a thaumaturgical compendium

Today, I share a birthday with Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of Wired magazine and only communication professor to get a walk-on in a Woody Allen flick (WMV - 2Mb). His aphorisms still show up with some regularity, not least the idea that electronic media would lead to a “global village.” I’ve written and talked about this in the past, but recent events of “blogs biting back,” particularly in terms of jobs and careers, brings me back to an idea: certain kinds of non-anonymous blogging tend to lead to the integration of identity, rather than multiple fractional identities. I think what we see in recent examples of blog-firings and related issues is a symptom of this new sort of integration of identity.

McLuhan’s global village feels warm and fuzzy, largely because of the connotations of the word “village.” But in reading his descriptions of such a village, he speaks of a distributed mind, something that has more recently appeared under the rubric of a “hive mind.”

The idea that networked and mobile communication technology leads to the increased division of personality and reference groups is widespread. The is perhaps most concretely presented in Turkle’s Life on the Screen, in which she suggests the new technologies feel “consistent with a zeitgeist of decentered and emergent mind, of multiple subjectivities and postmodern selves.” Nobody on the internet knows you are a dog, and that provides a great deal of social and psychological freedom to those who imagine themselves to not be dogs, or at least, to be more than merely dogs.

I think this tendency to have more diffuse identities or to be at the center (egoistically speaking) or a larger set of independent social networks has much in common with the move from agrarian villages and the modern metropolis. Someone raised in a rural area is likely to go to school with, date, and work with the same social group for much of their life. In the city, you may be a very different person in the office than you are in your neighborhood or in the clubs. The complexity of the physical space of the city allows for barriers between various performances of identity and interactions among reference groups.

The clash between these subjectivities is something I think most of us have run into. On more than one occasion, I have met students at a club or bar, and literally not recognized them — not just because of the new context, but because they seem to be literally different people. This change can be extreme, because not only do they dress differently and act differently at the university (as do I), they also adhere to an even further removed set of behaviors when interacting with me, because of an implied power dynamic and a number of other cultural expectations. So, a student will come up to me and start talking and it will take me a minute or two to figure out who they are, even if I know them well. (That assumes that they recognize who I am, though that isn’t hard to do since I generally appear out of place no matter where I am.)

As an aside, these kinds of clashes between social class and social group and identity are certainly not absent from the city. Indeed, they provide the city with a great deal of its spirit, I think. (And I suspect Benjamin, among others, would agree.)

My first exposure to Livejournal (circa early 2000) was just sort an experience. I searched for my name online and found a journal being kept by a student in one of my smaller classes. He had mostly nice things to say about me, which meant that the shock wasn’t as bad as it could be. In an earlier entry, he wrote about how his best friend had come out to him, and how he wasn’t sure how he felt about this. He noted that his friend (whom he named) had not yet come out to his own parents. This struck me as a strange venue in which to discuss such private matters, particularly when it wasn’t the students own privacy involved. Indeed, this was a blog entry that seemed inevitably poised to “bite back.” (And no, despite searching I cannot find this entry, which means — I assume — that I have not furthered any privacy breach.)

At root, what is happening here is that in some cases, the multiple lives we lead are colliding. The case of Matthew Kaye (the high school teacher who called in “sick” to perform in pro wrestling events) is often framed as an oddity, though I suspect that many of us live with multiple lives that may not be immediately reconcilable. The much more common case that people — children and adults — encounter is when their mother reads their blog. (Hi, Mom!) The sorts of things they might share with their friends and even random readers may not be the kinds of things they want their mother to know about them. Or their boss. Or their children. Or potential future mates.

All of this points to the necessity and utility of an anonymous or pseudonymous blog. (You do all know that I am really a high school sophomore from Milwaukee, don’t you?)

There are two reasons that I don’t think that anonymous blogging is the answer for everyone, though it may be the answer for some.

First, I anonymous or pseudonymous blogging is never really possible. The patterns that you create lead to connections to your real world that, with enough time and detail, are difficult to ignore. Over time, it becomes difficult, I suspect, to maintain a blog that is not entirely fictional, and difficult even to maintain one that is entirely fictional.

But second, and more importantly, I think there are definite benefits that can accrue from blogging as a “real” person, tied to your real identity. The greatest is perhaps credibility. It’s never entirely clear whether someone is invested in their discourse if they can disappear without having lost very much. I do think that over time, you can come to trust a pseudonymous blog, but when it is tied to a real live person the words come with, I think, more consequences.

Beyond this, I think there is something of value in uniting the disparate parts of your life under a single, public identity. There are still things — many things — that I will not blog about; identities that I would not entirely expose here. I even keep other blogs. But I think there is something of value to keeping a fairly large number of eggs in a single basket. I like the idea that my friends, colleagues, and students might find each other through this personal network, and that all of us may benefit from the overlapping of these social circles.

This idea of a village within the metropolis isn’t new to blogging: it is sometimes termed a tribe (bund). I think blogging allows for not a “global village” in the McCluhanian sense, but for the emergence of more central identities and social networks that more frequently overlap. Since private, corporate, and public life are increasingly interpenetrated anyway, doesn’t it make sense to look for models and technologies that allow us to work and play better in such an environment?

One of the elements of libel is that you have to clearly identify the person you are talking about. Traditionally, this meant naming them, or otherwise indicating who they were in a way that was identifiable by a large number of people.

In the Style section of the New York Times today is an essay titled The New Nanny Diaries Are Online, in which a Helaine Olen takes apart her former nanny. She notes that her view of her former nanny was changed when she started reading her blog. She starts out the story:

Our former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she’d had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.

Sounds like the kind of person I would like to meet! Leaving aside whether “the nanny” was, in fact, defamed (”false light” might be closer, but I doubt any defamation would actually stick), does Olen identify her nanny?

The easy answer is “no,” but the actual answer is “yes.” Later in the article, Olen anonymously quotes the blog. Any non-trivial quotation is easily found Google, leaving little doubt as to the identity of the nanny. She answers the essay on her blog, making a persuasive argument that she was mis-characterized. (Though I find a much earlier post more interesting.)

So Google makes her identifiable through the quote. But paradoxically, it also makes her capable of responding, and engaging Olen in a public debate. She has no interest in suing, but if she did, I think you could make the case that she already has set the record straight. You would think the least the Times could do is link to her rebuttal.

Rubel points to a posting on the BuzzMetrics blog about whether blog readers know they are reading blogs. It turns out they may not, according to a survey by Neilsen/Netratings. As the entry notes, anyone that works with blogs already knew that, but it’s nice to see it backed up with data.

I remember talking with Lee Rainie in Maastricht 2003 about why Pew Internet and American Life wasn’t asking about blogs. He said that the number of people who read blogs was just too small to be able to drum up a decent sample via telephone. I remember telling him that if you ask what a “blog” is, of course they won’t know. Blog readers think of the sites as diaries, journals, or news sites, or by the name of the host (e.g., “Livejournals”).

Of course, both the term has more currency now and the number of poeple reading and writing blogs has increased exponentially, but it is nice to have some empirical indication that those who read blogs don’t necessarily know that they are doing it.

As an aside, since I am blogging my job search, I actually sent a c.v. off to BuzzMetrics at the beginning of the year when they were looking for a senior research analyst, but never even heard back. I guess I lack that certain buzz.

I have just been re-reading some of the material Larry Sanger has posted as a critique of Wikipedia. The open source encyclopedia, including his essay on Kuro5hin (Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism) and a memoir posted on Slashdot.

I am of two minds on this issue, and the reason for this is in part personal. When I heard about the Nupedia project (the edited, open source forerunner to Wikipedia), I was thrilled. This seemed to me to be the most obvious way of making the internet live up to it’s potential, a potential hinted at by the World Brain and the memex. And so, I emailed and said “sign me up.”

There was a problem, though: I didn’t have a Ph.D. That meant that I could not be an editor in the communication section. After a little back and forth, I was installed as a peer reviewer, though. Which would have been fine, except for the fact that for many months there was no communication editor, and when he did show up (I don’t recall who it was), it didn’t have any impact. In the end, as far as I know, there were never any communication articles in the pipe for Nupedia.

Wikipedia was successful precisely because it adhered to the open source development ethos. The approach was something along the lines of “ask for forgiveness rather than permission.” For me, it seemed like the perfect way to develop articles that could then be peer reviewed. Of course, that isn’t how things turned out. Those who are regular readers of this blog know that I think Wikipedia is spectacular. I think it is the best thing to ever happen to the web. As I tell my classes, I think our grandkids, a century from now, are going to ask what we contributed to the early days of the Wikipedia. That said, I think that Sanger correctly identifies a flaw, and that is the lack of a stable, credible “freeze” that might be effectively cited and integrated with more academic work.

One of the reasons for this is that the claims of validity and salience fall back on Raymond’s open source dictum that “many eyes make all bugs shallow.” This is a great idea in practice, and is largely correct, though there are certainly counterexamples. Wikipedia, likewise, mostly validly identifies what I will call “interested general knowledge.” That is, while it is true that most Americans think that Sadam Husein is responsible for the events of 9/11, most of them do not have an interest in proclaiming this from the rooftops, or even in everyday conversation. That is, when forced to give an opinion, they may express this attitude, but I doubt that it is something that they would be prepared to argue.

Not all public misinformation is of this type. Tom Cruise considers himself an expert on psychiatry, and especially of psychopharmacology. (Note that his claim to authority on this matter is not some sort of gnosis, delivered by deity or faith, but because he has “read the literature”.) Though I doubt Mr. Cruise is a Wikipedia contributor, the place of scientology on the site is contentious, precisely because the standards of science are only held in as high regard on the Wikipedia as they are in the general public.

Even in practice, however, Wikipedia entries for Scientology or Intelligent Design seem to maintain a degree of balance. I have little doubt that there are errors in Wikipedia, of omission and of commission, but I also have little doubt that most of the entries are trustworthy. The problem is why we trust them. Do we believe in knowledge as a democratic process?

Sanger’s push is for an accreditation of an encyclopedia by “acknowledged experts.” Those experts are established primarily through institutions of acceptance. One of those processes of marking someone an expert has traditionally been publication. The web is already undermining this. I think one of the reasons publication has been a way of demonstrating expertise is that there has been financial risk associated with it. Someone would not be published unless there was some guarantee that their book or article would sell, and one of those guarantees is expertise. (Another is simply an ability to be compelling — non-fiction is not the only sort of publishing.)

The other kind of imprimatur that Sanger originally used is the Ph.D. You would think, having spent a goodly number of my bestest years pursuing just such a degree, I would be be happy with this hurdle. But having been up close and personal with the process of “earning” a Ph.D., I am convinced of two things. First, that some absolute fools manage to get the doctorate. Some of these fools graduate from the best schools out there, and some of the less able programs graduate more fools than scholars. So, the Ph.D. is certainly not a measure of insight. Indeed, how many business cards have you received with the “, Ph.D.” after the name and thought that this was a replacement for any obvious signs of intelligence.

Moreover, there are plenty of brilliant people who will never get a Ph.D. The degree has a lot to do with a conforming to a particular set of social and economic conditions, and it is not the best learning fit for very many people. It was good for me, I think (still working that one out), but it’s not for everybody. And I have flunked some truly brilliant people out of our own program because I knew that while they were smart and able, they were not going to be able to complete a degree.

I do think that the average Ph.D., and perhaps the average faculty member, is an expert in their field and able to teach about it. But just as with the Wikipedia, that expertise is only most of the time on most of their specialized topics. The difference is that there is social acceptance of this form of authority. And the question is how to lend that authority to Wikipedia.

Sanger sees this need:

Nevertheless, everyone familiar with Wikipedia can now see the power of the basic Wikipedia idea and the crying need to get more experts on board and a publicly credible review process in place (so that there is a subset of “approved” articles–not a heavy-handed, complicated process, of course). The only way Wikipedia can achieve these things is to jettison its anti-elitism and to moderate its openness to trolls and fools; but it will almost certainly not do these things. Consequently, as Wikipedia increases in popularity and strength, I do not see how there can not be a more academic fork of the project in the future.

I hope that a university, academic consortium, or thinktank can be found to pursue a project to release vetted versions of Wikipedia articles, and I hope that the new project’s managers will understand very well what has made Wikipedia work as well as it has, before they adopt any policies.

Likewise, others who are directly involved in Wikipedia are looking for a process for vetting and testing the truth claims found on the site. So far, I think these approaches have been stymied by the enormity of the project involved. At least two viable approaches have been suggested in various fora:

1. Estimate the degree to which wikipedia reflects knowledge as expressed in the scientific literature. By taking a sample of pages and “fact-checking” them using human coders, some indication of the reliability (in the colloquial sense) of the resource could be established. Then, someone citing Wikipedia could be confident that 99.44% of the content, for example, was reliable.

2. Use Wikipedia as a free source of pre-written material to peer review and publish as a reliable subsection. This need not be an entire encyclopedia, as such an undertaking would be tremendously difficult, but might work quite well as a way of seeding a peer-reviewed reference work within a narrower field.

In each case, we have to discount material that is simply not reflected in the scholarly literature. As an aside, I think that this material is particularly interesting, but there really isn’t much to check it against.

It may be that this is a turning point for the resource, a kind of coming-of-age that requires that a meta-conversation happens. Given its successes so far, I would not want this to impede its further progress. My thought is that for a reliability check of any sort to have a good chance of success, it needs to remain in some way distributed. In particular, I’m thinking about one of a number of approaches to developing trust that will allow for interesting extrusions of the wikipedia.

One way of doing this would be by using something like Outfoxed, a trust-based plug-in for Firefox. There is real value in egocentric trust networks, but here, I am looking for the imprimatur of a set of experts. So, instead:

1. Create a transparent set of criteria, perhaps field-specific, that allows for the creation of a set of people that have wide acceptance as experts. This might have something to do with educational credentials, academic appointments, and publications, though this really does differ from field to field. What is an acceptable set of criteria for an scholar of physics is unlikely to be the same as what is acceptable for a scholar of music.

2. Present frozen articles to the peer group and allow them to rate the articles as “acceptable” or “needs more work.” Naturally, given the open nature of Wikipedia, they would be encouraged to contribute to that work, within Wikipedia.

3. Identify gaps in Wikipedia and create stubs, perhaps recruiting authors for the item.

4. Present a frozen subset of Wikipedia as authoritative, maintaining all of the licensing requirements. Revisit the version periodically, on a cycle of years rather than minutes.

This has a further advantage in that, as long as experts were picked in a fairly demanding way, association with the project would be something akin to association with the editorial board of a journal or “real” encyclopedia. In other words, it would provide the sort of reputational currency that many scholars require in order to devote time to a project.

This isn’t to say that some of the other projects to check Wikipedia are not good. I am involved in two such projects, both in a very cursory way, and I am in favor of letting a thousand flowers bloom. And perhaps the best place to start is within the (relatively empty) field of communication. The above could be accomplished relatively easily, I think, for such a small slice.

[Update: I accidentally posted an earlier draft.]

A lot of little policy issues have come up for the blog lately, and so I figured I would make an overarching policy statement:

Unrelated Comments or Trackbacks

I will delete comments that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with the posting or with previous postings, or with previous comments. I will be very open minded about this. If there are links to sites that are utterly unrelated, or if the reason for posting appears to be to drive traffic to a site for reasons unrelated to the topic, I will delete. Really, what I am saying here is that I will delete spam.

Illegal Comments

Again, I’ll be as open as I possibly can here. I have no way of knowing when comments are libelous, and I don’t have time to check the veracity of comments or the identity of posters. However, if there are comments that are clearly illegal, I will zap them. This has to do particularly with an entry that seems to attract threats on the president’s life, and I have enough to worry about without having to deal with the Secret Service knocking on my door. (Under US law, it is illegal to threaten the president’s life.) I will both allow and encourage critiques and plans for legal attacks on politicians of any party.

Paid Placement

If I am paid to write something on my blog (hasn’t happened yet), I will say so. If someone provides me with a product to review free of charge, or invites me to an event (please do), I’ll make that clear.

I won’t reiterate my conflicts of interest due to employment. Who I work for is spelled out on my “about” page. You should expect that things that I write about myself and organizations I work for are self-serving.

I also often include links to Amazon, for which I (very rarely!) receive a small affiliate’s fee. I don’t usually spell out the associate’s link, but I think it is common enough that people are aware of this. And thanks for using it!

License

Unless otherwise noted as material I have not produced myself, the material (including images) on this site are protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You are welcome to quote the site for commercial purposes under fair use and with proper citation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

The School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo will be making a couple (a few?) faculty hires in the coming year. The first of these to come down the pike is for and assistant or associate professor (tenure or tenure track) with both an IT background and a library background. The listing appears after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another installment of a bunch-a-links that would have made too-short blog entries:

* Fascinating interview with the maker of Mad Hot Ballroom. Copyright clearances made up nearly half the cost of the film.

* Enlisting the power of the interweb to find an apartment in Greenpoint. Need to do something, since NYC is the 13th most expensive city in the world to live in, and the most expensive in the US.

* “Now, for the first time ever, you can re-create the harrowing experience of being chased out of a house and down the street by a naked fat middle-aged tow truck driver and his flapping penis, just as Miles and Jack did in the blockbuster movie, Sideways!”

* AIBO Daft Punk Video contest winners.

* Design porn from Business Week