Spinuzzi

Irony of the day: Rules for Radicals

2009-11-20T12:44:00.003-06:00

A screen shot of the UT library's listing of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Of course real radicals aren't going to return the book!

Soma Vida's Work Well Social Event

2009-11-19T12:09:00.002-06:00

Soma Vida is hosting a Work Well Social Event on December 15. If you're in Austin, swing by for free coworking (9am-noon) and learn more about this unique coworking space. I plan to be there too.

Reading :: Networks in the Knowledge Economy

2009-11-17T21:16:00.002-06:00

Networks in the Knowledge Economy
Edited by Rob Cross, Andrew Parker, and Lisa Sasson

Edited collections are often uneven, and this one is no exception. The chapters mostly focus on social network analysis, including relatively new pieces as well as classics, and even two chapters that Malcolm Gladwell originally wrote for the New Yorker. The order is odd as well: Granovetter's classic 1973 piece “The Strength of Weak Ties” comes right after, not before, Krackhardt's 1992 reply to it, “The Strength of Strong Ties,” and a chapter before Gladwell's discussion of the Granovetter piece. Someone who is relatively new to social network analysis – such as, say, me – would have to reconstruct the order themselves.

Fortunately, the individual pieces are strong and compelling, so the reconstruction effort was worth it. By the time I finished the book, I had a good understanding of social network analysis (SNA). It's not that complicated, although some of the pieces use some rather intimidating formulas to crunch the quantitative data.

Cross, Parker, and Sasson start the collection with a strong introduction that both leverages their own data and overviews SNA. Network has become “a central organizing metaphor for twenty-first-century firms,” they point out, particularly in restructuring efforts to “promote organizational flexibility and efficiency”; and “one outcome of these restructuring efforts is that information flow and work increasingly occur through informal networks of relationships rather than through channels tightly prescribed by formal reporting structures or detailed work processes” (p.3). In addition, knowledge-intensive work has become more prevalent, increasing the importance of trust in informal networks (p.3). Such informal networks are not on the organization charts, but “frequently can be sources of both strategic and operational success for an organization” (p.4). So how do we figure out where these informal networks are so that we can promote and leverage them? The authors suggest SNA (p.4).

As they tell it, SNA is not that difficult; their example involved reading an organization chart and having executives fill out a survey. But that simple methodology, they argue, yields complex network diagrams that show the strength and density of ties among executives – and thus insights into (1) social capital; (2) knowledge creation and sharing; and (3) how informal networks support strategic objectives (p.7).

In Chapter 1, Ronald Burt argues that networks can take different shapes, with some optimizing for efficiency (with nonredundant contacts, i.e., contacts that don't connect to each other except through you) and others optimizing for saturation (with redundant contacts, yielding friendships and dense resources). Clusters of contacts need to be connected by weak ties: “weak ties are essential to the flow of information that integrates otherwise disconnected social clusters into a broader society” (p.30).

Chapter 3 expands on weak ties, a concept that comes from Granovetter's 1973 work. Here, David Krackhardt argues that although weak ties can be powerful because they connect disparate networks and draw in different sources of information, we shouldn't ignore “the strength of strong ties in cases of severe change and uncertainty. … Strong ties constitute a base of trust that can reduce resistance and provide comfort in the face of uncertainty” (p.84). Krackhardt demonstrates by drawing on a fascinating case study of a high-tech company facing possible unionization.

Inexplicably, this chapter is followed rather than preceded by Granovetter's classic paper “The strength of weak ties,” in which Granovetter argues that the strength of interpersonal ties can be measured by time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and reciprocal services (p.110). He draws on his study of how people got jobs, finding that they most frequently found new jobs through weak ties rather than strong ones.

Let's skip to Chapter 9, where Krackhardt and Hanson examine the informal networks in an organization. They interviewed executives, and concluded that the organization had at least three informal networks: advice, trust, and communication (p.236). The advice network revealed experts (p.240), but the trust network revealed a very different set of clusters (p.241). The authors were able to convincingly argue that these networks had great bearing on how the organization reacted to issues.

In Chapter 11, Rob Cross, Stephen Borgatti, and Andrew Parker continue this theme by discussing how to make invisible work visible. “Informal relationships among employees are often far more reflective of the way work happens in an organization than relationships established through the formal structure. However, these informal relationships are often invisible or at least only partially understood by managers – a problem that is growing with de-layering of organizations, virtual work, and globalization” (p.262). The authors suggest tracing these invisible relationships with SNA. After another case study, the authors argue that “work of importance is increasingly accomplished collaboratively through informal networks” and “network relationships are critical anchoring points for employees, whose loyalty and commitment may be more to sets of individuals in their network than to a given organization” (p.277). The authors conclude with some methodological notes about how to conduct SNA (p.278).

I hope it's obvious by this point that I find SNA to be a fascinating and valuable technique. But at the same time, to my eye, it has some flaws as an analytical tool for the sort of research I do. Methodologically, SNA only maps connections – mostly self-reported connections – between individuals in an organization. None of these studies appear to triangulate by using observational data or other sources such as data logging (although I have seen some papers elsewhere that attempt to articulate networks through email contacts and frequency, connections in online social networks, and so forth). None of these studies go beyond personal connections to texts, genres, artifacts, practices that are handed down from one individual to the next, and so forth. In this volume, SNA doesn't seem to have a language to describe peripheral influences transmitted through artifacts. That doesn't take away from what SNA does extremely well, but it does limit SNA's use for the sort of research that I do – and it limits SNA's implications for information design, textual design, and related areas.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants a look at SNA or who is studying networks.

Reading :: Lingua Fracta

2009-11-17T21:13:00.002-06:00

Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media
By Collin G. Brooke

The first thing I noticed about this book when I pulled it off the shelf was that the cover claimed it was “Edited by Collin Gifford Brooke.” The second was that the subtitle on the cover said “Towards a Rhetoric of New Media,” while the title page reads “ Toward a Rhetoric of New Media.” When I contacted Collin about the first error, he told me that I must have gotten an early copy – later copies have been fixed. The subtitle issue is apparently still in the later copies.

Don't judge a book by its cover. Brooke takes up an intriguing project: rethinking the canons of rhetoric in terms of new media. “A rhetoric of new media,” he argues, “rather than examining the choices that have already been made by writers, should prepare us as writers to make our own choices” (p.15). So he concludes that “we must begin to move from a text-based rhetoric, exemplified by our attachment to the printed page, to a rhetoric that can account for the dynamics of the interface” (p.26). To undertake this project, he first appeals to the ecological metaphor that has lately been deployed in related areas. He cites several scholars in related fields who have used this metaphor, including my colleague Peg Syverson and me (thanks, Collin), and suggests that the canons of rhetoric have been left behind in this work (p.36). So, he says, let's frame the canons in terms of ecology (p.37).

That reframing work is undertaken in the subsequent chapters, where Brooke uses several “p words” (p.197) to refigure the canons. In chapter 3, invention becomes proairesis; in chapter 4, arrangement becomes pattern; in chapter 5, style becomes perspective; in chapter 6, memory becomes persistence; and in chapter 7, delivery becomes performance. Brooke casts his net widely for examples as he reframes these canons, discussing Wikipedia, World of Warcraft, blogs, tag clouds, social bookmarking, and other new media examples. He concludes in Chapter 7 that “this book seeks to stage a mutually transformative encounter between rhetoric and technology” (p.197) – an encounter that is necessary, he emphasizes, because we can't productively understand either one without the other.

Those who are studying rhetoric should certainly give this book a look. In particular, students of rhetoric and technology will find it useful for thinking through the relationships between the two – although Brooke argues here that all rhetoric students should also be students of technology and that the separation is damaging. Nevertheless, I think the book will make its deepest impact in graduate programs oriented toward rhetoric and technology and in the computers and writing literature, where scholars are already prepared to wrestle with the issues that Brooke outlines here. For them in particular, I recommend this book.

Reading :: Memory Practices in the Sciences

2009-11-17T21:10:00.003-06:00

Memory Practices in the Sciences
By Geoffrey Bowker

Geoff Bowker apparently likes the term “redolent,” which he uses throughout this book in throwaway descriptions like this one: “Here is an extended quote from Russell Seymour that is redolent of Lyell's concern with archive commissioners” (p.171). But then again, this is a book about memory, and fragrances often evoke memories in ways that other sensory input doesn't, so perhaps this word – with its double meaning of evocation and fragrance – works. And maybe Bowker is trying to get at a sense of memory that is more evoked, more diffuse, and more intimated than the sense that is usually meant in the sciences. After all, this book isn't just about memory but about different types of memories, different memory regimes, and breaks between different memory practices. It's as much about forgetting as it is about remembering.

Bowker is well positioned to write this sort of book: his previous books have similarly dealt with science in practice and with scientific categorization. They're terrific. This book was not quite as compelling to me, but it's still a solid book on how we remember in the sciences.

So how do we remember? Or: “how do scientists figure their own pasts” and “how do scientists figure the past of their entities” (p.6)? Bowker answers that “we generally project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs” (p.18) because we understand nature through the archives we have accumulated, and those archives are organized in particular ways. “The empire voraciously gathers as little information as it can” due to high transaction costs, Bowker reminds us in a discussion of railway tickets (p.38). “The imperial archive cannot be understood solely in terms of record keeping. Thee acto of keeping records is itself intimately tied to the conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording” (p.39).

Bowker explores this theme with several concrete cases drawn from the archives. In Chapter 1, he first describes the new time of the Industrial Revolution, then discusses Lyell's successful attempt to create a special time for geology – a kind of time separate from sacred time and secular time, a geologic time that could avoid contretemps with the church while still telling a story of an ancient, slowly changing Earth (p.52). See p.63 for his discussion of the “day-age” and “gap” theories that Lyell's allies deployed to square the idea of an ancient Earth with the Book of Genesis; these theories are still deployed today. Lyell invented a geologic time – a time that, Bowker argues persuasively, is itself a reflection of industrial time with its division of labor and its parceling of time into regular units (p.69). At the same time, geologic time excludes, or works around, the time of heroes and a literal interpretation of the Bible (p.69). Sounding like Latour, Bowker reminds us that Lyell's concept of time is just as constructed and just as grounded in his own world as these earlier conceptions of time were. Geologic time was invented by treating the Earth as an archive and setting the rules for interpreting it.

In Chapter 2, Bowker looks at a very different branch of science, cybernetics. And here, he argues, we have the other side of the coin. Whereas geological memory practices represent an “explosive, singular memory” that is “working in a world of too few facts per unit time,” cybernetic memory practices represent “the implosive, recapitulative memory practices of the cyberneticians working in a world of too many facts per unit time” (p.77). In cybernetics,

we have seen three kinds of accelerated recapitulation: accelerated social change (whole civilizations in a decade), accelerated data processing (whole centuries of scientific progress in a year), and accelerated philosophizing (whole millennia of useless philosophy taken up and reworked in a trice). … in each case … the unit of historical time is changing such that processes once tied to civilizations and “longue duree” are now attached to individuals/societies and much shorter duration. The ontogeny of cybernetics recapitulates human phylogeny. (p.94)

In Chapter 3, we get to the age of the database and the context in which it is deployed. “The miracle of memory in our time is that memory practices are materially rampant, invasive, implicated in the core of our being and of our understanding of the world – and yet we experience them and discourse about them in terms of their ideal ramifications on some hypostatized entity created to void materiality from the equation: the individual, the nation-state, the people, and so forth” (p.109). And here and in Chapter 4, Bowker explores the study and memory practices of biodiversity – a realm in which the explosive memory of geology meets the implosive memory of cybernetics.

Memory Practices in the Sciences is a challenging book, partially because of its perspective, partially because of its thick cases. If you're interested in the rhetoric of science, or in memory, I recommend picking it up.

The Read/Write/Ruin Web

2009-11-17T08:51:00.002-06:00

John Robb discusses open source insurgency, which was a theme of his book Brave New War , in terms that are very similar to the ones I used in my own book Tracing Genres through Organizations (Ch.6) several years ago. But whereas I, and others working in the read/write web space, focused on positive contributions in a developing ecology, Robb points to the possibilities for guerilla action.

The benefit of this passive approach is that it creates the potential to form an open source community around the topic. As such, it not only attracts people tightly aligned with the creator's goals, but also a much larger group of individuals and groups that are pursuing tangential and marginally aligned interests. Also, because the site is a tool, it benefits from a virtuous feedback loop that tends to accelerate growth: people that use the site often see immediate benefit from the interaction.
Software tools of this type can be used to create open source communities for both positive endeavors (like building resilient communities) to insurgency.
For example, say I wanted to run an insurgency against financial capitalism, and in particular an effort that specifically targets Goldman Sachs. The software tool approach offers a variety of entry points for this endeavor.

Read the whole thing.

Coworking in Austin: Cospace

2009-11-16T17:22:00.002-06:00

“We bring the co,” enthuses Kirtus Dixon as he discusses Cospace (http://www.cospaceatx.com), a coworking site that he is planning to open with his business partner Andrew Bushnell. Here's what the co stands for, according to their website:

Why Cospace?
We feel it a simple yet effective name for our space and what it means to us and the community it will serve. The prefix CO means together, mutually, or jointly, and that expresses what our space will be perfectly. It is a COoperative, COmmunal, and COllaborative space that will be a place for work and opportunity for its members.

So that's what we're discussing: the co. We're sitting in a room at Genuine Joe, a coffee shop in north Austin, and we've been talking for an hour about the space they're planning. I contacted the two earlier this week, after seeing Andrew post a message on the coworking Google group, and they've been telling me about their vision for Cospace – a vision quite different from the other coworking spaces in Austin. The two met when working as recruiters at a company in California, where they appreciated some aspects: the open floor plan (a “bullpen”); the spontaneous collaboration; the ability to learn from others, especially about technology (they're “late adopters”). But they found that they wanted more. In particular, they wanted more flexibility, more opportunity to build their own businesses, and more diverse coworkers. One problem with working at their old organization, Andrew tells me, was that everyone did the same thing. So they would talk about work all day, leave the office, go out for a beer with coworkers, and talk more about work – learning nothing.

Finally the two broke away, moved to Austin, and became entrepeneurs and business partners, driven by three goals: practice, freedom, and enjoyment. They've started a child safety franchise, initially working out of their houses, but they missed the interaction with other people and they suffered from a lack of work-life separation. More than that, they missed the opportunity to network with other small business owners. Suppose we need a website, Kurtis asks rhetorically. How do we know who has a good reputation? Go to Craigslist? An impersonal, electronic solution like Yelp doesn't appeal to them; they see social media as a good way to cast a broad net, but for relationships, they prefer face to face contact. Networking. The co.

Networking drew them to coworking. After looking into various office solutions, they discovered coworking and saw the appeal. It fit in well with their three goals – practice, freedom, enjoyment – and it met their networking needs.

So why not work at an existing coworking facility? Several reasons. One was that none of the existing or proposed coworking spaces fit the niche. Conjunctured is tilted towards freelance entrepeneurs, tech entrepeneurs, and artists in downtown Austin. Soma Vida is oriented toward family entrepeneurs, especially those in the East Austin area. LINK will be focused more on employees of corporations. None of these serve the small businesses community, address the networking needs of small businesses, or explicitly serve as incubators for businesses that will eventually outgrow the space (although they don't disallow that). None of these spaces reflect Kirtus and Andrew's identities. In addition, none are in north Austin where Andrew and Kirtus live – an important factor, since they want to build a community where they live.

So Kirtus and Andrew saw a niche for SBO coworking, serving growing businesses with sales between $500,000-$1,000,000 that need an SBO network to grow. Businesses like theirs. They envision a place that resembles the bullpen environment in the company where they met – but one where the corporate setting has been washed away. “Take out the bad,” Andrew says. Kirtus agrees and describes the place as resembling the group projects in which he used to participate in business school at classmates' houses.

Flexibility, they say, is the name of the game these days. And that's not necessarily tied to technology, an area where they say they have a lot to learn. It has more to do with networking, developing new relationships, sensing opportunities, and building relationships. As people who fall at the dividing line between Gen X and Gen Y, they see value in mindsets they associate with each, and they also see opportunities in mentoring the next generation, who overrely on social media and underemphasize personal relationships. Social media, Andrew and Kirtus tell me, do a good job of being the broad end of the funnel – they establish broad but shallow connections. But for deep, enduring relationships, you need human contact.

So when will we see Cospace open? Kirtus and Andrew are actively looking for a space, but they recognize that they have to find a landlord who “gets” it and can be flexible in terms of future capacity. Initially they tried working with a real estate agent, but they couldn't find one who could get her or his head around the concept of coworking. Now they're looking for spaces on Craigslist, looking for broad connections that they can turn into one deep relationship with the right landlord.

For now, though, if you're in Austin, you can meet the two during a Jelly at 360 Primo on Thursday at 11:30am.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool

2009-11-15T19:19:00.003-06:00

Via BoingBoing, we find out what at least one of the Zapatistas is doing these days: hacking cheap mobile phones to create tools for illegal immigrants to cross the border between Mexico and the US.

What is the device, exactly?
We looked at the Motorola i455 cell phone, which is under $30, available even cheaper on eBay, and includes a free GPS applet. We were able to crack it and create a simple compasslike navigation system. We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway—things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border.

Repurposing cheap consumer devices and using publicly available information to route around law enforcement. Brilliant, and undoubtedly just a small part of what we'll see soon. Plenty of smartphones will be available cheaply soon and, as little computers, should be quite hackable.

Reading :: The Third Wave

2009-11-09T16:24:00.002-06:00

The Third Wave
By Alvin Toffler

According to the cover, this is "THE BOOK THAT MAKES SENSE OF THE EXPLODING EIGHTIES." Published in 1980, just after the oil crisis, the Iranian hostage crisis, and Reagan's election, the book made some bold predictions. Toffler, after all, was a futurist whose work was to extrapolate the future from current trends. In a way, that makes The Third Wave an interesting piece of science fiction: Toffler predicts that we would soon be living on space platforms and in aqua villages (p.144), while the gene industry would make other innovations possible. One interviewee predicted that we would be buying "a 'mammary mattress' - created out of the same stuff as the human breast" (p.148). Other predictions included the paperless office (p.189) and a renaissance in lodges, clubs and churches (p.204).

It would be easy to poke fun at such predictions. But what is striking to me is how often Toffler gets it right. In fact, many of his predictions came true quite rapidly: the demise of the secretarial pool and the popularity of even senior executives writing their own correspondence due to the computer (p.186); the shift toward telecommuting and the "electronic cottage" (Ch.16); the rise of cooperatives - "all sorts of new relationships and organizational forms become possible" due to computer networking (p.205); the death of the melting pot due to demassification and diversity (p.232); the demassification of time, leading to the popularity of flextime and workers' autonomy over their own time (p.246; 385); social networking (p.250; 372); the increasing popularity of matrix organizations and other networked forms (pp.259-264); the move toward private armies (p.397; cf. John Robb's work); and electronic town halls (p.429). In parts, he sounds a lot like Drucker's and Castells' work in the mid to late 1990s. That's extraordinary.

Toffler builds these predictions on his thesis that we were, in the 1980s, experiencing the "third wave" of change. The first wave was the agricultural revolution (p.10), which gave rise to institutions and hierarchies - as well as families, nations, etc. The second wave was the industrial revolution (p.10 and most of the first half of the book), which enacted huge changes across civilization, from the most basic (the family unit; the understanding of time and morality) to the most elaborate (work organizations, markets, representative democracy). He doesn't give a name to the third wave, but he associates it with the year 1955, when blue-collar jobs were first outnumbered by white-collar and service workers (p.14; compare Drucker, who pegs post-capitalist society to the GI Bill just a few years earlier). And he predicts that the Third Wave will similarly restructure society in very basic ways: from families (he predicts, for instance, that other family configurations, such as gay marriages, will become increasingly accepted; cf. Castells) to the perception of time to the authorities and values to the very organizational substrates of our world.

The three waves that Toffler identifies seem to track closely with Ronfeldt's TIMN structure, with tribes being pre-Wave, institutions corresponding to the First Wave, and so forth. That's probably not a coincidence: Arquilla and Ronfeldt had Alvin and Heidi Toffler write the preface to their collection In Athena's Camp. Nevertheless, I'm impressed at what Toffler managed to describe 15 years before other, similar work came out. I'm not ready to canonize him, but I do plan to read more of his books. If you're interested in the knowledge work literature, definitely take a look.

Reading :: Online Town Hall Meetings

2009-11-09T07:51:00.003-06:00

Online Town Hall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century
By David Lazer, Michael Neblo, Kevin Esterling, and Kathy Goldschmidt with Collin Burden

Someone recently pointed me to this report, suggesting that it provided a positive alternative to face-to-face town hall meetings in the aftermath of this year's health care protests. In this project, funded by the NSF, the researchers conducted a series of experiments in connecting constituents to issues.

The experimental groups participated in an "online town hall" in which they used software (Adobe Acrobat Connect or Microsoft LiveMeeting) to submit questions to a moderator; the moderator passed questions to the Member of Congress or Senator holding the town hall; and the representative answered each question over VOIP. All participants received two-page materials on the topic beforehand. Representatives were from both parties.

One control group received the same materials, but no session. The other received no session or background materials.

Results were characterized as positive:

The key findings from the town hall meetings were that:
The online town halls increased support for participating Members of Congress.
Members persuaded constituents of their position on the issue discussed.
The town halls increased policy knowledge of constituents on the topic of discussion.
The sessions attracted a diverse set of constituents.
Participation in the town hall increased citizen engagement in politics.
The discussions were of generally high deliberative quality.
The positive results of the smaller sessions were also seen in the larger session.
The sessions were extremely popular with participants. (p.11)

And indeed I can see why they would be positive results from the perspective of incumbents, because this format seems custom-made for helping incumbents persuade voters - as finding 2 above intimates. In fact, "no matter which side of the issue they were on, the Members dramatically moved their constituents to their perspective" (p. 16). In the specific issue - immigration - if the Member, say, supported making illegal immigration a felony, s/he persuaded constituents of this position. If the Member opposed making illegal immigration a felony, why, s/he persuaded constituents of that position. Constituents, in fact, appeared to capitulate to the superior knowledge of their Member:

As one constituent stated, “As we move to the upper echelon of politicians, things get more complicated. There are just so many outside variables that we as normal citizens just do not consider or see. You don’t realize that until you participate in something like this.”

So constituents were willing to forfeit previously held positions on the belief that the Member knew the complicated issue better and therefore should make the decisions.

As Michel Callon once said, to represent someone, you have to stop them from speaking. The online town halls do this quite well - literally, since the Member speaks to the constituents, but they can only type questions to him/her, questions that are selected by a moderator and not brought into a genuine dialogue. One constituent stated without any apparent irony that "It was great to have a Member of Congress want to really hear the voices of the constituents" - when in a literal sense, only the Member was allowed to project a voice.

So, yes, this forum was much more effective than the messy, conflict-ridden live town halls that erupted in August. The Member could be the sage on the stage, without any possibility of interruption. The constituents were put in the place of asking questions, not making statements or demands. The moderator made sure to prioritize questions from different constituents rather than follow-up questions from the same constituent, minimizing any chance of dialogue. Constituents learned that their place was to be persuaded by their own representative and to capitulate to their representative's judgment in strategic as well as tactical issues; their role was not to set direction or express their own objectives. And according to the results, they learned their lessons well.

I'm not surprised that incumbents are enthusiastic about this format. But I am not so sure that I would characterize it as "deliberative" - or "positive."

How not to write fiction

2009-11-09T05:31:00.006-06:00

Note: This blog post comes from a talk I presented at Texas Christian University on November 6, 2009.

How Not to Write Fiction: Style and Evidence in Qualitative Research Studies
So I no longer read fiction. I read perhaps one book of fiction a year.

It wasn't always that way. Growing up, I used to love reading fiction – especially, I admit, science fiction. In fact, the first long novel I read was Jules Verne's annotated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I was intensely proud of having finished it – I was perhaps seven – and also really interested in the annotations, which taught me all about narwahls and light bulbs and so forth. Most of the science fiction I read wasn't so highbrow, though: Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pohl, Herbert, Burroughs (Edgar Rice, not William). I even went through a bad patch where I read Piers Anthony, which is the science fiction equivalent of drinking Keystone Light.

Don't get me wrong, I also read other genres. I read a lot of murder mysteries, mostly Agatha Christie. I read the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. I read the Bible cover to cover at least three times by the time I finished high school. I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago the summer before my senior year. And I read plenty of trash, such as Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods. But science fiction was my passion, and I even thought that I might be interested in becoming a science fiction writer someday. Although I decided not to pursue that career in college, I kept reading fiction, at least a paperback or two a week, up to the point I started my PhD. Program at Iowa State University. And then, within a year or so, I stopped reading fiction almost entirely.

Why? It wasn't the course load. It wasn't that I thought I was suddenly too good to read fiction. It was simply that I had begun to read research studies, and I found that good research studies – the ones that were solidly grounded, well written, and intellectually curious – were more interesting than fiction to me.

Look at it this way. In fiction, you know the story is the author's construct. You know that it's often a reference to contemporary issues, sometimes an allegory, sometimes with a moral you have to intuit. You can scrutinize it to see how it's constructed. You can anticipate plot twists, sometimes far in advance, which really takes the fun out of it. You can pick holes and identify what's implausible. And although there's some pretty trippy science fiction out there, for the most part even the trippiest ideas are conventionalized enough to sell copies. Science fiction writers like to say that science fiction is not really about the future, it's about the present, and after a while you start to see the present concerns poking through the futuristic window dressing. It starts feeling preachy and contrived.

Compare that to, say, Edwin Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild, where he takes a concept as trippy as anything you see in science fiction – cognition isn't in your head, as everyone assumes, but instead it's distributed across people and artifacts – and he makes a solid case for it with compelling writing and stories that actually happened.

Compare it to Lev Vygotsky's studies in Mind and Society, where he argues that everyone has child development wrong – thought doesn't bubble out of children as language, language gets absorbed to produce thought – and he provides evidence with ingenious and bizarre experiments.

Compare it to Bonnie Nardi's Context and Consciousness, a collection of studies that is as compelling as any collection of short stories. (To me, anyway.)

These studies make claims that changed the way I saw everything, they backed them up with true stories and reproducible data, and they "showed their work" with methods sections – I could play along at home. And I had to: unlike my science fiction readings, these didn't give me the luxury of rejecting stories as implausible or suspending disbelief when they were well written. Either the theoretical framework held up and the methodology worked well, or not. And let's not forget that while fiction has a moral, research studies offer an implications section. Here's the lessons we learn; here's the work that must still be done; here's the ways in which actual people, including the real people in these stories, can benefit.

That, I decided, was the kind of study I wanted to write. Something useful, something interesting and trippy, something really readable in terms of style. Something like the studies that Bruno Latour writes. You've read Latour? He's a master stylist. Reading Latour is like drinking too much. Reading his books in the evening, you think, "this fellow is brilliant! Why isn't this clearer to his critics?" Then you wake the next day with a headache. "Ohhh, does that even make sense?" That's what I wanted to achieve – minus the headache.

A little side story here. A few years ago I was rereading some rhet-comp articles about research, and one casually mentioned that the researcher Steve Woolgar had gone as far as to make up a coauthor in one of his experimental ethnographies. That's odd, I thought. So I turned to the bibliography to see what ethnography the author was referencing. And there it was: Laboratory Life, by Steve Woolgar.

Laboratory Life, of course, was coauthored by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. And it dawned on me that this author thought Latour was a figment of Woolgar's imagination! A fiction!

Style and Fiction: Who Killed Rex?
Okay, so here's a story of my own. In 2000, I found myself sitting in the Network Control Center of a regional telecommunications company in West Texas. I really didn't know what I was looking for, to be honest: I had talked this company into letting me study its employees over ten months in exchange for reports on the company's "communication problems." Whatever they turned out to me. So I started with Customer Service, moved to Customer Service Data Entry, and then to the NCC, simply to see how people were communicating with each other. I would spend two hours shadowing each individual, then observe them again a couple of weeks later, giving them an interview after the second observation. And I would pick up artifacts – printouts, sticky notes, anything that looked interesting and related.

The NCC was a big room with a screen on one wall, seats facing it on tiers, kind of like a small movie theater or a large Enterprise bridge. Specialists hot-desked in the NCC. And the phones were always ringing: the NCC was where you were transferred when you reported some sort of network problem, like lost or interrupted service, crosstalk on the line, and so forth. If your overhead line was snapped by a falling branch, if you accidentally dug up an underground cable with a backhoe, the incident would eventually make its way to the NCC. There, a specialist would create a trouble ticket, assign it to a technician – usually a technician working for the dominant telecomm provider in the area, which we'll call BigTel - and communicate with the technician until the problem was resolved.

The NCC was busy. I mean, our individual phone service is rarely interrupted, but strands of the telecomm network break all the time. So specialists would be working three tickets on the screen, typing up a fourth while talking to a customer about the fifth. It was quite incredible to watch.

So one day I was sitting in the NCC, waiting for all these incidents to form patterns, when a specialist, Nathaniel, leans over to the guy I'm shadowing, Donald. Nathaniel said:

"BigTel let somebody's dog out and it got run over. Nothing mentioned in the ticket about it."

Donald nodded and listed the tickets he was to work for that day.

A few minutes later, the NCC's assistant manager sternly told the story again, this time to the entire NCC.

"There was nothing about a dog on the ticket," he said. "You must note that."

So this intrigued me. I mentioned that I read murder mysteries as a kid, right? And although this wasn't a murder mystery per se, it was still a mystery. Of course I asked people about it. Long story short, treating this incident like a mystery helped me to understand how Telecorp communicated internally and externally. It intrigued me, just as mysteries had intrigued me when I was younger, just as research studies had intrigued me in grad school.

Eventually, I wrote it up for a collection being put together by my good friend Mark Zachry and my beloved former professor Charie Thralls.

And since I had thought of it as sort of a murder mystery, I wrote it up in those terms, making it as entertaining as possible, hoping that others would get the same sort of thrill reading this study that I had gotten reading Hutchins, Vygotsky, Nardi, and especially Latour. The editors and I were pleased with the result.

An Email and a Question
Then I got this email from a graduate student. I've redacted it, but you can get the gist.

Clay,

I'm currently taking a Qualitative Research Methods with [professor] at [university]. In our last class, we read your article "Who Killed Rex?" During our discussion, it was suggested that you fabricated your qualitative investigation of Telecorp in an effort to educate your readers ...

Fabricated!

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that this graduate student has asked me if I have falsified research data, a serious ethical charge. Maybe he wasn't aware of how big a deal that would be. Instead, let's concentrate on the irony here. Ten years after I gave up on reading fiction because it wasn't interesting enough, I was being asked if I had written fiction. At least he hadn't accused me of being a figment of Steve Woolgar's imagination.

The answer was, of course, absolutely not. I have never fabricated or fictionalized research data. Besides being completely unethical, that would have missed the point. It would have taken all the fun out of it! How easy and how boring that would have been.

I told the grad student that the story of Rex was true, that I had the data to prove it, and that each claim had at least 2-3 different data points supporting it, data points coming from different data collection methods.

Write Like a Mystery Writer, Build the Case Like a Lawyer

I had written the case like a mystery author, but I had built the case like a lawyer. Specifically, I had sourced each claim by triangulating, and I made uncertainties clear through hedging. (This is something I just finished discussing with my undergraduate field methods class.)

There are at least two types of triangulation:

Triangulating across data types. In a qualitative study, you should have at least a few different types of data, and these should give you different views of the phenomenon. You can't rely on just one. If you just rely on observations, you'll only have your perspective - you will be able to describe what happened, but not why or how it connects with their goals. If you just rely on interviews, you get their perspective - their story - but sometimes people recall incorrectly or are just flat wrong. So as much as possible, you have to build a story by looking across the data to see what the different data types are telling you. In this case, people from the NCC were blaming the other units for the problem, and if I hadn't cross-checked their stories with the other data, I might have told a more simplistic, less accurate, less interesting story.

Triangulating across data instances. But I also had to make sure to triangulate across instances. It wasn't enough to, say, compare Nathaniel's statements with observations and artifacts pulled from his sessions. I also had to compare his statements against statements of others; his observations against observations of others; his artifacts - well you get the drift. Doing this allowed me to ask: how representative is this incident? How representative are these views? Am I talking to an oddball here, or does everyone see things this way? This sort of triangulation helps you to ensure that the most interesting or extreme views don't take over the argument.

Hedging. Finally, unlike a fiction writer, we don't get to take a God's-eye view. We don't see everything, and in fact John Law has some great examples of how he always seemed to be missing the action in his ethnography of a research center. So if we didn't see an incident, or get that interview describing it, or pick up the artifact that would confirm it, we have to fess up. This is ethos-building, it's confidence-building. Hedging is a sign of honesty and confidence, not weakness.

Some examples of hedging in "Who Killed Rex":

"I did not witness the original complaint being filed, of course, but I did observe customer service clerks dealing with similar complaints."
"We can't rule out Customer Service entirely, but their culpability seems less likely than Donald suggested."
"I did not observe any sales reps asking about pets and locked gates. But ... sales reps had developed no self-regulative genres, no scripts or checklists or forms, to remind them to ask about pets and locked gates."

Being Accused of Writing Fiction
So much for building the case like a lawyer. Let's talk about writing like a mystery writer. As you can tell, this topic is dear to my heart, because I really, truly believe that the best studies can be as interesting and more world-changing - and certainly stranger - than fiction. How can you be accused of writing fiction?

Get excited about your work. When my undergrads conduct studies, I remind them that chances are, no one has ever looked at their site in this way, with this level of scrutiny, with these analytical tools. I tell them that they'll see a lot of things that their participants already know about - but they'll achieve a systematic overview and a depth of understanding that no one else ever has. That's a big deal. And it has transformative potential.

Celebrate when the data don't fit your preconceptions. When I started the Telecorp study, I was working within a standard theoretical framework, activity theory. Even my interview questions were constructed around the parts of an activity system. But soon I realized that the data were not fitting activity theory well. I was thrilled: that meant that my theoretical preconceptions were not shaping what I saw. I wasn't just repeating the story that other activity theorists had told me - I was actually recounting my own story, based on the data I had collected.

Let the evidence deepen your claims. As you triangulate, you'll find that your early hypotheses (claims) often won't be complex enough to account for the data. Great. Let the claims simmer a bit, working in the data, deciding which claims to abandon, which ones to hedge, which ones to make more specific. Often the early claims are not nearly as interesting as the ones that you've let simmer, just as a two-dimensional character isn't as interesting as a three-dimensional one.

Edit for style. Remember, build the case like a lawyer, but write like a mystery writer - or borrow from whatever genres interest you. Look how some of the more engaging studies handle the challenge. Me, I read a lot of Latour as I wrote this study, and some of his bombast and dramatism rubbed off on me. In the book, I also drew from all those readings during my youth, especially the Bible, which I quote and paraphrase and play with.

At its best, a qualitative study can be better than fiction. It can grab people, fascinate them, impact them, and improve their lives. And that's what I want to leave you with:

Make it better than fiction.

Are you using my books?

2009-11-05T10:47:00.002-06:00

A request. I'm trying to get a sense of who's using my books in

classes (grad, undergrad)
graduate reading lists
theses, dissertations

If you've used one of my books in any of these contexts, could you send me a link? You can comment here, respond to me on Facebook or Twitter, or email me (clay dot spinuzzi at mail dot utexas dot edu). Thanks, all - I'm eager to hear from you.

I'm appearing at TCU Friday

2009-11-04T09:54:00.003-06:00

If you're in the Fort Worth area Friday, I'll be speaking at TCU at 7pm about writing up qualitative research. Information is at the TCU English page, where they also have a downloadable PDF about the event.

The talk is entitled "How Not to Write Fiction: Style and Evidence in Qualitative Research Studies." Basically, I'll be talking about writing up qualitative research in an engaging way while remaining true to the case - in other words, how to write like a mystery writer, but build your case like a lawyer.

I don't like to give long presentations, so this one will probably clock in at about 20 minutes, with plenty of time for discussion afterwards. Swing on by if you're interested! And if you can't make it, I'll probably post a modified version on my blog next week.

Reading :: Bullets & Blogs

2009-10-28T12:14:00.002-05:00

Bullets & Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter

By Dierdre Collings and Rafael Rohozinski

"If I can discredit my adversary," says one nameless participant quoted in this analytical synthesis, "then I don't have to kill him" (p.17). And that, in a nutshell, is what this workshop report is about: the fact that new media have changed warfare, dramatically increasing the importance of argument, engagement, and (although the report doesn't use the term) rhetoric.

The report is "an analytical synthesis and workshop report" summarizing the findings of a workshop on "New Media and the Warfighter" that was held at the US Army War College. Participants were Army officers, many of whom had combat experience in Iraq. The specific cases they discussed were drawn from the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war, a fascinating case in the use of new media and its power to counter conventional forces, but officers also drew on (unclassified) examples from their Iraq experience.

A few words about the cases. The authors characterize the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as

an important milestone for warfare in the information age. The non-state actor Hezbollah proved capable of thwarting Israel’s primary war aims and forcing a battlefield stalemate. While Hezbollah stood little chance of prevailing militarily against the Israeli Defense Forces, its strategic victory was achieved by way of an information-led warfighting strategy that leveraged new media to influence the political will of key global audiences (including the Israeli public). (p.1)

Like the Zapatista netwar in the 1990s, the Israeli-Hezbollah war involved a smaller, weaker combatant that successfully forced a stalemate due to its superior use of the information space to establish and develop a narrative, one that networked the interests of many actors. But this netwar happened at a breakneck pace. The authors caution that

The current and future geo-strategic environment requires preparation for a battlespace in which symbolic informational wins may precipitate strategic effects equivalent to, or greater than, lethal operations. It demands a paradigm shift away from an emphasis on information control and towards information engagement. (p.1)

Certainly that shift was on display during this conflict. On one hand, Hezbollah was outnumbered, but on the other hand, it was far more agile in the media space. Hezbollah realized that “the center of gravity was public opinion – often of multiple audiences” and therefore they had to maintain a “distributed presence” as well as credibility (p.2). So they did several things to establish superiority in the media space, including hammering away at a coherent narrative, broadcasting information (including troop movements and images) instantly, beating the Israeli army to the punch in battlefield reports, making information available across various languages and media, and developing crude but effective propaganda that supported its storyline. The IDF also suspects that Hezbollah gained access to the mobile phone system, allowing them to tap troops’ conversations and even track their movements – although that allegation is still unproven. (Israeli troops, used to taking action in areas supplied by Israeli telecoms and used to constant contact with their loved ones, sometimes ignored orders to turn in their mobile phones when they entered the battlespace.)

The authors allege that Hezbollah effectively established “information engagement”: communicating effectively and making their messages “sticky,” while arguing with and countering their adversary’s messages (pp.2-3). They warn that

Irregular and hybrid adversaries — aided and abetted by new media — have demonstrated the capability for rapid and effective maneuver in strategic information engagements. Adversarial agility is underpinned by three factors: a coherent strategy, synchronized methods, and decentralized organization, all of which leverage new media to their advantage. (p.3)

In particular, such adversaries have mastered – and the US Armed Forces need to master – six competencies, “underpinned by six core competencies” (pp.3-4):

Speed. While the Israelis were hampered by going through layers of bureaucracy to get their messages approved, Hezbollah fighters were empowered to push out messages in real time.
Authorities (need to be powered down): “Insurgent forces get their stories out fast because they all know the story-line, and are non-hierarchical when it comes to message approvals.” By “fast,” they mean in a matter of minutes, not hours or days (see p.22).
Message: Must be “specific, consistent, persistent, reflexive.” To push (message) power to the edge, all fighters have to know the basic storyline and know how to supply messages that contribute to it. (This one makes me think of Rich Freed’s discussion of themes in his book Writing Winning Business Proposals.) Indeed, in many such attacks, the message is the point; killing is secondary (p.28).
Media: Forces must engage in the “conversation” across traditional and new media: anywhere that your multiple target audiences may get the message. (This means an expanding universe of media and genres – including first-person shooters, in Hezbollah’s case [p.46].)
Messengers: Beyond the ground-level fighters, the authors stress “third-party validators” who don’t always push exactly the same message but who do have the established ethos to validate elements of the force’s storyline. In the Israeli-Hezbollah war, Lebanese bloggers served in this capacity (p.38).
Synchronicity. “Synchronicity enables organizational speed and agility by empowering actors at all levels to act appropriately. Synchronicity is achieved when different actors and actions, messages and messengers all reflect a shared narrative and strategy. This does not mean a coordinated and controlled response. Rather, it means that a clear strategic message sets the left and right parameters within which all agencies and levels ‘nest’” (p.4).

Such forces have established – and the US Armed Forces are trying to establish – continual self-documentation, such as filming all operations, declassifying them via guidelines rather than explicit approval, and rapidly posting the information to counter negative messages (p.4). In one example, a Lt. Colonel who had served in Iraq swore that he would “never again participate in an operation without at least helmet cams if combat camera personnel were unavailable” (p.23).

Countering is a big theme, because in most cases, the traditional method of “lethally targeting the delivery system” is no longer effective; rather than centralized broadcasting tools, adversaries are using the decentralized Internet. “The future is not to remove the message, but to respond to the message” (p.4). In other words, the future of warfare looks – in part - more like a flame war than Iwo Jima.

The future of espionage looks different too:

Experts noted that social networking sites can be a “disaster for national security:” “Give me the name of somebody in your unit, and in five minutes I can map the entire unit. I can draw a lot of valuable intelligence from these sites, that would otherwise take me hours or days of interrogation.” (p.55)

So self-monitoring and “rules of engagement” for social media become tremendously important. I’ve mostly focused on the executive summary here, but the entire 99-page report is riveting. It certainly points to the future of warfare and the challenges our third-generation army faces in a world of fourth-generation warfare. But it also suggests lessons across a wide range of organizations and activities. Fascinating reading; I highly recommend it.

Reading :: In Athena's Camp

2009-10-26T13:13:00.002-05:00

In Athena's Camp
Edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt

In 1997, RAND published this collection on conflict in the information age. The issue, as Arquilla and Ronfeldt explain in the first chapter, is that there are no conventional wars in sight; the information revolution is having a deepening impact on military affairs, just as it is having everywhere else. They argue:

Information, in all its dimensions, will enhance both the destructive and the disruptive capabilities of small units for all the services; in an information-age “battlespace,” massed forces will simply form juicy targets for small, smart attackers. In the new epoch, decisive duels for the control of information flows will take the place of drawn-out battles of attrition or annihilation; the requirement to destroy will recede as the ability to disrupt is enhanced. (p.2)

And they predict that "Curious combinations of premodern and postmodern elements will appear in antagonists’ ideologies, objectives, doctrines, and organizational designs." (p.4). Conflicts will revolve around information (p.4); changes in conflcit will be just as much about organization as technology – maybe more (p.5); war in the information age gravitates toward networked forms of organization (p.5). Indeed, "the conflict spectrum is being remolded from end to end" and "Information-age threats are likely to be more diffuse, dispersed, nonlinear, and multidimensional than were industrial-age threats” (p.5).

With that in mind, the editors have rounded up chapters exploring various aspects of the information age's impact on warfare. I'll just hit some of the highlights below, then sum up.

In Ch.2, “Cyberwar is coming!” Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue that

The information revolution, in both its technological and non-technological aspects, sets in motion forces that challenge the design of many institutions. It disrupts and erodes the hierarchies around which institutions are normally designed. It diffuses and redistributes power, often to the benefit of what may be considered weaker, smaller actors. It crosses borders and redraws the boundaries of offices and responsibilities. It expands the spatial and temporal horizons that actors should take into account. And thus it generally compels closed systems to open up. But while this may make life difficult especially for large, bureaucratic, aging institutions, the institutional form per se is not becoming obsolete. Institutions of all types remain essential to the organization of society. (p.26)

Yet in many cases, hierarchical institutions give way to networks:

The network form is very different from the institutional form. While institutions (large ones in particular) are traditionally built around hierarchies and aim to act on their own, multi-organizational networks consist of (often small) organizations or parts of institutions that have linked together to act jointly. The information revolution favors the growth of such networks by making it possible for diverse, dispersed actors to communicate, consult, coordinate, and operate together across greater distances and on the basis of more and better information than ever before. (p.27)

And networks lead to netwar, which

means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population “knows” or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. ... In contrast to economic wars that target the production and distribution of goods, and political wars that aim at the leadership and institutions of a government, netwars would be distinguished by their targeting of information and communications. (p.28)

One reason that networks are ascendant as an organizational form for some aspects of warfare is that warfare is increasingly reliant on “topsight.” leading to a deluge of information. In hierarchical command and control, this glut of information can result in bottlenecking and information overload. Therefore, the authors see a possible transition from hierarchy to network. "The traditional emphasis on command and control, a key strength of hierarchy, may have to give way to an emphasis on consultation and coordination, the crucial building blocks of network designs" (p.45).

This theme is partially expanded in Chapter 3, “Preparing for the next war,” where Blank argues that

States seeking strategic superiority via technological superiority must undergo substantive organizational transformation that enhances adaptability. Today, states move from technological to strategic superiority by achieving organizational superiority. Organizational transformations translate superior technology into superior strategic performance because organization is itself a form of technology. Moreover, the importance of organizational change grows during periods of technological innovation. (p.63).

In chapter 4, Davis argues that the information revolution means a merging of strategic, tactical, and operational levels:

The primary impact of the Information Revolution is to push the envelope of the decision-making speed-limit, i.e., the speed of thought. The result of these technological advances is that the time required to take action on the battlefield is becoming increasingly limited by the speed at which the human in the loop can make a tactical decision. (p.92).

And

In the past, decisions were made at a given command level because only that level had the requisite information to make the appropriate decision. But now, everyone in the chain of command can have access to the same information at essentially the same time. (p.92)

Davis argues that we must switch to networks to "allow greater flexibility, lateral connectivity, and teamwork across institutional boundaries" (p.93)

In Chapter 6, “Information, power, and grand strategy: In Athena's camp – Section 1,” Arquilla and Ronfeldt take up the question of what information is. They explain that there are three understandings of information: as message; as medium; and as physical property. But

Now, the emphasis has shifted to the concept of “complexity”—and this has led to a new concern with the “coordination” of complex systems. Control and coordination are different, sometimes contrary processes; indeed, the exertion of excessive control in order to avoid entropy may inhibit the looser, decentralized types of coordination that often characterize advanced forms of complex systems. What James Beniger called the “control revolution” is now turning into what might be better termed a “coordination revolution.” (p.148)

They also review three views of power: as resources, as organization, and as immaterial. And they provide a summary matrix (p.153), in which the “view of Athena” is located at the conjunction of matter and metaphysics.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt go on to discuss netwar in Chapter 12, “The advent of netwar.” Netwar, they say, works at the societal end: low-intensity conflict (LIC) and operations other than war (OOTW: “a broader concept than LIC that includes peacekeeping and humanitarian operations” p.275). We can expect increasing “irregularization” in warfare.

While the US military was the leader in cyberwar in 1997 (the date of publication), others led in netwar (p.276). And those others aren't necessarily enemy states: “some extremist rightist militia members in the United States have been heard to declare netwar (or netkrieg) against the U.S. Government, and have organized a virtual netwaffe. Also, center-left activists operating in Mexico sometimes refer to themselves now as 'netwarriors'.” (p.279).

A netwar actor, the authors explain, consists of a web (network) of nodes. These could be individuals, groups, organizations, etc. Such nodes exist in a flat organization with little or no hierarchy; have multiple leaders, no single leader; and make decisions in a decentralized way. Their capacity may depend on doctrine, ideology, or interests/objectives that span all nodes (p.280). Here, Arquilla and Ronfeldt cite Gerlach and Hine's SPIN concept (“segmented, polycentric, ideologically integrated network”) as a precursor of the netwar concept (p.281). This design's “node-level characteristics, rather than implying a need for rigid command and control of group actions, combine with interoperability to allow for unusual operational flexibility, a well as for a rapidity of maneuver and an economy of force” (p.281).

Netwar “tends to defy and cut across standard spatial boundaries, jurisdictions, and distinctions between state and society, public and private, war and crime, civilian and military, police and military, and legal and illegal. A netwar actor is likely to operate in the cracks and gray areas of a society” (p.283). It “may also confound temporal expectations by opting for an unusual duration and pace of conflict” (p.283).

On the other hand, a network is harder to run than a hierarchy because “network forms of organization generally require constant dense communications. The information revolution dramatically enhances the viability of the network form” (p.285). Proliferating media and genres “contribute to netwar,” becoming layered onto older media and genres to increase flexibility and density of communications (p.285). That's important, because in the past, the network as an organizational form was hindered due to its need for dense communication, the time to make decisions in a network, and “free riders” in the network (p.287). The information revolution shores up these problems, and thus favors networks while eroding hierarchies (p.290).

So what are the implications of a move toward networks? In Chapter 13, “Societal Implications,” Nichiporuk and Builder argue that the information revolution weakens hierarchies in two ways: by bypassing them (e.g., the breakdown of the nuclear family), and by using more effective alternative human organizational forms (e.g., the computer industry) (p.297).

The authors list two reasons why power is shifting from institutions to individuals. First, “the informational processing and filtering roles performed by many levels within traditional hierarchies have become obsolete” so “hierarchies need no longer serve as the exclusive conduit of information to the individual” (p.299). Second, the workforce has changed in advanced economies: “Information workers generally do not need the structure or control provided by traditional hierarchical organizations, since their jobs require them to innovate and adapt on a daily basis. Indeed, they operate most efficiently when they are given the autonomy to attack problems with their own independent approaches” (p.299). Whereas hierarchies are optimized for managing routine work, that work is becoming a smaller percentage of the work in most national economies (p.299). Hierarchies will survive for specific functions (p.301), but information workers need a more flexible organization structure that allows them more autonomy.

Indeed, the authors argue, “hierarchical institutions become the victims of abundant information, while networks thrive on it” (p.304).

Those networks are not necessarily what we would consider legitimate state actors prosecuting conventional war aims. In Chapter 14, “Transnational criminal organisations and international security,” Williams discusses criminal enterprises as networks. One of his most arresting claims is that the Cali cartel is the developing world's most successful transnational organization (p.324). And in Chapter 18, “Information, power, and grand strategy: In Athena's camp, section 2,” Arquilla and Ronfeldt further argue that economic threats rise as military threats recede. They warn of “neo-merchantilist networks that are designed to perform well against market-oriented competitors.” (p.428)

Finally, in Chapter 19, “Looking ahead: Preparing for information-age conflict,” Arquilla and Ronfeldt attempt to synthesize “the beginning of an integrated vision of information-age conflict” with four parts: “conceptual, organizational, doctrinal, and strategic” (p.439). Among other things, they discuss network-hierarchy hybrids, recognizing that in military application, networks must operate in relatively flat hierarchies (p.440, 462). “Gaining a competitive edge depends not only on strengthening one's ability to compete against rivals and adversaries, but also on one's ability to cooperate with partners” (p.490).

So what are we to make of this collection? As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm not a big fan of collections because they're hard to keep coherent. And we see a bit of that problem here, with some chapters – particularly the ones on cyberwar – aging less gracefully than others. But the collection also has some real gems, chapters that explicate the netwar concept and examine the characteristics of networks more generally. The Arquilla and Ronfeldt chapters are particularly useful, but some of the others discussed above are also really useful for covering more specific parts of netwar.

This book is available for free at RAND.org, although I bought my copy. If you're interested in netwar and/or networks, I recommend it – but download some chapters from RAND.org first and see what you think.

Reading :: The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico

2009-10-21T15:22:00.002-05:00

The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico
by David Ronfeldt

About halfway through this book, I tweeted that books like this one are why I gave up fiction. It's true: The book is fascinating, combining a gripping story with a fascinating analysis and rousing implications. And lest people in my field discount its relevance, let me emphasize that this story is about how rhetoric helped David (the Zapatista movement) win a war against Goliath (the Mexican army).

That's an oversimplification, certainly, but it highlights some of the issues at play here. On New Year's Day 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) – with only 1000 to 2000 insurgents – occupied five towns and a city in Chiapas; soon it declared war on the Mexican government (p.1). This insurrection “began as a traditional, Maoist insurgency” (p.45), with the traditional Maoist strategy of building into large units, eventually regiments and divisions, that could take on the government's forces in symmetrical warfare (pp.48-49). Such insurrections had happened before in Mexico, and they had been swiftly crushed by the government. But this time, something odd happened. In press conferences and communiques, the ELZN disavowed Marxist and other ideological leanings, instead emphasizing its indigenous roots and solidarity, appealing for creation of a true democracy and socioeconomic reforms (implying the abrogation of NAFTA) (p.2). It called for a peaceful nationwide civic struggle, not an armed conflict, to reach these goals. And it called for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to monitor the conflict (p.2).

What on earth happened? The authors of this RAND report patiently take us through the history of the crisis, using the netwar framework to explain how the Zapatista strategy changed as NGOs became involved. For instance, the Zapatistas suddenly found themselves supported by single-issue NGOs: NGOs representing the rights of indigenous peoples and by NGOs representing human rights in general (pp.37-39). But they also enjoyed the support of multiple-issue NGOs: ones dealing with Central America, ones opposing NAFTA (p.39). Suddenly many NGOs looked at the Zapatistas and saw an organization that supported – or apparently supported – their issues. And such NGOs were networked with each other, with activists, and with the media. Despite itself – for the ELZN was generally hierarchical (p.43) – the ELZN was drawn to networking with the NGOs, and in doing so, became part of their network.

That meant changing. To use the language of actor-network theory, the Zapatistas and NGOs were interessed: they collectively defined the problem, and in the process, locked themselves into place as actors. The ELZN disavowed a Marxist struggle and instead took up a “compromise agenda” that reflected the shared goals of the NGOs supporting them (p.51). The list of NGOs, by the way, is quite lengthy (pp.58-60). This swarm of NGOs attacked the Mexican government – not violently, but rhetorically: through the media, bloodlessly exerting pressure that, incredibly, held the army at bay.

But the Mexican army changed too. The netwar “has prompted tactical decentralization, institutional redesign in favor of smaller, more specialized and mobile forces, new efforts at joint operations, and improvements in interservice intelligence sharing” (p.77). After all, “it takes networks to fight networks” (p.79).

I've discussed some of the theoretical apparatus and implications of this analysis elsewhere. But the story is well worth reading, not just because it's interesting or theoretically rewarding, but because the Zapatista netwar is one prototype for the networked organizations – and the low-level conflicts – that very well may become common in our near future. If you're interested in organizations, in rhetoric's transitions, or in the future of the state, I highly recommend this book.

Google Wave vs. Google Docs

2009-10-15T09:00:00.002-05:00

I've been a GDocs user for a while now, in great part because I like its commitment to collaboration. I even have students use it to peer review papers and turn in papers to me. (Reactions have been generally positive.)

So as I begin using the alpha version of Google Wave, I've been trying to figure out where it fits. After all, Docs and Wave do seem to overlap in at least one function, collaborating on documents. Here are some tentative thoughts I posted to my Twitter feed a couple of days ago:

GDocs has better readout of revision history, but Wave alerts you to unseen changes and puts your collaborators across the top.
GDocs embeds comments; Wave splits wave sections (blips) when you comment on a portion of the wave. Document vs. Hyperforum.
Wave has stronger mashup potential because it doesn't closely imitate conventional docs. But it is weak now because extensions are scarce.
GDocs is better for working with documents in more structured, turn-taking collaborations. Wave may be better in agile or synchronized collaboration.
GDocs kills email pingpong (sending versions of documents as attachments, which leads to version control issues). Perhaps Wave kills the idea of documents?

Let's think of it this way. GDocs adds capabilities to the word processors we all know. In fact, GDocs' button bar looks a lot like older versions of MS Word. It uploads Word documents. It does Word- or Works-like things. It starts with the molar unit of the document and adds collaboration.

Wave starts with collaboration, and adds capabilities to produce different sorts of genres within that collaborative paradigm. Documents are just one.

So Wave will have a higher learning curve (as I can attest) and will be less specialized for producing documents. Consequently, it's not as well honed for producing traditional documents. But it's a more general collaborative tool.

As Wave is developed, I expect that we'll see Google giving its API a workout to increase interoperability with GDocs and other services. But I'm not sure if we'll see a collapse between the services, which are still doing rather different things.

"Does TIMN imply developing the so-far least favored (+N?) option: networked non-profit cooperatives?"

2009-10-12T09:43:00.003-05:00

David Ronfeldt, about whose TIMN framework I recently blogged, has some thoughts about how a TIMN (Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks) analysis might characterize different kinds of governance. At the end, he points toward further possible work, including this:

Can TIMN help assess what seems to be ideologically amiss with liberalism and conservatism in the United States? Have both moved too far from being soundly triformist? Is one of them turning too tribalist (even monoformist) for its own and the country’s good? And what about a current policy issue — healthcare — that has liberals and conservatives all riled up, at odds over whether to go for a public (+I) or private (+M) option? Does TIMN imply developing the so-far least favored (+N?) option: networked non-profit cooperatives? I’m still working on this part, and I’ll post a separate announcement when it’s ready to be inserted here. Maybe next week.

I'm looking forward to this development. Either way, I like that this theoretical framework can become a tool to think beyond the current twinned either-or fallacy that the health care debate has become in this cycle.

"It’s decentralized now."

2009-10-12T09:01:00.003-05:00

Earlier this year, I blogged about the health care town halls and TEA parties, suggesting that the health care protesters were leveraging a hybrid top-down, bottom-up approach in which independent groups or individuals make lateral connections online, come together for protests in which they agree with specific claims (although perhaps not reasons or warrants), and make personal connections at those protests that allow them to scale further. I pointed to Manuel Castells' work and the netwar literature as ways of understanding this phenomenon, and I concluded:

I'll end by stating again that in examining this development, I am not taking a side - even if there were a side to take. Protesters - of the WTO, of Social Security reform, of health care reform, etc. - don't necessarily have a coherent side, any more than federations of knowledge workers do. In describing this tactical development, I'm not endorsing any of these groups, any more than I would be endorsing Nazi Germany by analyzing the Blitzkrieg.

The Blitzkrieg, of course, was a revolution in military tactics built around tight communication between air and land power. Although we have negative associations with the term Blitzkrieg, the basic tactic is neutral - and has become the foundation for modern conventional warfare, including the US' AirLand Battle conceptual framework.

So I was interested to click through an NYT article today and see an account of another protest, one very different from the health care protests and TEA parties, but one that had much in common with them tactically. The article: "Gay Rights Marchers Press Cause in Washington." Here are some representative quotes; I've added emphasis.

“I think this march represents the passing of the torch,” said Corey Johnson, 27, an activist and blogger for the gay-themed Web site Towleroad.com. “The points of power are no longer in the halls of Washington or large metropolitan areas. It’s decentralized now. You have young activists and gay people from all walks of life converging on Washington not because a national organization told them to, but because they feel the time is now.”

Indeed, the marchers were enraged that a national organization was not protesting:

The rally on Sunday and a black-tie gala on Saturday hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights advocacy group, made for a glaring dichotomy. Mr. Obama, who spoke at the dinner, had the crowd on its feet reiterating his pledge to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and declaring his commitment to gay rights as “unwavering.”

The President had no statement, and Rep. Barney Frank dismissed the protest. And

Organizers of the march encountered considerable opposition from within gay political circles and from those who argued that it was hastily planned and would divert resources from campaigns at the state level.

This disjuncture between a national advocacy group and the marchers is a big difference with the health care protesters, who enjoyed varying levels of support from conservative groups. On the other hand, the national organization that might have supported the gay rights marchers under a Republican administration has instead sought an accomodationist footing with a nominally friendly Democratic one. When the White House next changes hands, we might see these differences reverse.

In any case, I think we'll see more hybrid and/or bottom-up demonstrations, tying in more groups and claims, and developing in sophistication and tactics as they proceed. I think we'll also see these groups drawing on each others' tactics in an ideology-free way, just as Blitzkrieg became AirLand Battle.

Some tentative thoughts about a networked rhetoric

2009-09-28T10:50:00.003-05:00

I've been rereading David Ronfeldt's RAND working paper "In search of how societies work: Tribes - the first and forever form." Ronfeldt's work is fascinating to me, partially because it's really grappling with the broad implications of organizational forms, partially because it's often illustrated with very concrete cases (e.g., his monograph with Arquilla, Fuller, and Fuller on the Zapatista netwar in Mexico, which I'll be reviewing soon). This work ranges broadly - like Castells, Ronfeldt seemingly reads from everywhere - and has interesting implications, although I approach those implications gingerly because I don't feel that I've reviewed them enough to stand solidly on them.

So I'll be tentative here, speculating about what Ronfeldt's ideas might mean for a networked rhetoric.

Ronfeldt lays out his TIMN framework here: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks. These, he suggests, are the four major forms of organization. Plenty of minor forms exist, but, he argues, as hybrids of these four. These emerge over time, in response to specific conditions, and differently in different societies; although, he says, forms of each have existed since ancient times, different forms become ascendant under different conditions. They tend to coexist in a given society. And each "embodies a distinctive set of structures, beliefs, and dynamics (with bright and dark sides) about how a society should be organized - about who gets to achieve what, why, and how" (p.1).

These different forms matured during different epochs: tribes in the Neolithic era; hierarchical institutions, most notably with the Roman empire; competitive markets with England and the US in the 16th century; and collaborative networks in the present day (pp.1-2).

These forms also emphasize different things: tribes, social identity and belonging; institutions, power and administration; markets, complex exchanges; and networks, Ronfeldt suggests, perhaps emphasize social equity. I think that perhaps he's more on the mark at the top of p.2, where he suggests networks emphasize collaboration across boundaries.

The forms are typically overlaid: as a new form becomes ascendant, the old forms are often strengthened, although their scope becomes more limited (p.3).

And the forms, Ronfeldt argues, involve "different kinds of bonds, transactions, decision rules, and coordination mechanisms. Each has a long, distinct history of association with different philosophical ideals, codes of conduct, and mentalities. Moreover, each requires an actor to have different kinds of information to perform well in that particular form" (p.16). And "What is deemed rational - how a 'rational actor' should behave - is different for each form" (p.20). They are also enabled through different information technologies: tribes, early language; institutions, writing and printing; markets, telephony and radio; and networks, the Internet and faxes - and we might add texting (p.20).

(Just to illustrate, recall that writing apparently emerged to address a thorny accounting issue that the Sumerian empire - an early institution - faced when gathering tributes from its far-flung tributaries.)

With all that in mind, let's tentatively postulate that Ronfeldt has given us a starter framework for understanding types of rationality in different societies, and by extension, a way to conceive of effective logic within each.

Tribes respond well to affiliation, since their key purpose is identity, their key effect is solidarity, and their key information technology is the spoken word; we can see the effect, Ronfeldt says, in failed states. In tribes, "it is not at all illogical to have one code for one's kin and another for outsiders. Indeed, it may seem sensible - and not at all unethical or illegitimate - to behave in what modern analysts may regard as deceptive, exploitive, and even murderous ways toward outsiders" (p.40). Among other things, Ronfeldt suggests that racism is largely situated within a tribal frame.

Institutions, on the other hand, have the key purpose of power and authority; the key effect of sovereignty; and the key information technology of writing and print. Their structure is hierarchical, meant to deal with groups of people that have scaled beyond the limits that tribes can handle. Institutions help people to deal with others that they don't necessarily know by name. Think in terms of Hammurabi's code, which was promulgated so that everyone knew the laws to follow and the rights they had under the laws. What we know as classical rhetoric was codified during this period, originating with a particular institutional setting: the courts.

Markets address the issue of complex exchanges. They have the key purpose of trade and investment, Ronfeldt says; the key effect of competition; and the key information technologies of telephony and radio. Their structure is the exchange. Ronfeldt doesn't address rhetoric here, but we might draw from Drucker's account in Post-Capitalist Society, where he says that the modern age is characterized by knowledge applied to tools, to work, and lastly to knowledge itself (the management revolution). Efficiencies, leverage, and measurable outcomes might be aspects.

So now we get to networks, and Ronfeldt fills the boxes with question marks. Key purpose: Social equity? Key effect: collaboration? Key information technologies: Internet and fax (no question marks here). Networks span boundaries, connecting actors from different organizations, spaces, tribes, markets, etc. "What is distinctive about information-age networks is that people who are far removed from each other can connect, coordinate, and act conjointly across barriers and distances. ... this form is suited to enabling people to address modern, complex policy issues that may require efforts from many directions at the same time, such as health management and disaster recovery. These networks offer new designs for mutual collaboration that cannot be characterized as tribal, hierarchical, or market in nature" (p.22).

Ronfeldt and colleagues offer several examples in the netwar literature, but one of the best is their analysis of the Zapatista netwar. The Zapatistas (EZLN) began as a traditional Marxist insurgency, arranged along Maoist lines in which guerillas would build up forces and eventually form regiments and divisions to confront the enemy. Unfortunately for the EZLN, this strategy was not working. But the EZLN found that it gained traction among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) interested in various issues, such as indigenous rights, human rights, and anti-NAFTA sentiment. These NGOs did not necessarily agree with each other about many things, but they did detect a shared set of propositions - which the EZLN quickly clarified as its own, shifting its objective from revolution to reform, jettisoning much of the Marxist language and demands along the way. As Ronfeldt et al. put it in the Zapatista study, "NGO coalitions arose that were characterized by 'flexible, conjunctural [coyuntural], and horizontal relations' held together by shared goals and demands" (quoting Castro 1994; brackets in original). And "To some extent, this was a compromise agenda" (Ronfeldt et al. p.51).

Let's think about this, tentatively, in rhetorical terms. Under classical (and arguably institutional) rhetoric, arguments are expected to be internally coherent. Let's use the Toulmin structure as an example: A well-formed argument has a claim supported by reasons, each of which is in turn supported by evidence. Connecting the claim to each reason is a warrant, an assumption shared by both the speaker and the listener. The more reasons, the better; the more evidence per reason, the better. And in a well-formed argument, none of these can contradict each other.

But in the Zapatista example, we see something rather different. True to network principles, different actors cross boundaries to collaborate on a single set of shared goals and demands. Let's call this set of goals and demands the claim. The NGOs are largely single-issue: indigenous rights, human rights, anti-NAFTA, etc. They come from different regions, are based in different countries, and reflect different ideologies. But they are all interessed (to use actor-network theory's terminology) in the same problem or proposition or claim; they all define it and are in turn defined by it. So in Toulmin terms, each contributes warrants, reasons, and evidence. But these components do not have to be coherent with the components of the other NGOs. NGOs A, B, and C may have completely different logics, ideologies, warrants, reasons, evidence, etc. But they swarm the proposition/claim and lend their support to it.

Since this networked argument is not coherent, it provides a much more difficult target. It may not even appear rational to an institutional actor, and in fact it's probably a lousy argument by institutional (classic rhetorical) standards. To use terms from my recent book: institutions expect a woven argument; networks deliver spliced arguments.

For fun, let's (again, tentatively) plug this back into the recent health care town hall protests I blogged about recently. As I argued there:

they are united in tactical opposition rather than strategic objectives. And they come into contact and network with those who have similar tactical goals through information technologies that also help them to rapidly coordinate.

That is, they are united in claim or proposition, not in reasons, warrants, or evidence. They don't necessarily form a coherent argument because they have their own, often orthogonal reasons for opposing the health care bill. Seniors worry about Medicare cutbacks; deficit hawks worry about the deficit; proceduralists worry about the aftermath of a rush job; birthers and red-scare types worry about socialism. They might trade reasons and evidence, but they don't necessarily buy into each others' arguments. They don't have to.

What does this sort of networked argument look like to an institution? Either it looks irrational or it looks like a "vast right-wing conspiracy." Addressing this sort of argument with a structured counterargument, point by point, as President Obama attempted, doesn't help much because such counterarguments are geared to exposing incoherencies and contradictions, and incoherencies and contradictions aren't a liability in this case.

Of course, the rationalities of the earlier forms have not disappeared and can still be exploited. Individual institutions can be vulnerable to institutional counterarguments, for instance. Racism - and for that matter, the accusations of racism leveled by some of the President's defenders - can be considered a tribal appeal. But a rebuttal for networked rhetoric perhaps remains to be developed.

One more thought. Activity theory, I suggest, is institutional; actor-network theory is networked.

As mentioned, these are early, tentative thoughts. Comments?

Reading :: The Ethics of Internet Research

2009-09-28T10:15:00.002-05:00

The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process
By Heidi McKee and James Porter

Internet research - specifically, qualitative research conducted in Internet spaces, such as email, listservs, social networking sites, and virtual environments - has become increasingly important as we conduct more interactions via Internet media. Yet, as the authors point out, institutional review boards and other research ethics bodies have not kept up: in some cases they have tended to interpret Internet research as archival research, demanding relatively low hurdles for consent, while in other cases, they have demanded much higher hurdles. In this book, McKee and Porter examine the ethical and institutional issues that surround this sort of research. Through their interviews with several Internet researchers - including, I must add, my friend and fellow Iowa State alum Dave Clark - they look at a range of ethical actions that these researchers have taken that go beyond the demands of their IRBs. And they push toward an understanding of ethics that is more tuned to the specifics of Internet research.

So they do useful work here, and I'd recommend the book to scholars who are embarking on Internet-based studies. (I should mention that I haven't conducted such a study so far.) I am not entirely in step with some of their conclusions, such as their recommendation that "the genre of the social science report ... [be revised] to include a section on ethical issues" (p.156), a move that I worry will bog down the genre with pro forma pronouncements as ethical standards for Internet research become more settled. But as a temporary feature during the development of Internet research ethics, such a section makes sense.

If you're doing Internet research, I suggest giving this book a read.

The G20 Protests

2009-09-25T11:03:00.003-05:00

Not long ago, I analyzed the health care town halls in network terms, linking the protestors' tactics to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Now we're seeing something more similar to the WTO protests, the G20 protests currently going on in Pittsburgh. I'm not going to attempt an analysis, at least not yet, but it's worth quoting John Robb on them:

In general, governments worldwide are losing control over all of the classical forms of national power from borders to finances to communication to media to economic activity to security to trade flows (of all types). The upshot of this accelerating weakness is a tendency to view any and all forms of public protest as a security threat.

Right. Castells goes further, noting that the state traditionally asserts a monopoly on violence (Communication Power p.51, for instance), and that "because networks are global, the state, which is the enforcer of power through the monopoly of violence, finds considerable limits to its coercive capacity unless it engages itself in networking with other states, and with the power-holders in the decisive networks that shape social practices in their territories while being deployed in the global realm" (p.51). But nonstate actors are also in play, as the Seattle protests nicely demonstrated, and these threaten states' abilities to enforce power.

So, Robb points out, states have begun turning to paramilitary operations, early and free use of nonlethal weapons on crowds (e.g., sonic weapons, tear gas), and speech restrictions. And as Robb warns:

This effort will almost undoubtedly generate unintended consequences (we can already see protest groups learning to counter this by using flash mob mobility via cell phones).

Yes, and as with the previous examples, groups are mingling and networking, using Internet and mobile communication technologies to coordinate, exhort, and plan. Techniques in one context are deployed in others - on both sides. For instance, one response to the town hall protests has been to hold "virtual town halls" in which representatives control the communication channels and thus the conduct of the meetings. The results have been less unruly, but also have been perceived in some quarters as analogous to Potemkin villages. Such communication management is perhaps analogous to the "free speech zones" Robb notes, but we can imagine more aggressive measures along these lines, such as disrupting mobile phone service or social networking.

Reading :: Communication Power

2009-09-22T21:24:00.002-05:00

Communication Power
By Manuel Castells

Although Internet media had played a role in politics before, including the early success of the Dean campaign, perhaps the most startling impact it had was on Dan Rather's famous report about George W. Bush's National Guard service. Based on what he called "unimpeachable sources," Rather claimed to have solid evidence for the long-circulating rumor that Bush had used family connections to avoid serving in Vietnam, and in the waning days of the election, he grimly told the electorate that the war president was a draft dodger. His evidence: memos purportedly written by Bush's National Guard commander.

You know the rest. Bloggers and commenters at Free Republic, Little Green Footballs and Powerline examined the memos and noticed what anyone who has closely followed the shift from typewriter to word processor should have noticed: the memos were written in a proportional font and were automatically tracked. One person created an animated GIF showing one of the memos alternating with the same text typed into Microsoft Word with the default settings; except for smudges, the two were identical. Alerted by these differences, others noted content discrepancies. The story, which could have seriously compromised the Bush campaign, instead damaged CBS News. Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, was terminated, and Rather was put out to pasture. And bloggers famously told the legacy media that they would "fact check your ass."

It's telling – and disappointing – that the closest Manuel Castells gets to addressing this watershed event is to call Bush a "draft-dodging, alcoholic, drug abuser" (p.236) while holding Rather up as a sterling example of the US media, trying and sometimes failing to criticize the Bush adminstration enough (p.171, footnote 21). I found this quite disappointing, since one of the things that I admired about Castells' The Power of Identity was his evenhandedness in examining networked relations among disparate social movements despite his sympathy for one (the Zapatistas) and his antipathy for the other two (the black-helicopter crowd and Aum Shinrikyo). We sorely need that sort of evenhandedness to understand the very phenomenon Castells is trying to examine here – communication power – but Castells is anything but evenhanded. And in ignoring the Rathergate blog swarm and other examples that go against the anti-Bush narrative, he loses several opportunities to provide a fuller, more challenging analysis.

Indeed, I regret to report that Castells seems to entirely give up the analytical view in spots. His account of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, for instance, reads like a campaign ad – or a love letter – in which he is unaccountably credulous of the campaign's statements and actions. He extensively cites Obama's books as his major sources on the candidate's life, seemingly unaware or unconcerned that political autobiographies are typically crafted to work within a campaign's narrative. He enthuses that Obama is a different kind of candidate, oriented less to the left-right divide and more toward the future vs. the past (p.375). He even finds himself arguing that "Obama ... made a strategic alliance with the Chicago political machine, but he was not part of it" – and in the next sentence, suggesting that since the Daley machine produced such successful policies, maybe this dynasty wasn't so bad after all (pp.388-389).

Omissions such as Rathergate and commissions such as the offhand embrace of machine politics (when they support Obama, at any rate) are hard to overlook, and they cast a pall over the purpose of the book. In the opening, Castells describes how as a college student in Franco's Spain, he tried to resist the dictatorship's censorship. He came to believe that "power is based on the control of communication and information" (p.3). He is interested, then, in "why, how, and by whom power relationships are constructed and exercised through the management of communication processes, and how these power relationships can be altered by social actors aiming for social change by influencing the public mind" (p.3). In particular, he's interested in how communication power is exercised in the network society, which is constructed around digital technologies, technologies that have produced media of "mass self-communication" (p.4). What's mass self-communication? Think in terms of the blogs by which bloggers published their own analyses of Dan Rather's memos and contributed to each others' interpretations – just to pick an example out of the air.

Castells, as usual, is wide-ranging, and he tells us at the beginning that he will draw on various theories (which he characterizes as "disposable tools," p.5) without wasting too much time critiquing or reconciling them (p.6). And so he does. At times, this is regrettable: actor-network theory, for instance, is cited in a single sentence, called "brilliantly theorized," yet is characterized as being about "humans" – which is pretty much the opposite of Latour's intent (p.45). Nevertheless, Castells covers the network society pretty well in chapter 1, which is largely an update of his argument in The Rise of the Network Society.

His next chapter, on communication in the digital age, delves into the idea of mass self-communication: communication that could potentially reach the masses, but "is self-communication because the production of the message is self-generated, the definition of the potential receiver(s) is self-directed, and the retrieval of specific messages or content ... is self-directed" (p.55). Mass self-communication coexists with interpersonal and mass communication, generating a hypernetworked diversity that encourages mixing and recombining (p.55). This present age is undergoing at least four transformations of communication: a technological transformation based on digital communication; a transformation of the organizational and institutional structure of communication; a transformation of the cultural dimension of multilayered communication; and a transformation involving the social (typically power) relationships underlying the evolution of this multimodal communication system (pp.56-57). Castells traces the implications of each here, quite densely; I won't summarize all of his conclusions.

So far so good. But things start to slide, I think, in Chapter 3. Here, Castells starts borrowing from neuroscience and cognitive science, and I'm not thrilled with the results, which seem sutured together without enough theoretical structure to provide a well-structured argument. Castells tried to counter this criticism in the Overview, but I'm not buying it. I'll skip over the neuroscience portion he borrows from Damasio and go straight to the Lakoff. Frankly, I haven't read Lakoff, but every summary of his work has read like Castells' summary here: (a) Framing an issue is important because once people accept a frame, they can't see outside of it; (b) conservatives have successfully framed issues by activating the frames of terror and patriotism, frames that trigger conservative impulses in the hearers because we get more conservative when we think about death; (c) liberals need to therefore get off the ball, stop being so cerebral and even-handed, and start activating their own frames. I won't launch an extended critique of this line of reasoning (as Castells represents it, anyway). Instead, I'll just point out that that there's a rich history of studying and theorizing persuasion (i.e., rhetoric) and it has historically been critiqued by those who don't trust persuasion because the truth is so obvious that people could not be persuaded otherwise without some sort of nefarious trickery. I don't give this any more credence than I do the other side of the coin: conservative rumors that President Obama is such a successful speaker because he uses known hypnosis techniques.

Castells rides this horse a bit more in Chapter 4, discussing the rise of scandal politics (and illustrating it, as I mentioned at the beginning of this review), and really contributing some valuable theoretical work on why it is ascendant. Scandals, he says, have become the hidden expression of political struggle by other means (p.261; think here about Speaker Pelosi's claim that the CIA had never briefed Congress about waterboarding, for instance). He examines three different countries (the US, Russia, and China) to demonstrate how states use techniques tailored to their political climates in order to assert message control. This is among the most valuable parts of the book: how communication networks are "programmed."

Even more valuable is Chapter 5, on "reprogramming" communication networks through individuals' insurgent activities. Let's pass over Castells' merciless characterization of non-actors as "selfish parasites" (p.300), and let's applaud the apparent return of Castells' analytical distance as he points out that social change could be in any given direction (p.301). He argues that social change requires "reprogramming" communication networks, changing the power relationships embedded in these networks (p.302), and he points to "the potential synergy between the rise of mass self-communication and the autonomous capacity of civil societies around the world to shape the process of social change" (p.303). His extended example is that of the 2004 Spanish election, in which the ruling party claimed falsely that terrorist bombings were the work of Basque separatists rather than al Qaeda (p.349). The mass media were constrained from reporting fully, but citizens exchanged text messages, organized rallies, and forced further journalistic investigation, leading to the defeat of the ruling party. Alas, later in the chapter, he covers the Obama campaign in much less analytic detail, as I mentioned above.

Castells concludes by counseling us, without apparent irony, to "practice your critical thinking every day" (p.431).

I've been hard in this review on Castells, who I have admired in his previous efforts for his ability to cover and synthesize many different bodies of research in the service of understanding the network society. And Castells has some genuine, solid contributions here. But as I've intimated above, the book is quite patchy, with some parts reading like a second draft, some parts highly polished, some parts highly analytical, some parts glossy and nearly analysis-free. In a way, this book reminds me of Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, which (to my eye) seemed like the sort of book one writes when one no longer wants to bother answering critics. Unfortunately, the result is a fair amount of gold mixed with a fair amount of dross. Proceed carefully with this book, and "practice your critical thinking every day."

Reading :: The Ayes of Texas

2009-09-20T15:28:00.003-05:00

The Ayes of Texas
By Daniel da Cruz

I read perhaps one book of fiction per year. This year, I picked up a piece of Cold War science fiction about which I had always been curious. The premise behind this 1982 book, The Ayes of Texas, is classic Cold War paranoia. In 1994, the Soviet Union is going strong, having taken over most of the world; the United States has gotten bogged down in pouring foreign aid into its own third world client states, including India and China. The Soviets have demonstrated their own strategic defense initiative and shown off their vast underground cities, both of which guarantee their ability to survive a nuclear struggle. An uneasy detente rests over the world. As the author explains, Reagan's attempts to reverse his predecessor's neglect of the military has doomed the US.

In this situation, a Texan millionaire, who happens to be a triple amputee WWII veteran, answers the call of the Texas governor by secretly refurbishing his old WWII ship, the rusting Texas. At the same time, the Soviets have proposed a peace accord that is a transparent Soviet ploy: one that would have the US abandon its industrial base and focus on agriculture. The weary US public buys this, but a few don't, and the Texas millionaire is among them. He riles up sentiment in Texas against a Soviet fleet that is touring US ports; the result is Texas secession and an unlikely battle in which the city of Houston annihilates the entire Soviet 17th Fleet.

The book is interesting mainly as a relic of Cold War paranoia in which Soviet expansion was inevitable, and only a Machiavellian Great Man could save the free world. As we now know, in retrospect this chain of events is not plausible: Carter's military spending had begun an upward trajectory even before Reagan came into office; the Soviet Union had already begun to suffer from overexpansion; and Great Men are overrated. But the book reflects the mindset of its time, and that's really the most interesting thing about it. I don't recommend the book.

Reading :: The Reagan Imprint

2009-09-20T14:57:00.002-05:00

The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror
By John Arquilla

As John Arquilla notes, many books have been written that speculate about President Reagan, seemingly open, but in practical terms one of the most private and closed presidents we have ever had. Arquilla does not set out to "crack the carapace of his psyche" (p.9), but rather to examine his strategic thinking based on foreign (not domestic) policy. And in those senses, Arquilla comes up with some surprising answers. He argues that Reagan was in many ways the pivot of presidential foreign policy, a president that has not been appreciated for his strategic insights as well as his strategic successes. "In short," Arquilla argues, "the world would be far more complicated and infinitely more dangerous had Ronald Reagan not risen to the presidency. But he did, making a favorable peace with the Russians just in time to give the United States the running room it needs to cope with a new era of complex problems and grave global challenges" (p.212).

Arquilla is, of course, most concerned with foreign policy strategy in general and military strategy in particular. I've reviewed some of his previous work on this blog, including his recent book on reforming the military to better deal with asymmetric warfare and some of his writings on netwar. In this book, he is most interested in "the Reagan imprint," the lasting influence that Reagan's strategic thinking had on the US military, US strategy, and the conduct of subsequent presidents. Arquilla's assessment is not entirely positive, but it appears thorough and searching to this lay reader.

This portrait of Reagan may be hard for some to take, given a popular perception of Reagan as driven by ideology, Christian apocalyptism, and half-remembered movie plots. But Arquilla builds a case that Reagan was "above all else a strategic thinker" (p.215). Although the entire book builds this case, I'll quote from the book's excellent summary. Arquilla singles out five ways in which "Reagan transformed American grand strategy" (p.215):

From containment to rollback: Up to Reagan's election, the US had taken the strategic position of containing Soviet expansion: a reactive, resistant strategy. Reagan elected to "take the initiative away from the Soviets" (p.216) by encouraging those under Soviet control to resist: "helping others help themselves," as Arquilla put it (p.216). Arquilla demonstrates that Reagan's successors (Bush, Clinton, Bush) have in their different ways followed through on these principles by "helping others free themselves" (p.216, my emphasis).
From deterrence to defense. Arquilla argues that up to Reagan's term, the Cold War emphasized avoiding war between the US and the USSR at all costs, because it would spiral into nuclear war. That was partially because US forces could not react quickly or forcefully enough to repel an expected Soviet invasion of Europe; war games with this scenario inevitably led to a nuclear conflagration. Reagan reasoned that building conventional forces meant opening a middle ground on which conventional warfare could be fought – making the world safe for conventional warfare, as it were – and thus making nuclear war less likely. Reagan was fond of saying that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," and Arquilla argues forcefully that Reagan's statement was not merely window dressing, it was a core tenet driving his strategy. The other component was, of course, ballistic missile defense (p.217). Arquilla demonstrates that this shift in strategy has influenced each of his successors.
From arms racing to arms reduction. "Until Reagan came along," Arquilla argues, "statesmen and strategists generally believed the superpowers were locked into an airtight, inescapable security dilemma" (p.218). Every attempt at defense could be understood as a threat by the other side; the arms race could be slowed through limitation talks such as SALT, but not stopped or reversed. Reagan rejected this dilemma and engaged in arms reduction talks (START) (p.218).
From propaganda to public diplomacy. Arquilla emphasizes that Reagan was the first president to use the term "information strategy" – and the first president of the Cold War to actively pursue one. The Great Communicator rejected "the propaganda that had characterized the war of ideas before him," and in contrast, "his strategy consisted of steadily increasing presssure on our adversaries by communicating directly with those people they were oppressing" (p.219).
From coercion to constructive engagement. Finally, Arquilla points out the more subtle change that Reagan introduced in our engagement with dictators. Reagan, Arquilla argues, inherited "a diplomatic strategy that, in its emphasis on containment, had come to rely on cultivating friendly despots to help defend areas that might come under threat of Soviet influence or control" (p.220). But the contradiction between US tolerance of dictators and its articulated human rights policy was severe. Reagan's solution was to "buil[d] his constructive engagement concept upon [the idea that some dictators were less odious than others] and added his own flourish about all tyrannies of the mind being weak. Their inherent weakness made it possible for us to think in terms of engaging them diplomatic, for time was always on our side according to this point of view" (p.220). Again, his successors followed this principle.

Lest Arquilla be thought as a Reagan cheerleader here, he also points to the failings in Reagan's strategy, failings that have made us far less able to deal with terrorism.

Allowing Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons. This failure arose from Reagan's need to accommodate Pakistan as it helped to support the Afghan muhajadeen against the Soviet incursion. Yet Pakistan's nuclear development led to the rise of the AQ Khan network and North Korean proliferation, as well as the possibility of nuclear weapons being taken by terrorist networks (p.222). Unfortunately, Arquilla adds, Reagan's successors have followed his lead.
Turning the concept of waging a war on terror into practical policy initiatives. Here, Arquilla uses "war on terror" to mean addressing asymmetric warfare – something that the US military is not well optimized or prepared to do, since it was shaped by Reagan's Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger to fight conventional wars. Weinberger preferred to take on terrorism using conventional forces. Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz preferred covert special operations forces – the forces that were used with such success in Afghanistan under George W. Bush's administration. "Had Reagan's choice been to launch an irregular war on terror more than twenty years ago, the odds are that al Qaeda and other networks would not have become the potent threats they are today," Arquilla argues (p.223). Again, Reagan's successors have all followed this path.
Reagan's revitalization of the military gave the Pentagon free reign. This "resulted in a reaffirmation of the most traditional views of strategy and warfare at a time when the need to anticipate the rise of irregular adversaries was acute" (p.225). Reagan thus built a military optimized for a type of warfare that is "ever less likely to occur," and his successors have followed suit (p.225). Forces have been too large for their jobs.

Nevertheless, Arquilla makes a compelling case for Reagan's presidency as a transformative one, a presidency that in terms of strategy was driven by ideas rather than ideology. In the main text, Arquilla goes into great detail about how Reagan's actions were essential for spurring the collapse of the Soviet Union, taking on critics who have claimed the USSR would have collapsed even without Reagan's influence; how Reagan introduced essential ideas of informational strategy, drawing on his experience in the media; and other wrinkles. For many of my readers, these arguments will go against long-held assumptions about the Reagan presidency. But Arquilla limits his claims, supports them, and evaluates the results evenhandedly. If you're interested in strategy, in asymmetric warfare, or in informational strategy (the most direct connection to rhetoric), his book is worth a read.

A personal note. Reagan was president until 1988; I graduated from high school in 1987. As a high schooler, I had a surface understanding of the foreign policy challenges at the time, and a somewhat deeper appreciation for Soviet totalitarianism once I read Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago just before my senior year. And like many who grew up in the 1980s, I was pleasantly surprised to make it through high school without being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Arquilla's book has given me a better understanding of the challenges we faced during that decade, and a better appreciation of the challenges we face during this current time.