THE TRIANGLE IS THE BINARY OPPOSITION OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Why is it that scholars are suddenly so drawn to the triangular graphic model, as though three-ness eliminates all of the shortcomings of binary logics?  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t intend to be (wholly) snarky here, as I find that all my own best thoughts about conceptualizations and categorizations seem to come in threes.  But it seems to me a very different thing to say, on the one hand, ‘here are three possible ways of thinking about this phenomenon,’ or even ‘here are three aspects of this phenomenon,’ than it is, on the other hand, to draw a triangle.  Threeness suggests a kind of openness, a sense of more potential possibilities.  A picture of threeness, though, does not; a triangle is closed, contained, complete. (2.45 pm)

FIELD?  DISCIPLINE?

Steve Jones, in his keynote address, asks a series of questions about Internet Studies that have long been asked about other such interdisciplinary programs or modes of scholarship:  Is Internet/Media/Cultural/Etc. Studies a field?  Is it a discipline?  Does it matter which, and if so, what’s the difference?

There are, as Steve notes, significant material, institutional implications for such questions:  disciplines are housed in departments, and as such get budget and tenure lines; fields, when they are acknowledged institutionally, are housed in programs, and as such are the poor stepchild of academia, with minimal budgets and only the rarest of tenure lines.  There’s a certain political expediency, in this regard, in the seemingly inexorable movement toward disciplinarity; develop a canon and a curriculum, indicate your rules and borders, and you too might be graced with resources that enable not just survival, but growth.

However, Steve points out that there’s a significant downside to such institutionalization, to the disintering (dis-inter-ing, that is) of the interdiscplinary:  the existence of a discipline allows those working in other disciplines to “offload responsibilities” for considering the object in question.  Thus (to grab wildly for one example), once there is a Media Studies department, the English department can tell the student interested in questions that touch on media other than print, or print’s own mediations, “We don’t study that here; go talk to them.” While fields remain interdisciplinary, the disciplines cannot wholly shirk their responsibilities for them.  (4.40 pm)

MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED

The following are the notes I took in Pierre Lévy’s keynote address, “The Collective Intelligence Ontology.” There is little to no commentary here, other than the suggestion that there’s something off-puttingly and simultaneously comprehensive and reductive about the model as briefly sketched out.  Here’s hoping someone else (Liz?  Jason?) posts a more analytical response to it—most of this is transcriptions/descriptions of slides, and a record of me gazing open-mouthed at them:

• Cyberspace and the Future of Culture
• In the knowledge society, cyberspace is becoming more and more:  a memory repository, a communication medium, an enabler for transactions, a support for Collective Intelligence
• In the future, an increasing part of cultural functions [in the broadest sense, the anthropological sense] will use cyberspace or will be represented in cyberspace
• Techno-economic and Cultural Trends
• In the coming decades, bandwidth, storage capacity, computational power and general interconnection will increase at lower costs
• In any case, these basic technologic and economic trends will:  transform our cultures (in which way?) [as human cultures were transformed by writing, by the printing press, etc.; transformation not simply in technology but in values]; aim at a global civilization (but which one?)
• The Road to Collective Intelligence
• Our challenge:  the expansion of cyberspace’s cultural meaning
• How can we face this challenge in a responsible way?
• By inventing collectively a civilization oriented towards:  intercultural dialogue; augmentation of our personal and collective cognitive functions (leading to human development)
• By increasing the amount of communities that will practice, study, and improve a tradition of Collective Intelligence
• The Collective Intelligence Ontology (CIO) is a scientific model to help us in this matter
• Ontologies
• A local ontology is a network of concepts mapping a semantic zone
• A universal ontology is a network of concepts mapping, or translating, local ontologies
• Universal ontologies are useful to deal collectively with common issues
• The Collective Intelligence Ontology is a universal ontology, structured like an open, hypertextual, fractal, peer to peer (P2P) network of concepts [CIO as wiki?]
• Human Development
• One of the most important common issues is human development
• Some well-known measurable criteria of human development are (in alphabetical order):  cultural heritages (transmission of); democracy; health and well-being of a population; human rights; economic prosperity; education; innovation; peace and security; scientific research (fecundity and social benefits of)
• Semantic Web and Human Development
• Reminder:  in the semantic web, the data will be addressed by their meaning and usage
• The CIO is the conceptual architecture of an observatory of human development in the semantic web
• Except for personal information, digital data can be coded and processed to represent, synthetically and analytically, ecosystemic dynamics of human cultures
• The understanding provided by a CI-oriented semantic web will help the development of human communities
• Universal Semantic Functions
• Many centuries of research on meaning teach us that meaning emerges from the association of three semantic functions
• The function thing:  it produces the referent of the sign, what the sign designates (the res of the scholastics, C.S. Peirce’s object)
• The function sign:  it produces the signifier, a significant phenomenal image (the vox of the scholastics, the foundation of the sign for C.S. Peirce)
• The function being:  it joins a sign and a thing in a cognitive act (the signified of the linguistics, the conceptus of the scholastics, the interpreter of C.S. Peirce)
• [using such “semantic primitives” as the basis for a universal language, for mapping a semantic space; using the link as an operator]
• The Universal Link
• Recursive definition:  a link is a semantic function connecting one link (the sender) to another link (the receiver) through a channel
• 9 Anthropologic Archetypes of the CIO
• [series of ideograms] being –> thing = world; sign –> thing = time; thing –> thing = space; being –> sign = society; sign –> sign = thought; thing –> sign = truth; being –> being = feeling; sign –> being = message; thing –> being = body
• Iconic Version of the 9 Anthropological Archetypes
• 9 of the 81 combinations of the Anthropological Archetypes
• 9 Semiotic Operations Archetypes of the CIO
• to make the world with signs, we name; to make time with signs, we mark; etc.
• 9 Technical Functions Archetypes
• to make the world with things, we need tools; to make time with things, we need containers; etc.
• 9 Social Roles Archetypes
• to make the world with being, we need judges; to make time with being we need scribes; to make space with being, we need guards; etc.
  
  combinations of the above
• Skills Archetypes of the CIO
• complex chart: rhetoric/dialectics/grammar; cultivation of semiotic realities/cultivation of human realities/cultivation of technical realities
• combinations of the above
• General structure of the CIO
• Real = signs (document networks), beings (people networks), things (physical networks); Virtual = knowledge (representations networks), will (intentions networks), power (skills networks) [all interconnected and interacting]
• But also a Collective Intelligence Epistemology
• Formal Intelligence (semiotic operations; representations); Emotional Intelligence (social roles; intentions); Practical Intelligence (technical functions; know how)
• And a Collective Intelligence Pragmatics
• messages (semiotic operations), people (social roles), equipments (technical functions); research traditions (representations), institutions (intentions), professions (know-how)
• Collective Intelligence Semantic Web Flowchart
• CIO 36 Classes of Links, first as matrix, and then mapped onto semantic web flowchart
• General Principles Leading to a Strong CI
• The strength of the six matrixes depends on the structure and activities of their networks:  connectivity, activation frequency of the links, stability and other factors
• Because of their interdependence, the strength of the six matrixes should be dynamically balanced
• Conclusion:  Toward a Collective Intelligence Consciousness
• Collective Intelligence Consciousness:  The semantic web of tomorrow will mirror mankind’s Collective Intelligence
• Questions:  What about disparities of access to the network?  What about ambiguity?

The conference has been fabulous so far, but I think the highlight for me, personally, has been reconnecting with old colleagues (David Silver, Tara McPherson, and Michele White from the NEH seminar a few years back) and getting a few faces to put with the names of folks I’m coming to consider new colleagues.  Had a drink and a great conversation with Liz yesterday evening, and then dinner with Jason.  There’s always a little frisson in making those first IRL contacts after a purely electronic crossing, but my meeting-up with George this summer broke the ice a bit.  It’s also nice to be, if briefly, in a group among whom this blogging thing is taken a bit seriously. 

On to the next session.

ON THE QUANTITATIVE VS. THE QUALITATIVE

This reveals my deep humanities-oriented bias, but I must confess that quantitative studies leave me at a complete loss.  I do admire anyone who has the patience for the counting-work of quantitative discourse analysis, but I’m never sure what I should take from it.  Okay, so 60 percent of the weblogs you looked at that focused primarily on personal content were written by women, while 85 percent of weblogs that served as news or link filters were written by men.  But what does that tell me?  Or more:  what does that tell me that isn’t either reductive or truistic?  I crave interpretation, analysis, reading.

Or, as Liz asked, what are the implications of a project that begins with the intent of seeking the “average” blogger, when that average (if it indeed exists anywhere) only tells us something useful about the center, and nothing whatsoever about the majority that exists outside it? (5.07 pm)

***

ON THE HEGEMONY OF MODERNIST DESIGN

Gary Thompson, in his paper “Visual Factors in Constructing Authenticity in Weblogs”, presented his students’ reponses to the visual aspects of a series of blogs, ranging from the A-list to the randomly personal.  Interestingly, his conclusions suggest that, despite his students’ apparent craving for anarchic design, they nonetheless privilege what Thompson refers to as the “modernist” school of design (lots of white real estate, low-key color usage, Times New Roman or sans-serif fonts—this begins to sound a bit familiar) when deciding which blogs they “like,” when “liking” takes into consideration some aspect of seriousness.  One of the questioners used the adjective “corporate” to describe this style.  Is the preference for the clean style a sign of our complicity within the dominant ideology, our incorporation? (5.23 pm)

What follows is the first set of what I hope to be a decently full set of entries on my experiences here at the conference.  A program note:  because of some of the restrictions in wireless access here, my plan at the moment is to post once or twice each day, though I’m blogging throughout the day; I’ll attempt to time-stamp each sub-entry to indicate the sequence of their writing.

***

PING

After two long flights (which I’ll only describe by presenting one small detail:  Houston to Toronto on an Embraer Regional Jet, which seems to me to defeat the whole purpose of that R in ERJ), I arrived in Toronto late last night.  Alas, I’m still pretty clearly on west-coast time, so I was wide-awake until 3 am, and dragging myself out of bed at 7.45 was painful.  But:  up, shower, breakfast, conference.

I’m very pleased to have caught the tail end of Alex Halavais’s “Broadening the Blog I” panel, in particular because of a suggestion made by Matthew Rothenberg near the end of his paper “Weblogs and the Semantic Web”:  what if traditional scholars were to adopt from webloggers the technologies of TrackBack pings, such that scholarly conversations could be traced forward, and not simply backward?  Right now, scholarly modes of reference—the footnote, the bibliography—allow for an archaeology of scholarly exchanges, tracking them backward to their influences and origins, but there is no currently available way to follow such exchanges forward.  What if databases such as the MLA Bibliography could be adapted to such technologies—such that footnotes of new articles are mined for their references, and those references set to “ping” the previous references that appear in the database?

More soon.  (9.45 am)

***

ON THE EVANESCENCE OF BLOGGING

Taso Lagos, in a paper entitled “Parallel Society:  Weblogs, Micromedia, and the Fragmentation of the Public Sphere” (during the “Broadening the Blog II” panel), pointed to the rise and fall of interest in the Greek video-gaming ban as evidence of the different mechanisms by which the “parallel society” of blogging functions:  bloggers find modes of political protest that evade traditional channels, but issues too often die without ever fully developing.

This reminded me of Liz’s post from some weeks back on the speed with which posts roll off the front page and into the archives, often too quickly for conversations to develop to anything like fruition.* I imagine that the “recent posts” module might be one method of sustaining focus on particular issues, but how effective is that, really?  Another method might be that I’ve seen ogged pursue throughout the consideration of the Plame affair, raising an issue and returning to it enough times for the multiplicity of its issues to develop.  The drawback to this mode is its reliance on the link to mainstream media news or other bloggerly interest:  such an issue can really only stay in focus in the blog as long as it stays in focus elsewhere.

Another possibility might be a form of serialized posting:  raising a topic, opening comments, and responding to comments in future posts, or else releasing a topic into the blog in increments.  The latter option feels a bit disingenuous to me, and the former threatens to close discussion down rather than open it up.  I’m trying to brainstorm other modes, though, of sustaining such discourse over longer periods of time.  Given my own surprise on rediscovering an 11-month-old post on our new Governor, I have to wonder if the nature of the blog is forgetting.

Of course, this begs yet another issue:  Is an onanistic mode of selflinking necessary to any attempt to overcome such forgetting?

*Of course, one of the ironies of this link is precisely that I haven’t forgotten; as one of Liz’s commenters suggests, “the interaction over a post might be short-lived, but I think a good post lingers.” (12.04 pm)

I’m headed to Toronto this afternoon, and will be there through Sunday.  As befits the conference, I’m traveling fully wired (wireless-equipped laptop, iPod, PDA-cum-cellphone, noise-cancelling ear buds), so I’m hoping to update from there.

Of course, the last two times I’ve had such hopes, no blogging has come of it.  We’ll see…

This week, in The Literary Machine, we’re reading Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, which has led me to think a bit about the course’s subtitle, “Writing in the Human/Computer Interface.” Originally, I imagined that interface functioning differently in the different types of texts we read—some traditional novels that contain representations of computers (in which case the novel and its representations become the interface), some more properly cybernetic fictions that appropriate systems principles to literary ends (in which systems theory becomes a sort of interface), some electronic fictions that use the computer itself as a mode of representation (in which the interface becomes, well, the interface).  So as I built the syllabus, I thought a lot about the varying ways that “interface” in my subtitle might be defined, and about the varying kinds of “writing” that might be done with respect to that interface.

But I didn’t think very much about my choice of preposition—“in.” Re-reading Ullman has, more than any other text we’ve read thus far this semester, highlighted for me the question of “in-ness” w/r/t the interface.  Crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries between computers and readers, between programming and the literary, between “end users” and code, Ullman has a very different relationship to the interface than do the other writers and theorists we’ve studied.  She is the means of translation from human purpose to machine commands; she is our means of understanding a technoverse that many of us can never inhabit.  Despite her rhetorical insistence on moving “close to” (and, by implication, away from) the machine, if an interface is something one can be “in,” Ullman is truly in it, rather than existing to one side or the other of it; one might even argue that she in fact is that interface.

This begs, for me, a question that Noah, my summer research assistant, raised as we were planning the course, and as he argued for Ullman’s inclusion on the syllabus:  where are the other such memoirs of technology?  If there is something about the first-person memoir of the programming life that allows the writer/programmer to find her way in, what other texts might similarly be imagined to inhabit the interface?

As I was doing a bit of weeding this weekend, I stumbled across this entry in the archives, which made me stop and stare a bit:

Have just come from completing civic duty, which is increasingly difficult to imagine has any beneficial effect in the world, given the awful lesser-of-two-evils [note:  Bill Simon link no longer functional] choice before us here today.  Thank goodness for the phone calls this weekend from my favorite president advising me in the casting of this vote.

The most important race on the ballot, however, is not this year’s gubernatorial election, but that of 2006, the primary for which is being held today.  Proposition 49—aimed at creating after-school programs for “at-risk” kids (good), but funded in a loaves-and-fishes style, in which no new taxes are raised and no existing programs are cut (puzzling at best)—is the brainchild of this candidate, who everyone openly acknowledges is testing the waters for a gubernatorial run.

And I thought the Gipper was frightening.

What optimism I felt a mere eleven months ago, assuming that there were years between us and the ascendance of the Governator.

I’d really begun to feel a bit left out:  all the cool kids were busily discussing their comment spam problems and solutions thereto, while I remained, with one pathetic exception, completely unhit.

I’m thus bizarrely happy to report that in the last 24 hours, I’ve been hit six times by Lolita, who is desperate to tell me that I have a Nice Site!

Given the plethora of her compliments, and the utter failure of her attempts to link to a pretty hardcore pr0n site, I’m doing a little editing, but just leaving them be.  A record, if you will, of my entry into the hip crowd.

Of course, if things get more plethoric, or if they come with more successful linkage, they’ll probably get deleted.

[UPDATE, 10.11.03; 8:32 am:  Got hit seven more times by Lolita overnight, with more objectionable content.  Comments have been deleted and IP banned.  We’ll see...]

[UPDATE2, 10.12.03; 10:56 am:  Sixteen more today, with slight IP variations.  This is getting tiresome.  Looking forward to Monday...]

I’ve been watching various blogs of folks preparing for their trips to Toronto for next week’s AoIR.  I’m headed there, myself, though sadly not giving a paper; at the time the CFP went out, I was committed to an ASA panel (ASA being, of course, the same weekend), but then, as I fully expected to happen, given my rotten luck, the panel was rejected by the ASA, and I found myself conference-less.  Happily, I was able to offer myself to the AoIR conference organizers as a roving panel chair.  I have no earthly idea what panel(s) I’ll be moderating, though, as they’ve never let me know anything beyond accepting my services.

I will hope to meet up with some of you there—I’ll be the one wandering around with the beatific smile, experiencing the too-rare joy of soaking up a conference without having to perform.