Bronwyn Bishop is a liberal party MP and a former minister.

Seems to me this is social learning and cultural science in the form we discussed at the recent Durham symposium should have something to say about this.

On games and social learning, I recommend that you take a look at Minecraft and the associated player Youtube videos demonstrating various creative possibilities of the game. Social learning in action. I’m working on an article about this at the moment for the Cultural Science online journal, building on my Durham symposium presentation. More on this next week.

“90,000 B.C. — A great ice age is fast approaching. Another titanic struggle for global supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species.
Dominant Species is a game that abstractly recreates a tiny portion of ancient history: the ponderous encroachment of an ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth.
Each player will assume the role of one of six major animal classes — mammal, reptile, bird, amphibian, arachnid or insect. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another. But that won’t last: It is indeed “survival of the fittest.”

Not sure how ’scientific’ it is, but might be fun ‘cultural science gaming’.

In this book, Deutsch, the father of quantum computation, presents an argument on the coherence of knowledge structures across parallel universes. Well, for the non-physicist the latter idea may not seem too obvious, unless she is a sci-fi aficionado, but let me just say that many physicists adopt the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which states that the different propensities of quantum states just describe different states in different parallel universes, the conjunction of which makes up the multiverse, in one parlance. Deutsch makes the point that this variety is constrained for objects that undergo evolution by natural selection. His example is the genome. He posits that random (hence quantum) variations in the genomic structure will be channelled by natural selection in a convergent process across parallel universes. So, the universes are connected by a set of identical objects, which a much more limited range of possible states.

When reading this, I was suddenly aware that this argument extends to all possible applications of Darwinian theory. So, if one accepts the view that evolutionary theory is also valid for analyzing culture, then this would imply that all different physical expressions of evolution would link up the different universes, such as, for example, technological artefacts or memes. Deutsch say that these stable structures represent knowledge. Well, this is certainly true for all symbolic knowledge, cultural items etc.

I rushed forward with using Lotman’s term of the ’semiosphere’ to refer to this stable connection in a paper that was recently published in the journal ENTROPY.

Meanwhile,  I changed the name to semioverse. So, we have got a connection between culture, biology and physics. In terms of the physics, I am currently working an an energetic interpretation of cultural items as externalized artefacts. This is an old idea in anthropology, which would receive a fresh interpretation in that general context. This can be related with biosemiotics, which I started to study as a consequence. So it seems that the Deutsch hypothesis helps to overcome disciplnary barriers in a new way. Deutsch himself only had biochemical structures in mind. But in a naturalistic approach to culture, such as developed in my recently published book ‘The Economics of Identity and Creativity‘, these material structures are much more universal.

So I would like to propose a new definition of cultural science: The science of the semioverse.

We can report the viewing statistics for cultural-science.org since it was launched in July 2008, up to 22 January 2010.

The website as a whole has attracted over 20,000 visitors:

The top 10 source countries for visitors to the site were:

The graphs on the left below show the top 10 countries by year and the graphs on the right represent the monthly traffic by year.

2010

2009

2008

Cultural Science Journal has attracted over 18,450 viewers, with 21,238 reads of articles. Stats by issue are as follows:

Vol 1:1 Creative Destruction

Vol 1:2 Creating Value

Vol 2:1 New Directions

The blog – Popper Juice – has had over 4,000 views. Apart from the home page the most popular entry was Carsten Herrmann-Pillath’s ‘The financial crisis: a humble evolutionary economist’s perspective’ (17 September 2008).

21 January 2010

Dear All,

I’ve been thinking about Clay Shirky’s “Shock of Inclusion” on the Edge site (thanks for the link Jason!)

Public Thought and Shirky’s Shock

I really liked this short piece when I first read it, but there is also a niggling problem with it, which I’m going to try to write through. Along the way I’ll include other materials that came my way while I was thinking about this, which makes the piece as a whole a record of the actual process of “public thought” (someone thinking in public), so it may seem a bit long, but most of it is the cited material – the evidence.

First, let me just remind you of what Shirky said. The paragraphs that made me think (my bolding) are these:

This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

The beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity, whether academics or politicians, reporters or doctors, will complain about the way the new abundance of public thought upends the old order, but those complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere.

Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

The idea that most struck a chord was this one: that the “average quality of public thought has collapsed.”

Shirky probably meant this in a banal, arithmetic sense – given the same task (say, writing opinion columns in the press), two billion amateurs will score a lower individual average on any quality measure than a few experienced professional specialists. It seems therefore that he is conceding the more means worse argument (a classic manoeuvre of the educated Left), for he talks about “the shock of inclusion” as (potentially) “another Dark Ages” where “pancake people” (widely-spread and thin) connect through “an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions.”

Average Collapse

I’m not ready to concede that argument. It has no basis in either maths or in history.

In terms of the maths, let’s say that among internet users, only a minuscule one in a thousand (0.1 percent) qualify as high (as opposed to “average”) “quality.” Out of two billion users, that still amounts to two million quality creators – more than any previous mass medium could muster. Of course the real proportion will be much higher. When I first went to university, only 4 percent of the UK population were graduates; now it is more like 40 percent. Not all graduates are high quality, so let’s stick to the lower figure. Four percent of 2bn is 80 million – the population of Germany. Could you call participation by such numbers in “public thought” a “collapse”?

In terms of history, more of anything worthwhile has never meant worse – more education, healthcare, affluence, freedom, comfort, intellectual or entrepreneurial activity … whatever …. has consistently resulted in, well, more. Growing up as a poor kid without a breadwinner in the family, I still had better dental care than Ramesses the Great, better education than the Queen of England (who never went to school), more intellectual freedom than the pope … and so on. In short, extending once-priestly or royal privileges to everyone benefits … everyone. Duh!

Why would this not be true also of “public thought”? So let’s hear no more of the collapse of the “average quality of public thought” in general.

Journalistic Collapse

None of this crossed my mind when I first read Shirky’s piece, however. I took him to mean something else, because my imagination was caught by that word “collapse.”

I took it to refer to the collapse of the existing system of “public thought” and its replacement by the “influx of the amateurs”; i.e. that “the average quality of public thought has collapsed” among the professional commentator class.

This made sense, not least because I’ve been away from Australia for a few months and have only just started to pick up again on the op-ed columns in the Courier Mail and the Australian, on the news & current affairs shows on TV, and even on ABC Newsradio overnight (effectively, BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle).

Just for a taste, here is the latest “Thursday View” by Courier-Mail Columnist Jane Fynes-Clinton:

WHERE have our little girls gone? In the past five years or so, a strange phenomenon swept them away, leaving swearing, smoking, fighting, drinking creatures in their place. These girls are as angry, fat and sexually active as they are too young for all those things. It is enough to make a caring society weep. 

This was part of a concerted campaign by the Courier Mail against “Bad Girls” – that being the front-page headline on Tuesday:

A MASSIVE spike in violent attacks by young Queensland girls has been blamed on internet “fight sites” where videos of the attacks are posted. Authorities say a 44 per cent jump in assaults is being driven by the growing popularity of “girl fight sites”. … Professor Kerry Carrington, from Queensland University of Technology’s School of Justice, yesterday warned of a new generation of “very nasty” and physically violent girls. “There is no doubt girls are becoming more violent,” she said. “The internet actually encourages this behaviour because kids from all over the world go on and rate the fights, so even when conflict doesn’t exist this particular medium may be encouraging violence.” Prof Carrington said a simple internet search revealed 73 million hits for girls’ fighting compared with 31 million for boys, and 24 million girl fight videos on YouTube – eight times more than those featuring boys.

On Wednesday, a “teen girl” who was said to have “got off lightly” with a “rap on the knuckles” was shown in a large colour photograph – an attractive young woman in a summer dress, shown seated in the back of a car, wearing handcuffs.

Courier Mail, Wednesday January 13, 2010, p. 7

Although no mention is made of it in the paper, the quarter-page photograph was nearly two years old. It was first published during the original trial for the assault (April 24 2008 – it is still attached to an online report of that case).

You have to read quite a long way into the accompanying story to discover that this “female ringleader” is in court on more recent charges, and that the assault in question had occurred two years previously. The story leads (paragraph 2) with: “But Tiani Slockee, now 19, has escaped actual jail time.” Only later (paragraph 5) does it transpire that she had already served 91 days in custody on remand. It is not until paragraph 7 that we learn that “Yesterday” she was back in court for a breach of probation. And not until paragraph 10 (of 11) do we learn that in the meantime she has suffered the death of “one of her premature twin children.”

A bit of googling reveals that although it does not figure in this coverage, her side of the story had been reported – by the Courier Mail itself – in 2007:

Defence lawyer Debbie Marinov said Slockee approached the couple – who were walking on East Dutton Street, Coolangatta, about 12.50am (AEST) Saturday – when she saw them arguing. Ms Marinov said Slockee had asked the off-duty police officer: “Doesn’t she love you any more?” The officer then made a derogatory remark and Slockee responded that she was “only joking”, Ms Marinov said. The court was told the man then made another derogatory remark and tackled one of the youths in the group to the ground. “(Slockee) stood back in shock – she could not believe the level of violence and how it had escalated so quickly,” Ms Marinov said, adding that Slockee had said she did not touch anyone during the melee. As Slockee was led away from the court into custody, a tearful Slockee said to her mother in the public gallery: “I love you, mum.”

Further hints of a different kind of life were also readily retrievable:

The teenager was refused bail on Saturday because she was deemed at risk of reoffending, but yesterday [defence lawyer] Mr Winter revived an application for bail. He told the court Slockee … needed to return home to look after her sick, elderly grandmother, as she was her primary carer. Mr Winter said Slockee’s grandmother suffered chronic lung disease and emphysema and her granddaughter was the only person available to shower and feed her. (Gold Coast Bulletin, 29 January 2009)

On Tiani’s Myspace site, we read: “R.I.P. Nan. I’ll never forget you.” And under “ethnicity” she has entered: “Pacific Islander.”

(Here I must interpolate some qualms about referring to a private citizen’s Myspace page, not least because this is a familiar ploy in journalism, especially where embarrassing photographs are concerned. However, I decided to go ahead, because (a) I want to show how easy it would have been for the news media to  construct a humanising picture of her; (b) because I’m quoting only her basic datasheet, not communicative content as such. Of course, I’m also (c) demonstrating that Myspace material, which may have been posted for a restricted circle, remains public and appropriable for purposes not imagined by the user.)

By such means, public and instantly searchable, a potentially very different reality emerges… A person of Indigenous heritage is caught up in a ‘who-started-it’ dispute with a police officer that rapidly escalates out of her control. The upshot is a catalogue of catastrophic encounters with the law … for a recently bereaved young single mother.

But all this is lost on the Courier Mail, for whom the cause of it all is … the internet:

Teen girls get off lightly for violent crimes

QUEENSLAND’S fastest-growing group of violent offenders are likely to be let off with a scolding as punishment for their crimes.

The Courier-Mail revealed yesterday that girls aged 10 to 14 were responsible for a massive 44 per cent spike in assaults last year, a phenomenon child experts have linked to the explosion in the number of girl fight sites on the internet. (Courier Mail, January 13, 2010)

Yes, I thought – even allowing for the silly season – the quality of public thought has indeed collapsed!

You may well say, well, duh. But this is quite a big admission for me, as I have spent an entire career avoiding making negative statements about the quality of popular media. I have argued instead in favour of the media’s emancipationist potential.

Academic Collapse

The reason for my refusal to trash popular culture is that too many people are already lined up to take their turn at that sport. Here is a letter to last week’s Times Literary Supplement, sent by Gabriel Josipovici, an emeritus literary critic:

What are universities for?

Sir, – A document has come into my possession which might be of interest to your readers – an email, in fact, which the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex, Michael Farthing, has sent to all undergraduates, explaining to them his plans for “the development of the University”. These plans consist of the sacking of over 100 staff and the closing down or reduction of a number of “areas”, so that the word “development” is somewhat ironic, but in keeping with the tone of the document, which is couched throughout in the worst bureaucratese. Thus: “Our aim is to continue to invest in successful areas in the University and grow our income where possible”.

As one might imagine, this is not good news for those disciplines which have always been seen as at the heart of the Humanities side of English universities. “In some areas”, the VC says, “there are no opportunities for sustainable growth and we need to make targeted reductions in those areas while continuing to develop our University as a broad and balanced research-intensive institution across the arts and social sciences.” It is difficult to see how this last aspiration is to be met when it is followed by this: “In a number of schools we are now seeking financial savings, including Engineering and design; English; History, Art History and Philosophy; Informatics; and Life Sciences”. By contrast, predictably: “In academic schools with recent growth and good prospects for the future, we are pressing ahead with our growth and development plans, including the schools of Business, Management and Economics; Global Studies; and Media, Film and Music”.

Though he insists that “staff affected by the changes will receive our support and help”, none of the people so affected that I have talked to has received any such thing, and, indeed, it is difficult to see what form such support and help might take. The VC also insists, in his execrable English, that he is committed to “maintaining excellence in the student experience”, promising that “we will support your teaching, and we are not proposing to reduce contact hours” – presumably he will achieve this by working the remaining faculty even harder. “We will continue to invest in improving the student experience at Sussex”, he concludes. “One of our absolute priorities through this difficult process is our commitment to students and to the quality of the education and student experience we provide.”

Clearly, this university at any rate is being treated strictly as a business, with the least profitable branches closed and the most profitable ones developed. No doubt, in the light of the proposed changes to research funding criteria (see Stefan Collini, “Impact on humanities“, November 13, 2009) and the cuts recently announced by Lord Mandelson, vice-chancellors around the country are doing exactly what Farthing is doing. The question this raises is: Are universities really businesses? And if not, what are they? Are they to become forcing houses for the immediate economic development of the country and nothing else (ie, are Business and Media studies to replace Engineering, English, History and Philosophy)? If that is what the country wants, so be it. But we should be clear that it means the end of universities as they have been known in the West since the Middle Ages.

GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
60 Prince Edward’s Road, Lewes.

Collapse is imminent! And the evidence is … that Media studies will “replace” … English.  This is the end of civilisation as we know it.

Such harrumphing hatred of media studies as the proxy for “the immediate economic development of the country” (understood as a calamity) is a longstanding genre in itself. Josipovici seems anxious to prove the point by invoking (and linking to) a recent contribution to the TLS by fellow-harrumpher Stefan Collini. His expression of contempt for anything popular or media-related is dressed up as a witty critique of the UK’s inclusion of “impact” in research funding criteria. Here’s a sample (it’s a very long column):

What follows is, I assure you, neither a satire nor a parody, though I suppose it might seem laughable were it not so serious. … there is no reason to expect a literary scholar to be good at this kind of hustling and hawking….  If anything, meretricious and vulgarizing treatments … will stand a greater chance of success than do nuanced critical readings. … One reason why measures such as these do not now provoke more vociferous opposition is that over the past three decades our sensibilities have been numbed by the proliferation of economistic officialese – “user satisfaction”, “market forces”, “accountability”, and so on. Perhaps our ears no longer hear what a fatuous, weaselly phrase “Research Excellence Framework” actually is, or how ludicrous it is to propose that the quality of scholarship can be partly judged in terms of the number of “external research users” or the range of “impact indicators”. Instead of letting this drivel become the only vocabulary for public discussion of these matters, it is worth insisting that what we call “the humanities” are a collection of ways of encountering the record of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity. To attempt to deepen our understanding of this or that aspect of that activity is a purposeful expression of human curiosity and is – insofar as the expression makes any sense in this context – an end in itself. Unless these guidelines are modified, scholars in British universities will devote less time and energy to this attempt, and more to becoming door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of their increasingly market-oriented “products”. It may not be too late to try to prevent this outcome.

The most-recommended comment on Collini’s rave on the TLS site was this one, from a suitably patriotic correspondent:

John Bull wrote:  Why do not at least the older universities refuse to accept this anti-educationalism? If Oxford and Cambridge, and the respected London Colleges, refused to touch it, what could the government do? Will no one stand up for Western Civilization? (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6915986.ece: November 13, 2009)

“We” all agree, it seems, that defence of “Western Civilization” will only be achieved if “literary scholars” are protected from the “hustling and hawking” required to explain their research to the public, which will inevitably result in “vulgarising and meretricious treatment” in the media. Only the “older” universities can save us now!

So the forces of darkness and light are lined up in traditional opposition: the “fatuous, weaselly phrases” and “ludicrous” “drivel” of “economistic officialese” (Boo!) versus “what we call ‘the humanities’,” which is “an end in itself” (Hooray!).

And what “we” call the humanities, as Josipovici makes clear, extends only to “those disciplines which have always been seen as at the heart of the Humanities side of English universities” – that is, anything but media studies, which is populated by Collini’s evil “door-to-door salesmen for vulgarized versions of [universities'] increasingly market-oriented ‘products’.”

Are there any such things as “door-to-door salesmen” any longer? And what does “vulgar” mean? It means “of the common people” (you know, folk like Tiani). Re-enter ancient class prejudice, by the back door.

Keening at a Wake

All this floods into my mind as I read Shirky’s comments on the collapse of the “quality of public thought.” Yes! Yes! It has collapsed! And I for one do not want to be pulled back into that slough of despond that we used to call an English Department – bogged down in stagnant purposelessness and wilful disutility, tangled up with a deep-rooted but toxic sense of entitlement, and overhung by a superiority-complex dripping with contempt for everyone else.

The siren wailings of professors Collini and Josipovici – who were singing the same song all those years ago when I started out – amounts to professional bad faith. If they weren’t so stuck in the mud, sensibilities numbed by accidental exposure to economics, surely the purveyors of “nuanced critical readings” would want to run away from these “forcing houses” and set up their own “vociferous opposition” somewhere far away from “‘user satisfaction’, ‘market forces’, ‘accountability’, and so on”?

Of course they wouldn’t. As Shirky astutely points out, they are the “beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity,” whose “complaints are like keening at a wake; the change they fear is already in the past. The real action is elsewhere.”

Yes, indeed – so let’s hear no more about “inclusion” signalling the return of the “Dark Ages”!

Sequence of Collapse

The changes brought on by the “abundance of public thought” hit the academy long ago; more recently politics itself and at last the public media too are feeling the winds of change. This is what really got me excited about Shirky’s piece. It struck me that there might be a sequence in the collapse of the “average quality of public thought.”

If he’s right – if it is true that the change feared by the “beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity” is “already in the past” – then there must be a history – a causal sequence – of such change. If so, then “keening” by “beneficiaries” may in fact be used as an indirect measure of the location, presence and intensity of change.

Here’s what I would hypothesise on that topic: The collapse was first experienced in the academy (a proxy for intellectual and literary life); then in politics (a proxy for community life); then in journalism (a proxy for corporate interests in the copyright industries).

1.      Academic (intellectual/literary) collapse. The social prestige and political influence of the professoriate – as a class – has been in genteel decline (especially in the humanities) since the mid-1900s or earlier. To some extent the collapse was internal, as imperial/ modernist certainties were challenged by successive waves of critical theory (structuralism, feminism, identity politics, relativism, deconstruction, constructivism, postmodernism), critiquing the knowledge-power nexus and disputing the truth-claims of science.

In recent decades this precipitated open hostility towards the academic left in the so-called culture wars. The “quality of public thought” within and about the academy degenerated into mutual contempt or derisive spoof – witness the Sokal affair.

I don’t know whether it is a consequence of this, but at the same time academic specialisation ensured that debate retreated into ever-tinier enclaves, where more has been written about less than ever before.

People responsible for “public thought” were once proud to carry the moral, political and aesthetic conscience of empires on their shoulders – remember, Kipling (Nobel laureate for Literature) called it the White Man’s Burden (http://www.online-literature.com/kipling/922/) and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge) called it Noblesse oblige. Now they are reduced to an ambition for satisfactory impact metrics – among which forming the taste and judgement of future leaders does not appear. Hence the harrumphing humanities.

Meanwhile, the trained expertise upon which our vestigial claims to a public platform might have been based was steadily eroded by the increasingly obvious fact that such expertise was neither scarce nor valuable – everyone is an “expert” on popular culture; and few want to pay for knowledge about “ordinary” life. Now, we may be able to produce high-quality “public thought” on our specialist topic; but it’s so micro, arcane and impenetrable that … there’s no public paying attention, so who cares?

2.      Political (community) collapse. “Public thought” on the question of ‘Are we all going to die?’ ended with the end of the Cold War internationally and capitalist/ socialist struggles internally. As the danger of Mutually Assured Destruction (by weapons or workers) faded, politics became purer ; that is, more abstract, not about anything except adversarial opposition itself.

Robert Hughes called the result the Culture of Complaint (OUP, 1993). The USA became, he wrote, “obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; sceptical of authority and prey to superstition; its political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism.” Excessive politicisation corrupts: “Polarization is addictive. It is the crack of politics – a short, intense rush that the system craves again and again, until it begins to collapse”.

The “quality” of political “public thought” nosedives. Instead of looking for reds under the beds, we’re looking for child molesters. Someone to blame for our continuing sense of risk in conditions of unprecedented security. Or perhaps it’s those “teen girls,” heads turned by the internet, roaming the Gold Coast, spoiling for a fight … or a party.

3.      Journalism (commercial) collapse. It’s the Economy, Stupid. Here’s where Shirky gets interested; not when professions or publics suffer systemic collapse, but when business plans are threatened. The principal large-scale “beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity” were of course publishers – of songs, sights, and stories. That is, the music business, broadcasting and the movies, the press, and publishing – the existing copyright industries.

The one bit of this sector of the economy where “public thought” was linked directly to private enterprise was journalism (loosely defined, i.e. including opinion, commentary, features and PR). It’s not just individual firms; whole industries are crumbling, business models don’t work … hey, it’s the end of civilisation as we know it!

So now journalism has something to campaign about in which its own fate is implicated. It’s back to the good old days of ‘are we all going to die?’ (but now the ‘we’ is a plc). The campaign is not confined to editorials, the op-ed pages and features, but permeates so-called hard news too. Journalism as a whole is geared up to turn “public thought” into a culture of complaint … about piracy.

Along the way, editors are quite happy to stage front-page news reports that white-ant their online rivals in “making things public,” by whatever pretext that comes to hand: “A massive spike in violent attacks by young Queensland girls has been blamed on internet…”

Every Time You Torrent

Here is where we are now: the latest outbreak of “keening” is by commercial creators, manufacturers and disseminators (up to and including Rupert Murdoch) and their freelance-consultant allies, like Andrew Keen (The Cult of the Amateur).

Here he is, writing recently in the house-magazine of the Directors’ Guild of America, going about the business of foe-creation, the essential first move for any “battleground.” Here’s a  list of the “digital literati” he opposes:

• “The digital rebels use many names to describe themselves. They are ‘hackers,’ ‘bloggers,’ ‘longtailers,’ ‘diginauts,’ ’socialista,’ and ‘digerati.’ Above all, however, they identify themselves as ‘pirates.’ They even now have their own international political movement, the Pirate Party”;
• Andrew Robinson, “the head of the United Kingdom’s new Pirate Party”;
• Stewart Brand, “countercultural creator” of the Whole Earth Catalog;
• Matt Mason (The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism);
• Lawrence Lessig (Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy), “misty-eyed academic dream”;
• Jeff Jarvis, “pirate intellectual”;
• Jay Rosen, “digital liberation theologian”;
• Cory Doctorow (“Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium”), “pirate rebel”;
• Karl Marx, as in “Just as Karl Marx welcomed the industrial revolution … so Lessig welcomes the digital revolution as our savior”;
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, “left-leaning communitarianism gone amuck”;
• David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto: the end of business as usual), “academic cluelessness”;

Adopting the familiar dripping-with-contempt tone of Josipovici or Collini, Keen summarises the manifesto of the “pirate rebels” – among whom Clay Shirky must surely number:

Just as Karl Marx welcomed the industrial revolution as the liberator of the human condition, so Lessig welcomes the digital revolution as our savior. To critics of “authoritarian” mainstream media like Lessig, today’s Internet technology is the great emancipator, the enabler of the digital rebellion. We’ve supposedly arrived at another Gutenberg moment in history, one of those once-every-500-years historical events that forever alters the course of the human story. But instead of the old exclusive printing press, all we need now is a personal computer to become a Johannes von Gutenberg, a William Randolph Hearst and a contemporary Hollywood movie director all rolled into one noble citizen-creator.

He sums up the case for the copyright industry:

What these leveling “democratizers” miss, however, is the reality of any creative economy-talent. Utopians like Mason seem to believe that everyone-irrespective of their intellectual training, personal rigor, and innate ability-should have their work represented in the creative commons. This naively fails to acknowledge the inconvenient truth that not everyone is an artist, or has interesting things to say.

He seeks to undermine the opponents’ credentials by association with (discredited) academia:

Perhaps it’s not surprising that so many of the rebel pirate intellectual leaders are academics at leading American universities. … Despite trumpeting the rights of the individual creator over their corporate exploiters, none of these tenured ivory tower theorists appears to particularly respect the sensitivity of freelance artists dependent on the security of their creative content. …

He concludes with the “great cultural achievement” of the internet: it is … bathos:

So this is the great cultural achievement of the Internet? For all the promise of a glittering new cultural age, of radical democratization, of a renaissance in creativity, what the digital revolution is actually promising to deliver are “cheap” and “crummy” online videos with infinitesimal audiences and no way of realizing any meaningful revenue.

Just in case you think this is about art, or talent, rather than the economy, stupid, his column features a literal bottom line – a comment interpolated by the President of the Director’s Guild of America (DGA):

Your DGA leadership believes that Internet piracy poses a great danger…and a great challenge to this Guild. … This is a complex and multifaceted issue which is too often reduced to simplistic sound bites that hide the real threats we face from those who want our work ‘for free.’ It is only by educating ourselves that we will be able to put forward our strongest and most effective offense to protect the creative and economic freedom of Guild members. – Taylor Hackford, DGA President

Leicester Square, London, October 2009 (Pic: Author)

An Invisible College – At the Airport

But if Shirky is right, the complaints of beneficiaries are simply evidence that it is already too late for Keen’s “keening.” The real action is elsewhere.  I think he is indeed right. And I know where the real action is. It’s at the airport.

I’m thinking of the airport in relation to long-haul flights in particular (from recent experience!), where time-zones, jetlag, transit lounges and complete subjection to the will of others relativises everything, from your circadian rhythms to your experience of time, place, self and society. That grey hub of artificially induced docility fails to mask the realities of uncertainty and risk, where no-one is at home (in equilibrium) but everyone visits some time, myriad agents bent on different but mutually accommodating ends, finding ways to suspend time and live in pure relativism.

Airports are perhaps the best physical manifestation we have of humanity’s skill in developing social-network infrastructure; they’re an analogue version of the “packet switching” that enables the internet to function.

Here we come to the last bit of the Shirky piece that I quoted at the beginning of this one:

We could, however, also use it [the Internet] as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.

As well as the democratisation of knowledge, he favours an Invisible College (precursor of the Royal Society), modelled on the network of experimental inquiry and open argumentation that we now call science, which was established among early-modern chemists in Europe.

I support his sentiment that a world where everyone is a publisher may drive progressive intellectual and civic change; and like him I am interested in ways of organising and sharing knowledge outside of formal institutions.  In fact I wrote a book on these topics (The Uses of Digital Literacy, UQP, 2009). However, I do not follow Shirky’s idea of an Invisible College.

All his talk of an “influx of amateurs” and “another Dark Ages” has made me suspicious. If the Invisible College is just a few self-selected savants – of those who “adopt norms” – then it smacks of Brave New World, not to mention the latter-day Illuminati.

But if, at the other extreme, it is taken to be the internet as a whole (“here comes everybody”), then such a vast system-of-systems cannot hope to achieve purposeful change, even if it is called for from within the ranks of users themselves.

What then might be a model for directed, educative change, including “open sharing and participation” among any if not all Netizens, in the iterative improvement of contested knowledge (… i.e. science), as a self-organising, grass-roots approach to knowledge transfer, so as to use the emergent productive capacity of the internet to best effect?

The answer is staring us in the face. What does everybody do at airports? They buy books to read on planes. The Invisible College is … airport bestsellers.

Such books belong to a peculiar genre. They must fit in with the realities of air travel: long but not too long, absorbing and narratively compelling, not like work … and extremely well promoted, branded, and celebrity-endorsed, because travellers must be able to choose on the fly, as it were, without access to their habitual feedback loops.

Most such books are novels; but significant sub-genres exist in non-fiction, including business, popular science, history and biography. The whole point of them is that they address non-specialist, ordinary readers with other priorities and purposes. They address the general public, which is thereby constituted in the form of a constantly changing but continuously replenished market.

Please note that almost all of the “digital literati” lambasted by Andrew Keen, along with Andrew Keen and Clay Shirky themselves, are authors of non-fiction bestsellers, the ideal-type of which is the business book you buy at the airport.

Where once these clustered around the prating of alpha males (Jack Welch syndrome), there is now a sizeable segment devoted to digital topics, often by (or co-authored with) those who’ve made some money. Indeed, such books are part of the definition of the “digerati”:

The “digital elite.” People who are extremely knowledgeable about computers. It often refers to the movers and shakers in the industry. Digerati is the high-tech equivalent of “literati,” which refers to scholars and intellectuals, or “glitterati,” the rich and famous. Digerati, “technorati” and “geekerati” are synonymous. See Technorati and Illuminati.)

The airport bestseller is the book most likely to be cited by high-profile controversialists (like Andrew Keen or Clay Shirky) as they conduct their online arguments. It is the common currency of communication about the internet among the diverse and multivalent, not to say mobile and shifting, population of non-specialist readers. It is the medium of instruction for the “influx of amateurs” – a readily available resource that they can turn to for inspiration.

Needless to say, this being the age of the internet, anyone can write one.  Here’s how:

How to Write a Business Best-Seller

By eHow Contributing Writer

Article Rating:  (1 Ratings)

Writing a book, topic, takes a lot time. But anyone given enough time – and assuming they are literate – can write a book. Writing a bestseller, now that is a lot more challenging. Most people are not even capable of writing a book that someone other than themselves would read. A bestseller requires the approval of a very large group of people.

Instructions

Difficulty: Challenging

Step 1

Find an original idea or creative approach to an existing topic. A business book is marketed to a very discerning audience of highly intelligent people, so for it to be successful it must be a new idea; you can’t just talk about investing the same way everyone before you has, or you will not have a book that will sell. You can, however, draw new conclusions about old data.

Step 2

Succeed in business. Your book needs credibility in order to become a bestseller. This requires that the author has succeeded in business. The buying public wants to know that the advice or ideas in the book have been successfully applied to the real world. They want to know that they can use them to achieve success.

Step 3

Write the book; this entails more than just putting words down on a page. Business people as a rule don’t like to spend an excessive amount of time on any one task. This means that in a book they are looking for clearly defined answers delivered succinctly and without unnecessary fluff. However, do not assume that you can just present facts and bare bones sentences. The book also has to be interesting enough to read so that it doesn’t put the reader to sleep.

Step 4

Promote your book, as one can’t just be content to allow simple market forces to compel your book to bestseller status. You might want to do a simple book-signing tour, or you might want to arrange a series of seminars and speeches; but either way you need to tell people why they should buy your business book instead of all of the others. Once you have them convinced that the book will change the way they do business for the better, they will buy it in droves.

It’s so simple! LOL.

eHow gives good advice, but notice that it does require more than mere domain knowledge and wordcraft (Step 2: “succeed in business”). Note also that Step 4 is promotion – “simple market forces” (Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” need a helping hand from marketing (Schumpeter).

Signalling the Quality of Public Thought

The problem of the “quality of public thought” is solved. In the first place, those who have followed the advice above – from Eric Beinhocker (The Origin of Wealth) to the Freakonomics guys – tend to write really good books. “Quality” is condensed into the simple and unarguable form of sales data: if it’s a bestseller, it’s a good idea (until it is overturned by a subsequent bestseller). This system feeds on itself: if I’ve heard the buzz I’ll buy the book.

Conversely, if you academic experts – drear drudges of dismal data – have done nothing more than master your subject, perfect your methodology, and discover something new, then der. You won’t compete until you’ve caught the eye of public attention, as Richard Lanham and Brian Boyd have both stressed … in their own airport bestsellers (The Economics of Attention and On the Origin of Stories).

Promotion, including celebrity-status, attention-seeking antics, polemical attacks and controversies, turns out to be of crucial importance to the propagation of knowledge.  Mere expertise runs a distant second; although professional expertise in promotion is still at a premium.

The airport bestseller is thus a signalling mechanism.

New Literacy; Look at Moi!

This takes us beyond Shirky’s “shock of inclusion.” The initial phase of Schumpeterian creative destruction “upends the old order” (as he puts it). The existing “beneficiaries of the system where making things public was a privileged activity” (among whom I’ve specified academics, political parties, and commercial publishers) are discombobulated and dethroned. However they don’t disappear – perforce, they regroup, trying to adapt to the new circumstances (even the harrumphers and keeners are busy adapting).

But the real action is happening over at the airport. Here we can observe the emergence of a new order – a market in ideas for busy, mobile, half-attentive but motivated and self-directing consumer-agents. This market also establishes a pecking order among opinion-formers, who are the true educators of the “here comes everybody” era.

The catchphrase of the old tailoring sitcom was ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’, as if the two were incommensurable. But now we are among the long-tailers of the power law generation, where quality (peak bestsellers) and width (broad sales of diverse titles among a heterogeneous public) are in a relationship (a mathematical one at that), not in opposition to one another.

Airport bestsellers do for tradable ideas what newspapers once did for nations, and what universities are still supposed to do – they create a public for new knowledge, and they sort the ideas according to their uptake among that public. This process, of differential uptake, is what we might once have called education and even intellectual emancipation, except that now it is self-directed, demand-led, and self-organising.

Of course, it’s not entirely online. The “shock of inclusion” proceeds in multiplatform mode. There is plenty of online chatter about the latest offerings, and many of the best titles are (legally) available online in their entirety (Charlie Leadbeater’s We-Think; Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet … and How to Stop It). But these books have to take physical form too; else why do we have Amazon … or airports, come to that?

Clay Shirky says that “publishing has become the new literacy” – and I agree with him. I’ve claimed that “journalism is a human right” (i.e. that in a democracy, everyone is a journalist – they can publish as well as hold opinions; broadcast as well as know facts); and I also agree that the internet marks the most important evolutionary step in the growth of knowledge-technologies since Gutenberg.

But we don’t yet know how to harness all the new “public thought” that’s already out there (even if much of it is what the linguists call “phatic” communication, designed to keep in contact – which means to attract attention - rather than to communicate thought). We know even less about how to stimulate, improve or propagate its “quality.”

In this context, the argy-bargy of complaint, controversy and keening should not be taken at face value. It is not important to decide on a winner or loser among all the arguments, nor to agree with this or that commentator. Instead, note the importance of signalling in the propagation of public thought. If you want to get an idea across, get attention. If you want attention, keep the lines of communication open. Thus, the rhetoric of polemical argument itself performs a phatic function (like eighty percent of internet traffic).

It’s going … “Look at Moi!”.

Trust Me: I’m a Doctor?

The lesson we should be learning is that a mechanism for extending and improving the quality of public thought exists – airport bestsellers as Invisible College. The readership is proving both able and willing to take advice.

It may take a while, but so did the real impact of print, which took about 150 years to emerge. However, we can see here a model for propagation and improvement of popular public thought. What we don’t have yet is a mechanism from extending the system beyond readerships.

Here there is plenty of room for improvement. The internet is populated by a much larger public than the one captured by the readership of even the most popular bestseller. Lots of people out there don’t read books at all, but they do count among Shirky’s two billion.

Take Tiani Slockee (again … sorry!). Her Myspace page, now somewhat neglected, lists her interests, which centre on “my friends, beach, DANCING.” But when it comes to the books, rejection is total, and proud of it: Against the box marked “Books” is checked: “fuck that!!!!”.

So the question is: How to reach out to everybody - including those who don’t want to be improved, but whose life-chances are liable to real, catastrophic “collapse” if they don’t get good advice on how to avoid sticky situations: how to survive not only chance encounters with off-duty policemen but also parenting, relationships, bereavement, legal jeopardy, media attention … and being (as here) public property?

Here’s one among the self-published internet billions, who could evidently use some “invisible high-schooling” in identity management, on the street, in the media, and online. Where will she get it? What signal will attract her attention? What knowledge will sustain her interest? What can she learn to lift the quality of her own “public thought”? Is the new literacy any more up to this job than the old one was?

If there has been a “collapse of public thought” (among academics, public representatives and commercial media) it is in the willingness of all of them to exclude such folk altogether; or to assume that empty chatter (phatic entertainment) is enough for the likes of them.

It would be a big – epochal – mistake to imagine the internet in the same terms, making an invidious distinction between what Shirky calls “a modicum of educational material” (Hooray!) and “an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions” (Boo!), not only because we’re slow to recognise the same elements in our own “public thought,” but also because we know in advance which way many users will choose to jump.

The existing organs of public enlightenment (the professional beneficiaries of “making things public”) have lost Tiani’s attention; the internet still has it. Let’s start from there. And if we want to be really ambitious, let’s think about what she might need to know next time she catches a Jetstar to Bali.

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* Reaction code pinched from: Buzzfeed – thanks Jean!

Jeremy Hunsinger – co-Founder and co-Director of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech

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One of the central concerns was the perennial experience of the clash between science and humanities folks, with the former emphasizing reductionism and analysis, and the latter holism, subjectivism and interpretation. This issue has also a very serious normative dimension, as the adherents to the latter position claim that this is also the very foundation of human autonomy, dignity and responsibility. How can we reconcile this contradiction?

A central topic of the discussions was neuroeconomics. One participant, Stuart Derbyshire argued that minds are inherently social, and that therefore neuroscience reductionism does not work. That was an eye-opener for me, because in my presentation, taking place before his one,  I had made a simple, but fundamental point:

To me, one of the most serious misunderstandings in a large part of the literature on brain and mind is the assumption that brains and minds are co-extensive, in the sense that the boundaries of the mind and the boundaries of the brain coincide, independent from which position is taken regarding emergence, supervenience or whatever kind of relation between the two. This tendency is particularly strong in neurophilosophy, where minds are necessarily seen as neuronal networks.

I think that this is fundamentally wrong. Stuart’s position that minds are social corresponds to a possible position in the philosophy of mind that asserts that brains are brains, and minds are systems of brains. Minds as systems of brains are interconnected via non-neuronal physical mechanisms. This is precisely the ontological difference between mind and brain, but it does not imply Cartesian dualism. This is Stuart’s statement naturalized. Mind emerges in networks that include at least two physically different media of connectedness that cross body boundaries.

There is an immediate consequence of this, and that is subjectivism naturalized. As every single brain is unique, there is a probability of zero that structurally similar connections between brains will produce the same effects within brains. In other words, if, for example, we see language as a physical medium connecting brains (soundwaves), the brain functionings triggered by linguistic signals will never be identical across individuals.

In this brief note, I do not want to expand on that. Actually, the wonderful summary of my ideas in the previous entry reveals that it is all in there already, yet with less simplicity. I add another idea from Glasgow. If we look at these brain-brain systems,  it is evident from many results of complexity theory and related formal disciplines, that these systems will never be able to analyze themselves (as in the software debugging problem). From this follows, that we, as scientific observers, will always face an ontological gap in explaining those systems. This implies that both positions that I mentioned in the beginning, the reductionist science view and the holistic-subjectivistic humanities view, are right. Neither position is ever able to explain the totality of the phenomenon of mind, once we adopt one position in extreme, we will always bounce back to the other position, because there will be an explanatory gap. For example, we will never achieve a fully naturalistic empirical view on meaning.

I posit that this insight corresponds to the wave/particle dualism in physics, so we have a principle of duality of cultural science. I claim that this principle of duality is fundamental for a naturalistic view on culture, and this resolves the perennial debate over the two views on human mind and cultural life.

This can be most fruitfully applied in many areas of research. For example, media studies. Media can be seen as physical connections among people. That implies that technology makes a fundamental difference in how brains work. Indeed, scholars today agree that writing, as compared to speaking, enables the mind to think differently, precisely because the physical structure is different (e.g. storability). At the same time, writing allows for new expressions of subjectivity, i.e. the uniqueness of brains.  In the duality view, research on new media such as the internet necessarily must be research into technology and cultural creativity.

The principle of duality also implies that Actor-network theory is a congenial point of view, thus allowing for a conceptual synthesis also across the borders to social science.

That’s what I learned from Glasgow.