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!

August 08, 2006: Embracing Chaos

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!

July 22, 2006: The Classroom of the Future

Things have been quiet here because this past week I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop being conducted for the benefit of about half a dozen principals from the California public education system. The purpose of the workshop was basically to let them know what was out there on the "bleeding edge" of new technologies, particularly information technologies, as a way of getting them to offer their own visions of the classroom of the future. Listening to their presentations on the final day, I was struck by a distinction that I first raised in discussing the opposition of lexis and praxis: While most technical presentations I attend are heavily noun-based (usually concentrating on features and their attributes), the grammatical foundations of all the presentations the principals gave were heavily (and refreshingly) rooted in verbs. Given my preoccupation with this need to give "equal time" to both nouns and verbs, I was very glad to see that attention reflected in the way in which these representatives of the educational community expressed themselves.

However, following the presentations, the discussion took a twist that was also very interesting. Whenever the conversation turns to any form of change management in an educational system, whether or not it involves new technology, the question that always arises involves what it will take to make the change happen in a setting that is painfully strapped for resources and always seems to be the victim of prevailing political trends. One suggestion that was raised was that we could not count on change management coming from the government; so it would have to come from the commercial sector, which, after all had the most to gain (or lose) from the quality (or lack thereof) of public education. At this point I realized that one of the principals had invoked the language of scientific management on one of his slides, although, to his benefit, he realized that one had to think beyond questions of "productivity" to questions of "customer satisfaction." Nevertheless, it made me think about the cultural context in which we think of the stakeholders in our educational system as "customers."

This then reminded me of a book that I read with great relish at the beginning of this year: Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools, by Raymond E. Callahan. Never mind that this book was published in 1962; the extent that it was still relevant today was, to say the least, chilling. In a nutshell this book provided an excellent review of the principles of "scientific management," which basically originated from the work of Charles Taylor, and then discussed the ways in which public school systems tried to embrace those principles to the general detriment of the quality of education. Callahan recognized that the overall goal of scientific management is efficiency of production and that this goal is, at the very least, at cross-purposes (if not fundamentally opposed) to goals of education, which, to invoke terminology I raised on June 13, have more to do with effectiveness than efficiency. Then I realized that, for all the lip service that has been paid to getting beyond the narrow view of scientific management in the enterprise, whether it involves "total quality," "knowledge management," or rhetoric about "customer relationships," most enterprises are still locked into that goal of efficiency of production, even if, in the Brave New World of services and globalization, they do not always have a clear idea of what it is they actually produce! Consequently, it may be a vain hope to expect that change in the educational establishment will come from a private sector that may be willing to talk about the value of effectiveness "in theory" but, when it comes to practice, it still locked into thinking about efficiency of production.