Category: culture

Unknown And No Longer Optional

Published April 28, 2009 by cgerrish

In his first address to Congress, our new President said that a college education was no longer optional. Education is a high priority and an important driver for the recovery of our economy. When we talk about a “college education,” we seem to know exactly what we’re talking about. We know about the Ivy League schools, the great technical schools, the football schools, the party schools, the medical schools, the law schools and the business schools. We need to learn to learn, and that’s what a college education seems to be good for. If adaptive behavior is the key to survival in a changing environment, then learning how to adapt would be a requirement for prospering in uncertain times.

Just we all seem to agree that everyone must have one– that it’s no longer optional, Mark C. Taylor throws the whole thing into question. I’m sure he doesn’t question that we all must have one, he simply questions what a college education is– or rather what it should be in this emerging network culture. He outlines his ideas in a piece for the NY Times. In brief, here are his six points:

Restructure the curriculum, beginning with the graduate program and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structures like a web or complex adaptive network.
Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years, each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. Possible topics might include: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting.
Transform the traditional dissertation. Do not write traditional traditional papers or graduate theses, rather develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games.
Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.
Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Tenure should be replaced with seven year contracts, which like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed.

Is our emerging network culture really still emerging? Oprah is on Twitter. The Web is already primarily social and is moving fast. The public relations and marketing industries are scrambling to transform themselves to be operational in a two-way many-to-many network grid. Our students are already networked. Imagine if our universities were not only institutions of learning, but also learning institutions– adaptive in the mode we intend our students to be.

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2-Way Asymmetric Networks: Robots Call Me All The Time, Yet I Never Call Them

Published April 26, 2009 by cgerrish

lobster_phone

There are a number of stories that have been running through my playlist recently. The theme, the question, has to do with what I call spammable identity endpoints. With the growth of dual one-way asymmetric follow networks, I wonder if we are creating new communications channels that will make the phone number and email address obsolete?

Here are the stories:

Avital Ronell’s “book” called The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, opens with a description of our relationship with the node of the Network that the telephone represents:

…And yet, you’re saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you’re its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don’t know who’s calling or what you are going to be called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. Who answers the call of the telephone, the call of duty, and accounts for the taxes it appears to impose?

Bruce Sterling may have said something resembling the following at the recent SXSW:

Connectivity will be an indicator of poverty rather than an indicator of wealth.

There’s a story about how cultural norms are solidified and passed to the next generation:

A room contains a researcher and a small stool. Hanging over the stool is a banana on a string. The researcher wears a white lab-coat and holds a fully pressurized fire-hose. An arbitrary number of monkeys is released into the room.

Sooner or later one of them will make for the stool to try and grab the banana. Yet as soon as that monkey climbs the stool and approaches his prize, the researcher lets him have it with the hose. And not only does that monkey get it, but all monkeys in the room (whether they touched the banana or not) get sprayed. After soaking them roughly for a few moments, the researcher turns off the hose.

Perhaps another monkey gets brave or hungry. When he climbs the stool and touches the banana, the researcher lets him have it. And as before, all the monkeys also get doused, whether they moved towards the banana or not. Repeat this process enough and, after the group has suffered enough soakings, the following effect should be noticed: Should any monkey make for the stool, the rest can be counted on to beat him silly before he reaches either it or the banana, sparing themselves. After awhile, the group avoids the banana even as their bellies growl.

Now say the researcher removes a monkey and brings in a new one to replace him. No big surprise, one of his first actions might be to make directly for the banana. And of course the others won’t allow this, for if he should make it they all get sprayed again. They administer a beating to the confused newcomer, until he learns not to near the stool.

Should the experiment continue, perhaps after replacing every monkey in the original generation, one can even remove the researcher. The descendants enforce the social order even though they may never been sprayed or even know about the researcher. By now no monkeys have directly experienced the hose, and in fact no white-coated danger exists, yet still their options are self-curtailed. There is no risk in the banana. Yet they avoid it, none quite certain why.

I’ve heard this story from Clay Shirky, although I can’t seem to find a reference to it (either on my book shelf or on the Network). So I’m going to make something up that Clay might have said:

Marconi invented radio as a means to enable ship-to-shore communication. The intention was to create a one-to-one communications network. It turned out that anyone with a radio listening device could hear the broadcast. In a network with only two radios, transmissions were scoped correctly as one-to-one. On a network with a broadcast radio and many radio receivers– just add some commercials selling soap, and you’ve got modern broadcast radio.

The network transmission characteristics of a technology make an imprint on our cultural practice. We all know that we couldn’t survive without the telephone and email. Going back to the telegraph and the telegram is not an option. We have a unique phone number and email address so that we can reached through the network. We make these identity endpoints findable, so that if it’s important, you can call us. The relation is two-way asymmetric — if my identity endpoint is known, it can be called. For instance, robots call me all the time, and yet I have very little desire to call robots. Although, I suppose I could.

If Twitter had a presence status indicator and full-duplex voice transmission enabled through the direct message channel, how quickly would it replace the telephone? Skype is already the largest international telecom provider in the world. Could a dual one-way asymmetric pub/sub communications network supercede the current network where robots can call me any time they are directed to do so? Or has this already happened, and are we just scrambling to put together the documentation of how it works…

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Identity in China: Square Pegs, Round Holes

Published April 21, 2009 by cgerrish

square_peg_round_hole

This morning over a cup of tea and the NY Times, I discovered a major new Identity System. On the edges we argue about user-centered identity, aggregated/fragmented identity across social networks, or the meaning of custodial identity and its role in commercial or financial transactions. Sharon LaFraniere, of the NY Times, writes about bestowing names, the written Chinese language and databases — and a new identity system for China’s 1.3 Billion citizens.

square_watermelon

By law, every Chinese citizen must carry an identity card– the legacy system is a handwritten card. The government is transitioning to a computer-readable card that will feature a color photo and an embedded microchip containing data including: home address, work history, background, ethnicity, religion and medical insurance. Within this transition we can observe what is lost as we move from the handwritten to the computer-readable.

Let’s start with some numbers:

There are roughly 55,000 written Chinese characters
China’s Public Security Bureau database is programmed to read 32,252 Chinese characters
A government linguistics official has suggested that the new standardized list will only include 8,000 characters
About 3,500 characters are in everyday use

Although China has a large population, it has very few surnames:

100 surnames cover 85% of China’s population
70,000 surnames cover 90% of the U.S.’s population

Because many people have identical surnames, it has become common to bestow an unusual given name to create a unique identity.

“Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.”

While the Chinese writing system may be one of the most difficult in which to manage data, it is also the oldest system of writing in continuous use. Since these new identity databases can’t read unusual characters, the government will be asking people to change their names to something machine readable. Given a logographic written language, a handwritten identity card could accommodate an infinite variety. Alphabetic writing systems don’t have this problem as they attempt to convey phonemes rather than morphemes.

This story surfaces a number of issues with regard to technology and identity. The first and most obvious is what personal data should be contained on a government-issued identity card– who controls that data and who has access to it. A more subtle issue is: what is possible with language (written and spoken) as humans use it, and what is possible within the subset of “language” that machines can “understand.” If your name can’t be parsed by the Government’s identity database do you exist? And further, should you change your name to suit the system? Should the landscape change its features to accomodate the limited technology of map making? And if you’re creating an Internet Identity system, should it be in English? Should it be national or global? How should it relate to writing systems, the marks we make to suggest things or states of the world?

What does the technology of identity reveal about the identity of technology?

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Names, Spaces, Name Spaces

Published April 19, 2009 by cgerrish

Language is coarse, filled with misunderstandings, hidden meanings, used by anybody for any purpose whatsoever. Language provides transit for information, misinformation, thoughts, images, vague feelings, strong emotion and indications of a vague direction. Many different signifiers can point to the same signified. And the signified is a use, a way of life, that assembles itself variously under different contexts.

Our craving for clarity gives rise to second-order languages, controlled vocabularies that attempt to rule out all ambiguity. A single signifier unequivocally bound to a single signified is an extension of Euclidean geometry to the properties of physical space.

An implication of Einstein‘s theory of general relativity is that Euclidean geometry is a good approximation to the properties of physical space only if the gravitational field is not too strong.

Unique spacial coordinates describe a single location. Names are substituted for numbers, or letters, in the Name Space. In the spheres of mathematics, logic, physics and computer programming unique objects are a requirement. To the extent that the system is without friction, noise or ambiguity, it will operate outside of time– a perfect perpetual motion machine. By definition the system must be closed, new elements would upset the delicate balance.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

120.

When I talk about language (words, sentences, etc.) I must speak the language of every day. Is this language somehow too coarse and material for what we want to say? Then how is another one to be constructed? –And how strange that we should be able to do anything at all with the one we have!

In giving explanations I already have to use language full-blown (not some sort of preparatory, provisional one); this by itself shows that I can adduce only exterior facts about language.

Yes, but then how can these explanations satisfy us? –Well, your very questions were framed in this language; they had to be expressed in this language, if there was anything to ask!

And your scruples are misunderstandings.

Your questions refer to words; so I have to talk about words.

You say: the point isn’t the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning. The money, and the cow that you can buy with it. (But contrast: money, and its use.)

121.

One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word “philosophy” there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word “orthography” among others without then being second-order.

The question of Internet Identity ends up being a tussle about binding organic and synthetic agents to a name space with the force of law. (Local law must submit to Federal law.) This intersection of human forms of life and unambiguous computing systems surfaces in the rise of social networks and the attempts of the semantic web movement to sanctify a second-order language. The most common example of this is the issue of claiming a username within the namespace of a particular service.

“You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.” — Bob Dylan

Every John Smith cannot be John Smith within a namespace. In point of fact, the user with the username John Smith need not even be called John Smith. She might be Jane Doe. The “words” or “names” in the username are not actually words, they have an orthogonal relationship to language, they only need to function within the context of a particular computer program and its data schemas.

Oprah Winfrey recently joined the Twitter network. One of her first questions to Ev Williams was about how someone else could twitter as Oprah without actually being Oprah. Oprah’s name is a brand that is protected by the force of law.

In addition, Oprah is a member of Actor’s Equity which requires that each member have a unique professional name. Archibald Leach, Betty Joan Perske, Caryn Johnson, Frances Gumm and many others invented new identities for the unique namespace/brandspace of show business.

Remember: your professional name is your identity in a complex and ever-changing industry, and you may use it for 70 years – choose wisely!

The power of a username isn’t its value as a unique identifier within a computing system, it’s the value it has within a system of signifiers in our language as we speak it– in the rough and tumble world of everyday language. The value of the username “Oprah” was established through years of hard work outside of the communications system in which it was claimed. In Oprah’s case, a path was cleared for her by system admins to claim a particular name that matched her brand. Ashton Kutcher made a different choice with his username– his brand gave a unique string of letters a special value. (Username as code name, or nickname.)

As real life becomes entwined ever more deeply with the Network, it must accomodate– as Wittgenstein would call it, language full-blown, and life full-blown. A provisional or preparatory life that places arbitrary restrictions over its full depth starts out as comedy, but quickly becomes much more serious.

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