This comment also got me thinking because it reminded me of an interaction I had at Media in Transition 6, the first major conference I attended as a presenter.  The year’s theme was “storage and transmission,” and there were a lot of well-established scholars from a variety of fields talking about social media in terms of archives and memory practices.  I remember one discussion where people were talking about how exciting it was see the widespread emergence of Facebook photo albums, arguing that youth who share photos on Facebook were engaging in the 21st century equivalent of scrapbooking – a once-common cultural practice which had been in serious decline.  I raised my hand and made a comment I’m not sure was fully grasped: that as one of the youngest people in the room, my friends and I understood photo sharing not a form of archiving but a mode of communication.  In other words, I take a photo of the MIT Media Lab and share it on Facebook primarily to tell my friends that I’m in Boston at a conference.  Sure, there is archival value to this kind of activity, but that is an added benefit which we occasionally utilize – and always after the fact.  We don’t take a picture to remember an event and then later remember that event.  We take a picture to communicate an event, later remembering a strange hybrid of the event itself and all the interactions we had about the event.  This is especially the case with something like Facebook’s timeline: instead of carefully assembling scrapbooks ourselves, we have delegated these memory practices to Facebook’s algorithms.

Returning to instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes, I admit that as a twentysomething techie-hipster in the Bay Area, I use not just Twitter, but instagram, Tumblr, and a variety of other social media platforms.  I also enjoy pumpkin spice lattes, perhaps because they are delicious, but also because I really do take in all those little things that tell me that summer is ending and autumn will soon begin.  We don’t have that much seasonal variation in the Bay Area, and coffee is a big deal here as it is everywhere – it is the world’s most popular drug.  All this to say that the first advertisement for pumpkin spice lattes plastered on the side of a Starbucks is something I notice.  And so I take photos of them, which I share with my friends and strangers.  Some of them are in the Bay Area and have the same seasonal cues I do, while some are in completely different parts of the world, where frozen water falls from the sky and other crazy things like that.  Together, we engage not so much in an act of collective sensemaking, but the sharing of a common experience: thanks to this and a hundred other little reminders, we know that winter is coming.

I don’t do it because I think I’m contributing to some grand archive of humanity’s historical record.  Not even close.  In fact, if that is how I thought about most of my social media practices, I would be so anxious about choosing what to post and when that I wouldn’t make use of it at all.  I know this because there was a time when I did think of my social media usage in such a way, and that is exactly what happened.  Today, I am self-conscious enough to realize that there are people who would harshly judge me for the fact that I do come to know and understand the changing of the seasons – such a timeless and universal force of ‘nature’ that humanity is always subjected to – in part through a multi-national corporation’s advertising campaign.  So, fearing context collapse, I don’t publish those same kinds of photos and have those same kinds of interactions in the same place as I publish my academic musings.

Yet the important thing to realize is that in posting these instagram photos of pumpkin spice lattes, I am likely contributing to some grand archive of humanity’s historical record – or at least there are people who think I am, which is probably even more important for this argument.  In fact, there are uncountably many digital artifacts on the Internet documenting the excitement leading up to everything from the McRib coming back to a new season of Mad Men premiering.  These are the kinds of interactions which are being recorded and increasingly preserved at a startling rate, compared to what kinds of materials we have typically chosen to preserve.  If we as a society preserve them not like members of previous generations individually preserved letters and memorabilia, but instead stored these interactions in massively-indexed digital archives, they will likely be an irresistible resource for future generations of historically-minded humanists and social scientists.  Perhaps this is where the tension lies: it could be that many people don’t want the records we leave for posterity to be filled with what is certainly not a representative sample of our collective cultural experience.  I somewhat agree with this sentiment, because I know that the people who post the most on these sites are probably some of the least representative of humanity.

However, I must argue that if a future historian (or a contemporary social scientist or humanist) wants to seriously delve into what it is like for a certain segment of the population to be human and experience the world in 2012, they have to understand that they ought to be looking a lot of nearly-identical photos of Starbucks products.  Not because pumpkin spice lattes themselves are such a culturally important phenomenon which reveal so much about the human condition – that’s completely the wrong way of looking at this.  Rather, the activity of sharing nostalgia-filtered instagram photos of the first pumpkin spice latte of the year is one way in which some members of a globalized, corporate consumer culture collectively experience the changing of the seasons.  If you’re not a part of a social group that engages in these kinds of practices, then you probably see the stray instagram photo that someone publishes to their Twitter stream as, well, something to be ridiculed.  You also may think that someone who has let a multi-million dollar corporate advertising campaign overcode their experience of nature is also independently deserving of ridicule, which I also disagree with, but that’s another issue entirely.

On a side note, this ‘photography as documentation versus experience’ issue may also be why instagram, with all its filters and frames, gets so much hate. If you’re a photographic realist and understand photo sharing as a way of documenting the present world for an other who is not present in time and/or space, then those silly filters and frames seriously invalidate a core assumption behind such a practice.  However, if you instead understand photo sharing as a mode of communication in which we seek to not so much objectively document the external world for others as subjectively express our experience with others, then filters and frames are probably one of the most innovative ‘features’ added to the social activity that is photography since the caption.

This is also where I disagree with the critiques of photography from theorists like Barthes and Sontag, or more accurately, I think their critiques are only specific to the kinds of photo sharing practices which were prevalent in their time.  A photojournalist who waits for days to take an unrepresentative snapshot of a war zone is doing a completely different kind of ‘manipulation’ than someone who adds a washed-out filter to a smartphone photo of an empty street so that it more accurately conveys the dreariness they feel.  Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that instagram filters are also so prevalent because they enforce an aesthetic field in which almost any photo – even those blurry, overexposed shots quickly taken in poor lighting with crappy smartphone cameras – can be made to look “good.”  But that only strengthens my point: “serious” photographers who see instagram as a platform for collectively engaging in a centuries-old craft in which the world is captured onto a fixed medium don’t get that it is actually a platform for collectively engaging in a much older craft: conversation and storytelling.  In fact, I see these critiques as essentially the same ones Plato had of writing and rhetoric: How dare you make it easier for people to competently relate their experiences in a way that has meaning to themselves and the people around them!?!

Those who study youth and social networking practices should already know that this entire issue is one of context collapse, but it is a more expanded case than the standard media narrative about college students posting wild photos that their parents or potential employers can see.  The issue is usually framed as stemming from the need to use the same platform to interact with multiple, overlapping, simultaneously-existing social worlds that hold different values about what is acceptable behavior and what is not.  However, I think that both of these cases also arise from a much less-discussed disagreement regarding the way in which participation in social networking sites is understood: When I share a photo of a party I attend, am I objectively documenting an event that happened to me, recording what took place so that my social network – including those people who I later friend on Facebook – can go through my profile and see how I’ve always been a cool party-goer?  Or am I sharing the photo to the people I currently interact with on Facebook, communicating that I was just at a fun party not as something that will stand on its own for all time, but instead something to serve as the basis for a conversation?  Either way, I will have to deal with the standard context collapse issues about how I should act in a social space where people from different social worlds are watching me, but this distinction is something more than that.

This issue about the profile as a performance of the self versus the profile as a by-product of interactions seems to be my main frustration with something like Facebook’s now-mandatory Timeline feature.  Tensions over the rollout of Timeline, which aggregates your entire past on Facebook in an easy-to-read summary of your life, seem to be part of a larger trend that seeks to conflate these two understandings of what it means to engage in social activity online.  And as a side note, it is interesting that Timeline conflates this distinction with code, as opposed to cultural critics who conflate this with discourse.

Anyways, after a terrible context collapse incident as a freshman in college, I like to think that I’ve always been a savvy Facebook user, self-censoring when I’m interacting in a space that could in any way be public.  Still, I just spent quite a long time trying to remove as much as I could from my Timeline, not because it contains anything that I would be seriously embarrassed about, but because it doesn’t represent who I am now in any way.  The people who I was friends with in 2005 aren’t the same as the people who I’m friends with in 2012, the things that mattered to me aren’t the same, the photos of me look nothing like I do now, and so on.

Especially because there weren’t that many ways of interacting as there are now, since 2005 I have understood and used my Facebook profile as a carefully-curated representation of myself, working hard to remove those little interactions about how awesome last night was after they served their immediate communicative purposes.  However, that is getting harder and harder to do, which is why I move to other platforms – partially because their code is written in such a way that does not essentialize my interactions to form my profile, but also because the people who I communicate with share my same understanding of what it means to interact in such a space.

Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and others have been doing),” wrote Geiger, “but the ways in which bots themselves relate to the world”. Geiger believes that constructing and relating an emic account of the non-human should be the ultimate challenge for ethnography but that he’s getting an absurd amount of pushback from it.” He explains why in this fascinating account of what it means to study the culture of robots.

HF: So, what’s new, almost-Professor Geiger?

SG: I just got back from the 4S conference — the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science — which is pretty much the longstanding home for not just science studies but also Science and Technology Studies. I was in this really interesting session featuring some really cool qualitative studies of robots, including two ethnographies of robotics. One of the presenters, Zara Mirmalek, was looking at the interactions between humans and robots within a modified framework from intercultural communication and workplace studies.

I really enjoyed how she was examining robots as co-workers from different cultures, but it seems like most people in the room didn’t fully get it, thinking it was some kind of stretched metaphor. People kept giving her the same feedback that I’ve been given — isn’t there an easier way you can study the phenomena that interest you without attributing culture to robots themselves? But I saw where she was going and asked her about doing ethnographic studies of robot culture itself, instead of the culture of people who interact with robots — and it seemed like half the room gave a polite chuckle. Zara, however, told me that she loved the idea and we had a great chat afterwards about this.

HF: What do you think people are upset about?

SG: The more middle-of-the-road stances come from people who don’t personally have a strong reaction either way, but tell me that I’ll have to fight an uphill battle from angry humanists who I’ll talk about later. These people aren’t really against the idea, but they don’t really see the value added in ascribing culture to the non-humans. They tell me that there are better and more non-controversial ways of analyzing, say, distributed cognition in a heterogeneous network of humans and robots. It’s a response that I appreciate, because it would be futile to have to go through all of this work on an ethnography of robots if my analysis is otherwise identical to an ethnography of robotics. And then the most polite responses I get are people who tell me it is interesting, and then when I prod them further to ask them if they actually buy it, they tell me that they don’t *yet* think it can be done, but would like to see what I end up with.

Some of the really negative responses I get involve a visceral reaction against attributing ‘culture’ to the realm of the non-human. I understand this — anthropology is, by definition, anthropocentric: it is concerned with the human condition, as it is constituted in various localities and peoples. This is the same fight we Latourians have with sociologists about the term “agency”: there is a very deeply-rooted assumption that humans have some innate, unique qualities that distinguish us from not only mere matter but other animals as well. When someone comes along and makes a very nuanced point about how objects have agency, the most immediate and natural response is first of all anthropomorphism, which is easy to rebut.

But then comes a much more worthy ontological argument from people who really know their stuff: that when Latour ascribes agency to objects, he actually manages to do so by keeping the agency of humans and the agency of non-humans symmetrical. Against the standard, boring objection that he ascribes too many human characteristics to non-humans, what is really going on is that he accomplishes so much by taking away so many of those ‘uniquely human’ qualities from human agents. This is why Latour never goes inside of anyone’s head, why he rarely tries to give a psychological or cognitive account in the actor-networks he studies. (Read Latour’s review of “Cognition in the Wild” by Ed Hutchins for more on this, and you can see that he loves the idea that these seemingly human abilities like cognition are not pre-given but themselves an effect of a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans.)

Anyways, far from being an anthropomorphism, Latour’s ontology is flat, in which all entities have the same capacities. That is, they have the same a priori capabilities, but they are definitely not equal after socio-technical relations emerge and start operating. This all means that against the vulgar interpretations of ANT, objects don’t have intentionality or consciousness, because — and this is the really important point — neither do humans. Or, in another interpretation, perhaps humans do have intentionality or consciousness, but it makes no difference one way or another. A good actor-network theorist is able to take some existing system in which there are far too many explanations based on those uniquely human qualities and give an alternative account that relies instead on materials, technologies, infrastructures, documentation, and other modes of externalized practices. It is not to make the more futile argument that norms and consciousness and all those warm fuzzy humanisms don’t exist, but that they’re not necessary.

Anyways, the same thing happens with me in my ethnography of robots, as I’m effectively taking life out of culture. You can see why both sociologists and anthropologists object to this, albeit for slightly different reasons. Sociologists will allow, for example, some analysis of the sociality of bees, while anthropologists will reject out of hand an ethnography of bees (which like robots/robotics, is different from an ethnography of bees-with-humans). But both seem opposed to attributing sociality or culture to a fundamentally non-living set of individuals. Or even calling non-living entities ‘individuals’ in the first place. And I won’t fall into the trap of saying that robots are living and then mapping human categories onto robot phenomena (e.g. consciousness = statefulness, cognition = code), even though it might seem to make things easier in the short-term. More on that later, but for now be content that all of these things are possible without robots having some advanced AI.

Any ethnography of a non-human society would have to fight this same kind of battle that Latour fought over agency, if it didn’t wish to succumb to the very tempting but misguided prospect of simply importing and mapping existing ontological categories from sociology: e.g. norms in a robot society are found in protocols. This, by the way, would then be using ‘culture’ and indeed the entire ethnographic framework as one massively-stretched analogy, which isn’t the point. The argument is not so much that a robot society is very much ‘alive’ in the same way that human societies have, say, deviant individuals, fluid norms, fascinating rituals, internal contradictions, complicated power relations, and many more weirdly beautiful and complex aspects hidden just below the surface.

Rather, the point of anthropology is typically to locate a people who are typically strange and foreign to us, and then relate the way in which those people live, showing not only how they are different from us but also how they are the same. In doing so, we learn not only about others, but also ourselves. So in that framework, I tend to agree with the critics who say that only way to give a vitalistic account of a robot society is by projecting too many human qualities onto the non-human. What is then left is a non-vitalistic ethnography: an account of a culture devoid of life. Like with Latour and agency, once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins — and you can see why lots of people would oppose this.

HF: No friends for robot anthropology, then?

SG: I do have some allies and kindred spirits, and I keep returning to this quote from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus on music: “Of course, as Messiaen says, music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains … The question is more what is not musical in human beings, and what is already musical in nature. Moreover, what Messiaen discovered in music is the same thing ethnologists discovered in animals: human beings are hardly at an advantage, except in the means of overcoding, of making punctual systems.” Music is but one of many domains that is typically seen as inherently social and therefore uniquely human, and the anthropocentric perspective tends to reduce everything to how it functions in the human experiential frame. And on a side note, this is why I’m so excited by Ian Bogost’s upcoming book “Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s Like To Be A Thing” — the title just says it all, doesn’t it?

And before you start to think that I’m envisioning some sort of AI-based fantasy of the singularity in which robots start to replace all of us social humans — therefore locating the sociality of robot culture in its ability to stand in for humans — that’s definitely the exact opposite of where I’m going. Robots can be said to have their own culture precisely because they don’t need to copy our sociologisms in order to be social, although what they do in their own social realm may not easily map on to things we do in our social realm. This is probably what fascinates me most about this project. And it is precisely for this reason that we must absolutely resist the temptation to make cheap analogies between things that happen in robot culture and human culture, such as saying that protocols are just robot norms.

Freely-accessible or freely-licensed?

There are actually two issues here, the first being that members of these communities want access to research about themselves without having to pay the average $20-$30 an article.  While important, this also overshadows a more fundamental concern: communities like Wikipedia, Apache, Creative Commons, and OLPC were founded on the idea of providing free and open software, hardware, or educational content to the world.   The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission statement is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain.”  That is pretty clear-cut, and those of us with obligations to both our own academic community and the Wikipedia community are having more and more problems with negotiating those competing tensions.

In a sense, this is related to how the major ethical dilemma with 19th and early 20th century anthropologists wasn’t about giving ‘their natives’ a copy of their manuscripts. Rather, it was that most anthropologists were participating in systems of colonialism, which were in direct opposition to the interests of the people they studied.  Now, I am in no way arguing that the same kind of power relation exists between academics who study Wikipedians and the Wikipedian community, or that the issue open educational sources is on the same ethical level as colonialism.   As an aside, contemporary anthropologists have documented this shift from ‘studying down’ to ‘studying up’, although I would say that most academics who research open communities like Wikipedia are now ‘studying across’ — but that interesting subject is for another blog post.   But I bring it up because unlike with the Trobriand Islanders, the communities that we study are now beginning to articulate their concerns with how we perform and publish our research, and it is something that we need to listen to.

So to return to the core issue at hand: why is the Wikipedian community (and the Wikimedia Foundation) supporting research that will be copyrighted and bound up in publications which further support an intellectual property regime they clearly stand against?   And what does it mean for us as academic researchers to give back to the communities we study?   It obviously goes beyond being willing to send a copy of a PDF to an interested Wikipedian over e-mail, or even hosting a freely-accessible copy of our copyrighted PDFs on our websites (which many of us do, even when we’re not supposed to). For those of us studying Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Scratch, or a number of open content creation communities, it means releasing our research under a Creative Commons license, as this has become the standard for releasing everything other than code.

Now, the moment I say this, all the academics breathe a heavy sigh, knowing that such a request is impossible, given the current academic system in which we are entrenched. Even the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, one of the few top-tier open access journals in the social sciences, is copyrighted by the publisher. Some academic superstars like Lawrence Lessig have been able to get their books published from a university press while still being released under a CC license, but not all of us are Lawrence Lessig. Especially for graduate students and junior faculty, who are desperately trying to get their research published anywhere, when the paper finally gets accepted and that copyright assignment form comes in your inbox, the last thing you want to do is start a losing battle over CC-BY-SAing your paper. However, I do have to give a shoutout to Joseph Reagle, who spent a massive amount of effort getting MIT Press to let him publish his book on Wikipedia under a CC license (although with a number of restrictions), but it is unclear the extent to which this will continue in the future.

A partial solution: freely-licensed figures, ‘used with permission’ in copyrighted research papers

So now I finally get to the solution that this blog post was supposed to be entirely about. We academics who study open content communities have an obligation to release our research under free licenses. This does not mean that we have to release our research papers under CC-BY-SA, which is all but impossible for most of us. What it means is that we must release our findings, results, and conclusions under such licenses, and thanks to how copyright works, we can do this through the existing system. Conclusions and abstracts are easy: we just re-write them. We should actually be in the habit of re-writing our densely-worded abstracts and conclusions under a more succinct and human-readable for the communities we study anyway.

However, there is also a way to do this with figures, charts, and graphs. This idea came to me when I saw a copyrighted article in the ACM library (from the Association for Computing Machinery, where a significant amount of Wikipedia research is published) which used a photo someone else took “with permission.” This kind of thing happens regularly enough for the ACM to have a rather sane policy on it: “The author’s copyright transfer applies only to the work as a whole, and not to any embedded objects owned by third parties. An author who embeds an object, such as an art image that is copyrighted by a third party, must obtain that party’s permission to include the object, with the understanding that the entire work may be distributed as a unit in any medium.” I haven’t checked any other publication houses, but I’ve seen this kind of situation happen in so many different books and papers that it could provide a nice loophole in for most of academia.

For most research on Wikipedia, the figures, charts, and graphs are the most interesting aspects of the research, and these can be released under a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license, and then used with permission in an ACM article. The ACM’s main concern is that they need authors to assign copyright to them in order to make sure publication goes smoothly, and as long as the ‘original author’ of the image is completely fine with having the image in the work and published by the ACM, everyone is happy. I’m no lawyer, but I think this would work with releasing figures, charts, and graphs, even though the copyright policy only qualifies the legal phrase with an example of art images copyrighted by third parties. This doesn’t work as well with many forms of qualitative research, such as historical or interview-based research in which the goal is to elaborate on specific case studies. Still, figures and conceptual diagrams are also useful in those kinds of papers, and can be added to an alternative documentation of a research project, which is possibly co-extensive with but not identical to the research paper.

I’ve actually been putting my charts and graphs up on Wikimedia Commons for quite some time (you can check them all out on my user gallery), even before I realized that copyright was even an issue.   These figures are present in my published papers, many of which are copyrighted by the ACM.  Thankfully, it turns out that this is actually compatible copyright-wise, but this is only solid because I uploaded them to Commons before assigning copyright to the ACM.  It is less clear if someone can retroactively release such images.

But that issue aside, my graphs and charts can live in both worlds, serving members of both communities.  For my quantitative research, these graphs contain my core findings about the rise of bots and assisted editing tools, for example. I have yet to document my previous research projects in a way that would be helpful to others.  More on that in the section below, but I think that even just uploading figures to Commons is a good start.  And it is incredibly painless, especially given that uploading to Commons is a lot easier now than it has been in the past.

Research documentation on Meta-Wiki

Documentation of research projects could take place quite nicely in a new Research: namespace that some great people at the Wikimedia Foundation have provided to document planed, current, and past research projects on Meta-Wiki, the wiki that is used to coordinate many tasks which are common to all language versions of Wikipedia, as well as projects like Wikisource or Wiktonary. You can see a very rough example of one of these that I am working on with as part of my summer research  fellowship with the Wikimedia Foundation: an incomplete but still interesting study of new users that fellow-Fellow Jonathan Morgan and I are doing.

The documentation page is not written like an academic article, although it does give Wikipedians and researchers alike something that is arguably more important. It gives information necessary to replicate the study, for example, how we sampled for new users and what coding schema we used to track new user participation in community spaces. It also contains a few sentences about the motivation of the study, and a few sentences about each of the results. And critically, it contains the graphs which clearly indicate that since 2004, fewer users are participating in community spaces in their first thirty days of joining the project.  If I wanted to write this up into an academic article (which I do plan to), I can do so in such a way that is both suitable for the ACM or another academic publisher, while keeping all the existing content on the documentation page freely-licensed.

Now, to be on the safe side, it may be wise to release these graphs under a CC-BY license instead of a CC-BY-SA one, because the Share Alike requirement might require some other researcher to release an entire academic paper under a CC-BY-SA license if they use one of my CC-BY-SA figures.   However, I do not think this is the case, because as I am the original copyright holder, I can choose to give permission to using images in my own academic papers.   This is a common misconception with Share Alike and CC licenses in general — while I can never revoke my license once I make it, I am not bound by those terms in my own work, and can release the image under as many free and non-free licenses as I choose.   For example, if it is entirely my own image that I license with CC-BY-SA, I do not have to release every work that builds on it under CC-BY-SA, just as I can license the work for commercial use even if I choose a CC license that prohibits commercial use.

Research isn’t a paper

In all, I think that many of the seemingly-intractable problems stem from the false assumption that research projects are entirely encapsulated in a series of papers, and so the demand to ‘freely license your research’ is heard as ‘freely license your papers’.  However, academics already think of research projects as these long processes which spawn multiple papers, and so there is no reason why a research project could not also spawn a freely-licensed documentation space which does not prohibit the publishing of research papers.  Certainly there are many aspects of research papers which would not be included, and there is a risk that these documentation spaces would be second-class reports which are always incomplete compared to the research paper.  Though it is a bit patronizing to universally assume that community members don’t want that dense theoretical analysis of how distributed cognition flows in the actor-network, I think that a facts, figures, and abstracts version would suffice for most.

Given the current academic systems in which we are currently entrenched, I think that this is a good short-term solution, especially for graduate students and other junior scholars who do not have the political capital to change the way in which existing publication regimes operate.  And who knows, perhaps by creating alternative, freely-licensed spaces for documenting research, these publications will recognize the need to make research, though not necessarily research papers, freely accessible and open to all.

While I was watching the film, I initially had to stop myself from being disappointed with the film for not being a proper academic book on the rise of the world’s most popular font.  The film, which is extraordinarily well-made, seems to present itself as two things.   First — and it does this so amazingly that you’ll see the world differently — it gives us a glimpse into the sheer pervasiveness of Helvetica, which is done by breaking up the segments of the documentary with clips of the font used in incredibly diverse situations.  Second, the meat of the film is a story of the font in modern, post-modern, and contemporary Western culture, which goes from the historical moment in modernist design in which it first emerged in the ’50s, its creation and instant explosion in the ’60s and early ’70s, the post-modern reactions against it in the late ’70s and ’80s, its rebirth as a standard computer font in the ’90s, and then to the present day.

It does this entirely through interviews with typographers and graphic designers, which is main the problem I had with it: the stories about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Helvetica are quite mystical, even bordering on the mythic.  There are serious holes in the factual record, especially with regards to the incredible, unexplainable rise of the font’s popularity.  The story told in Helvetica is largely a timeline of conquests, taking on an air of inevitability that pervades most narratives of technology.  In one of my favorite segments, a young designer ruminates about what it must have been like to be a young corporate imaging consultant at an ambitious design firm in the 1960′s.  He imagines himself as a client meeting in which he places the classic 1950′s corporate letterhead of “The United Industrial Widget Corporation” — awash in all its royal imagery, intricate logos, and scripted lettering — next to a single sheet of paper that says, in Helvetica, “WidgeCo.”  That sentiment perfectly captures the belief expressed by many of the interviewees: that Helvetica was the most perfect font produced at the most opportune time, the ultimate final expression of modernist aesthetics, unleashed on an unsuspecting world that was itching to shrug off the lingering Victorian era but didn’t even know it.  Once introduced, Helvetica spread like wildfire, because when placed next to everything else, there was simply no comparison.

It is a story like this that sounds warning alarms in my head, because these kinds of explanations are given for everything — especially technology — and actually explain nothing.  Almost every interviewee says Helvetica was simply the perfect font at the perfect time, and nothing can be done to ‘improve’ it further; so to progress in typography, designers had to first undermine the cultural-aesthetic space Helvetica came to dominate and define.  Even its harshest critics admire how terribly modern, how ruthlessly efficient, and how perfectly emblematic  of corporatism it is.  Because of this, the film fails to be a history of Helvetica, which is why I initially thought I had to just appreciate the film for taking the effort and entertaining me.   As I kept thinking about the film’s missed potential and how patently mystical the rise of Helvetica was portrayed, I pulled out a couple classic accounts of myths as genres to see how many qualities of myth this prosaic narrative masquerading as explanatory history actually fell back on.    Never-ending battle between eternal opposing forces of order (modernism) and chaos (post-modernism)?  Check.  Primordial time before our world was settled?  Check.   Told by elders and leaders?  Obviously, the film is nothing but this.  Major characters played by non-humans (be they Gods, spirits, geographies, technologies, or so on), who progress through humans playing archetypal, genericized minor characters?  Double check, the humans involved in the creation of the font appear as sterile Swiss stereotypes, then are forgotten as the major actors become the massive graphic design firms and then major corporations who first adopt the font.  And same with major players in the anti-Helvetica movements, who present themselves in cultural stereotypes and then minimize their own roles as they tell of their own conquests.

But then I realized that critiquing what I thought was a historical argument revealed Helvetica as something much more impressive: an anthropological window into the design community, and how they see the world’s most popular typeface.  In looking through articles about myths, I pulled out one of Malinkowski’s articles on “Myth in Primitive Psychology” and was surprised how well it applies to the story that Helvetica tells.  In this article, he does not put forth a set of standard qualities of myths, but instead talks about the role of myth in both ‘primitive’ and contemporary societies.  What he most famously does is critique the etiological (or explanatory) conception of myths as exaggerated, false, incomplete, or symbolic history, which is how I had been thinking of Helvetica.  Instead of thinking of them as perversions of true accounts, Malinkowski notes that while myths do seem to tell a kind of chronological account and explain why things are the way they are, they don’t actually discuss anything that needs explanation.  Instead, they serve a much different function in society: socialization, giving form to our current world instead of revealing the contingencies of the past.  So the questions that the #1 and #2 myths of all time — the creation of the land and sea or of the two sexes — answer are less about the particularities of how we came to be and more about how we ought to be.  They establish boundaries between social groups, the sexes, nature/culture, and give justification for ritual practices of all kinds.

With this in mind, I began to see Helvetica as less of a documentary of the font itself and more of a story of the contemporary graphic design community, which happens to hold Helvetica as a supremely sacred object.  As designers say over and over again, there is nothing that can be changed about Helvetica: its supporters say there is nothing that can be improved, and even those that violently critique it do so by decrying it as the ultimate logical conclusion of a half-century of modernist aesthetic.  As one interviewee says, to go against it, people had to literally go back to the drawing board and think of an entirely new way of placing type on a page, or even the very idea of standard, uniform fonts.  As revealed through the film Helvetica, designers live in a world situated between order and chaos, a world in which both Helvetica and a child’s scribblings are both a priori rational choices when starting a project.  The film tells us the origin myth that keeps the boundary between these two eternal forces steady.

I describe the complex social and technical environment in which bots exist in Wikipedia, emphasizing not only how bots produce order and enforce rules, but also how humans produce bots and negotiate rules around their operation.  After giving a brief overview of how previous research into Wikipedia has tended to mis-conceptualize bots, I give a case study tracing the life of one such automated software agent, and how it came to be integrated into the Wikipedian community.

The Lives of Bots [PDF, 910KB]

The problem is that most people only read his first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which was written in 1962, and then proceed to critique “the Habermasian public sphere.” I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read which demand that we ‘move beyond’ Habermas or go ‘post-Habermasian’ and only cite Structural Transformation. It’s a great literary foil if you’re advancing your own concept of the public sphere, and the whole ‘new events require a re-evaluation of old theories’ is a mainstay of academia.  As a crazy post-Latourian socio-technical ethnographer who grants agency to everything (literally, every single thing) except for social structures, it is weird that I’m defending him.  But I’m also a huge proponent of keeping your intellectual allies close and your intellectual opponents closer.

* I love how all our social/cultural/economic/political theories of the state, legitimacy, revolution, and democracy are undergoing their most radical problematization since the fall of the Soviet Union, such that we don’t know how to name the events in the past month, thus we settle on something like “what’s going on.”

Problem one: We’re on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Structural Transformation

So there are two problems with equating the description of the public sphere Habermas gives in Structural Transformation with ‘the Habermasian public sphere’. First, Habermas — who is still not only still alive but writing, teaching, and lecturing — wrote twenty-nine books after he wrote Structural Transformation at the age of thirty-three. If by Habermasian we mean the ideas and theories of the public sphere found in that book, Habermas in the 21st century [note: great band name] is probably one of the most post-Habermasian theorists out there. He has expanded, refined, and further developed his theories of media, communication, politics, power, law, democracy, and, yes, the public sphere in a myriad of books and articles.  Now, if you want a recommendation, I personally think that Between Facts and Norms (1992 in German, 1996 in English) is an excellent synthesis and refinement of his work in the 70s and 80s.  I think section 8.3 contains the best and most concise depiction of how Habermas himself conceptualizes the public sphere, and it looks like someone has all of chapter 8 up.  Again, I don’t defend it, but let’s just say that it comes a long way.

To ignore these later works is just intellectually lazy, and for those of us perfectionist academics who endlessly struggle with getting the argument right (i.e. all of us), the only way we manage to push it out the door is to tell ourselves that we’ll always have the ability to further refine our works in response to criticism.  In fact, this is precisely how all of academia — or even all of culture, art, politics, you name it — progresses.  I’m recalling my senior thesis, the very first work I published on Wikipedia: even though I still believe I got most of the facts right and that the argument remains coherent, I’ve realized that there were many issues and have a more sophisticated framing.  And that was just five years ago.  I can’t imagine how I’d react if it was still happening on the eve of 2055.

Now, with regards to critics of Habermas, I do have to give credit to scholars like Nancy Fraser, who keeps up with his more recent works and repeatedly shows how, for example, how his analysis of gender is still inadequate as he reframes the concept.  But this is only the case with dedicated readers of Habermas, and it’s a lot easier to repeat the claim that ‘Habermas’s conception of the public sphere (Habermas 1962) subordinates women (Fraser 1990)’ without skimming more than the first few pages of either citation.  However, as Fraser and others understand quite well, swap that 1962 citation for 1981 or 1985, and it is a radically different argument, which I’ll get to below.  (But already, I should note that we’re twenty years in the past with a statement like that, and both Habermas and his Anglophone critics have undergone a very fascinating, dare I say dialectical, co-evolution over the past 20 years).

Problem two: There is no theory of the public sphere in Structural Transformation

The second problem is worse, because it involves what I see as a misreading of his famous 1962 book, which, despite my last argument, I still believe stands coherent (even with significant issues) after nearly 50 years.   The full title is The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, and many people don’t really acknowledge that subtitle.  In my reading, Habermas doesn’t set out to define what he thinks the public sphere is and ought to be, as if he were constructing what many have called ‘his’ concept, theory, or ontology of the public sphere. In the tradition of critical theory since Hegel — and in stark opposition to the tradition of philosophy since Aristotle — he seeks to understand how bourgeois society thinks of itself.

And as he rightly identifies, a certain kind of idea of the public sphere became a fundamental category of bourgeois society starting in the 18th century, in the sense that society couldn’t think of itself as not having a relation to it. A side note: in this critical tradition, such a move is necessary with philosophy of society and impossible with, say, philosophy of action or perception because society is entirely self-constituted by its understanding of itself. The critical move then comes from holding up a mirror to society and seeing if this concept of the public sphere, which is conceptualized and instantiated in certain ways, lives up to what we claim it does. He doesn’t do that in Structural Transformation (it was his first book, after all), which is why I think he gets a lot of undeserved criticism.

Now, Habermas and his translators definitely didn’t do a good enough job expressing this intention, but it continually frustrates me to see critiques that “Habermas’s public sphere” is a bourgeois fiction which never truly realized its ideals of universality, systematically excluding along lines of gender, race, class, status, and more. Now, I think that all the accounts of such exclusion which have emerged are necessary, because Habermas does not devote that much time to such issues, and does not give accounts of various ‘counter-publics’ which we now know emerged in opposition to the exclusive salons and coffeehouses.  But this is not the goal of Structural Transformation, which is an account of how bourgeois society came to see and legitimize itself through the concept of the public sphere, which he repeatedly describes as a fiction.

The concept of the public sphere described in that book, even in its ‘ideal’ formations, is not one that Habermas himself necessarily advocates. His fault is perhaps in taking society at its word, in effect arguing something along the lines of: this is how you think of yourself, and let us see if you even live up to that.  Again, in the tradition of critical theory, the point is precisely to not come up with some universal, neutral, objective standard and then see if society measures up to it; it is to unravel the internal contradictions within society.  But people like grand, unified theories and system builders from Kant to Castells are popular for a reason, and he has become one of them with his later work. Now, Fraser and others rightly call him out on this, and their critiques are explicitly focused on whether he does jettison the bourgeois concept of the public sphere when he starts developing his own conception.

Habermas’s fault is perhaps not understanding the massive impact his first book would have, and how bourgeois society, woefully lacking a solid concept of the public sphere, would come to take its fictional depiction of itself as a theory of itself.  With this in mind, it makes sense how someone trained in the critical tradition like Habermas could become someone who created an entire theoretical system that he then uses to externally understand society.  The way I see it, he inadvertently tapped into a vacuum with the concept of the public sphere, and has since had to serve two audiences, critical/cultural theorists and social/political scientists.  I have my own critiques of both Structural Transformation and his later works, and again, really can’t believe I’m defending Habermas of all people, but you’ve got to get your target right.

Abstract: We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems.  Trace ethnography is a flexible, powerful technique that is able to capture many distributed phenomena that are otherwise difficult to study.  Our approach integrates and extends a number of longstanding techniques across the social and computational sciences, and can be combined with other methods to provide rich descriptions of collaboration and organization.

Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices (PDF, 361KB)

Citation: Geiger, R.S., & Ribes, D. (2011). Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination Through Documentary Practices. In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.  Retrieved from http://www.stuartgeiger.com/trace-ethnography-hicss-geiger-ribes.pdf

Harman is amazing on a number of levels, and if you’re someone who comes from STS and/or contemporary philosophy, you should definitely be reading him for his academic musings.  Even if you don’t care about recent developments in post-Heideggerian object-oriented actor-network sociotechnicopistemology, the American sportswriter turned Egyptian professor is worth reading for his insights into academia, life, and academic life (which are three way different things).  But back to my original point, the man is prolific – he blogs as often as most people tweet, giving his thoughts on everything from the recent crisis at Middlesex philosophy to personal reflections on the writing process.

Obviously he formats his posts and checks them for errors, but it doesn’t seem like he spends that much time thinking about what he should blog about or if some particular topic is worth posting.  He just writes about what ever is interesting to him, sometimes just sharing a link, other times giving commentary, and (where I find him most invaluable) doing both, sharing an excerpt of something that someone wrote with his thoughts on the matter.  It might be an essay one of his colleagues wrote regarding speculative realism’s view of innate qualities of objects, but it is more likely to be about plagiarism by students, whatever fiction or non-fiction book he’s reading, the latest conference he went to, or the English-speaking abilities of Cairo taxi drivers.  This can sometimes be overwhelming — say, when I open up my feed reader and find ten posts written while I was sleeping — but I’ve realized it is the right approach.  Not only has he kept me informed about topics, ideas, books, conferences, controversies, and so on that I would otherwise not know about, but he also offers a window into his world. I’ve never met him, but I feel like I know Graham Harman.

Contrast this with me.  I haven’t posted an update in months, and the last one I did was formatted much like a short academic paper and took a good hour or two to write.  I have about a half dozen drafts of posts that I’ve spent way too much time on — not writing, but thinking, second-guessing myself, googling to see if I’m original, and so on.  They are long, but that’s not a inherent problem.  Rather, they are filled with things that just don’t need to be in a blog post: no specific words or phrasings, but  instead the awkward insecurities that permeate all formal academic writing at the beginning stages.

Maybe it is part of being a grad student, where I feel afraid that I’ll accidentally offend someone or, more likely, just say something stupid.  Maybe it is because my site is first and foremost an academic portfolio constructed with blogging software, a professional, polished, public space in which I can present a slightly more interactive CV.   Maybe it is because I’ve been part of an pedagogic culture in which blogging is overwhelmingly just a digital form of the standard one-page essay summarizing and responding to the week’s course readings.  And as I write that last sentence — which may be interpreted as a slight jab towards some of my favorite professors — I realize exactly what my problem is: I have to stop myself from obsessing too much, or else I’ll never actually blog.

Thus comes the title of this post (which, by the way, is a riff on the amazing We Have Never Been Blogging, a Latourian blog which itself is a rift on the book We Have Never Been Modern).  I haven’t been writing blog posts, I’ve been writing short essays about topics that are only worth the time and energy for blog post.  That’s not to disparage the people who do publish academic essays with blogging software, it’s just a different thing.  And having broken my new rule again with a good ten minutes of rewriting that last sentence, I’m just going to end this post now.

So all this to say that I’m going to be blogging again, and with a new understanding of what that means.  I don’t think I’m as interesting as Graham Harman and I don’t plan on being as prolific as him, but I do plan on easing up on the slack.  For me, blogging is an immediate activity, something that you  put out there when you think of something that you find interesting.  I hope you do and that is the ultimate point of this, but not something that can be dwelled on.

If you are interested in the history of contemporary science, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, citation analysis can be a useful tool to discover broad trends in scientific research.  In this area, the ISI’s Web of Science is the de-facto source for this data, claiming to be the most comprehensive database of articles and journals. They index articles using a number of categories, including author, title, publication, subject, topic, and more. With a built-in results analyzer, it is very easy to chart the top authors in a subject, the journals that publish the most in a given field, or, as I was interested in, the growth of a particular topic over time.

I’m currently researching the history of a software suite for the simulation and modeling of molecules, and it is commonplace to cite its debut article if research has been done using the tool, making citation analysis quite painless. I learned though archival research that a certain feature was added in 1990 that would make the simulation of enzymes much easier.  The obvious question is if it had any measurable effect on the amount of research being done with this tool to study enzymes. So I told ISI to give me a list of all articles citing the original software article with the topic “enzyme” between 1985 and 1994. I found the most beautiful results:

According to the citation counts, it seems pretty clear that enzyme research using this program took off dramatically after 1990.  Knowing that correlation doesn’t equal causation, I restrained myself from thinking that the introduction of this new feature in 1990 caused the growth, but I knew that there had to be something here.   Perhaps enzymes were getting interesting after 1990 for some external reason (increased funding or relevance, new discoveries, etc) that caused both the new feature and the increased research.  So I did a database-wide search for all articles on the topic “enzyme” and analyzed it by year.  What I found was even more remarkable:

After 1990, all enzyme research appears to take off dramatically, with a 300% increase a single year.  I knew I was onto something here, and candidates kept coming into my mind: did the Human Genome Project spur this massive interest in enzymes?  Was there a general increase in science funding at this time, a worldwide biology research initiative (like the International Geophysical Year), or the takeoff of the biomedical/biochemical industries?  Whatever it was, I had a lead on something big, something that I hadn’t seen in any of the literature on the history of contemporary bioscience.

I began to search the literature for bibliometric research with phrases like “after 1990″ and “after 1991″, combined with various synonyms for rapid growth.  I found a number of other historians and sociologists of science who were making the same kind of argument that I was considering: important events happened in 1988-1990, and these events had to have at least some effect on the massive explosion of articles in a given discipline, subject area, or sub-specialty.  All of them used ISI, and all of them narrowed their search by topic.  While my intent was to find something in fields related to biochemistry, I these articles were making the argument across the sciences, including nanotechnology, materials science, mental health, oceanography, and more.  So I ran the same kind of analysis as before, but this time with a wide range of topic keywords (and scaled the results by the relative increase in citations from the previous year):

As is clear, topics from numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary fields remain steady until 1990, have a massive increase, and then plateau.  The effect is anywhere from 140% to 330%, but the fact that they all occur in the exact same year seems too perfect.  Even if there was a massive, across-the-board increase in science funding, research cycles are so varied – some kinds of studies can expect findings in six months, while others can take years.  The lack of residual effects after 1991 makes this even more unlikely: while the percent increase from 1990 to 1991 is varied, the growth from ’91 to ’92 is no more than +/- 10%.

Occam’s razor leads me to believe that these anomalies are an artifact of ISI’s Web of Science, not scientific publishing itself.  The most likely situations would be that in 1990, 1) a large number of new journals (most likely less popular ones) were added, 2) new kinds of research materials (books, conference proceedings, data sets, etc) were added, or 3) ISI’s method for determining article topics was changed (such as including author keywords or abstracts).  I suspect #3, and after far too much digging, I found some confirmation in a 1994 essay written by ISI’s founder:

Through large test samples, we concluded that the titles of papers cited in reviews and other articles were sufficient to add useful descriptive words and phrases to the citing paper. This was later confirmed in studies by A. J. Harley, as Irv Sher and I recently reported.11, 12

In 1990, ISI (now Thomson Reuters) was able to introduce this citation-based method of derivative (algorithmic) subject indexing, called KeyWords Plus®. 7, 8 In addition to title words, author-supplied keywords, and/or abstract words, KeyWords Plus supplies words and phrases to enhance these other descriptors and thereby retrievability. These KeyWords Plus terms are derived from the titles of cited papers, which have been algorithmically processed to identify the most-commonly recurring words and phrases.

Unfortunately, this new algorithm for topic indexing appears to have been introduced without distinguishing it from the old one.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to just search for pre-1990 style keywords in post-1990 articles, meaning that ISI’s topics and keywords are useless for historical bibliometrics that span across this date.   And thanks to what I’m calling ‘the 1990 effect’ (someone give me a better term, please!), many researchers are being led down a deceptively misleading path!

Abstract:  Is computer-mediated discourse leading to collective political action in the public sphere, or simply more fragmentation? This question has been asked by social and political theorists ever since the Internet entered academia in the early 90s. However, this debate has been recently rekindled by Jurgen Habermas – one of the leading theorists of the public sphere – who recently broke a longstanding silence and spoke out against the Internet as a potentially democratizing medium. Instead of directly intervening in this debate, I interrogate the techno-epistemic conditions of possibility for ‘the blogosphere’ to exist as a sociopolitical entity. Specifically, I analyze social aggregation sites like Technorati, Delicious, Digg, and even Google, which make it possible for collective action to precipitate out of the Internet. I find that Habermasians should not fear fragmentation, but instead integration: the blogosphere as a public sphere is constructed and unified not by ideal discourse, but algorithms.