Some notes on the importance of overlapping knowledge, the supposed democratizing effects of the Internet, the supposed decline of B2B, and the supposed conflict between teaching and research. By popular demand I've put titles on the longer notes. I'm reticent to do this because each set of notes is designed to fit together as a whole. But I guess people have lives and don't have time to read straight through to find the most relevant bits. So, okay, titles. ** I've added more useful stuff to "Networking on the Network". The most important change is a major rewrite of the section on negotiating an academic job offer: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html#section8negotiating The previous version had been dangerously unclear on the distinction between a department wanting to hire you and a university making a legally binding offer. I haven't been on a search committee in a few years, though, so I'm hoping that faculty can look at the new version and tell me if I've got it right. Have you heard any horror stories from PhD students or junior faculty members that might suggest further topics for "Networking on the Network"? If in doubt, send them along. I've already heard some killers, but I'm sure I haven't heard them all. ** Longtimers will also recall the obsessionally exhaustive bibliography of "books on the social aspects of computing, 1996-1997" that's at: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/recent-books.html Well, I've created an analogous bibliography for the years 1994-1995. It's not nearly as obsessional or as exhaustive, but I think it's useful to look at the development of what was being published when. (Lissen, George W. Bush plays solitaire; I assemble book lists. Sometimes a guy's gotta zone out.) http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/earlier.html At some point I'll merge the two. ** People often ask me to recommend books that students and citizens can use to understand the social role of information technology from a realistic perspective, freed from the hyperbole that everyone is so tired of. Here are the books I recommend: Rob Kling, ed, Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, second edition, Academic Press, 1996. Though it is a few years old, this volume is infinitely preferable to the transient hype. It's a diverse collection of articles on the full range of social issues around computing: privacy, online interaction, safety, ethics, the design process, organizational changes, politics, educational applications, and so on. I used it as the primary text in a required course on social issues for computer science undergraduates a few years ago, and it worked perfectly well. Fifteen years ago such a course would have been a disaster; the students would have figured, "instead of taking this course we could be learning more technical stuff, therefore it is a waste of time", and mass resistance would have broken out. But now I think that people are more accustomed to the idea that computing is a social activity. The cultural impact of the Internet gets much of the credit for this. I did have a mass exodus of people who were terrified of the writing requirement, and I also had one of those guys who give fraternities a bad name. But mostly I was able to sell the material. I said, "if you want your technical work to get used then you need to understand the context in which people will be using it, or refusing to use it". That seemed to do it. William Dutton, Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, Oxford University Press, 1999. This is a synthesis of a large-scale research program in the UK, the Programme on Information and Communications Technologies (PICT), from the mid-1990s. Even though Bill is from USC, they brought him in as director during the later stages of the project, and he put the whole thing together. I probably tend to underestimate this book because I know all the research on which it is based -- including Bill's own work over many years. But if I step back and look at it through the eyes of someone who is not acquainted with serious, methodologically sound empirical investigation of the reality of computing, as opposed to the fairy tales of the enthusiasts, I can see what an incredible gulf he is bridging. His organizing theme is "shaping access": access of people to information, of audiences to programming, of businesses to their customers, of citizens to the government, and so on. Because computing is so malleable, we cannot know a priori what "impact" it will have. Instead, we have to look at the "ecology of games" -- people politicking and strategizing in various economic, political, and cultural venues -- through which the practicalities of access get shaped in the real world. Despite its academic grounding, the book is written in an accessible way, and it would make a good textbook for serious students at any level, not to mention regular citizens who are looking to vent the hyperbole from their heads. ** The importance of overlapping knowledge. On one level, an institution is a set of roles and a set of rules. That's the *formal* level on which we all get defined as doctors, patients, teachers, students, defendants, jurors, coaches, players, and audience members in our various dealings with one another. On another level, an institution is a body of knowledge. The people who occupy those roles and confront those rules develop a body of intuition, of lore, of savoir-faire, of settled practice, of maxims and how-to's. That's the *substantive* level on which the collective learning of society gets applied to practical outcomes for better or worse. Here are some examples of the substantive level: * The detailed manufacturing knowledge that is accumulated by the engineers in an industry (a phenomenon first identified by Thorstein Veblen and recently expanded upon in the work that Alfred Chandler summarizes in the passages I quoted the other day) * The highly evolved strategies for networking and career-building in the research community that I have outlined in "Networking on the Network". * The skills and customs for collective problem-solving that build up in the political culture of a democracy (see, for example, Harry Eckstein, Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway, Princeton University Press, 1966). The two sides of an institution, formal and substantive, presuppose one another and play off against one another. Both are part of a big story about human activities get coordinated, and how people manage to be so brilliant collectively even though they are so finite in isolation. Both sides of the institutional story can become invisible, taken for granted, because the framework of institutions that organizes a society does not often change. So it is easy to adopt simplistic or even destructive attitudes toward institutions. Proponents of technology-driven change look at the gathered wisdom of institutions and see pure reactionary resistance to the imperatives of progress. Conservatives, at least when it benefits them to do so, claim that only a blind reverence for tradition will enable the accumulated wisdom of institutions to persist and society to avoid falling into chaos. That is what conservatism means. Realists occupy the rational middle ground between these two extremes. They realize that the accumulated knowledge of institutions is both valuable and a hindrance. No institution is perfectly just or perfectly efficient, and much of the settled practice of any institution consists of hidden interests and routinized log-rolling. We cannot go around randomly blowing up institutions, because we do not know how to fabricate new institutions to replace them on short order. Yet we cannot simply let them be, since the world can most assuredly be better than it is now. Because institutions exist largely to solve informational problems, these things matter especially in our current times of radical change in information technology. Yet we know so little about them that a great intellectual vacuum is opening up. The fall of communism and the spread of democracy created intellectual interest in the nature of institutions. Economic analysis of industry structure is proving a valuable tool in parsing the unexpectedly complicated patterns of change that new information technologies are bringing to markets. And historical studies have shown how institutional take form through disputes between social groups. Even so, we still know almost nothing about institutions and the ways they change. So in reading the literature on the subject, I try to articulate useful intuitions about institutions -- intuitive ways of explaining how and why the social world works -- so that we can have a chance of moving toward fairer, healthier, and more efficient institutions as the possibilities afforded by new information technologies begin to unfold. I want to sketch one of these intuitions, which I'll summarize using two concepts: anamorphism and overlap. First, anamorphism. You've seen Saul Steinberg's cartoon, "View of the World from 9th Avenue", that was on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976. It's a map of the world, but with lots more detail in Manhattan than anywhere else. The further away you get from 9th Avenue, the less detail, until the American West is just a cactus and Japan is just a blob on the horizon. In mathematical terms Steinberg's map is anamorphic: relationships of geographic locality are more or less preserved -- stuff that's close together in the real world is close together on the map -- but the map is grossly deformed, as in a fun-house mirror, so that some parts are much bigger than they ought to be, and other parts are much smaller. The joke was on New Yorkers, but everyone knows that the lesson applies to them as well. We all know our corner of the world the best, and none of us knows the world as a whole. Parochial or not, it's simply impossible to know the whole world. We're all locals. But our knowledge is not limited to our immediate vicinity. Every one of us has some vicarious knowledge of many other parts of the world: through our past experiences, our friends and family, people we meet socially, the newspaper, novels, movies, etc. The knowledge is often sketchy and distorted, but it doesn't vanish at the end of the block. It's an anamorphic map of the geographic world and of the various social, professional, and cultural worlds, including the ones we inhabit and the ones we don't. Next, overlap. You have an anamorphic map of the world, and so do I. Your map is centered in your home and neighborhood, your office and profession, your social network, your reading material, your resume, and so on. My map is centered differently. When I travel, I often ask myself, "What's it like for this, here, to be the center of one's world?" I chat with the elderly couple who run the dim sum shop on the side street in Chinatown, and that's the center of their world. They know the regulars in the shop, the politics of small business people in Chinatown, their relatives, the news from China, their kids at college, and so on. Of course, they also know about US national politics and the Internet and everything else, just like anyone else does, just like I do. It's just that the proportions are different. Their map is deformed; so is mine. They have a 9th-Avenue knowledge of things that are like the lone cactus in the West for me, like how on earth people manage to stay married for fifty years. I probably know a few things really well that they've spent maybe ten seconds thinking about. The point is, our maps overlap. We know many things in common. We *can* chat because we have a reservoir of references that we can make in common. We don't live in different worlds -- we live in the same world. We just have different anamorphic maps of it. Anamorphism is a measure of our finitude and difference. Overlap is a measure of our universality and commonality. The relations between our maps are not random, but neither are they especially predictable. And institutions depend on anamorphism and overlap. Take the case of the institutions of research. The idea of research is that everyone is supposed to do something new all the time. It's very hard to do anything new. And it's hard to run an institution in which everyone is always doing something new, because the institution won't work unless it can evaluate the work, allocate resources, and create the right incentives. The need to credit all relevant work motivates everyone to develop an extensive map of the literature. The sheer magnitude of the literature ensures that these maps will be anamorphic, since nobody could ever read it all. The need to differentiate one's work from everyone else's means that everyone's anamorphic map will be centered in a different place than everyone else's. But the maps will overlap a great deal. At least, everybody's map will overlap a great deal with many other people's maps. Junior scholars typically have very focused maps; senior scholars typically have more extensive maps. The senior scholars, being older, have had more time to map things, but one's role also shifts with seniority, so that one is called on to set agendas and evaluate work that encompasses larger territories beyond one's immediate speciality. Anamorphism and overlap work together to keep the institutions of research reasonably healthy. Peer review means that everyone's work is evaluated, and feedback on it is generated, by people whose maps overlap enough to evaluate it responsibly, but whose maps are nonetheless different enough that fresh perspectives are brought to bear. So I might write about the role of information technology in higher education, but I make no claim to be a scholar of higher education -- I've skimmed the journals in that area but am not deeply immersed in them. A journal editor might therefore send my paper to be reviewed by someone whose anamorphic map of the literature has its dead center in the literature on higher education, someone for whom the literature on higher education is three-quarters of the world, just as Manhattan is three-quarters of the world for the people Saul Steinberg had in mind. That limitations of that person's world view might prevent them from fully understanding my argument, but I can correct for that. In fact their misunderstanding will be useful, because it will help me to unearth the unarticulated assumption that was leading his or her interpretation of my argument onto a different path from the one I had in mind. When this system is working right, the institution can bring far more knowledge to bear on a question than any individual could possibly bring alone. The institutions of the research community provide an ordered diversity, diversity within a common framework, so that everyone gets the benefit of feedback from people who really know the subjects that their work touches upon. Anamorphism and feedback are also important in social and political terms. Two hundred years ago, people like Herder invented the idea that people's ways of life are sorted into discrete cultures: German culture, for example, or French, or Chinese. The historical context of Herder's thought makes clear why this idea made sense: Germany at that time was politically fragmented, and the idea of a unified German culture was part of the political movement that led to a politically unified German nation. Other nationalist movements found the idea of a unified and discrete culture appealing as well, and in fact Herder's ideas were anticipated in large part by an author in another fragmented not-yet-nation, Giambattista Vico, who wrote in Naples. This idea of discrete cultures, however, has had unfortunate consequences. If each culture is an organic whole that expresses its totality in every word and artifact, then overlap does not exist. Herder did believe that it was possible to understand another culture, but only by getting the entire culture into one's head through extensive scholarly study. It must be said that there is some reason for skepticism about the possibility of communication between cultures, given the capacity of "civilizations" to stereotype one another to such an extent that they don't even *care* to communicate. But the empirical fact is that cultures are not discrete. German and Dutch cultures emphasize their differences so strenuously precisely because they have so much in common. There really are common themes among the Meditteranean cultures -- overlapping elements that different subsets of the cultures share. And the same is true for almost any geographically adjacent cultures around the world. Cultures, in other words, are really overlapping bundles of traits rather than organic wholes. Cultures do work to integrate their various traits, but in practice they can exist in contradiction and tension as much as in organic unity. A culture is better understood as a repertoire of themes, some of which are consistent with one another and others of which are not. A culture's repertoire is always available to its members, who appropriate whatever themes might be useful for them for a given purpose, and the various themes get coded and recoded through various movements and disputes over the course of centuries. Once we understand all of this, the idea that cultures are hermetically sealed from one another becomes less defensible. Identity politics starts from this assumption of separate spheres, so that every culture must be seen to have its own variety of science and politics and everything else. Fortunately, the intellectual leaders of identity politics -- if not the routinized identity movements themselves -- have gotten beyond this simplistic view of cultures and identities are separate worlds. By acknowledging both anamorphism and overlap, it turns out, one can be oneself, value others, and presuppose an extensive basis for communication and cooperation, without fearing the return of a false conception of universality -- the impossible but easily imagined idea of a perfect and complete map. Anamorphism and overlap also help institutions to regulate themselves. The legal system, for example, only works if every law lies at a point of overlap of many different parties, each with different kinds of interests. Most especially, each law should be monitored by diverse interests who care mainly that the law be rational -- for example that it be applied consistently and logically, without indefensible double standards. Why is this abstract principle of rationality in anybody's interest? Because they have other laws that they care about on a more substantive level, and they want those laws to get applied in the way they want. They need legal protection to do business, for example, and they need to make sure that the legal system keeps working to that end. Now, of course, the legal system doesn't always work in this way. Every law tends create coherent classes of people whom it affects asymmetrically, and those people will always try to pull against that particular law on a substantive level in one direction or another. The dangers of corruption are great, if only intellectual corruption, and that's why it's important to have a large variety of third parties whose interest in the issue is more abstract. People who are affected by the law will always form large coalitions, for example to make it easier or harder to file class action lawsuits, but the system will only work correctly to the extent that even more players retain an abstract interest in the outcome of the coalitions' struggle remain rational, regardless of how it ends up substantively. The same principle applies to every other institution. John Commons points out that every institution has its own rules and its own informal mechanisms for enforcing them, whatever formal mechanisms it might also have. Institutions socialize people into their values, or at least into their language and practices. And so long as most participants in the institution retain a stake in its functioning, they will act on their socialization to spontaneously enforce the institution's rules. Again, this is not some kind of law of nature, and we must inquire in every case to determine whether and how well it works. If everyone is engaged in log-rolling then a new layer of rules will emerge to regulate the processes by which people allow one another to bend the official, public rules. Institutions that depend on representation, delegation, and agency tend to suffer from this sort of institutionalized log-rolling, but the result may well be more efficient, and certainly more orderly and thus predictable, than any known alternative. The point is that an institution's functioning is dependent on the concerted interests of many parties whose standpoints on a given issue differ but overlap. The principles of anamorphism and overlap are hardly sufficient to explain every aspect of institutions and their functioning. But they do suggest ways to assess institutions and perhaps to improve them. Does the institution socialize people to cultivate an anamorphic map of the relevant world? What are those maps like? How focused or broad are they, and how does the degree of focus or breadth depend on an individual's location? How different are individuals' maps? Are they randomly or systematically different? What incentives do people have to map the world? Are there points of low overlap in the world, such as borders between nations whose citizens know little about one another? What kinds of mapping tools do the people have? What roles do informal contacts play in extending people's maps, and then what roles do formal mechanisms like journalism play? Are there adequate mechanisms for drawing a diversity of people with overlapping maps into the deliberations over a given issue? How do people even find out when issues arise that fall in the middle ranges of their maps -- not 9th Avenue, perhaps, but not the single cactus in the West either? Do overlaps in people's maps serve as the basis of systematic methods for building social networks? If a citizen wants to know about topic X, how easily can s/he find another citizen with an overlapping map (so as to facilitate communication) that also includes X (so as to facilitate learning)? Is it worth trying to make the maps explicit? That way people could search for one another by their pattern of knowledge. Do professions encourage their members to develop maps that are too similar and not developed enough outside a parochical boundary? How diverse are people's maps? Does everyone effectively choose from a dozen stereotyped maps, or does every individual end up with a unique map as a result of their unique interests and life experience? What kinds of overlap is it useful for everybody's map to have? Is intellectual diversity a scarce and dwindling resource, or do modern knowledge institutions actually promote increased diversity despite the leveling effects of global media and telecommunications? What consequences do these phenomena have for the design of digital libraries? How can we conceptualize anamorphism and overlap without falling into the twin extremes of pretending that everybody knows everything or that everybody knows nothing? How can people design their own maps, aside from choosing the electives they take in school? Can anamorphic maps be rationally designed? Is it possible to work backward from life and career goals to the design and maintenance of such maps? Is it possible to develop social networks that provide access to people whose maps are complementary in the most useful ways? Can the rationalization of anamorphic maps become an instrument of social control? Is it good enough to have diversity in a standardized framework, as for example in the case of the research community, or is it also important for different people's knowledge to be organized in quite different institutional ways? Good questions. Okay. Having sketched my intuition about the substantive analysis of institutions, let's stop and appreciate my new phrase: "the principles of anamorphism and overlap". Doesn't that sound impressive? A long time ago I figured out that I could think better if I made up words and phrases to name every intuition that started taking form in my notebook. The very act of putting a name on an idea causes it to take form. It causes me to notice examples of it, because you can only see things that you have names for. It encourages me to multiply questions about it, and compare it and contrast it to other ideas, and so on. So I teach this to students. In fieldwork classes for example, I send them out to interview, encourage them to explain what they found interesting, and then we put a name on it. Sometimes I compel them to make up their own name. They find this odd, because in their experience names are just there, the taken-for-granted gift of authorities, and not something that anyone can make up for themselves. You too, I say, have a right to put names on things. In fact that's one of the main ways that we make ourselves useful as scholars: if we observe something and name it, then other people can observe it too. ** A company called Whispercode is reported to be marketing a device that detects an inaudible identifying sound embedded in the audio tracks of television and radio commercials. The idea is to measure audiences more reliably by issuing the devices to a sample of people who promise to keep them in their pockets. I think this is a technology with real promise. Let's embed an inaudible identifying sound in the roar given off by a leaf blower. Then we can design a device that detects the identifier and automatically collects a fee from the leaf blower's owner. This would be a free-market way of internalizing the negative externality associated with noisy leaf-blowers, which are a pure case of cost-shifting (from quiet, expensive brooms to noisy, cheap blowers). We could do the same thing with car alarms, except that we'd create an incentive to bump into a car just to collect the fee. Still, I'd like to see car alarms equipped with a device to report to a central board every time they go off. Then the local newspaper could print a monthly top-100 of the cars whose alarms have sounded most often. Another, lower-tech approach would be to make it illegal for one's car alarm to go off for no reason. Any cop who sees your car alarm go off for no reason could just write you a ticket. I think a lot of tickets would get written. I swear that I see a car alarm go off for no reason -- not just hear it, but literally see a car that happens to be in my visual field suddenly start screeching for no reason, or no remotely good reason -- at least once a week. Pure cost-shifting. ** A Y2K prediction: The perfection of civil society For another installment in my series of predictions for the year 2000, consider the following passage from Raymond Williams, The Year 2000 (Pantheon, 1983): ... one of the major benefits of the new technologies could be a significant improvement in the practicability of every kind of voluntary association: the fibres of civil society as distinct from both the market and the state. Today, though the dominant lines of communication and organisation are powerfully and centrally funded and controlled, millions of people, continually and irrepressibly, set up their own organisations, either for purposes ignored or neglected by the established forms, or as means of positive support and influence. Typically they now work under serious difficulties, of resources and especially of distance. An association can have a hundred thousand members and yet not more than a few hundred, and often only one or two, in any particular place. The consequent problems of travel and funding are then devotedly addressed, but for many purposes the new interactive technologies could transform them by providing regular facilities for consultation and decision from people's own homes, workplaces and communities. In any formal organisations, such as parties and trade unions, such facilities would greatly assist the improvement of democratic communication and decisions. But there would also be a great strengthening of every kind of voluntary and informal association, from special interests and charities to alternative and oppositional political and cultural groups. This could be, in practice, the achievement of full social and cultural powers by civil society, as opposed to their appropriation or marginalisation by the corporations and by the state (page 150). What I find most striking about this passage is how up-to-date it seems as a prediction. It's still very much the way that democratically- minded people think, for example with the emphasis on civil society, decentralized lateral connections, the overcoming of distance, and so on. I've written such things myself. But is it true? By its nature it's a hard thing to test: it anticipates a multitude of diverse and mundane effects rather than anything visible and easy-to-measure. Decisions are to be improved, associations to be transformed. Fine, but then there's that last bit: ... the achievement of full social and cultural powers by civil society, as opposed to their appropriation or marginalisation by the corporations and by the state. Williams was a socialist, and this (and not any sort of Soviet-style centralization) is what socialism meant to him. Indeed that's what it means to most socialists. And to the extent that he was predicting the rise of socialism, he was of course wildly mistaken. But then we was not really predicting anything. He didn't believe in predictions, and certainly not in predicted futures that were supposed to be driven by technology. He held that technology is shaped by society, that no technology is inevitable, and that people who believe that particular technologies are inevitable are (consciously or not) covering up the interests that such technologies would serve. So even though he was assessing the prospects for a happy 2000, he understood that the 2000 we'd eventually get would be a matter of choice. Would his preferred scenario for 2000 even be practical? Probably not; at least it depends what you mean by "full social and cultural powers". The institutions of high technology (of which the computer industry is just one corner) are so sprawlingly complicated that it's hard to imagine them being organized on a voluntary basis. Yet it's striking to see the broad and deep global consensus that a strengthened civil society is the way of the future. He got that right. ** On the supposed democratizing effects of the Internet. Having refuted a common argument of the Internet skeptics last time, it is time once again to refute an argument of Internet enthusiasts. You've heard it -- it goes like this: The Internet is intrinsically supportive of democracy because it empowers individuals, and in particular because it equalizes power between individuals and institutions (business, government, etc). Online discussion groups are a realm where the individual reigns, and anyone can start their own online publication on exactly the terms as Time Warner or the Feds. How can you deny this when your own mailing list is a prime example of it? This argument is utterly false. To say that the Internet "empowers individuals" by ambiguous. On a weak reading it means that the Internet is a tool that individuals can use. That's true, but it's also true of a thousand other tools. So it's only a useful assertion on the strong reading, where it means that it empowers individuals relative to business, government, or whatever. And an even stronger version of this is what the second clause argues: that the Internet literally equalizes power between individuals and famous institutions. I find these latter assertions absurd. What is the evidence for them? It's an argument from formal equality: Time Warner can send a message to a newsgroup and so can I; the Feds can publish their views on the Web and so can I. But the problem with this argument is obvious: Time Warner has 10,000 times the audience that I do, and the Feds have the resources to maintain 10,000 times as many Web pages as I do. Lots of things are like this. I have just as much right as George Bush or Al Gore to run for president, except that they have 10,000 times as much money as I do. It will be argued that the Internet does amplify the powers of the average individual. The Internet has indisputably made it easier to run a newsletter with 5000 subscribers than it used to be. But the Internet enthusiast's argument needs something much larger: not simply that individuals' powers have grown in absolute terms, but that they have also grown relative to the powers of corporations, governments, and other earthly powers. But this is far from clear. After all, the Internet empowers those institutions as well: it helps them with their communications, their bookkeeping, their logistics, their surveillance of their employees, and so on. It provides them with new channels for their propaganda, helps them move quickly in emergencies, and enables them to coordinate their people over wide areas. So the individual side and the institutional side are both changing, and you can't tell who's winning until you measure them both. I find it particularly striking that the argument I paraphrased is often used to support two logically opposite conclusions. Some people argue that the individual-empowering effects of the Internet promote democracy, but other people argue that they *suppress* democracy by preventing governments (democratic or otherwise) from intervening in markets. Both of these arguments cannot be right. In fact I think that they are both seriously false. (One might also argue that the Internet will bring a new balance between democracy and markets, but that would be a diffferent argument, if almost as implausible a one.) So what's wrong with the Internet-brings-democracy argument? Well, to start with, it locates the problem of democracy in the wrong place. Democracy requires individual rights, but it also requires people to form larger units than themselves, including both informal networks and formal associations. The Internet does have democratic potential, precisely by facilitating these sorts of connection among people. But, and this is the second problem with the argument, the Internet has other potentials as well. The Internet facilitates all sorts of societal forces, and we have no way to add up the vectors and determine a single inevitable resultant. And this leads us to the third problem with the argument, that the Internet doesn't "do" anything. People either use the Internet to do things, or they don't, and what people choose to do will be shaped by culture, consciousness, historical memory, markets, and the material conditions of life. ** The Internet, you may recall, is supposed to cause the "death of distance". Is it true? Well, one test would be real estate prices in San Francisco. People in the computer industry are affluent and good with technology; their work can be done anywhere; they should be the very first to disperse to Caribbean islands and teleconference. If distance is dying then we should see real estate prices in San Francisco fall to a reasonable level as computer people scatter to the places they'd really like to live. On the other hand, if we see San Francisco real estate prices go completely insane then the death of distance is much exaggerated. Someone might want to have a look. ** Hype futures. The word in the media right now is that business-to-business electronic commerce, aka B2B, having once been fashionable, is o-u-t out. This is frustrating. It seems to me that media discourse about emerging information technologies has largely been captured by the small world of short-term stock speculators -- a category that includes a lot of venture capitalists. The question for these people is not whether a given category of technology is fundamentally important, or whether it will have an important long-term impact, or even whether the technology works on a basic level, but simply whether stock in the current crop of companies claiming to do business in that particular "space" can be sold to a greater fool for a large profit two quarters from now. These people don't deal in technology; they deal in hype futures. So 60-day B2B hype futures are down 3/16ths on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this morning, and that's all they need to know. I think it's fine, or at least inevitable, that people like this exist. What bothers me is when their way of thinking suffuses the public and media discourse of an important industry. The nature of B2B commerce is a matter of real consequence. All citizens should know about the moral and legal issues that new B2B intermediaries create, for example when they have been shaped by a small number of large purchasers at the expense of a large number of small suppliers. And all business people and many types of ordinary workers should know about the structural consequences of such technologies for their industry. But these are not 60-day issues. It's in the nature of B2B commerce that it will not happen right away. It's a long, hard slog. It requires large organizations to fundamentally change the way they do business. It requires incompatible businesses practices to be made interoperable with one another. It requires major security issues to be worked out. It requires a whole layer of policies, strategies, contracts, lawsuits, and other gnarly social stuff to be fought through. And it's impossible for anyone to get the big picture of these major, major issues based on the endless torrent of overhyped, distorted "announcements" and the speculative frenzies of the stock-flippers. We may think that the Internet stock bubble popped in April, but the basic ways of thinking and talking that made the stock bubble possible are still very much with us. ** Research, teaching, and the professionalization of everything. The most common complaint against the research university is that the faculty value research over teaching. This complaint has been current for almost a hundred years, and nearly everyone is familiar with it. Larry Cuban's "How Scholars Trumped Teachers: Change Without Reform in University Curriculum, Teaching, and Research, 1890-1990" (Teachers College Press, 1999) is a history of the medical school and history department at Stanford that is organized around the standard complaint and takes it for granted. He sketches the endless cycle of attempts to reform the university, each of which produces superficial and largely symbolic results without ever changing the institution at a deep level. He remarks in particular on the long-term trend toward graduate-school research values trickling down into undergraduate classes. I want to dispute the premise: I think that the main problem with the research university, and in fact with nearly all education, is that research values do not shape education enough, and that true reform would mean making all education much more like research. Once upon a time, education meant cramming a lot of knowledge in your head. This assumption about education has two completely different sources: the oral culture of the middle ages, for which all learning started with memorization of canonical texts, and the industrial or vocational model, for which all learning consists in the acquisition of concrete, practical, modular, economically valuable job skills. The hidden assumption in each case is that one leaves an educational institution as a fully educated person. This may once have been true, and it may still be true in a way. But many people have observed that the world has changed. The big change is often formulated in terms of "lifelong learning": the notion of education does not change, but it is asserted that knowledge keeps multiplying, and that people therefore need to keep cramming more knowledge (aka "human capital") into their heads for the rest of their lives. Yet the "lifelong learning" picture is not enough either. A better place to start is with the professions. Professions are not just guilds that have quasi-official monopolies on the practice of certain kinds of knowledge. They are also social machines for the production and transfer of new knowledge. Professionals advance by pioneering new practices, and professional conferences provide forums in which these new practices can be presented. A professional's public persona consists largely of the ideas that s/he is thought to have pioneered, and credit for new ideas is assigned both formally and informally through peer review (and not, say, by some outside authority). The professions are analogous to research communities in this way, and the analogies run deep. Research communities have more formalized methods of publishing their work. But the basic method of peer review is the same. It's a good method, flexible and adaptable. It creates incentives to spread new knowledge around, and it also discourages redundancy and encourages novelty by assigning credit to innovators. (Being a human process, of course, it does none of this perfectly. In fact it's a mess. But it works extremely well on the whole.) The Internet makes it possible to spread the professional model to more kinds of work. Take any occupational category at all and imagine making it into a profession, or take any existing profession and imagine making it more fully into a profession by supporting the publication of ideas. This transformation may take nonobvious forms. Think, for example, of the management consulting firms that require consultants to contribute case reports to a firm-wide knowledge base, for example using Lotus Notes. (Never mind Notes' less-than-graceful transition to the Internet.) From the firms' point of view, the appeal of this practice is obvious: it makes each consultant smarter through the aggregation of the other consultants' smarts. The first consulting firms that tried it, however, found that incentive systems had to be changed. Consultants live to be promoted, and if they can get promoted by hoarding knowledge (thereby differentiating themselves from their fellow consultants) then they won't want to contribute to any knowledge bases. Having had this pointed out to them (by Wanda Orlikowski's celebrated paper on the subject), the consulting firms make contributions to the knowledge base one of the criteria for advancement. When this is done right, consultants will strive to formulate their contributions in the most useful way. For all its utility for consulting firms, this scheme differs from a profession in that the knowledge is all proprietary. It's not like a IEEE conference, where the knowledge is all displayed to the public. But it's at least one example of an occupation becoming more like a profession through the adoption of mechanisms similar to those of the research community. A similar model could be applied in many other contexts. Imagine all of the people in the world who operate a particular kind of machine. Then imagine a digital library in which they can accumulate what they know. If they don't want to write a paper then they can record a bit of video. (Xerox PARC has done things like this.) Each "publication" would be obligated to point at all of the previous publications that cover similar topics, and new publications would only be entered into the library if they pass peer review. Everyone would develop a vita that lists their publications, and formal and informal incentives would reward long vitas. Now, labor unions have a long tradition of resisting this sort of thing. Like the consultants, they have a point: if your skill is the source of your unique value to the company, you don't want some knowledge vacuum cleaner to come in and suck that unique skill out of you. After all, what's to stop them from sucking out your knowledge, transferring it to someone making $2 a day in Mexico, and sending you home? The answer is that professionalization has to be more than just alienating your knowledge. Professionals need a degree of autonomy, a promotion path, a culture of their own, a degree of symbolic respect from others, and much else. Indeed, for all these reasons corporations regard professionals as being hard to manage. Corporations demand loyalty, but professionals' first loyalty is often to the profession. After all, it's the profession that reviews their work, and it's through professional networks that new and better jobs are likely to be found. On the other hand, professions help corporations by doing a lot of quality-control that the corporation itself may be unable to do. That's one reason why corporations often allow their research people to publish in the open literature. (Another reason is that otherwise the research people would leave.) It's an eternal tension, but if professions didn't serve at least some corporate purposes then they would have disappeared a long time ago. They may even be disappearing now, as more and more industries realize economies of scale and move toward monopolies. Medical care is an example, and medicine is a good example of what unionists somewhat hyperbolically call the proletarianization of the professions (see, for example, Charles Derber, ed, Professionals as Workers: Mental Labor in Advanced Capitalism, Boston: Hall, 1982). The point, then, is that the Internet can be one part of a broad trend toward the professionalization of many occupations. Many occupations cannot afford conferences or the cumbersome writing of research papers, but the Internet makes these mechanisms less necessary. Professions can now multiply, including many thousands of microprofessions whose members might be dispersed around the world. Such a development, it seems to me, would have profound consequences for education. School mostly teaches people how to be in school, and so school should be organized in ways that are analogous to the ways of the post-school world. In a professionalizing world, it follows that school should be modeled on the professions. Instead of writing term papers that only a professor will read, students should be publishing their work on the Internet in peer-reviewed student journals. Professors would probably be included among the peers, as would students in later years of school. Students would learn a structured framework for reviewing their peers' work, and reviews would be graded. Each course would have a single conceptual framework for all of the students' projects, just so teachers could achieve economies of scale in teaching a whole class of students at once, but then each project would apply that framework to a different case. This model could be applied in a simple and gentle form as far down as the third grade, and if it were introduced at early stages then it could be amplified in later grades. (Anne Gilliland-Swetland and Yasmin Kafai in my school did something like this with kids putting their field biology projects in archives.) By the time college rolled around, every student would be accustomed to having a public voice, to having their work judged (and misjudged) by others in a public space, to choosing topics that fit with their interests and skills, to relating their topics from those of others before them, and so on. These would be invaluable meta-skills that any student could then take into any professionalized job. Indeed, students who are accustomed to this model would create a huge force toward the professionalization of whatever jobs they went into. They would take for granted that they are creators of knowledge, not passive recipients and mechanical applicators of knowledge. They would take for granted that they were part of a knowledge community, not isolated individuals who are graded by an arbitrary authority. And they would take for granted that they had significant autonomy to frame their own topics in ways that served their careers. Of course they would also have to deal with bosses and customers, but they would internalize the tension and balance between getting the job done and contributing to knowledge. The world would be a better place. None of this will happen simply. Educational institutions will have to change. Professional communities will have to be established on every level, and this will include creating the infrastructure -- ten thousand digital libraries, each geared to the needs of a particular subject matter and level of learning. But because the institutional mechanisms within all of these communities will be so similar, it stands to reason that the task will get much easier once the first hundred communities have gotten established. For the educational institutions, the biggest challenge will be managing these new matrix connections. No longer will each class proceed in relative isolation from counterpart classes in other schools. Instead, instructors and schools will form alliances according to their way of teaching the material. More quantitatively oriented schools might form one online professional community, where more qualitatively oriented schools might form another. This is how it works with the research world, which is self-organizing largely because anybody is welcome to start a journal if they can find enough people to write for it and read it. Starting a journal is such a good career move that (in my experience) new journals are started whenever they can be. Likewise, starting a new professional community of peer-reviewed publication will be a good professional move for a teacher in the new order. Teachers will finally have a career path of their own, as they apply this same model to their own work, as well as supporting their professionalized students. Teaching will become more like research, and as peer review of teaching activities becomes widespread, teaching will start being valued as much as research. The standard complaint against the research university will have been addressed, but in precisely the opposite way from what's usually envisioned. ** In case we haven't beaten to death the question of Steve Ballmer's audacious claim that nobody has ever called Microsoft untrustworthy, one loyal reader faxed me a couple of pages from Stephen Segaller's "Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet" (TV Books, 1998). Recounting a disastrous joint venture that 3Com entered into with Microsoft under Bob Metcalfe, Segaller says (among other things): Metcalfe resigned from 3Com, after eleven years in which the company had grown from one employee to two thousand, from zero to $400 million a year in sales. As it turned out, that was just the rehearsal: the growth show was yet to come. But it left Metcalfe with a deep dissatisfaction with how Microsoft does business: "When I complained to Microsoft, the guy involved, whom I will not name, said 'Your mistake was, you trusted us'." (page 255) Bob, as you probably know, is not exactly an antitrust hawk. ** Some URL's. UXN Spam Combat http://combat.uxn.com/ Bombs Missed Kosovo Targets http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_879000/879560.stm Making Sense of the Wireless Internet http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Column/Archive/0,194,5,00.html SIAA brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the Microsoft appeal http://www.siia.net/sharedcontent/govt/issues/compete/amicus8-15-00.pdf Human ID Chip Implant Prototype Unveiling http://slashdot.org/articles/00/08/14/0041232.shtml Agency Could Be Coming for Your Domain Name http://www.news.com/Perspectives/Column/0,176,474,00.html Toysrus.com Drops Tracking Service Amid Pressure http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2520471.html police violence in Philadelphia http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/08/04/protest/ http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/08/14/police/ http://XRayNet.editthispage.com/PhillyArrests full text of judge's ruling against Napster http://news.cnet.com/News/Pages/Special/Napster/napster_patel.html British Library Junks 80,000 Books http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,353004,00.html News and Information for Monster-Hedge Victims in the UK http://freespace.virgin.net/clare.h/index.htm Design Education 2000 Conference http://design.curtin.edu.au/DesEd2000/ Truth Be Told http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1112-2000Aug9.html Richard Ling's ethnographic studies of cell phone use http://www.telenor.no/fou/prosjekter/Fremtidens_Brukere/publikasjoner.html Relate-Create-Donate: An Educational Strategy http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/relate_create_donate/ end