October 16, 2006 (1): Postmodern News?

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.

September 29, 2006: Poetry Document Management?

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

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!