Alchemical Musings

This summer, Bruno Latour was our tour guide – leading the way, not out of The Cave, but beyond the entire Cave System. Along the journey I also learned about a very interesting pedagogical technique intended to take engineering students on a similar journey.

Students at Sciences-Politique and Ecole des Mines in Paris, as well as at MIT in Boston are learning to map techno-scientific controversies according to a method which embodies Actor-Network-Theory (without all of the heavy theoretical jargon).  Past projects can be found at the Mapping Controversies web site, and Bruno Latour himself explains the project and its aspirations in this video.

Many of the possibilities explored in these new media projects are related to a broader question I have been interested lately concerning the impact that technology is having on epistemology itself. How is technology and new media changing what is knowable and how we go about knowing?  I wrote an essay last Spring, The Bionic Social Scientist: Human Sciences and Emerging Ways of Knowing, which begins to explore these questions, and it is wonderful to see more examples of these ideas materializing around us.

The Mapping Controversies pedagogy involves teams of students taking on the role of statistician, investigative journalist, scientist, and webmaster, working to research and represent a controversy. They discover (and depict) that concepts themselves vary depending upon who is speaking about them, and attempt to map these relations and progressions over time.

I can imagine this technique displacing the traditional 5 ‘W’s of journalism – The venerable Who, What, When, Where, & Why needs to b upgraded to a multi-dimensional, post-modern, reality. What varies and depends upon who, where, and when, and without the kinds of research and representations that the Mapping Controversies project is pioneering, we will never adequately capture the multiplicities of whys. I don’t know if these kinds of representations are intermediate forms of research, or if one day they will be part of the final production delivered as news to readers, but it is an important question to begin to grapple with.

Right now, the Mapping Controversies sites are somewhat anti-social – they are fixed, one-way communications, but from the introductory video, they hope to change this soon. At the moment, each map is also a unique work of art.  While it is premature to confine anyone yet to the paradigmatic blinders of conformity, I also think it is imperative for us to begin to imagine and develop a visual vocabulary that we can re/use when representing these kinds of relations.

In the field of information visualization, researchers are beginning to catalog Information Design Patterns that maps like this could build upon. Of course, riffs and variations from these patterns are welcome, where significant and meaningful, but a common starting point will improve the communicativity of these maps. As these patterns solidify, the corresponding implementation patterns can grow along with these efforts, as tools like Ben Fry’s Processing Framework (recently ported from java to javascript, which is much more web friendly, and used extensively in the MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit), will begin to institutionalize the knowledge learned in constructing these maps.

And, of course, all of the code and content used to create these projects should be free and open, so the world can learn and improve on their foundations.

Filed by jonah at 5:19 pm under earth,epistemology
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This summer I was part of an amazing reading group where we slowed to a crawl and closely read Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature. When I say we read the book, I mean we literally went around the table and read the book out loud, stopping to discuss difficult passages until we were confident we understood them.

I haven’t taken to the time to read a book this closely in ages, and the experience reinforced the age old addage about finding the universe in a grain of sand. Reading a book that deals with such deep eternal themes, written by a brilliant theoretician who has himself synthesized and integrated an incredible amount of history, philosophy, and literature, was like glimpsing the entire cannon through Latour’s eyes, and well worth the effort.

In this work, Latour performs a root canal on a form of conceptual dualism that has haunted Western thought for millennium. The book revolves around a perplexing circumstance in world we have constructed for ourselves – How did we end up in a world where one set of propositions (usually known as facts) are authoritative, unassailable, and incontrovertible and another set of propositions (usually known as values) are the kinds things we are allowed to argue about?

Apart from the challenge of figuring out which of these flawed categories a particular proposition belongs to, the artificial separation between the tasks of constructing the common world and constructing the common good shuts down all possibility of discourse – before we even get a chance to try to arrive at consensus! The institutionalization of facts and values are so inextricably intertwined that it is folly to erect barriers between these two enterprises.

Latour illustrates his perspective with examples from controversies in the sciences (especially Environmentalism and Political Ecology), but it is trivial to transpose his argument to the great debates between objectivity and subjectivity in Journalism, and the ways that certain kinds of propositions (‘data’ in many conversations about technology, and ‘revelation’ in conversations about religion) are invoked as trump cards to shut down all debate. Medical “science”, especially psychiatry and brain science are horrendous perpetrators of these offenses right now, and the consequences are anything but theoretical. The Onion provides my favorite example illustrating the confusion between facts and values.

Latour’s proposed strategy for re-imagining the mexican standoff between nature/culture, science/democracy, facts/values, objectivity/subjectivity, necessity/freedom, etc is to re-tie a metaphysical Gordian knot as an epistemological one. He would like us to consider an dynamically expanding collective of players/concepts, composed of humans and non-humans (the non-humans have spokespeople, whose assertions are speech acts – qualified by the same kinds of language we use to indicate our confidence in any speech act).

Revisiting and reinterpreting Plato’s metaphor of Cave, Latour traces the West’s tendency to cleanly divide smooth facts from messy values to the flawed idea of aspiring to leave the Cave to grasp/glimpse/experience the Truth. Even if this were attainable, the sojourners would still need to return back into the cave, to mediate and relate their experience to those still trapped within. Instead of aspiring to leave the cave, we need to transcend the entire Cave system.

It isn’t completely fair to criticize a book for what it’s missing (no single book can be all things), but it would be great to expand this line of analysis in the future and elaborate on the role of mediation in the current and imagined collective. It seems pretty clear to me that for Latour, the ‘Sciences’ encompass the entire enterprise of Science, including the scientists, the funders, the corporations, the educators, and the scientific journalists. But, there is little in the book that unpacks these relations.

A broader criticism sets an argument that John Durham Peter’s advanced in Speaking into the Air, against Latour’s conception of the Collective. Peter’s argues that we often view communication as salvation, when in fact alot of discourse never leads to consensus, and there are perspectives that are mutually incommensurate and irreconcilable. I may be naive to think the Collective that Latour dreams of is a realistic aspiration, though I sure would love to live to participate in it.

I also want to explore the connections between this work and the Death of Environmentalism essay I encountered last year. I think Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ argument is a vivid and direct application of the theory Latour argues in The Politics of Nature.

Ulises Mejias’ work on Networked Proximity is another work which might be fascinating to juxtapose with the dynamically expanding collective (which, can be thought about as a network).  Ulises’ notions of the para-nodal might be crucial to consider when the collective invokes the power to take things into account.

Filed by jonah at 4:35 pm under air,epistemology,metaphysics
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A few weeks back I attended a symposium (The Focus on Locus) at the Columbia Business school on the coming tusnami of location based services. For some reason I mistakenly believed the day might include discussions and demonstrations of visualizations and mapping UIs, but it was actually more about the other end of the equation – how every device on the planet will soon be aware of its own location, and the sorts of privacy, policy, and commercial implications of this emerging reality.

Henning Schulzrinne, the chair of the CS dept kicked of the day from 1000m up by pointing out that, nowadays,  just about every device on the planet knows what time it is (non-trivial when you consider the standards, protocols, and apis that needed to be resolved for this to happen so smoothly everywhere), and reminded us that less than 10 years ago you still needed to set the time on your cell phone. Knowing the time has become completely transparent on many electronic and networked devices, and has become part of the fabric of the digital age. We search for emails, pictures, documents and more based on timestamps – they are so common it is even hard to imagine computing without them.

Extrapolate a few years out, and the dimensional quartet of space-time will be reunited once more. Everything will know where it is, and not just geo coordinates – devices will know the street block they are on, the room they occupy in relation to floor plans, etc etc. Henning is even working on the standards and protocols to facilitate this ubiquity. Once you say this out load it becomes obvious – many of the systems that we use to figure out where we are rely on knowing when you are to do so. This dates back to the solution to the Royal Academy’s Longitude X-Prize, all the way up to the triangulation used by modern GPS.

Location based services have also finally creeped out the 99% of the people who don’t seem to grok the privacy issues posed by the tracks our digital footprints leave behind. Perhaps its more visceral, immediate, and concrete, but people are buggin. In a very surreal moment, I realized that many of the privacy concerns raised at the Columbia Business School symposium were very similar to the privacy conversations happening at the hacker conference (the Last HOPE) I attended the week afterwards. (yeah yeah – the groups are both stereotypically libertarian, but would you have predicted the similarity?)

Refreshingly, some of the models and thought experiments I have been developing in relation to my End of Forgetting work held up really well throughout both conferences. The information flux model remains relatively unique, and continues to suggest alternate ways of retying the gordian knot of that is strapping us to the petabyte age.

It’s always fun attending a meeting like this and trying to maintian a critical perspective – paying attention to the omissions, the assumptions, and even the construction of the instruments (like the standards which might be used to indicate the privacy levels of data). Speak now or forever hold your place.

Filed by jonah at 8:30 pm under earth,ethics
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I’ve got a wonderful summer backlog of posts piling up, but I really want to try to keep these posts short(er) and sweet, so I’ll try to compose staccato.

My explorations into virtual worlds have taken a turn for the surreal lately, as I have made a few new close friends who have been graciously teaching me how they play. I feel like I might be coming ridiculously late to the conversation (I don’t often play video games), but my experiences have given me new pause about the raging debate over the potential influence of sex and violence in games/media on people (not just youth).

I have learned first-hand how Second Life encourages people to articulate their fantasies in intricate detail – trying on new fashions, tattoos, piercings, behaviours, and lifestyles. From a few conversations, I am also pretty sure that much of this identity-play sometimes sticks, and often crosses back over into real life.

The whole process is spookily reminiscent of the “manifesting principle,” described in magickal/mystical systems like Chaos Magick (e.g. Carol’s Liber Kaos) and even Kabballah (The Three Abrahamic Covenants and The Car Passing Trick):

1. Know what you want. Clearly and precisely understand what you want by doing the intellectual work needed to really know what you want and how much it costs (or how impossible it is.)
2. Sacrifice your(ego)self to the task. Put your heart and soul into your endeavour. Do real work in the physical world towards your goal. Care deeply about the work you are doing. Work (and pray) well beyond your normal point of giving up. Do the work and show your caring anyway, even if it seems that [God] is not listening.
3. Return your personal will to [God]. Give up, be infinitely patient, and pay attention.

The manifesting principle only works when a person has made a real sacrifice and has continued to work even while they have let go of their expectations of the outcome they desire. When a person short-circuits the full process, nothing happens. When there has been no sacrifice, there is nothing for [God] to respond to. (Stan Tenen, The Purpose of Prayer).

So, while Halo or even Grand Theft Auto might not cross some yet unknown threshold, I am mildly concerned about the World of Warcraft players. Sure, many of them are just playing, but some might be inflicting real emotional harm on other real people. Something to ponder.

I haven’t really worked this out in detail yet, but I also wonder if Geertz’s notion of “deep play” (introduced in Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cock Fight) might be useful and relevant here. The deep play he describes shares many characteristics with these mystical formulas and the magical substrate that Second Life has clearly become for some people. Something the Stanford lab is trying to systematically measure and observe, though I don’t think they have floating this particular hypothesis yet 😉

In many ways my conversations and immersion in the wonderful Play as Being project and community have helped me think about these relationships (especially ‘letting go’, the final step in manifesting), but I will save some of the direct connections for a future post.

Filed by jonah at 10:06 pm under air,ethics,fire,metaphysics,playasbeing
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Have I ever mentioned how cool these newfangled series of tubes are sometimes?

I just found out that an essay of mine was translated into Italian, which is now the second essay I have written to be translated into a language I don’t even speak. Appropriately, a major theme of the essay was the economics of peer production, and the professor I wrote it for was actually from Italy, so perhaps it resonated strongly with the Italians.

The first was translated into Greek, which is beginning to make me wonder if it might be time for a nice trip out to the Mediterranean.

If any of my friends speak Greek or Italian, I would love to hear how these translations turned out 😉

Costruire la libertà: gli sviluppatori di software libero tra lavoro e gioco (Fabricating Freedom: Free Software Developers at Work and Play)

? ?????????? ZyprexaKills: ??????? ???????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ????????????? ???????????? (The ZyprexaKills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy)

Libre Lungamente in Tensione!

Filed by jonah at 7:03 pm under aesthetics,earth
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Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired published a provocative essay last week that really caught me off-guard:

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

I have been writing lately about the effects that technology is having on epistemology, namely, what is knowable and how we go about knowing.

But, I’ve arrived at very different conclusions than Anderson. I think that our methods for gathering evidence to support a hypothesis is changing – radically – but I certainly do not think that the scientific method (or attitude or stance, as Piet Hut sometimes puts it) is obsolete. Evolving, for sure, but I hope not in the direction that Anderson claims. Intriguingly, Kevin Kelly – who originally launched Wired, wrote an essay on the future of science that I think is much more thoughtful and prescient.

A cursory examination of the comments posted on his essay make me wonder if he hasn’t floated a straw man argument, just to be provocative. But after a few conversations with friends and colleges this week, I believe there is something important and scary in his perspective.

My thinking here is greatly informed by a book I am reading this summer by Bruno Latour – The Politics of Nature. In this book, Latour struggles to reconcile the perennial tensions between nature and democracy, science and politics, facts and values, and ultimately, objectivity and subjectivity. He critiques the veneration of facts as the penultimate authority – reminding us to always consider who gathered those facts and why. His argument is far more nuanced and complex, but I really see its re-enactment in the veneration of data Anderson naively concedes.

We must acknowledge that data itself is nothing more than a mediation with reality – and we shouldn’t confuse data with reality itself.  There are many good rebuttals appearing in the comments, but none that I have read point out that Anderson’s characterization denies the politics of instrumentation and data collection – the concepts and constructs that underlie the data, never mind the importance of stories and explanations in our politics and justifications.

This understanding is basic to the psychology of perception as well as the philosophy of science – there is no observation without pre-existing concepts and constructs – the buckets of data we are collecting (and, at least for now, some data is not being collected) are being stored according to organizational schemes – schemes created by humans.

Data isn’t sacred, and its folly to regard it as such. We need our models and the explicit self-awareness that we created them within a particular historical context and theoretical paradigm.

In the wise words of my mentor/advisor, Frank Moretti:

The problem with statistical analysis in the hands of many is that they expect the statiistics to yeild the truth and this leads into the mistake “reporting their findings” in a theory-deprived context. Whenever you are dealing with the human sciences, whether the information is statistical, visual or otherwise, you still have to build a meaningful narrative that requires that you have a point of view that has either overt or covert theoretical assumptions. Without that you are in danger of reporting your views in what Marcuse calls opreational language, a language derived from the tools of discovery rather a serious point of view.

Filed by jonah at 12:50 am under epistemology,fire
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Last week I went back to ‘ol Nassau and attended the annual New Media Consortium conference, held this year at my alma mater.

The conference was very engaging, especially since I don’t think I have ever attended an event geared specifically towards the kind of work we do at CCNMTL. Typically, whether its developer, librarian, technorati, activist, or academically oriented, our work shares aspects with other attendees, but usually not a similar overarching mission. I was reminded how special our organization’s niche is – we should take pride in our projects and values. I also gained a better understanding of how privileged our situation is.

While no two university’s I have ever encountered share the same organizational structure, many now support groups whose primary mission is helping the faculty use new media & technology purposefully. I was astounded at the constraints, and corresponding resourcefulness, these groups exhibit. Most of them have a much smaller staff than ours, and very few actually develop custom software. A WordPress or Mediawiki plugin is about as complicated as many of them can attempt. And yet, they forge ahead, scraping together whatever tools they can wrap their minds around – and in the era of mashups, the possibilities are growing daily.

It is interesting to contrast this resourcefulness with corporate, and even non-profit, technical efforts I have been involved with. Many of these groups have gourmet taste in technology, and initiatives are often paralyzed until the right tools are developed. The educators show how far a healthy culture of use can go in trumping system constraints.

Overall, many groups are still working with the faculty to get beyond the allure of the media, and demand a greater educational return than “mere” excitement and motivation. Critical engagement must go beyond supplemental materials, as it is decidely difficult to follow through on the promise of a demonstrated educational value. There were many projects that clearly helped the students feel good about their learning, but it is incredibly hard to design a curriculum where these new media objects become a central component in a student’s analysis. In our work we try, and occasionally succeed, to help push the faculty to design assignments where the new media elements are an integral part of the critical analysis – where the learners deeply engage with the media, and bring these elements into play as evidence in support of an argument.

These aspirations place the bar quite high, and often require faculty to develop an radically new teaching style. Additionally, none of us learned this way, though we all seem to be convinced these new styles are superior to the ways we were taught. Consequently, there is a great deal of experimentation and research involved in educational technology. It was really great having these kinds of conversations all weekend long – sharing and exchanging perspectives with the others grappling with similar concerns.

Some of the highlights I learned about included:

• Sun’s Wonderland Virtual World – a free-software, enterprise/education-ready virtual world environment, with more of a professional emphasis than Second Life. Of Sun’s 34k employees, 50% or more work remotely or from home on any given day, so collaboration tools are very important for them. The environment supports authentication, allows for any X window to be shared w/in the world, and even has telephony bridging, so users without a client can call in.
• Emerson’s NEA funded Digital Lyceum Project where New Media scholars Eric Gordon, John Freeman, and Aubree Lawrence are investigating the orchestration of attention during a live event. Research like this could help the backchannel transition from distracting to essential – its fun to imagine being able to cite or reference the flurry of associations, chats, and google jockeying that flow by in the stream of consciousness that live events have become.
• The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus – Wow. Imagine this media studio on wheels pulling up to your school when you were a kid. Three hipster musician/media-mavens tour the country on this bus, sponsored and outfitted by the likes of Apple and Sony – they are rock stars without the responsibility of performing. Students on the bus come aboard without any specific skills, and leave with something they made that day. The bus sports two fully outfitted media workstations, instruments, and even a green room. Buses like this represent an incredible amount of potential, helping students understand they can produce as easily as consume.

I hope in the years to come the bus incorporates a few more Media Fluency lessons (think: MacArthur’s Digital Learning Initiative, John Broughton’s Pop Resources and David Buckingham’s Journal of Learning and Media) at touchstone moments (“Ah! so all media produced incorporates the producers perspective”), a few more lessons on the ethics of sharing (“Hey, how do I share my media with the world, and let others remix it?”), and offer concrete strategies for continuity after the bus pulls away (“I get it – all media is produced on magic buses”)…

Many NMC’ers have drank deeply at the fountain of Second Life kool-aid, and I glimpsed more variations on the educational potential of Virtual Worlds. I didn’t hear too many people riffing on the centrality of realistic memories the environment offers, so this is an idea I certainly need to develop further. I am immensely grateful to the Play As Being community for introducing me to these experiences in a very meaningful context.

Finally, I spent lots of time reminiscing about my undergraduate years. My colleges and I cracked secret codes, narrowly averted an attack by a giant tiger, revisited the Princeton Record Exchange (where I spent $20 and came home w/ 6 cds), and lamented the campus’ new density – a building has sprung up in almost every open space I remember.

Phew.

Filed by jonah at 12:24 am under epistemology,nmc2008,playasbeing,water
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Last week I paid tribute to Albert Hoffman at an event hosted by Reality Sandwich. I have been following the site for a while, and really enjoyed the screenings and the conversation (led by John Perry Barlow and Daniel Pinchbeck).

I was a bit startled to encounter a perspective that I hadn’t thought about for a while. There were psychedelic enthusiasts who faithfully imagined the world being a better place if we all took a little trip (slight caricature, but bear with me). After a few years working on the Icarus Project and immersed in academia I found this attitude slightly jarring. Talk about technological determinism – our salvation in the form of an external molecule?

I happen to think that a bit of psychedelic experimentation might certainly help make the world a better place, but for one thing, if society were truly tolerant of freaks and drugs, we wouldn’t need them so badly in first place. For another, psychedelics are arguably more available now than ever before, and they haven’t (yet) catalysed the transformation imagined.

But what really bugged me is how this counter-cultural rhetoric would play directly into the hands of Big Pharma. Their message for years is that happiness can be found at the bottom of a pill bottle. Try to vividly imagine what these drugs would look like in their hands – the clinical administration of extracted active ingredients, outside of the usual cultural sacred context. This wouldn’t accelerate the evolution of consciousness, just the flow of capital into Pharma’s coffers. I also found it interesting to trace the genealogy of LSD back to psychiatry.

To be completely fair, Reality Sandwich’s message isn’t so simple, but I do feel its important to imagine how these messages might be appropriated.

I’ll leave you with one of the shorts from Post Modern Times: Consciousness is the Key

Filed by jonah at 12:19 am under dangerousgifts,ethics,fire
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Well, summer vacation is finally upon me – now I only need to work fulltime.

My first year in my PhD program I found myself thinking alot about methods. Not all that surprising, given that one day I will have to defend my methods along with my ideas, but a pretty abstract space to be preoccupied with, nonetheless.

This spring I wrote a paper about all the techniques that the Social Sciences really need to be borrowing from industry and the hard sciences:

• The Bionic Social Scientist: Human Sciences and Emerging Ways of Knowing

where I basically finally cashed the promisary note I scribbled 2 years ago. While it was an effort to write, looking back I am glad this now exists, and I really do understand the argument much better than when I started writing it. This is reassuring, since I keenly aware of how difficult it is to capture people’s attention, and much of my writing will likely go unread.  (I think this peice goes well w/ the Fall’s Out of Thin Air: Metaphor, Imagination, and Design in Communications Studies).

Along the way I also created a little lesson plan around Nirvana’s Lithium & The Abilify Commercial for the Teach, Think, Play weekend workshop with David Buckingham. And, I presented the ZyprexaKills Campaign (slides, paper) in London at the Politics: Web 2.0 confernce.

Phew!

Filed by jonah at 12:06 am under earth,epistemology
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It’s been a few weeks since I first started experimenting with the Play As Being practice, and ventured into Second Life. I continue to appreciate the performative brilliance of utilizing Second Life as a means to study the nature of consciousness, being, and reality. I am starting to imagine a metaphysical syllabus that incorporates virtual world immersion as an instrument for laying bare the everyday assumptions we make about consensual reality.

While I am learning something about myself as I project my identity into my avatar (its almost impossible not to, as veteran SL’ers will attest), I am also learning more about this world, and its seductive attraction. Lots of Second Lifers believe that Second Life is just as real as Real Life (which, for mystics might just mean that both are illusory), but I lean more towards the cautious opinion that Second Life is a mirror, albeit one with a great deal of depth.

Mirrors are quite magical and wonderful (7 years of altered luck, and all that). They can be used to see far and deep — think reflecting telescopes or the michaelson-morely experiments — but they have also trapped a fair share of narcissuses in their alluring reflections. So does SL represent the vanity of vanities? Maybe not, but considering that the energy consumption of a typical SL avatar now exceeds the energy consumption of an average real world brazillian, it is important that folks consider their time in SL well spent.

One upside of my recent journeys is that I now appreciate the research going on in this area much better. Here are two pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Ed reporting on research going on at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interactions Lab:

• What Happens in a Virtual World Has a Real World Impact
  
• Digital Avatars Make the Best Teachers

The claim that a user’s avatar imprints so strongly on their psyche is much easier for me to understand after spending some time in Second Life. I would have been far more skeptical of these findings if I hadn’t experienced the power of this medium first hand.

These findings and experiences really helped me imagine the potential impact of projects like Virtual Guantanamo (which I haven’t personally visited yet). I can say, that when I stumbled across the Virtual World Trade Center I found the location distinctly eerie and spooky. Apparently I’m not alone, as the virtual storefronts on the groundfloor are vacant here too. And, as I learned recently at a symposium at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SL is an ideal environment for teaching fashion and design. While SL has its share of casinos and lap dances, places like Rieul’s Zen Garden and the Interfaith Gardens show a real diversity of interest, consistent with the proposition of SL as a mirror.

As for the core experiment, sprinkling the pixie dust of reflection and contemplation throughout my day, I continue to be impressed by how malleable my awareness can be. In Pema’s words: “repetition is a powerful thing.” Over the past few weeks I have also enjoyed poking holes in reality while at the movies and travelling to foreign countries. Ideas we have been repeating and playing with regularly in Dakini’s lovely Rieul teahouse.

Filed by jonah at 12:15 am under earth,epistemology,ethics,playasbeing,water
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