They skip over the most interesting and difficult part: How to get folks to use it! They casually mention that they built RSS right into the system, as if that was an immediate sell. I think it could be used to great effect in classes and in academic meetings, but it seems to have had a lukewarm reception in these venues.

In particular, the Association of Internet Researchers meeting encouraged tagging for the conference. First off: not sure that an academic conference encourages tagging. It seems to me to be something that has to happen over a long period of time. Second, they gave folks too many options: suggesting del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr tags, to an audience among whom (ironically, I think) tagging is not a common practice. In all, the effort fell flat. But it had the standard “let’s do it and see what happens” vibe. Nothing wrong with that vibe — it is very Web 2.0 — but as I said, the value of tagging something for a fairly broad conference seems limited to me, especially (and this is key!) if it isn’t integrated into the whole.

I’ve also had my classes tagging this semester. Since the class “home page” is an aggregator (like this one) it’s easy to pull the RSS from del.icio.us and integrate it with the standard stream. Yet only those who already knew about tagging are tagging.

I’m now thinking about the Cyberporn and Society course for next semester (yes, it is a little late), and how to better integrate tagging into the course. I think an important step is to provide more of an overview of what tagging is all about and how to do it so that students have a better idea of what it is.

It is always a trade-off in a course: how much time do you spend talking about blogging/wikis/bookmarking/etc. and how much time do you spend with the actual substance of the course. In other words, what is the ROI (return on instruction) for focusing on the “ways of doing” rather than the “ways of knowing.” I have generally shied away from “teaching the tools.” Set up some expectations for product — I always thought — and students would teach themselves the tools.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering this a bit. It’s a truism that we are never teaching, but hoping our students learn to learn. It strikes me that certain kinds of tools (how to use a library, for instance) have a very high long-term ROI. While my “don’t teach the tools” made sense when we were dealing with Flash or GoLive (v.1, yikes!), when it comes to social computing, it may be something worth really focusing time and resources on.

Sure, some of you may say “duh”! But that’s a bit of a new direction for me.

* Habermas, J. (1991). Social structures of the public sphere. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (pp. 27-56). Cambridge: MIT Press. (This is a piece of the larger argument, but gets at the major thrust, I think. Note also that most now refer to Habermas’s broader work in Communicative Action.)

* Froomkin, A. M. (2003). Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a critical theory of cyberspace. Harvard Law Review, 116(3). (Yes, this will have to be a victim of the “fast-reading” Bourdeiu complains so much about. As you are working through, link back to some of the larger questions we have been asking about technology and the public during the semester.)

* (optional) Lenert, E. (1998). A communication theory perspective on telecommunications policy. Journal of Communication 48(4).

On December 7, we will wrap up with a discussion of metatheoretical concerns. Readings for this include:

* Chaffee, S. H. & Berger, C. R. (1988). What communication scientists do. Handbook of communication science (pp. 99-122). Newbury Park: Sage.

* Craig, R. T. (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory, 9, 119-161.

* Streeter, T. (1995). Introduction: For the study of communication and against the discipline of communication. Communication Theory, 5(2), May, 117-129.

* (optional) Deetz, S. (1994). Future of the discipline: The challenges, the research, and the social contribution. In S. Deetz (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 17 (pp. 565-600). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

In our discussions, we touched a bit on pop music and other fashions. If individual will and agency were not at play there, couldn’t we predict hits. Strangely, I have a little background there, having had a chance to chat with a few people about the question of pop music and models of diffusion (particularly in the J-Pop context) while at the Santa Fe Institute.

Now comes this: an algorithm called Hitpredictor that seems to be pretty good at predicting Billboard hits. If it is true that it is possible to detect factors in the content of a song that will make it a hit, it raises questions about where taste is made. It also immediately forces some second order effects. As if the tin ear of an A&R person wasn’t already a poor excuse for a low pass filter, we now (potentially) have computers taking a first cut.

Now I am rectifying that. Heck, I might get wild and see what other wonders are hidden in my hard drive. The response appears unedited (though boy-oh-boy are there some bits I would like to edit in here; note that every time I write “clearly” it appears before something fairly opaque) and is offered as an example, though certainly not a model!

Perturbing a Network of Group Affiliations: The Role of Individual Choice in a Highly Structural Environment

In the Web of Group Affiliations, we have from Georg Simmel an essay that is all too easy to interpret, from the title if not from the thesis, as a highly structured and possibly functional view of society. Like his description itself, his argument appears structured at the universal level, but highly individualistic in more attenuated readings. Clearly, his attempt, as with many of the authors we have read this quarter, is to strike a reasoned balance between the tyranny of social position and unconstrained individual control. His analysis succeeds in many ways in doing this, providing an interesting, if sometimes contradictory, explanation of how individual choice both constrains and is constrained by the individuals†wills.

In reading Simmel, it is sometimes difficult to remember that he is writing in within a temporal context removed from the contemporary world. His approach is entirely compatible with recent theories that stretch across a myriad of appellations: post-structuralism and post-modernism in particular. His “pre-” ideas seem to fit so neatly into the “post-” theories presented by people like Pierre Lévy*, rather than those of his own contemporaries — particularly his contemporaries in American sociological thought. There are a number of parallels we might draw between these two authors: both speak of highly networked societies in which the individual somehow retains his or her (though the latter of this pair is perhaps not as present in Simmelâ€s analysis) individuality in the face of increasingly tightly knit networks of affiliations; both speak of the “construction” or “formation” of groups, a small but significant perspective shift from those who might claim that groups “emerge”; finally, both see the process of group affiliation, at least in its more recent incarnation, as fundamentally emancipatory.

In the remainder of this brief paper, I will discuss these themes in turn. Throughout, I will argue that Simmel provides us with an explanation of the social/individual dialectic that seems at first counter-intuitive. He argues, though never explicitly, that groups are the ultimate determinant of much of our behavior. The only, and vitally important, area in which the individual may have a degree of choice is in with what groups he or she chooses to affiliate. Intuitively, I think we would often assume just the opposite: that individuals have a certain choice in what they eat or where they decide to make their home, but that the choice of a group of family, friends, and associates is in the hands of fate (exercised through the “invisible hand” of social structure). Simmel seems to retain some of the social determinism found in, for example, Bourdieu, but argues that the most important of relations, that of the individual to the group, is one that can be freely made and unmade at will.

Vital to this discussion is Simmelâ€s view of the individual and how that individual acts. For Simmel, individualism is expressed exclusively through individual choice of groups. He claims that “as individuals, we form the personality out of particular elements of life, each of which has arisen from, or is interwoven with, society” (p. 141). Such a view demonstrates a very strong view of individual freedom to decide action, at least in an ideal, thoroughly modern, social context. Though the behavior and power of individuals is expressly restricted by the social milieu(x) in which they exist, there are such a variety of groups in which personalities may be expressed that little practical restriction can be found.

One might argue that there are those actions that are truly “individual” — like wearing pants on oneâ€s head to class meetings. Here an affiliation has been made — to the group in society often labeled as insane, for example — but stresses in the argument begin to show. These stresses exist within the traditional view of society, not the ideal type Simmel argues modern society is moving toward. In less enlightened societies, it may be impossible to find a group that valorizes pants-on-the-head behavior — but such a group should exist. Insanity as an ascriptive group is a symptom of traditional society, unless such a group is self-selected. Clearly, such a “natural” group is unlikely to be superseded by elective groups.

Groups that induct rather than self-select are inscribed by the rubric of “organic,” for Simmel. Kinship relations, because they exist ab ovo (literally!), remain one of these organic groups. We must ask, however, if Levi-Strauss†infamous avuncular relation remains a social fact when we are able to choose uncles. Strong views of structuralism are undermined when individuals are able to select which of a wide number of social constellations may be chosen. While uncles remain sacrosanct in The Web of Group Affiliations, marriage does not. Modern marriage, because it results not so much in the gift of a woman, but in the woman being located at the intersection of two separate kinship groups, has moved from being an organic to an “objective” construct.

Is there any limit to how much of life can move from the “organic” to the “objective”? For Simmel, there does not seem to be, though this is not entirely clear. How then does this differ from the most extreme individualist position? Actions are strongly inscribed by the rôle one plays in various groups. The “choice” to join a group, while it moves from being a group of proximity to one of propinquity, still relies to some significant degree on exigencies of the environment. Moreover, while the intersection of various groups — again in a way reminiscent of Bourdieu — may lead to a certain degree of unpredictability, there is in anything other than the ideal social situation a limited number of groups to which one can belong, and thus a limited spectrum of choices available.
Given that Simmel sees these groups as disciplined templates of behavior, it is vital that we gain some idea of how these groups are “formed.” Though it is instructive that Simmel (or at least his translator) used this term, it seems his description refers more to the evolution of social groups from those based on terminus a quo to those based on terminus ad quem. (It is also interesting that he does not discuss possible counter-examples; I am thinking here of Silicon Valley as a city invented with already-established purposes. Other examples exist, I am sure.) Objective groups “constitute a superstrucure which develops over and above those group-affiliations which are formed according to natural, immediately given criteria” (p. 135). This superstructure eventually supersedes the “natural” relationships. However, Simmel does not succumb to the ex machina view of evolutionary change. It is clear that the move from a quo to ad quem exists within some collective move toward group affiliations.

These groups come about as a result of what we might call “individualistic mutations” in this process from organic to objective. Simmel brings forward Giordano Bruno as an exemplar of one of these mutations. But here Simmel draws some tenuous connection to a more Weberian view of the leader have vast, if unintended, effects on the social system. The division of groups for administrative reasons “makes possible a much higher, organic synthesis of the whole” (p. 194).

This evolution of the group is more than simply mechanical. Despite the increasingly fragmented (or networked) set of group affiliations, it is necessary for a “group mind” to evolve at an organic level. This holistic creation from deliberately heterogeneous cannot occur outside of the volition of individual actors. While the creation of groups and the overall social structure may not be determinant, it relies directly on the work of individual actors. This is a bottom-up view of social structure. We might find some recent theorizing borrowed from the world of physics instructive. Much of physics have moved from attempting to deduce micro behavior from macro events, and instead have begun trying to model macro events by describing micro behavior. In both cases, physicists are describing a systemic whole, yet in the latter approach, the individual, the unusual, the micro is not only privileged, but presented as causative. Though this word, which implies a certain determinacy, is not often used, as the behavior of the macro is more than the sum of its parts. This “extra bit,” however, cannot be described outside the generative process introduced by individual actors.

Though this has been alluded to several times above, Simmelâ€s description contains a strong emancipatory positivism. While the world he describes presents a wide variety of possible conditions for the individual, he seems to hold out for a certain progressive view of the move from traditional to modern society. Only with a very loose reading do we find explanations of cyclical “regressions” to a quo organization. How, for example, do we account for fascism within this view of society? Can individuals actually make choices, rational or otherwise, about group affiliation within the material world? How does the emergence (formation!) of the national socialists play within this view? Not only did this organization rapidly lead to an a quo group (that is, “naturalized” and unavoidable), but it seemed to do so by drawing explicitly on a nostalgic recreation of traditional group values. The road to modern society has quite a few bumps and a cul-de-sac or two. Simmelâ€s position would be stronger if these were better accounted for.

There are a number of other possible criticisms that could be leveled against Simmelâ€s view. The clearest of these is the claim that the individual can ever really choose the groups with which he or she affiliates. Bourdieu does not seem to grant nearly the same amount of agency to remove oneself from an inherited habitus and Hollis might point out that granting the individual this power still does not account for how the desire to join particular groups is instated in the first place. In fact, these two questions could be considered related. Simmel seems unprepared to examine volition, and sees the individual as an inviolable “black box.” In part, no doubt, this is a matter of perspective and attempting to put reasonable bounds on social inquiry. However, in doing so, he seems to dismiss the reciprocal effects of society on the individualâ€s preferences. A solution to this problem is seen in extending his ideas to within the black box, within the individual (cf. Minskyâ€s “society of mind”). He alludes briefly to such an extension when discussing the formation of the individual from the forces of various groups, but does not go very far along this path. It would be a long path indeed, as it would require a causative agent at some point.

Nonetheless, I feel that Simmel does more than any of the other authors we have read so far in describing just what kinds of choices might be made by the individual actor. These choices are entirely structural, in that they are about relations to others in the group(s), and yet maintain a surprising degree of individuality. Especially in an era when proximity is rapidly diminishing (“disappearing” being far too strong a word) as a formative factor in social structure, his ideas find a new foothold and present a solid basis for further exploration.

* Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankindâ€s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Robert Bononno (trans.), (New York: Plenum, 1997).

I also think this is the end of the posts that are teaching specific getting mixed up with everything else on the blog. There is value there, and I have heard from several people who like to see these posts who are not in the classes, but as I sat down to write this I realized that it really mattered only to the nine people still in the seminar, and that the couple thousand other readers of my blog probably are not very interested. Instead, I am thinking I will probably include a sidebar (though I was trying to avoid cruft…) of “other stuff I’ve written.” This would be titles and links to posts I make on other blogs, and possibly online articles and any longer comments I make on other people’s blogs. I’m not sure quite how I’ll do this, maybe a del.icio.us tag with associated RSS feed. I’ll think on it.

Anyway, if you are one of the nine and not the 1,991, you should go to the regular place we keep articles. In addition to finishing up the Bourdieu, if you haven’t already, you should go over the three short articles there: the Playboy interview with McLuhan, Minerva’s Owl by Innis, and a chapter from Ong’s Orality and Literacy. These are a bit lighter weight than we are used to, I think/hope. Since the doctoral students have been charged with briefing the Bourdieu (sounds a bit like a bad pick-up line: “hey baby, want to help me brief my Bourdieu?”), the three masters students ought to negotiate amongst yourselves who wants to be ready to give a mini-lecture on each of these three. I guess you can lay claim to one of them with a quick blog post. Something along the lines of “Ong’s mine.”

I’ve also put up some things we will probably be reading as we start to talk about meta-theory, as well as some things that we have hit en passant (Benjamin, Huberman, Tarde, etc.) that are there for your spare-time reading enjoyment. If you are ready to plow forward, we are sure to be reading the Craig piece and the Chaffee. We may hit the Streeter, but probably not. I really want to read the Habermas and the Lyotard that are up there, but I am thinking that something more in are of policy theory might be more useful to more of you. We’ll chat about that on Wednesday.

(As a side note, I had originally planned to assign editors to chapters, but instead, I encourage you to do what I am going to do, and pick targets for good editing. The one restriction is that you get credit only for editing other people’s chapters, not your own.)

Head over to the Communication Theory wikibook, and pick a chapter not your own. Then change it and save it. Repeat.

How do you change it? That can be both a technical and a non-technical question.

Technical answer:

1. Log in! (If you don’t have an account, start one with your real name so I know who you are.) If you make changes without logging in, you can’t get credit for it. This is not important for people who are visiting from the blog or elsewhere, but for it to help your grade in the class, I need to know who you are.

2. Click on the “edit” tab for the whole page, or on the “edit” link next to the section you want to alter.

3. Make the appropriate changes. If you are wondering about how to do italics or other formatting, you can take a look at appropriate help page.

4. Before you save, be sure to do a one-line description of what you changed — something like “improved wording” or “fixed reference” — to make it easier to figure out what you did.

5. Note: try to save each time you make an edit. This will provide a better record of the changes. In other words, don’t change five things and then save; change one thing, then save. It takes a bit longer, but makes it easier to track.

Non-technical:

OK, so maybe you already knew all that. Maybe you were wondering what sort of changes you should make. Any change that improves the text. More specifically, you may consider:

1. Correcting spelling, grammar, or agreement.

1a. Some of the references are a bit of a mess. Make sure that they adhere to APA style.

2. Rewording to make the prose clearer, or more concise. Can you say the same thing in less words.

3. Improving the style: are there sections or sentences that are redundant? Is there a better way of saying something? Is there a way to make the discussion more structured or more interesting?

4. Is something missing? Does the article not include an important point, up to and including an entire section?

5. Should there be hyperlinks to other chapters? To other sections in other chapters? To Wikipedia articles?

6. Is there a copyright free (i.e., public domain) image that might enhance the article? This can be something gathered from public domain materials or generated by you

7. I haven’t decided yet, but you might want to include definition boxes for important concepts.

8. Add substance. This takes way more time, but is potentially the most valuable part. Is a chapter missing something vital? Add it.

NB: If you have a comment about the chapter, but are not quite sure how to change it to reflect this, you can always add to the “talk” page for that chapter. You will see the “discussion” tab at the top. This is also a wiki page, and can also be edited, but it is meant for “meta” discussion among the collective authors. When you put a comment on the talk page, be sure to finish with ~~~~, which will automagically insert your name and the date you left the comment, as a signature.

So how many edits are enough? Good question, and I don’t have a specific number in mind. I am tempted to say “as many as it takes to make the articles perfect, but the that probably has a limit of “infinity.” If you are making more edits than I am, you probably are doing great, if you are making less than I am, you may be OK, if you are making way less than I am, you should be concerned. All of the edits that you will get credit for need to be done by the end of the month of November.

Questions?

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.

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?

Cardano was a 16th century gambler and astrologer, and relates a series of “near-misses,” including falling masonry and attacks by mad dogs. Here, he is speaking of an incident in which a dog attacked him while he was on a mule. He claims to have ducked and the dog sailed over his head. He notes that he found this to be equally incredible and checked with a nearby boy who saw the same thing.

I mention only in passing and because of my issues with imaginary dirigibles. If you write it enough times, it must be true.

(via Ethernity )

As I mentioned in the class, at this stage, I don’t have a fixed format in mind. I hope folks will start with a biographical sketch of their “tour guide,” the person that is their entree into a particular stream of theoretical thinking. For example, I know one of you is looking at phenomenological approaches to communication theory. You would therefore start with a single person (Merleau-Ponty, for example), and then expand to how this person’s views were unique, and how they shared ideas with a school or stream of thought. Who were their mentors, and how (if at all) did they diverge from them? Who did they, in turn, mentor (either directly or through their writing), and how did this lead to changes. Were there major schools or approaches that were contained by the tradition? What terms or ideas are central, and how were they interpreted.

We are already getting to the broader ideas of the theories presented, but you should definitely talk about the milestone research and publications that contributed to the theoretical development. What are the major claims of the theory? What does it explain? How can it be tested? Does it begin with particular epistemological or ontological assumptions? How does it relate to other contemporaneous explanations? How has it been criticized?

This year, I have a theme to my own thinking, which is that form and substance are not really as divisible as we might think. Of course, this is nothing new, but it keeps showing up in the work I am doing. The hyperlink (a formal construct) is really just more web content, and web content is really just more formal structure. I don’t want to go so far as to collapse the medium and the message, but I think we have overvalued the distinction between form and content. That is apparent especially in social computing, where the content can significantly change the form of the technology.

So, I cannot really say how you should form your chapter, as that is, in large part, up to you. Superficially, it would be nice if the structure from chapter to chapter was relatively congruent, but I suspect we can “fix” this in the editing stage. You should absolutely have subheadings. Normally, in a chapter this short, you probably do not need sub-sub-headings, but given that we are present material didactically, and that the book will be used as a text, the more apparent structure, the better. It should go without saying that beyond the headings, the structure should be made very clear, with abundantly clear topic sentences for your paragraphs, and a progression of ideas between paragraphs.

There are a few options for delivery. Here they are, in order of preference:

1. Go to the Wikibook for Communication Theory and create a link to your chapter. Then paste your chapter into that new page. Eventually, this is where all the chapters will be going, but if, at this stage, the whole wiki thing still freaks you out, do not worry about it at this stage. Your focus right now should be on producing the best chapter you are capable of.

2. Email me the chapter, in plain text, with double-spaces between paragraphs.

3. Email me the chapter as MS Word attachment. This is my least favorite, only because it means the most work to get it from here up to #1, but if you need to do it this way, that’s OK. As a note, for those of you running Asian-language Microsoft, the coding of your Word documents will likely be incompatible with English MS Word. It is not a huge deal, but it means, for example, that the quotation marks and other punctuation gets a bit messed up.

As far as citations go, I think we have agreed to use APA-style citations and works cited. Obviously, given the above, we are not following the broader APA guidelines for manuscripts. If there is something here I can clarify, leave a comment and I will if I can.

This will get us started:

October 26 – Systems
* von Bertalanffy, L. (1976). General system theory: Foundations, development, applications. New York: Braziller. Selection.
* Kennedy, J., Eberhart, C., & Shi, Y. (2001). On our nonexistence as entities: The social organization. Swarm intelligence. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
* Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of strategies in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.

November 2 – Networks & Diffusion
* Simmel, Network of group affiliation.
* Lowrey & Defleur chapters on Two-Step Flow, Project Revere, and Diffusion
* Carley, K. M. (1995). Communication technologies and their effect on cultural homogeneity, consensus, and the diffusion of new ideas. Sociological Perspectives, 38(4):547-571.

(Optional)
* Monge, P. R. (1987). The network level of analysis. In C. R. Berger & S. H. Chaffee (Eds.). Handbook of communication science (pp. 239-270). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

November 9 – Critical Approaches
* Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1993). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. Dialectic of Enlightenment (pp. 31-41). New York: Continuum.
* Bourdieu, all.
* Park, H. W. (1998). A Gramscian approach to interpreting international communication. Journal of Communication, 48(4), Autumn, 79-99.

Students sometimes ask which blogs are getting the most hits. Well, during October (so far), the top number of hits have gone to:

1. Infomancy
2. Cyberporn & Society (currently hibernating)
3. Happy Together
4. Murky Waters of the Smurfs†Garden
5. Speaking American
6. Informusings
7. Yakkety-yak
8. Ben’s Com Theory
9. Reel Around the Weblog
10. Ethernity

So what is del.icio.us, besides a pain to type? Del.icio.us is a “social bookmarking” site. I imagine that most of you already keep bookmarks in you browser for sites that you visit frequently or that you want to be able to find again. But what happens when you are at work and you don’t have access to those bookmarks? Del.icio.us solves that problem by allowing you to log on from anywhere on the web and use your list of bookmarks.

To use the service, you need to set up a free account. Then, you need to drag the bookmarklet to the quicklinks section of your favorite browser. (You can use del.icio.us without the bookmarklet, but you won’t.) Then, whenever you are surfing the web and see a site you want to bookmark for later, just click on the bookmarklet and you will be taken to a special page on del.icio.us. There, you write a quick note to yourself about why you decided to save this link, and what categories it falls under (“tag” it). Voila, you have a bookmark you can access later.

But wait! That’s not all! You also get…

There is an added bonus here, in that you can stalk your friends and others. You can see what they have been finding interesting during their own tours around the web. So, if you want to know what George Bush finds interesting lately, just look up his del.icio.us account. (If you know what it is, drop me an email.) For now, you could just check out mine. I have a handful of people who I track to see what they are bookmarking lately. (Not surprisingly, this is made easier through RSS, but we can hold off on that for later…)

But wait! That’s not all! You also get…

When you bookmark something, you assign it a “tag.” At a basic level, this is like putting a bookmark in a folder on your browser. But tagging is a little different, because you can put any number of tags on a single bookmark. For some time now, when I found a site that I thought would be useful for new graduate students, I tagged it with “advice.” That way, I can find it later when I need to.

But what happens when you can gather a whole bunch of bookmarks that people have freetagged (frietagged) together? Well, “advice” is a terrible example. I probably should have called it “grad_advice” to be a bit more specific. But if you look at the page that includes everyone’s advice tags, which is at http://del.icio.us/tag/advice you find all the advice the web has to offer, from how to pick up women to how to best settle insurance claims. Likewise, for almost any tag, or any bookmark, you can find dozens or hundreds of people who are collaboratively sorting out the web. Although there isn’t much there, people who are attending the Internet Research conference this week will be using the tag aoir6.

Moreover, when you bookmark something, you can find out who else has bookmarked it. For some bookmarks, you may be the only one to have found it interesting, and for some, there are thousands of others who thought it worth remembering. But what is interesting is when only two or three people have bookmarked a site. Even if you don’t know these people at all, you share at least this small interest, and you can go and see what else they have bookmarked.

The tag for the systems seminar is inf507. If you check out the page for that tag you will see that I have been bookmarking some things that I think are related to the class, and some of the other participants have started doing the same. Go, sign up, and start tagging.

As we will discuss in the coming weeks, this kind of tagging process is not limited to del.icio.us. Flickr lets you tag photographs, technorati lets you tag blog posts, and 43 things lets you tag life goals, for example. This creates a set of emergent organizing indexes, what some have been calling folksonomies

Here’s a quick bio, stolen from the IR 6.0 Agenda:

Ang Peng Hwa is Professor of Media Management and Law at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A lawyer by training, he worked as a journalist before going on to pursue a Masters in communication management at the University of Southern California and a PhD in mass media at Michigan State University. He is a central committee member of the Consumers’ Association of Singapore and is the legal adviser to the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore. He has consulted for government and private bodies in Singapore, as well as international agencies such as the United Nations Development Program on law and policy issues regarding the Internet.

Call for papers

Canadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information (CAIS/ACSI)

2006 Annual Conference

June 1 – 3, 2006, York University, Toronto

Information Science Revisited: Approaches to Innovation

With focus on innovative research and on information science as an evolving field, the conference will provide information scientists with a forum for presentation on three areas that form the conference program theme:

1. System design and evaluation: Information retrieval, interface design, system effectiveness and efficiency, information architecture, cost analysis.

2. Information and users: User studies, information literacy, economic and political factors, government initiatives, information communities.

3. Analysis and organization of information: Informetrics and Webometrics, informatics, metadata, classification, information science theory.

Conference proposal submission: Proposals for CAIS/ACSI 2006 should include a title, be no more than 500 words long, and specify how they relate to one of the areas within the conference program theme. Proposals with clearly articulated theoretical grounding and methodology, and those that report on completed or ongoing research will be given preference. Diverse perspectives and methodologies are welcome. Proposals may be submitted in English or French. Doctoral candidates are especially invited to submit proposals for the conference. Highest ranked papers will, with permission of the authors, be published in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science / La revue canadienne de l’information et bibliothéconomie with their abstracts appearing in the proceedings.

Deadline for proposals is January 16, 2006. Proposals, including the name(s) of the author(s), complete mailing and e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, should be sent electronically in Word or Rich Text Format to Dr. Haidar Moukdad, CAIS/ACSI 2006 Program Chair at cais2006@cais-acsi.ca

Conference proposals will be refereed by the Program Committee. Authors will be notified of the Committee’s decision no later than February 20, 2006. Papers to appear as full-text in the electronic proceedings must be submitted no later than April 20, 2006. With permission of the authors, abstracts of all papers presented at the conference will also be published in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science / La revue canadienne de l’information et bibliothéconomie.

The CAIS/ACSI 2006 conference will be held June 1-3, 2006, and is part of the annual Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which runs from May 27 to June 4, 2006 at York University, Toronto, Ontario. Please see the Federation Web site at http://www.fedcan.ca/congress2006 for registration and accommodation details.

(I guess flight crews opt for a variety of runs, but the cross-country one is better for them because they only get paid for time in the air. The short Buffalo-NYC run — which they might make several times a day — basically pays half as much per hour because of the time spent on the ground in each city. However it works out, crews on our short flight might be going to Miami or LA on another day, and they wanted to let everyone know that they hadn’t this time.)

What I hadn’t thought about as much, until noted by Earth Wide Moth, was what one passenger called the surreal experience of watching the landing unfold via the seat-back monitors from inside the plane itself. There is something slightly uncanny about that experience I suppose, but also something fairly emblematic. It’s not unique: there is a standard cliche that shows up as a comedic moment when people are watching the news at home and seeing a house surrounded, only to slowly discover that it is their own. But it seems that situation is creeping outward.

The other extreme might be what appears in “Strange Days.” In the film, “users” (and the relationship to drug users is played out) of a device called a SQUID (Super-conducting QUantum Interface Device – basically a bunch of electrodes placed on the head that allow direct access to the sensory portions of the brain) trade experiences that have been recorded by others. The character played by Ralph Fiennes discovers a trade in snuff recordings. At one point, a character is forced to watch her own death, from the eyes of her killer, and this is recorded for later viewing.

Camera phones are already near ubiquitous, and those capable of streaming video are fairly widespread. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. The “surreality” of the Jet Blue experience was due to the simple fact that a video screen with network access was in front of passengers. But we are already approaching a time when that is norm rather than the exception. What will it mean when mirrors are everywhere? When everything we do will be judged by how it is captured and viewed by ourselves-as-others?

I am reminded of someone who, when it rained on her outdoor wedding, had the guests come back a second day to capture the wedding as she had envisioned it. They went through an empty ceremony, as a simulation of the way the “real” wedding should have happened, while the videographer recorded their perfect wedding.

Of course, maybe we always see ourselves through the eyes of, to use Mead’s phrase, the “generalized other.” But by making that view transparent, does it mean we can more easily step into the shoes of the other? Or does it mean a new era of narcissism, when we no longer need to empathize to understand what others see, we need only turn on our TV?

September 28: Structural functionalism and its critique

• Lasswell, H. D. (1953). The structure and function of communication in society. In L. Bryson (Ed.), The communication of ideas. New York: Harper & Co.
• Mills, All, but pay special attention to c. 1-4, and read the appendix.
• 6:00pm: Axel Bruns on “prosuming.”

5: Direct Effects

• Lowery & Defleur, c. 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8
• Cantril, H. with Gaudet, H., & Herzog, H. (1940). The invasion from mars: A study in the psychology of panic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Selection. (Optional: listen to broadcast.)
• Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda. New York: Vintage. Selection.

October 12: Limited Effects

• McCombs, M., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, 176-187.
• Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26, 172-199.
• Iyengar, S., & Kinder, D. (1987). The priming effect. News that matters: Television and American opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Katz, E., Blumler, J., & Gurevitch, M. (1974). Uses of mass communication by the individual. In W.P. Davison, & F.T.C. Yu (Eds.), Mass communication research: Major issues and future directions (pp. 11-35). New York: Praeger.
• Lowery & Defleur, c. 5, 11-14

October 19: Conceptualizing Information

• Campbell, all.

I am using blogs in these two courses as a stand in for the pretty standard “response paper” found in many graduate courses. The idea here is to “engage” the readings in some way, extracting what you think the crux of the matter is and discussing it. This may be a synthetic essay that identifies a theme common to several readings, it may extend one of the ideas in the readings, or it may challenge some of the positions presented. Ideally, the readings inform and support your own ideas, acting as a kind of lever.

Over the next few weeks, especially, I will try to highlight some of the postings that seem to do this well. But at this stage, let me offer some general advice:

0. Be original. Make sure you are writing something that someone (not just me) would be interested in reading.

1. Have a thesis. No matter how short your entry is, it should have a central argument that is stated fairly early on. This may not be a general rule for writing, but for me it is. Any writing — from a note on the refrigerator to a multi-volume book — should have a clearly expressed thesis that is presented with evidence supporting the thesis.

1a. Have a title that reflects your thesis.

2. Assume an informed, third-person reader. Imagine that a graduate student at Stanford or Indiana or Keio is reading your entry. You should not start out with “What the author writes…” but identify the author and briefly recapitulate his or her position. This is equally true of commenting on the assigned readings, other things you find on the web, or your peers’ blog entries. A short sentence that says something like “John writes that Paul is short-sighted in his vision of the future of peas,” along with a hyperlink to the referenced item, is enough to orient a reader who may not be closely following our reading schedule or the ongoing conversation.

3. Contextual linking. I know that requirement for APA style slipped into the syllabus, but if there is an opportunity to link to a source, use it. As Lisa notes, blogging is all about the linking. (Yes, just like that.)

4. Check for spelling and typos. For now, this means copying and pasting your entry into Word or something similar to check for spelling. (I’ll work on building in a spell-checker, or there are spell-checkers you can install as plug-ins to Firefox and to IE.) You should also read over your entry for typos and homonyms, which may not be caught by your word processor’s spell checking function. Some of you would benefit greatly from reading your entries out loud, to see where you might be able to simplify and clarify.

5. While you are presenting an argument that is likely abstract, or general, make the evidence or examples as concrete as possible. Examples are a great way of providing something to think with.

6. Double-space between paragraphs. It makes reading much easier.

7. Tell me a story. All writing is ultimately about weaving a story; all the more so when you are trying to be persuasive.

For even more general advice to good blog entries, try here.

OK, on to some of the blogs in the informatics class:

* Generally, Andrew’s blog and Diane’s blog are good starting points within the systems seminar. These are among several others who are already doing an excellent job, and you can probably get a feeling for which these are on your own. I would recommend everyone identify the blogs you like, and steal some part of their approach. Note the style of making use of the citations, direct links to relevant information, and incisive analysis (literally “to dissolve”; taking apart the argument and making sure the pieces make sense). They rely on their own experience and knowledge, and each of you have unique experiences and knowledge you can apply to this process.

* Mr. von Tagger has an interesting first entry sets up what I think is an interesting question. The entry could have gone a lot further in answering it. I’m a bit less impressed by the answer in a follow-up, since it doesn’t seem to provide as careful an analysis as it might, but it’s an interesting effort. Seems to me that a bit of Lukacs might inform an answer.

* In his first couple entries, Charles invokes (without naming it) the idea of “appropriate technology”. His insights are interesting, though again, I wish he had continued to develop them a bit. I also like the image of him wielding gardening implements, both because I am a sucker for illustrative images, and because it builds toward an informatics tradition.

* Bonnie has an interesting “metablogging” post that ties blogging back to Hughes and the need to connect to others.

* Garrett (among several others) provides a good example of useful information foraging.

* You might also benefit by looking over some of the blog entries in your “sister” class in communication. How well are they doing these things? Can you follow their ideas without having been exposed to their readings?

My first reaction (and I would be curious if others shared this) was to ensure that I was not the culprit by doing a bit of googling. I don’t think I am the… is “collaborator” the appropriate term ?… but the search did turn up a photograph of Barry on my blog, identified by name:

https://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=665

There is some irony that the photograph is from a workshop in Toronto on what Steve Mann has been calling “sousveillance.” I find this use of imaging and other recording materials by citizens to be less liberating than he might find them. Yes, blogging, very broadly defined, has the potential of making our social lives far more transparent. I tend to think of this in a Brinian sense: the lesser of two evils, and seemingly inevitable. I have no doubt that I blog in the service of the secret and not-so-secret police of many nations. I also blog in the service of the secret and not-so-secret revolutionaries among us. And, heck, I’m also blogging for terrorism. The surveillance I engage in is open to all, and while more daylight can lead to sunburns, I think the benefits outweigh the potential harm.

The kind of intrusions Barry is talking about are likely to lead to a rethinking of what constitutes personal privacy. It’s worth remembering that the legal history of privacy in the US stems from precisely the sort of complaint made here. That is, people were sneaking cameras into private parties and publishing private conversations in public newspapers. From a US-centric perspective, you might go so far as to argue the combination of camera and penny-press invented the idea of privacy as we generally think about it now. I suspect that the cameraphone and blog will cause a similar shift.

I personally do what I can to guess at whether someone’s comments are “unbloggable.” I think, like many, I follow a golden rule of blogging (publicize not lest thee be publicized), with an added safety buffer to account for my utter lack of shame. But an ethics of blogging will only take us so far. The present state of social access to archived life experience–and for me, cameraphones and other recording devices are far more intrusive than relayed personal narrative–have already changed how a large part of society interacts and expects to interact, as danah has noted above. I think the important question now is understanding how these boundaries are conceived within various groups; that is, making the invisible assumptions of bloggers of varying stripes more visible.

I have a feeling that the academic setting adds a slight twist. While I might otherwise blog (or mention in a talk, etc.) an idea that I heard from “some dude” at a dinner, it strikes me that as scholars we have a special obligation to cite ideas that we may have gathered from others, even when the source of such observations are not found in a journal article. We have a particular difficulty when that obligation potentially interferes with observing perceived social propriety.

(And, in case it needs to be said, I’m blogging this.)

[This is cc’d from a posting to the AIR-L list.]

Let me begin where he ends. I was a bit surprised, given the morbid fascination with erotic death found throughout, that Peters narrows his interest in Freud to the libidinous nature of communication. Indeed, given it’s phantasmal quality, death seems to be very much the central feature of the communicative act–particularly in the way Peters has conceived of it here. And clearly, Peters is sympathetic to Emerson’s view of communication with the dead as paradigmatical, and extends this to suggest, I think, that communication with an unrecognized “other” is the norm, from which we move away instead of toward.

But there is this effort throughout to try to undo “communication” and “communication theory” even as he builds it. His claim to an authentic history of communication beginning in the late 19th or early 20th centuries seems fairly arbitrary to me. It tends to coincide with some of the narratives of the field of communication, but he never really avails himself of these. Indeed, early in the book he complains of the contemporary paucity of communication theory, so it’s not clear that the conceptualization of communication in 20s or 40s really did much to advance a common understanding of what it is and why it matters, either within the field of communication or within it’s constituent disciplines.

I think anyone who seriously endeavors to make sense of communication theory is inevitably drawn into some sort of a project like this one. In this course and in the following, we look at almost no one who considers himself primarily a “scholar of communication,” and “communication theories” are, with few exceptions, rarely so-named by their authors. The contingent nature of such theory need not be a detriment, but it does entail both a hermeneutic and archeological process that those in other social science disciplines can largely avoid; to their own detriment, in my opinion. On the other hand, it leads to the perennial comment at many of our conferences, “That’s interesting, but it is not really ‘communication.'”

Here are some promised items for my classes. First copies of the syllabi for the communication theories class (pdf) and the systems class(pdf). I did a quick “what I am interested in” talk for the systems class, and some folks requested the slides from that (pdf). Sorry about the color and one-per-page nature of the pdf on that one. Normally I use the Adobe Distiller to convert PowerPoint slides to PDF, but I’m on the road so I am using the (otherwise excellent) PDF Online.

Both of the classes are blogging (naturally), and if you are interested in following along, please check them out in the coming weeks:

* Communication Theories Aggregator

* Systems Class Aggregator

You will see that I am experimenting with a new aggregator for my classes this year, a souped-up version of lilina. I’ll report back as to how well that works out.

Required

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air.
Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination.
Shearon Lowery & Melvin DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research
Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason

Recommended

If you do not have a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, I strongly recommend you get a copy and (re)read it.

You may also want to consider getting copies of these two communication theory textbooks, and a sociological overview, to help make sense of the relationships among the wide variety of theories we will be discussing.
Armand Mattelart & Michele Mattelart, Theories of Communication: a short introduction
Randall Collins, Four Sociological Traditions
Stephen W. Littlejohn, Theories of Human Communication

Read First

You should read the following before our first meeting,

* The Introduction, first, and second chapters from Peters.

* Wikipedia: Communication Theory

I will distribute a course syllabus during the orientation, and I look forward to meeting you then.