a thaumaturgical compendium

If there is a silver lining to my little sister being nearly eaten by a large omnivorous beast, it is that I got to see her here in New York for the day. She’s due to be on Good Morning America tomorrow morning. I have had interactions with television news producers before, of varying reputation, but I guess I was unprepared for the frenzy of producers who want Megan to appear.

On one hand, I completely understand that this is a compelling story, though I also realize many do not see it as “real news.” While most people injured mortally at this age will still die behind the wheel of an automobile (less likely for Megan, since her old Volvo just gave up the ghost), there is a primal fear of being eaten, and perhaps an opportunity for people to vicariously feel the thrill of survival through Megan’s story.

We had brunch at Nice Matin and discussed her coming career as a motivational speaker. Her speech would be simple “Hi, I got bit by a shark and survived. Be inspired.” We then headed over to the American Museum of Natural History and made fun of the puny size of their Great White.

Meanwhile, the press, who had already been a bit frenzied during her hospitalization, seem to have gone berserk in the intervening days. Every Halavais with a phone listing (not many) are getting repeated calls from producers asking when Megan can come on. Some are expected (Montel, Current Affair) but the really tenacious ones are the daytime and morning network shows (no names mentioned, to protect the guilty). Some are seeking exclusives, but all want to have her first. And they seem perfectly willing to win over (or badger) her family members to apply pressure. Meanwhile, Megan is trying to navigate these shark-infested waters, and trying at the same time to deal with recovering from a pretty serious injury.

With personal legal insurance increasingly common, I think we need personal PR insurance for when we each get hit with our 15 minutes of fame. Rather than fielding dozens of calls from the media, the PR firm would step in, negotiate appearances, and make sure that fleeting fame landed Megan something more lasting than a trip to New York: say a replacement for the dead Volvo, or her own “Shark Bite” clothing line. Yes, I’m kidding (only serious)—I’d be happy enough if they could act as a minor barrier to ensure that she was treated with more respect than a piece of ratings meat. But hey, that’s just me.

Update: The interview can be found here (Under the Good Morning America tab).

Most scholarly treatments of blogging begin with a reference to Rebecca Blood’s (2000) history of the idea of blogging, or draw on a standardized definition like the one offered by Jill Walker (2003), which suggests that a weblog is “a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order,” and goes on to note the tendency of weblogs to be unedited, made up of brief entries, authored by an individual, and making extensive use of hyperlinks. The focus here in such definitions is on the epiphenomenal product of the practice of blogging. As Richard Feynman (1968) notes, “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” We learn about the bird by watching what it is doing.

So varied are the behaviors of bloggers that it is a bit surprising that the same term is used to cover them all. When journalists refer to bloggers, they generally are referring to a group of widely-read, politically-motivated editorialists. Others identify bloggers by a representative average, suggesting, for example, that “the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life” (Perseus, 2003). But few weblogs focus on day-to-day politics, and talking about an average blogger is as meaningless as talking about an average book author (Lawley, 2003).

If defining blogging in terms of its artifacts (the software and the web document) or the characteristics of its average participant limits us, where may we turn for a definition? There are four themes that seem to form a core set of practices and beliefs among bloggers: the networked nature of communication, the opportunity for engaging in ongoing conversation, easily produced microcontent, and transparency.

There are some weblogs that have audiences akin to a major newspaper or magazine, but most weblogs have few consistent readers. Traditionally, media that is designed for and reaches such a small audience is referred to as “narrowcasting,” but narrowcasting—cable channels that run only game shows or magazines for Smurf collectors—target particular, established niche audiences, and often make content available exclusively to these small audiences. Weblogs in-stead provide content to as narrow or as broad an audience as might encounter and enjoy the site. These audiences may share little in common except for being regular or irregular readers of a particular site. While other media may act to collect audiences and aggregate opinion and attention, weblogs encourage individualized views of the informational world. Nearly a century ago, Simmel (1964) described the tendency of metropolitans to opt to become part of a number of various social circles that may not fully intersect. Weblogs represent the alternative to broadcasting that allows for communication networks to more accurately represent and support these dispersed social networks.

The second hallmark of blogging is that it encourages reciprocal communication. Often commentators have focused on so-called “A-list” weblogs, those who attract the largest number of readers and links, and this has reduced the emphasis on conversation. On the other end, a large number of bloggers might be classified as “mumblers.” The structural equivalent of “lurkers” in other forms of group communication online, mumblers seem to post weblogs to a void, without obvious comments or readers. Even in this case, though, it is clear that one of the motivations for blogging is feedback through comments, links, and other channels. Trackbacks, blogrolls, Technorati tags, and other ways of detecting, measuring, and displaying links help to fulfill this conversational desire.

That blogging content is often accumulated in small segments, and with little commitment of time, represents a third theme. Particularly with the wide availability of free blogging software and hosts, the barriers to entry for blogging are extraordinarily low. While many bloggers invest a significant amount of time in reading and writing within the blogosphere, it is possible to engage this process as little or as much as desired. There is no minimum investment required, and even during a busy day, many bloggers may find the fifteen minutes required to type out a paragraph of commentary.

Finally, weblogs represent a relatively open and unfiltered view of thinking-in-progress. As with each of these themes, it is possible to identify exceptions, but most weblogs are marked by the absence of clear gatekeepers beyond the authors themselves. In one sense, this makes weblogs—even those that are maintained by a group—fairly personal. When companies have attempted to create weblogs written by brand characters or public relations specialists, they have been pilloried by many bloggers. This dedication to transparency has affinities with the open source and free culture movements, and this open process provides others with a model to emulate when they decide to start blogging. This dedication to openness in some cases collides with ex-isting institutionalized business practices that put a premium on secrecy.

These four themes are not unique to blogging. They apply more broadly to systems that support social interaction, including user-editable sites (wikis), tag-driven sites like del.icio.us and Flickr. The community that makes use of weblogs tends to be among the first to take up other social technologies as well. Though it will almost cer-tainly change over time—and the word “blog” may disappear from the vocabulary—these larger themes seem to have taken hold socially and are likely to continue to be influential.

It is not difficult to find antecedents to these overall themes in both the culture of hacking and of scholarship—two cultures that share significant common ground (Himanen, 2001). A decade ago Harrison and Stephen (1996) explained that computer networking was of such interest to academics. It played to long held ideals among scholars that had yet to be realized: “unending and inclusive scholarly conversation; collaborative inquiry limited only by mutual interests; unrestrained access to scholarly resources; independent, decentral-ized learning; and a timely and universally accessible system for rep-resenting, distributing, and archiving knowledge” (p. 32). Weblogs, while not addressing all of these ideals, have already shown them-selves to be effective in ways that other, centrally-organized efforts at scholarly networking have not.

Works Cited

Blood, Rebecca. “Weblogs: a History and Perspective.” Rebecca’s Pocket, Sept. 7, 2000.

Feynman, Richard. “What is Science?” The Physics Teacher, 7(6), 1968.

Harrison, Teresa M., and Timothy Stephen. “Computer Networking, Communication, and Scholarship.” Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the Twenty-First-Century University. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic. New York: Random House, 2001.

Lawley, Elizabeth L. Comments during discussion at the Media Ecology Association Annual Conference, Rochester, New York, 2004.

Perseus (2003). “The Blogging Iceberg.”

Simmel, Georg. Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations. Trans. Kurt H. Worlff and Reinhard Bendix. New York: Free Press, 1964.

Walker, Jill. “Final Version of Weblog Definition.” jill/txt (June 28, 2003).

[ This is a chunk of stuff that ended up on the “cutting room floor”; part of a chapter for the coming Uses of Blogs book that the editors asked to be excised—or at least substantially reduced. So it ends up in my blog, of course :) ]

In the systems class we are forming groups for the final project, which is, in practice, a fully formed and executable proposal. Not, mind you, a “I just thought this might be a cool idea” sort of proposal, but more of a “I’ve done a thorough literature review/benchmarking, am familiar with the best practices, have an IRB proposal, can slam dunk any criticisms” kind of proposal. In order to allow for uniformly high quality in the project proposals, I am allowing (erm, “making”) folks work in groups.

Everyone emailed me resumes and reasons for why they might or might not want to be appointed as group leaders. I will admit that I am surprised by how many didn’t want a leadership position. I suspect that this has a lot to do with experiences in which the leader did all the work for the group. If any of the leaders of the groups in this course end up doing all the work, they will have failed at their jobs. In fact, leadership is all about coordinating the efforts of the team.

The following people will be leading teams this semester: Croniser, Cunningham, Cywinski, Gianni, Kwiatkowski, Seibert, Tredo.

Each team will have three members, a couple will have four. The members of each team will not, as is common in many classes, be assigned randomly, or via informal processes. Each leader will be given 1000 points to allocate to closed bids on people they want on their team. They can allocate these in any way they like. If they are sure they want one person, they can bid all of their points for that person. If they want to spread those points across 10 people, ensuring that they get at least some of these, they can do that. Obviously, you want to be someone in demand…

Those of you who are not listed above as a team leader need to post answers to the following questions to your blogs by Monday (Halloween) night, at the latest. Remember: people besides the team leaders are going to see this, so be careful in crafting your self-advertisement.

1. What are you good at? Do you have particular talents or skills that would benefit a team? How have you demonstrated those skills? Be concise, but complete.

2. What do you most enjoy doing? What is your passion? What would you do if money were no object?

3. Think back to a project team you especially enjoyed working with. What about that team made it good? That is, what do you look for in a project team, its members, and its leaders?

4. Think back to your least favorite position. What is it that made it a bad fit for you?

5. What else is important for a team leader to know about you?

6. The end project proposal represents a proposed capstone project. Do you have some ideas—either general or more specific—for the form of project you would be most interested in working on?

We have been talking about evolution a bit in the Communication Theory class, largely in the context of Axelrod and social simulation. Ryan took exception to an introduction to one of the chapters in the Kennedy book that is fairly dismissive of “creation scientists,” calling the treatment “borderline repulsive.” Kennedy writes

Incredibly, as the second millennium drew to a close, the State of Kansas Board of Education voted to eliminate evolutionary theory from the state’s elementary school curriculum. Polls showed that only about a tenth of Americans could wholeheartedly accept the premises of Darwinism, that life has evolved to its present state through natural selection. “Creation scientists,” whose conclusions are biblically predetermined and whose arguments are based on the absence of some “missing links,” ignoring the tremendous body of positive evidence that does exist, are cited in the media as if they were real scientists.

Let me begin with a brief exculpatory “this is not my thing” admission of ignorance. I am not a biologist, nor do I play one on TV. Despite a fairly broad range of majors as an undergraduate, I managed to escape organic chemistry completely.

Let me also state that the quote above is inflammatory, and that there are “real scientists” (whatever that means) who dispute evolutionary theory. There are a much larger group who have more subtle objections that have more to do with fine tuning than they do with baby+bathwater tossing.

Of course, there are also scientists—relatively reputable ones—who believe in things like pyramid power, psychokinesis, and a lot of other things. That said, science is a process of consensus, and the consensus is that “creation science” / “intelligent design” is nonsense. Two scientists—reputable or not—do not mitigate crackpottiness. Two hundred scientists may constitute a “movement” but they still haven’t escaped crackpottiness. It’s worthwhile to remember that most of the great scientific paradigm shifts were led by crackpots, but most crackpots don’t shift anything.

Again, my exposure to this area is not deep, and I’ve not read widely enough to give a completely informed opinion. I did hear an interview with Michael Behe, and if he accurately represented his argument, I don’t find it to be at all compelling. (Neither, by the way, do his colleagues.) Basically, it comes down to this: while natural selection is almost certainly a strong, or even dominant, mechanism for adaptation at the macro-organism level, it cannot account for the extraordinary complexity of bio-chemical interactions at the smallest level.

The problem is that ID folks don’t posit a good alternative, and fail to show that evolutionary processes are not at work. Their argument comes down to seeming intuitively wrong. The watchmaker analogy and Behe’s mousetraps are interesting examples. They are, it is claimed, “irreducibly complex,” and therefore clearly designed by an intelligent being and not evolved through some natural process. Of course, neither watches nor mousetraps came into being through a supernatural act. It doesn’t matter that they were designed by humans, if humans themselves were created through evolutionary processes. Intelligence itself is complex. But claiming that complex systems come about through (=”are created by”) complex systems in no way obviates the evolutionary argument.

Intelligent Design often tries to escape from the label of being faith-based science, by positing some intelligent designer. That this is a god of some sort is normally only very thinly veiled, though it may be the Flying Spaghetti Monster or aliens, or any other intelligent thing. But positing the need for intelligence and then saying “ignore the question of what that intelligence or intelligent being is” is intellectually dishonest.

Why? Because when we say that watches are designed by intelligent beings, we mean humans. And when we ask what it means to be intelligent (one of the central questions, for example, for SETI), it often defined by the ability to create something complex or behave in a complex way. Whoa. Say it with me: starts with a taut, and ends in a logy.

It would be different if we didn’t have a long history of attributing the unexplained to the divine. Simply saying “we don’t have an answer yet so the source must be supernatural” is not science. Failing to posit an alternative theory is not science. The aim of science is to explain. That explanation cannot be “because God said so”. Even if that is an interim explanation, the question quickly follows: what made God do that. Science does not accept the idea of an unmoved mover. And creation “science” in its many guises, proclaims just this.

Now, is it possible to be a person of faith and still be a scientist? Of course! My guess is that that a fairly large proportion of scientists are people of faith. But to be a scientist requires the pursuit and destruction of mystery. To the extent that religion requires the maintenance of mystery, it remains in conflict with science. In my experience, most religions rely on faith, on trust without verification. Scientists rely on a sort of leap of faith whenever they induce toward theory. But they also believe (and, as with religion, we can debate whether that belief is based on more than “blind faith”) that they have ways of verifying objectively that their induction represents a true and correct rendering of the world. That is, faith is used as a bridge, as leverage, as something to temporarily lean against rather than stand upon.

I mentioned after class that I am a theosophist most days and an atheist when the wind blows NNW. That is, I see god in the machine. I see no reason that god cannot be revealed rather than reviled in the complexity of evolution. I have difficulty understanding the religious rejection of evolution. The beauty and complexity of the natural world is not, in my opinion, a “creation” of god—it is god. It is pretty easy to believe in a great power and simultaneously believe in evolution. My god makes process, not just product.

The problem quickly comes down to the question of agency, something we have talked about a lot in this class. One of the classic aims of science was (and to a certain extend is) the ability to predict. Predictability suggests determinism, which leaves little room for human will. If “you” consist of the arrangements of your cells, perhaps with some special focus on the arrangements of cells in your brain, then where do you fall in love? If you aren’t making you do stuff, who or what is? Just as understanding the mechanisms of thought does not remove our humanity, understanding the mechanisms of evolution does not remove its divinity. The good news is that the real world is made up of complexity, and that complexity means that it is extraordinarily difficult to predict what the future will bring. Yes, the path of the universe may be spelled out in any instantaneous complete understanding of the world (cf. Laplace’s demon), but since that understanding is impossible, we cannot know what the future may bring.

Human agency exists through a lens, even when that lens is (literally) in the eye of the beholder. Fatalism doesn’t come naturally to most people and raises all kinds of interesting ethical questions. Can we believe either in human consciousness or a powerful, effective god if we conceive of the world as an evolutionary system? My guess is “no,” but the love of our selves and our gods doesn’t do much to undo the observation that the world evolves.

Odd that it takes a shark attack to get a decent family photo. Here are Megan, Mom, and Arthur (my brother) in one place at one time. (Photograph is by Krista Kennell, and appeared on AOL News.)

“We do have a sense of humor, believe it or not.”

So says Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman on the recent letter to The Onion indicating that they were illegally making use of the presidential seal. (Via the New York Times; see Bugmenot for a password.)

You will recall that the final exam for the communication theory is a group oral exam. Again, I’ll be asking questions both individually and as a group, but with three of you there, you will have more of a chance to catch a breather between questions. Remember that the exam is closed-book and closed note. I know this will be harder for some of you than for others, but there is madness to my method.

Group 1: Anker, Hurley, Kwon
Group 2: Chun, Kozey, Liu
Group 3: Lackaff, Moon, Petrick

I encourage you to work together toward a solid understanding of what exists in the readings and in our discussions. Obviously, the two (should) overlap, but there is more in the readings than we have been able to cover in class. You should have a pretty good grasp of the major folks we have read and read about. Again, mapping out who goes with whom and why will likely be of help.

Here are a few of the questions I have asked earlier classes. With the exception of two or three, they probably won’t come up again. Each group will receive a different set of questions. Some of these obviously wouldn’t be asked (e.g., what is URT?) because we haven’t covered them this year.

• What is induction?
• What is URT?
• Emotional, rather than rational, appeals appear in several theories. Explain which ones and in what ways.
• Define the difference between “I” and “me” for Mead.
• How would Lyotard criticize agenda setting?
• What is communication theory?
• Pick a research question, any research question, apply one of the theories from the semester, and explain what the major concepts are, and how you might operationalize them.
• You have just purchased a new laptop computer. You end up with a Dell (which is recommended by UB). After your purchase, one of the first things you do is look at different ads online for similar computers and ask your friends what they think. Who has a theory for this and how does he or she explain it? Are there good alternative explanations for the same behavior?