied to context, we can only arrive at it by going "roundabout!"

September 03, 2006: The Other Side of Another Coin

2009-06-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

This morning I realized that yesterday's "CRM Society" article was unbalanced in (at least) one significant way: While I concentrated on the ways in which CRM technology was contributing to the objectification of customers, I neglected to give "equal time" to the fact that the technology also objectifies the vendor's work force, particularly those workers using the technology. Service is probably the best case in point. A call center operator who may sincerely want to engage with a customer is so constrained by a script that has to be used that psychological well-being all but demands blocking out event the slightest thought of a personalized interaction. Thus, a customer who is reduced to a feeling of mindless insignificance through an inadequate piece of technology arrives at that frame of mind through the activities of a worker who is also being reduced to a feeling of mindless insignificance through the obligation to use a tool whose inadequacies are blatantly obvious. Needless to say, users of other components of a CRM suite fare no better, nor do their customers much (most?) of the time.

Barbara Garson saw all of this coming almost twenty years ago. The subtitle of her book said it all: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past. The factory of the past was operated according to Frederick Taylor's principles of "scientific management." Taylor was definitely not the first to treat workers as objects (as yesterday's reference to the slave trade makes clear); but he was the pioneer of turning that world-view into an approach to management that was as dehumanizing as slavery and then having the outlandish gall to label that approach "scientific!" Garson's thesis is that information technology had become the most powerful enabling instrument for Taylor's approach, and the technology was barely out of its infancy when she wrote her book! One can only wonder what she things about current conditions, particularly where CRM is involved. (For that matter I have to wonder how it is that Wikipedia has decided that she is best known for her scathing political satire, MACBIRD, mentioning her four books about the nature of work almost as an afterthought!)

September 02, 2006: Thinking about Subject and Objects in a CRM Society

2009-06-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

Two themes seem to be merging together into a common perspective. The more vivid is the impact that When the Levees Broke is having, the more I watch of it. The other is the impact that CRM technology seems to be having on our view of the world, which, in the past, I have considered primarily from the point of view of service. However, what I now have to say applies to all aspects of "customer relationships" purported to be covered by CRM technology. More recently I have also been exploring this theme in my comments on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

Let us begin with one fundamental premise: The name "Customer Relationship Management" is nothing more than (to try to use polite language) a linguistic deception. Anyone who thinks that this technology "manages customer relationships" probably has a thoroughly impoverished view of management, an absolutely distorted conception of the nature of relationships, and nothing less that total ignorance of who the customers are. It is that last point that inspired the title of this entry, because, at the end of the day, all CRM technology is based on the assumption that customers are viewed as objects, rather than subjects who, for one reason or another, have been motivated to engage with the vendor.

Then, while watching When the Levees Broke, it hit me: This is an assumption that has extended beyond the scope of CRM! Listening to a victim's account of the evacuation of the Superdome, the description came to a head when she finally blurted out that the evacuees were being treated like slaves. (Spike Lee may be the only film-maker not afraid to take such racially charged material and put it on the screen rather than bury it in a wastebasket.) To defuse the racial connotations, what she was saying was that the evacuees were being treated as objects. This may have been a matter of expediency or efficiency, but the people managing the evacuation made a calculated decision to deny subjectivity to each evacuee. Where this women invoked the image of the old slave markets, my wife invoked the image of Auschwitz, the other classic example of "mangement by objectification."

Were the victims of Katrina being treated as objects by people hooked on CRM technology? Probably not, but those folks did have the same worldview one finds among CRM promoters and users. Will vendors ever get back to those "good old days" when customer engagement was important? I shall not venture a guess, but I will confess to a strong streak of pessimism!

September 01, 2006 (2): Hope Needs More than Help

2009-06-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

There was interesting discrepancy today between what one saw on BBC World Service Television News and what appeared on the BBC NEWS Web site. The headline on the Web site was "Donors pledge Palestinians $500m." On the television the story began with a clip of Jan Egeland addressing a gathering of donors in Stockholm, trying eloquently to get across the message that "the Palestinians need hope." The BBC announcer cut it at this point saying, "and they got help" following through with most of the Web site story on the impressive amount of money raised.

With my passion for analyzing text, I found this an interesting shift of priorities that seems to have gotten swept under the carpet. Neither A9 (Microsoft search) nor Google was any help in recovering Egeland's words. I really do not think I imagined them. Quite the contrary, my guess is that Egeland appropriated them from a speech given by the late King Hussein of Jordan in May of 1985:

The Lebanese tragedy has caused both Israelis and Palestinians to reassess the validity of their previous policies. Both are now considering, simultaneously, the need for a negotiated peace. Each is skeptical. The Palestinians need hope. The Israelis need trust. It is important for all of us to provide hope and trust they need. If we fail to do so, hope will surely turn to deeper despair and trust to invincible suspicion. The dangers for all of us, including them, will be much worse than before.

It is, to say the least, to see how little progress has been made in Lebanon since 1985; but it is equally depressing to think that, as far as the news media is concerned, the plight of the Palestinians will be solved by donors from around the world opening their checkbooks. This is not to say that the Palestinians do not need that $500 million (and we have to hope with all sincerity that every donor who made a pledge will make good on that pledge "with all deliberate speed"); but it is still important to recognize that, to paraphrase the Beatles, "money can't buy me hope." In this case the reconstruction of Gaza is ultimately only as good as the hope that it will not get blown up again (a very weak hope to anyone with a historical sense of what has happened in Lebanon).

So whence hope? By coincidence, this morning, while I was doing my weekly backup, I happened to be reading the original Foreign Affairs edition of the essay "Has Democracy a Future?," by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (This essay is now Chapter 6 of Schlesinger's book, War and the American Presidency. That is definitely the right place for it today. The original article was published in 1997, but Schlesinger predicted the unfolding of events in the first five years of the current decade with frightening accuracy.) Schlesinger is perhaps the perfect stick for bashing Thomas Friedman. He takes all of the exuberant cheerleading for globalization that has become Friedman's stock-in-trade and dismantles it down to the claptrap it really is, and does so with an eloquence that is probably far beyond Friedman's capacity to dream. However, the aggravation of global tensions by "unbridled capitalism" is only part of his story; the other key part is the problem of race relations that still lingers on American soil.

Tension will be mitigated even more by intermarriage. Sex—and love—between people of different creeds and colors can probably be counted on to arrest the disuniting of America.

This must have raised eyebrows when it first appears and probably continues to do so. However, Schlesinger may have been thinking about Romeo and Juliet, who united first in marriage and then in death and whose acts ultimately let to the reconciliation of the Montague and Capulet families. Is it such an absurd modest proposal to consider that intermarriage could address the respective needs of Palestinians for hope and Israelis for trust or the irreconcilable differences between Shiite and Sunni or [fill in your own favorite examples here]?

It may not be absurd, but it is pretty damned unlikely. Unfortunately, I would suggest that it is unlikely for a rather depressing reason. It has struck me that one thing that fundamentalists have in common, regardless of what they happen to view so "fundamentally," is a set of extremely strong (violent?) opinions about "correct sex." We see it in the United States, not only over issues such as same-sex marriage but even over contraception. Presumably Islamic fundamentalism is equally rigid over rules that amount to "keeping it in the clan." So, while Schlesinger may have hit on one way to get at hope in the Middle East that goes beyond financial aid, I doubt that he or anyone who sees the point he has been trying to make will get taken very seriously.

September 01, 2006 (1): Sometimes Deliberation Takes too Long

2009-06-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

Whatever I have been saying about deliberation, this morning brought a subtle reminder that sometimes swift action is more important (although, as I have previously observed, Isaiah Berlin has also made this point). The reminder came from the Vox channel on XM Satellite Radio, which happened to be airing Mahler's Knaben Wunderhorn songs the morning after I watched Act One of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. The song "Das irdische Leben" (The Earthly Life) seemed to be about the aftermath of Katrina, even though the text was far older. See if you get what I mean by reading an English translation of the text:

"Mother, oh mother, I'm hungry! give me some bread or I shall die!"
"Just wait! Just wait, my dear child! tomorrow we shall hurry to harvest!"

And the grain was harvested, the child still cried out:
"Mother, oh mother, I'm hungry! give me some bread or I shall die!"
"Just wait! Just wait, my dear child! tomorrow we shall hurry and go threshing!"

And when the grain was threshed, the child still cried out:
"Mother, oh mother, I'm hungry! give me some bread or I shall die!"
"Just wait! Just wait, my dear child! tomorrow we shall hurry and bake!"

And when the bread was baked, the child lay on the funeral bier!

August 29, 2006 (2): Back in the Box?

2009-06-14T10:01:00.000-07:00

Taking a whack at Web 2.0 has led me to wonder whether there is still any buzz over Web Services. When the book Out of the Box was published, I was working for a boss who wanted to see our laboratory go after the brass ring of Web Services in a big way; and I ended up being the annoying voice that kept saying, "Yes, but ... ." I just went to the Amazon site for this book and found that the last review was written in September of 2003. For me the operative sentence from that review was:

A highly readable work, just about the book's only weakness is that it is indeed based largely on conjecture, and the premise that today's web service protocols will form the foundation of long-term IT development.

I found myself thinking about this book last week when I was reading a 1983 paper from the American Sociological Review by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, entitled "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." What fascinated me about this paper is the argument it provided that, in any given field, such as health care, education, or even politics, the organizations that populate the field tends towards resembling each other rather than towards diversity. Thus, they manifest the phenomenon of the replication of social systems that lies at the heart of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory.

The more I read, the more I realized that, while Hagel had envisioned a world that could thrive on the diversity of software services that could be installed on the Web, the necessary infrastructure required just that kind of homogeneity that DiMaggio and Powell had studied. It is all very well and good to have representation for a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or a mechanism for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), but these representations can only link together different users of those users share some conventions on how those representations are structured. In other words the kinds of connection scenarios that Hagel presented can only work in a context of homogeneity among the beneficiaries in those scenarios. This then led me to ask whether or not, viewed as a population, Web sites are becoming more homogeneous or more diverse? I think we are still in a period of great diversity (which would not be good for Web Services); but it is not out of the question that the processes DiMaggio and Powell claim lead to homogenization, coercive, mimetic, and normative, will not eventually kick into action on the Web. Watch this space for further developments!

August 29, 2006 (1): The Next Economic Bubble?

2009-06-14T09:57:00.000-07:00

Rafe Needleman came up with a great title for his Web 2.0 blog yesterday: "Are there any Web 2.0 businesses in the real world?" After reading his argument, which involved a critical reading of the values of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I decided to follow up with my own TalkBack entry. I called it "Bubble 2.0," because I am always on the lookout for the inflation of the next economic bubble. As I put it, I wanted to argue that "the primary source of gas" for the current inflation is Web 2.0. Here is an edited version of my reasoning:

We should have learned from the last bubble that sobering concepts such as "the real world" just do not signify during bubble inflation, probably because the very act of inflation in grounded in an arrogant utopianism. ("Don't worry about the real world--or the 'old economy' or whatever--because after the changes you won't recognize it any more!") Consider Needleman's account of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its "shiny new values competing with reasonable but conservative older values:"

Simplicity over Completeness
Long tail over Mass Audience
Share over Protect
Advertise over Subscribe
Syndication over Stickiness
Early Availability over Correctness
Select by Crowd over Editor
Honest voice over Corporate Speak
Participation over Publishing
Community over Product

There is (at least) one entry missing from this list. It's absence discloses the dirty secret of the whole story. The entry I have in mind is:

Confidence over credibility

Bubbles are inflated by claims that, when viewed in retrospect have little, if any, credibility; but enthusiasm over the inflation dismisses any reasoned attempts to warrant those claims. Rather than reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, folks should be reading Mark Taylor's Confidence Games and its attempt to argue that our daily life, particularly as shaped by advanced technology, now plays out as one confidence game after another.

This not to say that we should hurl our wooden shoes into the works of the new engines of these confidence games. However, the Internet can help us to be more critical readers, rather than just more "clued-in" ones. If we read those ten enumerated value shifts more critically, we shall probably be less enthusiastic about embracing them. Some of us might even think our way through to dialectical syntheses that might play out in the real world!

August 26, 2006: Let Georg do it

2009-06-14T09:54:00.000-07:00

Notwithstanding Mitchell Kauffman's insistence (back in 2004) that John Culshaw's Tristan and Isolde project (Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic and Birgit Nilsson's Isolde (above), Fritz Uhl's Tristan, Regina Resnik's Brangane, and Tom Krause's Kurwenal) was a "match made in hell," I really enjoy the efforts that Culshaw and others made to document the recording experience, just as the recording experience of his Ring project was filmed in The Golden Ring. Now that it is more cost effective to bring video equipment to "live" performances of opera (usually to the detriment of the audience because of the lighting requirements), the craft of studio work, particularly where the massive resources of opera are involved, is like to be lost; so it is nice to have a couple of artifacts around that can remind us of some of the efforts that went into making this kind of magic. Where Kauffman hears Solti "slugging," I hear visceral; and getting that effect in the sterility of a recording studio with no audience other than the other performers and recording engineers is no mean feat. Solti left us a wonderful legacy of Wagner recordings, and I really value that a few bits of that legacy now have a "making of" back-story!

August 25, 2006: Another Lesson from Isaiah Berlin

2009-06-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

It looks like it is again necessary to revisit what Isaiah Berlin had tried to say in his study of the history of ideas. This time the occasion is a comment about the current situation in the Middle East that appeared on The Blotter, a Web site maintained by ABC News. The comment was posted by Adrian Reyes. Here are the first three sentences:

It's a good thing that Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have nothing to do with each other. Once again, terrorists are bad people. They can not be reasoned with and want nothing more than the destruction of Israel and the collapse of the West.

Now I have found the comments on this site to be a bit more reasoned than those I have encountered elsewhere (which may be either damning with faint praise or feinting with damned praise); but, given my interests in text analysis, I was fascinated with the way in which the third of these sentences appears to refute the first! Perhaps that is why so many (all?) attempts at discourse about the Middle East seem to come to an impasse. What Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have to do with each other is a shared animosity towards the state of Israel, which they perceive as a colonial imposition of Western values on Islamic cultures. If we do not recognize that this is, at the very least, a point of view that needs to be tested by validity claims (in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas' noble, if idealistic, attempts to characterize the processes by which differing parties can arrive at a mutual understanding), then the bloodshed will continue and, in the language of another comment on The Blotter, enough will never be enough! More than ever we need to honor the teachings of Isaiah Berlin, who passionately (if verbosely) argued that the "Western intellectual tradition" was not the only source of ideas or values. As John Gray put it in a recent review, "In opposition to this view Berlin maintained that conflicts of values are real and inescapable, with some of them having no satisfactory solution. He advanced this view not as a form of skepticism but as a universal truth: conflicts of value go with being human." If Berlin never prescribed how, as humans, we could live with these conflicts of value, then Habermas has tried to pick up that gauntlet; and we should all put our best efforts towards translating his idealistic theories into practices for a better world.

August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

2009-06-11T16:04:00.000-07:00

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!

August 17, 2006: What have you been Listening to, Karlheinz?

2009-06-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

I am not sure how I first became interested in Karlheinz Stockhausen's Licht project (outdoing Wagner with a cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week). I think it must have been some time around 1989 or 1990, definitely before I moved to Singapore. When I was a student, if one had any interest at all in avant-garde music, one could not ignore Stockhausen, although some of his oeuvre (not just the music but his comments on his own music) was so outrageous that he was sometimes perceived as his own parody (although Peter Ustinov used to be pretty good at imitating his texts). I think that, at the end of the day, his initial ambitions far exceeded what he could do with the instruments at his disposal, such as when he felt that all he needed to make electronic music was an enormous bank of sine-wave generators. (Didn't Fourier demonstrate that that was all you needed in theory?)

It seemed that, at some point, Stockhausen just succumbed to his frustrations and retreated from the world (apparently to an ancient German castle). He became very particular about who would perform his music under what circumstances, and created his own publication organization for his scores and recordings. It was through the Stockhausen Edition mailing list that I first heard about Licht, and I got curious.

I have not kept up with following the full cycle, but I now have Montag, Dienstag, Donnerstag, and Samstag. I have yet to see any of them performed. I certainly would like to see at least one of these operas, even if I have wondered whether the staging would come off as a remix of Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach. What has amused me more, however, is how I have come to listen to my recordings of the music.

Basically, there are three characters, each of whom has a particular instrument (rather than a Wagnerian Leitmotif). We start on Monday with Eva, whose instrument is the basset horn. Then on Tuesday we encounter the other two characters, the archangels Michael (trumpet) and Lucifer (trombone). For the most part none of these characters are represented by single instruments but by collections of them. (A few other characters appear to emerge, such as Kathinka, the Black Cat, whose instrument is the flute.)

What I began to feel as I listened more and more to my recordings was that the music was reflecting some rather interesting listing on Stockhausen's part. This listening had almost nothing to do with his avant-garde past as a composer; it seemed to be a reflection of the sort of jazz that was going on back in that day. The more I listened to Eva, the more I realized I was hearing Eric Dolphy (or, perhaps, I was hearing the way Stockhausen had been hearing Eric Dolphy). I am not sure whom I was hearing in Lucifer, but I would say that there are more than occasional flashes of Jimmy Knepper. Michael keeps reminding me of Freddie Hubbard. This one is particularly interesting because, when the trumpet is solo, it appears to be played by Markus Stockhausen (pictured above), who seems to be as involved in the performance of jazz as he is in performing for his father.

That's another thing: Stockhausen's scores have always been interesting objects in themselves. (I still have a closeout copy I got of his eleventh piano piece hanging on my wall, since I doubt that I shall ever be good enough to play it!) The reproductions of pages from Licht do not appear to be any exception to this rule. Nevertheless, when I read the descriptions and look at the photographs, I come away with the distinct impression that Licht is much more about the act of performance, than it is about the notes on the page. If this is so, then the entire project is much more in the spirit of jazz than it is of the experience of the opera house or concert hall. I would not be surprised if there is some closet in Karlheinz' castle that houses one incredible collection of jazz recordings and that, at the end of the day, the guy may have missed his real calling. After all, a single jazz performance that stretches out over seven days would be quite a feat, probably more so than a cycle of operas that takes twice as long as Wagner's!

August 16, 2006: The Virtue of Alchemy

2009-06-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

The following material comes from a recent exercise in autobiography that I have been performing, in which I have tried to demonstrate that what I have been doing might fairly (but not pejoratively) be called alchemy:

As a student, I was always drawn to impossible or unrealistic problems, seduced by visions of what life would be like if those problems could be solved. These visions were rarely good for my research methodologies, and they never failed to set me apart from my fellow students and later from my colleagues. My only source of encouragement and support was my doctoral thesis advisor, Marvin Minsky; but it was not until about fifteen years after I had completed my thesis that I appreciated his motives. The insight came when I heard him give a seminar at the University of California at San Diego. This was at a time when UCSD was a focal point of the connectionist approach to cognitive science, a position that Minsky opposed on the basis of arguments he had developed when I was still a graduate student. Therefore, it was inevitable that, during the Q&A, some local student would show off by asking him his current opinion of connectionism. I wish I had recorded his response verbatim, but it went something like this:

Well, there is certainly nothing wrong with attaching yourself to an advisor who will supervise your writing a connectionist thesis. You will have no trouble presenting your results at one or more conferences and will probably get a journal paper out of it. However, your achievement will be one of many similar results. You may even discover later that someone else arrived at the same results at about the same time and also published them. You will have your thesis, but you probably will not have advanced the state of the art of cognitive science.

On the other hand you could decide to investigate an area that few, if any, have decided to pursue. You will be driven by some grand problem, which you probably will not be able to solve; but, if you have the right advisor, you will be able to break off a viable piece of that problem and get enough results for a thesis. Those results may not attract very much attention, and you may even have trouble getting them published. However, you will at least have the satisfaction that those results were yours; and isn’t that why you went into doctoral research in the first place?

Minsky had basically summarized how he had treated me when I was his student, right down to the frustrations I encountered when trying to publish and continue my research once I had my degree.

This is the spirit of alchemy—trying to do things that are closer to fantasy than to the realistic practices of one’s times. The alchemist rarely fits it with those times. At best he is viewed as a harmless eccentric. At worst he is either exploited or persecuted (or both). Nevertheless, if he persists at his work, he arrives at results; and he at least has the satisfaction that those results are his.

Unfortunately, most of our institutions think little of that alchemical spirit. Whatever my fantasies may have been, I had to worry about getting a proper graduate education and then going out to earn a living. In my case this led to a highly nomadic lifestyle that concentrated on both coasts of the United States, as well as Haifa and Singapore. My nomadism also led to my failure to settle down into any single research area. Somewhat in the spirit of the Turner thesis, I preferred being out on my own in frontier territory. When the rest of the world began to take an interest in where I was, I knew it was time to pull up stakes and find another frontier. This book is a report from my most recent frontier. However, in order to set a context for how I chose to arrive at my results, I would like to offer a brief review of my earlier alchemical pursuits.

August 14, 2006: "Du Descriptif"

2009-06-11T14:17:00.000-07:00

I have chosen to appropriate today's title from Philippe Hamon's treatise on the text type of description. (To the best of my knowledge, this book has not been translated into English.) I see that the current Wikipedia entry for text types is still in stub form. Perhaps I shall do something about that, but not right now. What Wikipedia does say is that description is one of four text types, the other three being narrative, exposition, and argumentation. The path to my current concern with description is a bit circuitous, so bear with me.

Two of my recent entries (August 9 and August 11) were inspired by my reading the survey paper, "Emergence of Communication Networks," by Peter R. Monge and Noshir S. Contractor and written for the second edition of the Handbook of Organizational Communication. (Yes, I know I said this on August 11!) While it should be apparent that this paper triggered a variety of thoughts while I was reading it, I still have to confess that the act of reading, itself, was quite a slog, to say the least. By the time I reached the "Conclusions" section and was informed that "additional work is required to reduce or eliminate the extensive redundancy that exists among the different theoretical perspectives," I felt like screaming at the authors, "Isn't that what a survey paper is supposed to do?" In ignoring the very possibility of organizing their content to reduce, if not eliminate, all that redundancy in the existing literature, the author's reduced their paper to yet another instance of Winston Churchill's definition of the writing of history: "One damned thing after another."

This could be an excellent excuse for me to get back on my hobby-horse about the deleterious effects of excessive specialization in education, the corrupting force of techno-centrism on today's writing, or just a rant on why writing is more important to an academic career than whether or not what one writes ever gets read. Instead, however, I would prefer to address the question of why survey papers are such formidable intellectual challenges, so much so that it is rare that we run across a really good one. In a way the survey paper is the magnum opus of the descriptive text type, just as the novel is the magnum opus of the narrative text type, the topic-based essay is the magnum opus of the expository text type, and, I suppose, the hard-clad forensic text is the magnum opus of argumentation. The challenge is so great that it is a wonder that surveys get written at all, except that the demand for them has been so heavy in the past. The result is that almost none of them count for exemplars of good descriptive writing.

This is more than a little sad, particularly when we take into account to ancestry of the descriptive text. After all, if we want good examples, we can go as far back as the Homeric epics to find passages such as the description of the shield of Achilles; so we know that good descriptions have been around at least as long as good narratives. So is this just another case of our losing our touch as writers, of those authors who once knew better words now using only four-letter words? (Anything goes, indeed!)

I would argue that this problem is a bit more complicated; and now I have to take a jab a techno-centrism! See, in a world that is now driven by all the databases that store our "knowledge" (those are scare quotes, by the way), we tend to be deceived into flipping the coin around and thinking that knowledge is what we store in databases. So the object of descriptive writing is just that: an object. As database designers will tell you, an object is described in terms of its attributes and its relations to other objects. This is a nice, neat abstraction, so nice and neat that it often can be most conveniently illustrated by a directed graph; and, invoking language that Donald Knuth introduced into our vocabulary, one can then describe the object by traversing the graph that represents it. In other words, if you can represent your description in the abstract form of one of these directed graph, then you should be able to formulate a text description by stringing together smaller textual units for the nodes and edges of that graph. Of course when you do that you get exactly what aggravated Churchill: one damned thing after another. It usually does the reader a greater service to just illustrate the graph and keep the text to a bare minimum.

Needless to say, such a description is not a literary composition; but the prevailing counter-argument is that people who read survey papers are not reading them for their literary value. Granting that, we should still honor the fact that those people are still readers. Even if you are not expecting the quality of Lattimore's translation of the description of the shield of Achilles, shouldn't you expect to take some satisfaction in your act of reading? I suspect that the answer is, "Not any more;" and this, too, has a reason.

One way to view a survey paper is as a reference resource; and we no longer seem to expect literary quality when reading reference resources (even if this used to be a sign of the best of them). This gets me back to the problems I have with invoking the World Wide Web as the ultimate reference resource, be it for Wikipedia, Google, or even that wonderful composite, A9. The thing is that we do not really read these resources. We consult them, often in a highly fragmented manner. (How many times to you get your answer from Google in the excerpt from the hit, rather than actually linking to the hit itself?) We have come to believe that this is all we need; and, if a survey paper is a dry traversal of "one damned thing after another" that happens to be on-line, then Google will find the paper and then the find command will let us find the fragment of text we need. Why should the old-fashioned approach to reading be of any use any more?

One good reason is that the above scenario works best for experts. The people who still have a need for enough literary quality to make the act of reading worth while are the ones trying to come up to speed on a new topic. They often have a need for expository and descriptive texts that really are worth reading (and may be so through the skilled incorporation of argumentation and narrative). This is why "Dummies" guides are actually some of the best examples of writing currently on the market. The people who edit those series realize that their readers need to be provided with reading matter that is as good as the content being covered by the text. Nevertheless, I cannot help but fear that even these resources will eventually get sucked into (ensnared by?) the World Wide Web and lose that quality of writing style that made them so successful in their past. Then, unfortunately, we will have little more than Wikipedia and Google; and I cannot help but believe that our knowledge will suffer for it.

August 11, 2006: Normal (?) Science

2009-06-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting ideas to come out of the "knowledge movement" was the attempt to view an business organization as a "knowledge structure." One of the champions of this position was Bruce Kogut, who, together with his colleagues Shan and Walker, published a paper in 1993 with the intriguing title, "Knowledge in the network and the network as knowledge: Structuring of new industries." In a recent survey paper on communication networks, Peter Monge and Noshir Contractor summarized one of Kogut's key insights:

Once organizations choose partners, however, they tend to spend less time seeking other partners. As Kogut, Shan, and Walker (1993) say, "because information is determined by previous relations and in turn influences the subsequent propensity to do more relations, the structure of the network tends to replicate itself over time. The early history of cooperation tends to lock in subsequent cooperation" (p. 70). Further, they observe that "The replication of the network is a statement of the tendency of learning to decline with time. The structure of the network is a limiting constraint on how much new learning can be achieved. ...But when viewed from the perspective of the evolution of networks, there is a tendency for old lessons to be retaught" (p. 71).

This got me to thinking about the concept of "normal science" and the role it played in Thomas Kuhn's study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here is how Kuhn characterized the concept:

In this essay, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. Today such achievements are recounted, though seldom in their original form, by science textbooks, elementary and advanced. These textbooks expound the body of accepted theory, illustrate many or all of its successful applications, and compare these applications with exemplary observations and experiments. Before such books became popular early in the nineteenth century and until even more recently in the newly matured sciences, many of the famous classics of science, by such writers as Aristotle, Newton and Ben Franklin, served for a time to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.

It strikes me that Kogut's characterization of an organizational network as knowledge bears a strong family resemblance to Kuhn's characterization of normal science. The kind of knowledge that Kogut seems to have in mind is knowledge of "how things are supposed to be done" in an organization; and one strategy for maintaining that organization is to replicate that knowledge. In a similar way scientific communities may be viewed as organizations; and, to the extent that any community is based on the need to distinguish a collective "self" from an "other," normal science defines the community, not by its scientific results, but by the implicit knowledge of how things are supposed to be done. Straying from the path entails leaving (or being banished from) the community. Abandoning normative standards entails abandoning the recognition of one's activities as legitimate.

This returns us to the theme of order and chaos. Organizations, both industrial and scientific, depend heavily on a sense of identity in order to "get things done." However, we are now confronted with the question of how one establishes identity (which implies some sense of stability) in a context that is becoming increasingly chaotic. Normal science, in a sense, denies that there is chaos out there (or, to invoke Henry Miller's language, denies that there is no confusion that cannot ultimately be understood). Romanticism challenges this premise and, in so doing, challenges a normative approach to science (which is why Kuhn introduces the concept of scientific revolution in the first place) and may also challenge a normative approach to business organization.

Meeting that challenge may involve returning to the theme of the opposition of faith and interpretation. At the end of the day, the decision to accept that the conduct of science or business management rests on normative standards is an act of faith. One cannot invoke scientific method to justify the conduct of normal science. Indeed, much of the reaction against Kuhn had to do with the fact that the concept of a scientific revolution could be seen as a refutation of the validity of the normative conduct of normal science, thus challenging the prevailing faith of scientists at the time Kuhn's book appeared. Similarly, our commitment to normative standards of business management is also an act of faith; and all it takes are intimations of refutation to remind us how strong that faith is in the established community of managers.

In posing interpretation as an opposition to faith, I argue that anything we confront in the world always needs to be subject to interpretation; and, because the context is always changing, we cannot assume that any interpretation is stable or enduring. All we can do is hone our interpretive skills and continue to exercise them as a safeguard against atrophy. There is no guarantee that this will solve any major problems like unemployment or war, but it should at least keep us from sleepwalking through the world that others want to make for us!

August 09, 2006: The Sense of Identity on the Other Side of the Chaos Coin

2009-06-10T18:28:00.001-07:00

I prepared the above diagram after reading Plato's "Theaetetus." This dialogue is often invoked by the knowledge management crowd for its definition of knowledge as justified true belief. However, if you go to the source itself, you discover that, in the course of the dialogue, definitions of knowledge are considered (justified true belief being the last of these); and all of them are found wanting. The dialogue concludes by accepting (almost in the Kubler-Ross sense) the fact that Socrates and Theaetetus have failed in their attempt to define knowledge. What Socrates manages to demonstrate, though (although he never says this explicitly), is that the difficulty of defining knowledge may have to do with how tightly coupled it is to at least three other equally fundamental concepts: memory, being, and description (which may be a poor translation of the Greek λόγος).

I raise this summary because I think that the concept of being (along with the related concept of identity) must not be neglected in considering the strategy of embracing chaos that I discussed yesterday. This occurred to me while reading some of the business literature invoking terms such as "network organizations," "boundary-less organizations," and "virtual organizations." I realized that, from the point of view of actually getting the work done, this kind of language can raise some challenging questions of identity, for both individual workers and the "entities" (who knows what we want to call them any more) that, at least nominally, serve as their employers. As I suggested yesterday, this issue of identity is critical, because it is only through our sense of self that we can engage our own subjective skills of perceptual categorization, which are all we have in order to manage ourselves in that chaotic setting that we may be obliged to embrace. To some extent Social Psychology has recognized this with its sub-discipline of Identity Theory and the roots of that sub-discipline in George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism. In that respect it should be no surprise that Habermas' work on his theory of communicative action draws heavily on Mead's symbolic interactionism. However, what matters at the end of the day is how the issue of identity surfaces when each of us faces the prospect of going to work every day or confronts the fate of having lost one's job. Pop psychology has trivialize the phrase "identity crisis;" but it may be that one of the most critical consequences of the Internet has been the cultivation of an identity crisis of global proportions. As I have already suggested, these consequences have economic, social, and political implications, all of which have received little more that gratuitous lip service as a price for the worship of innovation. However, an emerging identity crisis may be an instance of what Malcolm X had called the chickens coming home to roost!

August 08, 2006: Embracing Chaos

2009-06-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

I would like to continue my reflections on Isaiah Berlin's Crooked Timber of Humanity, briefly alluded to yesterday. This time I would like to explore his idea that the conception of knowledge that came out of the Romantic Sturm und Drang movement in Germany is grounded in chaos, rather than order. Here is a relevant passage from Berlin (not as terse and therefore rather more typical than the one cited yesterday):

For Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for Wackenroder and Tieck and Chamisso, above all for E. T. A. Hoffmann, the tidy regularities of daily life are but a curtain to conceal the terrifying spectacle of true reality, which has no structure, but is a wild whirlpool, a perpetual tourbillon of the creative spirit which no system can capture: life and motion cannot be represented by immobile, lifeless concepts, nor the infinite and unbounded by the finite and the fixed. A finished work of art, a systematic treatise, are attempts to freeze the flowing stream of life; only fragments, intimations, broken glimpses can begin to convey the perpetual movement of reality. The prophet of Strum und Drang, Hamann, had said that the practical man was a somnambulist, secure and successful because he was blind; if he could see, he would go mad, for nature is ‘a wild dance’, and the irregulars of life – outlaws, beggars, vagabonds, the visionary, the sick, the abnormal – are closer to it than French philosophers, officials, scientists, sensible men, pillars of the enlightened bureaucracy: ‘The tree of knowledge has robbed us of the tree of life.’ The early German Romantic plays and novels are inspired by an attempt to expose the concept of a stable, intelligible structure of reality which calm observers describe, classify, dissect, predict, as a sham and a delusion, a mere curtain of appearances designed to protect those not sensitive or brave enough to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence.

In twentieth-century America this spirit may best have been captured by Henry Miller (yes!), who, in Tropic of Capricorn, wrote, "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."

I have to insert a digression here. My first teaching job was at the Technion in Haifa. I began in the fall of 1971, and the first course I had to teach was in data structures. At the time the only source was Fundamental Algorithms, the first volume of Knuth's uncompleted project, Art of Computer Programming. This book was both too expensive and too locked into Knuth's own invented machine language to serve particularly well as a textbook, so I prepared my own notes to distribute to the students. However, I was inspired by Knuth's indulgence in literary quotations (as were many of my contemporaries); so I could not resist showing off my reading background. Therefore, I began my notes with the above quotation from Tropic of Capricorn, a book that did a lot to help me maintain my personal sense of identity and sanity during my first experience as an expatriate!

I think it is important to appreciate the significance of the Miller-Berlin perspective because we are seeing the anarchic nature of the Internet coming into confrontation with our "inescapable universal" (to borrow a phrase from Max Weber) fixation on bureaucratic organizational forms in the worlds of both work and government. After all, the Internet is probably the only successful anarchy the world has seen since the Ancient Greeks took it upon themselves to invent the concepts of government and politics; but we are so terrified by the prospect of "an order which is not understood" that we desperately try to impose it on the Internet, whether through the Semantic Web, "neutrality" regulation, or God-knows-what-else.

This is not to say that anarchy is not scary. Berlin is right: It takes bravery "to face the truth from the terrifying chaos beneath the false order of bourgeois existence." If it is any help, we can bear in mind the principle that the order is not so much false as it is subjective. One of the things that Jeff Hawkins did not seem to get in all of his waxing on intelligence is that our brains have a natural inclination to impose order on their stimuli. Gerald Edelman called this perceptual categorization and made it the foundation of his own attempts to model the nature of intelligence (which he has tried to substantiate with studies of "wet brain" behavior). What we fear, then, is not that we cannot grasp order in the midst of the confusion but that the order that I grasp may not (probably will not) be the same order that you grasp. Now back in the Sturm und Drang days, Fichte tried to teach us that we should not fear this, that it is through this I-you opposition that each of us develops our own self-awareness (and, while Edelman does not explicitly invoke Fichte, his model of consciousness is definitely sympathetic to Fichte's philosophy). Thus, we can understand the confusion; and, if we are bold enough to let our understanding confront the understandings of others, then we can only benefit from the growth of our own self-awareness. Given all the different ways in which both government and media seem hell-bent on cultivating a culture of fear, the last thing we need to do is waste our cycles on fear of anarchy.

One final point: The way in which Berlin characterizes the Strum und Drang conception of reality is very much verb-based, rather than noun-based. On the other hand the whole "culture of organization," which has invaded our educational system as much as the worlds of business and government, is, by its very nature, noun-based. We have to get beyond the myth we have cultivated that reasoning can only take place when we "freeze the flowing stream of life." Berlin demonstrated how to get beyond the myth in his "Political Judgement" essay. Perhaps it is time to unravel (with "burning patience," as Neruda put it) all of his elaborate sentence constructions and see what those sentences are actually structuring!

August 07, 2006: Isaiah Berlin's Values

2009-06-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

Since reading Isaiah Berlin is so often a major effort of wading through sentences that are as stimulating as they are lengthy (one of which has already been quoted), I found it nice to come up with a summary of his thoughts in a single pithy statement:

Civilisation is a garden made rich and beautiful by the variety of its flowers, delicate plants which great conquering empires – Rome, Vienna, London – trample and crush out of existence.

This seemed worth considering in the midst of the current turbulence.

August 05, 2006 (2): Further Reflections on Wikipedia

2009-06-10T18:14:00.000-07:00

The Wikimania conference, at least as being reported by CNET News.com, seems to be providing me with an abundance of material for reflection. In this case I would like to pick out one paragraph from the report on Jimmy Wales' address to the conference that touches on "competition" with Britannica and the recent Colbert dig:

"The problem is that the technology barrier to entry keeps out really smart people who are geeks but not computer geeks. And it doesn't keep out all the other idiots," he said.

This may be an indicator of why, at the end of the day, Wikipedia cannot seriously compete with an organization like Britannica. Both Britannica and its contributors recognize that "really smart people" are only part of the recipe for a successful reference resource. The other import part involves the "really smart editors." Having edited book reviews for Artificial Intelligence, I know that, even in the geekiest of settings, even the smartest of people need good editing. The Wikipedia philosophy seems to be that collaborative contribution can compensate for the lack of smart editing, and I just cannot buy into that philosophy.

My reason for this position is based on one of the simplest truths about any text: Any written text has two elements, the what-you-say part and the how-you-say-it part. (This is one of the things that makes the study of how narrative communicates so fascinating.) The best editors recognize these two elements and know enough to figure out which of the two (or both) need to be tuned before the contribution goes to press. I simply do not believe that the collaborative approach does a good job at keeping these two elements properly separated. Collaboration may remedy errors at the what-you-say level, because someone who knows more about the topic can use the mechanism to add his/her two cents worth. However, I suspect that content edited by the Britannica process will always trump Wikipedia content when it comes to how-you-say-it; and this is the element that is particularly important if a reader is trying to come up to speed on a new topic.

Perhaps (since he can probably afford to do so) Wales should volunteer some of his time as an intern among the editors working at Britannica to get a better feel for what makes an effective reference resource!

August 05, 2006 (1): "Reasoning between Informed Participants"

2009-06-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

Truthdig has initiated an interesting discussion on a column about the approach the press has been taking to reporting the role of fundamentalism in Bush's policies. This discussion included, among other items, a comment by Hilding Lindquist that "voting is the packaging that comes with the gift of reasoning between informed participants." I voiced a slightly contrary opinion that I would like to elaborate on here.

My own position is that the best packaging for the "reasoning between informed participants" is consensus. It is through consensus that we recognize the need to both make a decision and honor the differences of opinion behind that decision. The extent to which Americans still believe that consensus is more important than voting results is reflected in the study conducted by Pew Forum study on Religion & Public Life, recently reported in "The Raw Story." Here is the important quote from that study:

Abortion continues to split the country nearly down the middle. But the large majority in favor of finding 'a middle ground' on the issue extends broadly across the political and religious spectrum. Only one group expressed unwillingness to find a middle way. Two-thirds (66%) of those who support an outright ban on abortion say there should be no compromise. In contrast, two-thirds of those who want abortion to be generally available are ready to seek a compromise.

This gets me back to my current inclination to bash mass media. The mass media are not interested in consensus, because consensus does not sell stuff. Ultimately, the marketplace is all about voting--choosing one product over another. So it is only natural that the media are going to report in a way that encourages a mind-set that favors electoral choice (voting with your pocketbook, as it were) over consensus. Folks of my age were probably first aware of this during the Kennedy-Nixon debates; but I am sure that the influence of the market mentality on the reporting of political matters goes back much further than that.

This takes us back to the hypothesis that our problem is not that America is not a population of "informed participants" but that the mass media are doing everything they can to keep them from being "informed participants!"