CCR 711: Network(ed) Rhetorics

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March 31, 2005

JFK

Posted by cgbrooke at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2005

divvying

I run the risk here, I suppose, of sounding obvious, but I'd like us to take note of the different sites that are being tested in some of these posts. As we think about the different academic networks that might be mapped, be mindful of the differences at play. Burt's chapter is dealing specifically with corporate networks, and while there are some overlaps, they're not perfect.

Under the umbrella of academia, we typically gather the networks that we call departments. Those departments form a network called the university. Most of us professors maintain part or all of the network we leave behind us when we leave graduate school. Finally, there are knowledge-based networks (topic areas, sub-disciplines) that aggregate to what we call a discipline. I'm sure that we can point out additional ones, or break these down further.

Simple to say, but hard to articulate, that there are differences among them.

For example, there is a Syracuse network--all of us who are here now, and all those who have spent time here but are no longer around, are part of it. We might develop metrics for determining our respective places in it, but our membership of this network is verifiable fact, yes?

Knowledge networks are a bit more difficult, though. How does one become a member? Publication? Attendance at a SIG meeting? Subscription to a listserv? And even if we can verify the nodes themselves, there's a content to the network itself (and Mike, this is where Burt's offhand ref to form and content starts to break down for me) that isn't necessarily true of the networks that Burt looks at. Any topic-based network (social focus?) occupies a space in our larger umbrella of comp/rhet--is visual rhetoric an actual specialization now, for instance? Or consider another area that's peaked in recent years--writing program administration was once simply a description of a certain kind of work that a cross-section of the discipline practiced. And now? There are entire collections devoted to articulating it as intellectual work, and it's become a topic of inquiry. I haven't checked this out, but presumably there are people working in this area who themselves have never actually administered a writing program.

Circling back to the readings then, while I want us thinking in terms of the language our readings deploy this week, I want us also to be conscious of the fact that a "structural hole" in the discipline means something very different from one on campus or from one in the Writing Program. Observations like this don't invalidate Burt, but they do require us to complicate some of his terms should we end up borrowing them.

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)

That Postmodern Thing Again

In thinking about how structural observations are more relevant when you approach the work with a question about the function of a structure… (and really misrepresenting Burke).

This really just reads like the postmodern debate of form over/versus function – “the ‘form’ of the network and the ‘content’ of the network … the content is given meaning/context by the form.”

If the function of a structure is simply how the structure will work to do (or support) the job it’s intended to do, can we really “trace” the form to a state that is shaped by the structure?

The function of the structure (holes and all) is merely a question of how the design will work to do the job its supposed to do. The “do” is the way people and information will do the tasks they have to do. It’s really the functions that we’re concerned with – the actions for which a person or piece of information is fitted, used or responsible, or for which they/it exists. The form that we are concerned with really refers to what the person within the structure will see and feel, avoiding the suggestion that the structural form is providing meaning to what is there now and what will be there in the future.

See, and here I thought I’d escape a semester without having to slog through this postmodern/post-postmodern soup.

Posted by mfrascie at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)

Messy-modal (or Say What?)

I'm wondering through S&P, quite literally. As I type this, I think of the connections of wandering through the A&P grocery. Anyway, I'm feeling frazzled these days. I like the idea of a messy-modal study (Sullivan and Porter 90). As I reflect on the discontinuity and (likely) self-contradictory nature of the work I've done for this course so far, I'm trying to think of how we'd map it, and the it keeps getting stuck. I'm not even sure where we'd begin trying to map this thing. I find myself defaulting to conceptions of webs as opposed to the blocked-out overlays S&P utilize.

I'm most intrigued by the conceptions of space and place as they intersect the notions of a spaceless place (was that Weinberger in Small Pieces Loosely Joined?).

It seems that S&P want to explore the spacial relationships within their projects. Space here seems to be thought of as a context. Place is either the locality of the exchange, or probably more intriguingly, the specific localities of those interacting in relation to one another. Within the space (context) of Max's experience, for example, he might have refused or failed to acknowledge the place of the participants with specific regard to their knowledge of computers and the specific languages that constitute computer usage.

I find it interesing that in the maps space is constituted by the project (and not a physical reality) and that place centers on the artifacts produced: the reports and not on the people trying to access or produce those reports. The relationship between those requesting specific data seems to be subverted by some assumptions about who will be using the final product. But I'm feeling a powerful rant on company organization coming on, so I'll stop this monkey bit.

I suppose for me the big question that this piece poses is something very close to my own interests: what is the effect of transparent technology? This is some wonderfully reflective work on how technology becomes a background tool and a powerful argument that the seemingly transparent technology has specific and situated value within the system. However, at the same time, the S&P seem to shy away from relating human/computer interaction as a technology (enter cybernetics). I say this because I don't see it coming through in their research as they omit all mention of training/documentation in their second example and then admit but quickly pass on from the lack of training/documentation in their third example. Maybe I'm missing some key passages, and I welcome a second (or Nth) set of eyes to help me see it. This is something I'm very interested in exploring further.

Posted by trobryan at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

The social capital of methodological interfaces

Both Burt (“The Social Capital of Structural Holes”) and Sullivan and Porter ("Postmodern Mapping and Methodological Interfaces") demonstrate the value of mapping contexts. In Burt’s case the value lies in an understanding of how one’s position in a network (and a la Watts, the structure of the network) can be an advantage—namely, the ability to bridge clusters by transferring information between them. This resonates with Watts’ discussion of how message-passing at lower levels of hierarchy in institutions with a core-periphery architecture can increase the overall efficiency of an organization (Six Degrees 278), and how informal networks of social relations can enhance the ability of an organization to recover from problems. Although he defines “social capital” as “an advantage created by the way people are connected,” Burt prominently

features the fairly hard-nosed measures of pay and promotion to make his case. I see a moral to be drawn: When you find yourself in an “information Polynesia,” get in the outrigger, paddle to the next island, and make friends.

Sullivan and Porter offer postmodern mapping to researchers as a theoretical technique for discovering possibilities of research programs. Although they pre-date Burt by what seems to be about nine years, they advocate much along the lines defined by Burt by pointing to the value of a bridge between academic research on computers and writing and workplace research (lacking a focus on computing as an environment for writing)”:

The classroom perhaps is the best site for effecting fundamental change in the nature of workplace literacy; it certainly provides an opportunity for experimentation, for testing new possibilities (whereas workplace action can be constrained by “the way things have always been done.”

Sullivan and Porter similarly map sectors (clusters) of research communities. The result looks very much like an information Polynesia.

There are two things about the S & P reading I’m still chewing on: (1) the instrumental and pragmatic nature of the corporate setting seemed to make a very odd bedfellow for postmodern theory, with its skepticism of institutions. Isn’t the move to pragmatism (and to tradition in hermeneutics) in some sense a hedge against the indeterminacy of the world postmodernism posits? Also, I had trouble seeing what was necessarily postmodern about these maps until S & P explained it in the last paragraph--thank you! (2) Could someone explain the difference between “situated theory” and “empirical practice”? It seems to hinge on a nuance between relationships and identities in particular situations, without metanarrative, as opposed to observed behavior in same without abstract theorizing. I can’t see the lines.

Perhaps the additional readings will throw some light on this.

Posted by hjjankie at 08:39 PM | Comments (2)

March 29, 2005

NCTE Council Chron and blog talk

Has anyone else seen the NCTE Council Chronicle article "Reading, Blogging, and 'Rithmetic?"? It's right on the front page. It describes blogs and blogging by describing how instructors in the Tidewater Community College system in Virginia Beach, Virginia used blogs as the solution to connect students at all four campuses in the system so they could participate in NCTE's 1984+20 Project. You can see their blog for the project here.

Some of the things the article claims: increased student awareness of genre, audience, and purpose; public accountability for what they write; increased quantities of writing than in other electronic mediums; bringing other voices into the classroom; more commenting on the learning process while in the process of posting; placing more value on writing that has a wider audience.

The article also touches on collegiality and privacy concerns for students. I'd send you to a link, but, ironically, the Council Chronicle doesn't have online publishing.

Posted by dwinslow at 10:40 PM | Comments (2)

March 28, 2005

Information brokers, structural holes, and postmodern mapping

Ok, so let me get this straight. Postmodern mapping shows where approaches to a problem (or research, or...) are reified by certain unquestioned assumptions. The map helps us see where things are leaning/stuck, and by placing approaches, actors, and actants on a mapped out continuum (but visually in different quadrants), we can envision other approaches that might get approaches and solutions closer together through attention to formerly unquestioned givens. So in a way, the map highlights structural holes, or zones of ambiguity, where (new)information can be brokered/(re)structured. And we, Super Rhetoricians, fly to the rescue with our excellent analysis skills and penchant for multiply reading a situation's "text" because we are "alert to frames as frames" (S&P).

Do I get it?

[Apologies for the super hero silliness--I'm a bit punchy]

Posted by dwinslow at 10:56 PM | Comments (5)

In your spare time

In response to all of you who have been clamoring for additional readings for this week, I have a couple of additional articles that I'd like you to get to if you can. The first is a chunk from Kenneth Burke's The Philosophy of Literary Form, a section on methodology that should ring a bell or two. It will be a little tough, because KB was a prolific reader, so don't feel as though you need to catch every single literary reference in there--read for the sense of what he's proposing in terms of an analytic method, and you should be fine.

The second piece is one of those "if you have time" kinds of articles. It's a CCC article that Porter and Sullivan wrote with some of their graduate students, applying the methods from Opening Spaces in an article-length text. It may be a little more accessible than the chapter itself, if only because it's self-contained.

Okay. So none of you actually clamored.

Posted by cgbrooke at 08:03 PM | Comments (1)

Interdisciplinarity: To Bridge or Bond . . .

Derek's post got me thinking about a discussion raised in class last week on interdisciplinarity. Let me try to recreate it here as a way of setting up where I am going.

We were talking about the long tail, and Colin mentioned I.A. Richard's quote about the inverse relationship word have between value and specificity meaning. (e.g. love is a very valued concept in our culture, but it is so broad as to have a multiple meanings, thus the word is marked by non-specific meaning). Therefore, in power laws, the top of the curve (A-list bloggers, U2, and the popular kids) have a broad appeal to many audiences. In other words, their meanings are non-specific and not specialized.

With me so far?

So then I posited that interdisciplinarity should be at the top of the curve because it spans knowledge from multiple disciplines, thus it is non-specific and not specialized. But we all know that in most disciplines, interdisciplinarity is not at the top of the curve, and in actual practice those of us who strive to be interdisciplinary often find ourselves hanging out on the long tail (if not falling between chairs while trying to balance multiple disciplinary knowledges). I was willing to chalk it up to the unenlightend-non-spatially-relational-territorialism that one often finds in disciplines, but after reading this weeks works, I am further perplexed as to how interdisciplinarity can be so readily relegated to the long tail.

According to Burt, in corporate situations, it is the "brokers" those people who can find and bridge the structural holes who profit in raises, advancement, and job placement. Brokers find ways to mediate and share information between differing groups of people who might not share information if otherwise. It is the presence of these people who can change the productivity of corporate network, and who are able to make the ship run . . . well . . . ship-shape. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) If we follow this logic, it seems as if those who attempt interdisciplinarity are trying to do just that, right? They are trying to bridge knowledges that might otherwise go unread and explored by each group if left to their own devices.

Now in the conversation last week, Collin pointed out that interdisciplinarity is also a way of being very specific because there is always disciplinary knowledge that one cannot fully know. For example, if a comp/rhet person deals with the rhetoric in cultural geography they will always be an outsider to cultural geography because they won't necessarily know all the mapping and statistic laden geographic history involved in the larger discipline of geography. Likewise, they may not know every nook-and-cranny of comp/rhet so their analysis may create disinterest in that field as well. (See Derek and the SIG conversation again.)

So then I am back to my titular question: Is interdisciplinarity a model of brokerage or bondage? Does the presence of interdisciplinary knowledge bridge structural holes, or does it merely bond those already firmly in one discipline together by the presence of "other" knowledge?

Posted by jlwingar at 06:41 PM | Comments (7)

March 27, 2005

Mapping Organizations

The Burt reading, Brokerage and Closure got me to thinking about the past work I've done with content management solutions (CMS). A CMS helps work flow between the people who have to develop, review, and approve content for production. In other words, I think a CMS mediates structural holes in an organization caused by, perhaps, a lack of communication or to put it another way, a CMS bridges structural holes in organizations. In a sense, a CMS is powerful in that it electronically "broker(s) the flow of information between people" (9-10). However, from my experience, people expect a CMS to do too much. People still have to write, review, and approve content. The system does facilitate separating content from design and depending on the model, it can help users manage workflow by sending system-generated emails when users in a workflow are assigned action items.

Let me add, from this experience I also now recognize that the people who were most successful (promotion and/or raises) during the launch of the CMS were those people who were advocates for change and bridged work groups, not just to gather requirements from business managers and help others interpret requirements, but those who actively did whatever they could to improve the flow of information (low density info flow between groups). That is, they acted as 'brokers' in the sense that Burt is talking about, and they also paid attention to users, but didn't get stuck when practical solutions were needed as Sullivan and Porter suggest. In other words, they didn't get stuck in an echo chamber and didn't get stuck in negative or pessimistic communication flows. Granted, it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. This was apparent in the readings last week. It's easy to get caught up marketing the top 10 products, rather than seeking marketing/suggesting opportunities in the long tail.

When I think about networks and understanding structures of institutions, I find myself asking, how do we best identify the power-players or key brokers and then how best do we "map" the issues, the players, the connections (or lack thereof) between the players and issues? Plus, then we need to determine the best rhetorical options for dealing with a particular group and set of issues.

Posted by mhansen at 08:35 PM | Comments (6)

March 26, 2005

Homophily Bias

Among the many intriguing ideas offered by Ronald Burt in the chapter draft of "Social Capital of Structural Holes," (PDF) from Brokerage and Closure, homophily bias--or the echo chamber effect--returned me to some questions I was thinking about at CCCC in San Francisco last week.  We're reading Burt's chapter for CCR711 this week, taking it up alongside a chapter on postmodern mapping as research methodology from Porter and Sullivan's Opening Spaces.  Earlier this semester, we read about homophily parameters in Duncan Watts' Six Degrees; commonly framed as echo chambers, the concept circulates in correspondence to like-mindedness, absolution of dissent, or the kind of diminished, unproductive parroting bound to stagnate--an abundance of closed-group gestures.  Homophily bias, then, is the orientation of a particular network structure toward such a closed-ness. 

And so I find the connection to CCCC in the structuring of Special Interest Groups or SIGs--the interest-defined clusters that form around a particular issue, cause, political imperative or specialization.  SIGs meet each year, and, of course, they make possible a forum for collegiality, perhaps even solidarity, organizational focus and expert niche.  Variously, they serve social, political and professional needs; as defined structures (form-alized with the petition to be listed in the program), they give us one way to imagine the field--embodied in the annual flagship conference--as a clustered topology.  Fair to say?

If we apply Burt's analysis to these clusters, however, we might begin--productively--to find vocabulary for understanding the rules, roles and power dynamics enforced in a particular SIG.  The groups have membership rosters, but what would happen if we started to differentiate the members as connectors (people who have multiple ties across special interest groups) and brokers (people who, because of their multiple ties, are able to pitch the group's interest to other, perhaps larger, bodies in the organization)?  Should the SIG accumulate too high a homophily bias, it would stand to disconnect from the more active channels in the organization.  Through particularly well-connected agents--active connector-brokers capable of bridging structural holes in the organization's topology--might the SIG sustain itself beyond a kind of isolation and connect meaningfully with the organization at-large, provided, of course, that such broader persuasions are mutually valued to the SIG's members.  For what it's worth, I'm not thinking about any particular SIG; instead I'm trying to reconcile Burt's terms with network formations related to CCCC.  Furthermore, I'm interested in exploring what it might mean to convene a heterophily-biased interest group--maybe something that would have different interest groups co-mingle for fruitful partnerships and cooperatives.

Posted by dmueller at 08:55 PM | Comments (5)

I stumbled on Creative Commons

In my e-mail this week I found Dawnelle's W.P. listserv post referencing a blog called Dialogic, so I decided to check it out. The blog itself is interesting, but what I am more fascinated by is the link to the Creative Commons deed and full license that is in the side bar on the right just before the "previous posts" section.

Check it out! It's and interesting take on ownership and fair use and alterability of bolg posts...at least that's what I think it is. There is also a link to Creative Commons, once you get to the bottom of the full license link.

I like the consciously chosen "human-readable" language that formulates the Deed--the full license is in full-blown legaleze.
What I'm not so sure about is what this actually does. I mean, it seems to say that as long as you give credit (which it seems most bloggers do) you can use it. But if you don't....? Is this just an educational tool for courteous use of other's ideas when blogging? And if it is, why are the details in legaleze and not human-readable?
And is this kind of mock policing, of the sort that reproduces the copyright norm, a blogging ethic?

Reading more of the Creative Commons site makes me think think that this non-profit is trying to negotiate a compromise between strict copyright laws and new, more flexible copying permission for web use. Does anyone know if this org is making headway in creating a new vision/version of web-worthy intellectual property ownership understanding, say, in the general area of copyright laws?

Posted by dwinslow at 01:18 PM | Comments (2)

blogs and the long tail

Back in early February, I sat on a panel with Dan Gillmor as he positioned blogs within the proverbial “long tail.” With the influence of bloggers on mainstream journalism, he says, the tail has begun to wag the dog.

He’s right on a couple of things: blogs are definitely part of the long tail, and some bloggers are beginning to have an astonishing influence on breaking news stories, perhaps most notably with the Rather scandal. There’s a lot of talk lately about bloggers as journalists, fueled both by Gillmor’s We The Media and the recent Apple suits against bloggers. I won’t argue with any of that.

I do think, however, that these theories are only applicable to a very small portion of the blog population. Yes, some very prominent bloggers devote themselves to breaking news and attendant commentary. I would also extend the “journalist” definition to the pundit blogs. These folks are not the long tail, though. They’re toward the front of it, and if we lopped off the tail just behind them we’d have a very stubby tail. The whole blogger-as-journalist metaphor just doesn’t account for what the rest of us do.

Rather than journalism, I think the print precedent for most of us lies in zines. Remember zine culture? You, or you and a friend or two, put together this weird little collection of stuff that had to do with your particular, peculiar interests. It didn’t appeal to the masses and it wasn’t meant to. I think most blogs follow the same principle – a way to announce yourself and the strange little star you follow. Some look more zine-like than others: The Heretik and Slight Publications are examples. But regardless of visual style, the majority of blogs I read are targeted at a zine-like niche audience. There’s only a certain number of people who want to read a blog about grad student musings, intellectual property, pinups and (currently) broken ankles. Only a specific audience wants to read about badass, hilarious mothers. Or a postmodernist priest. Or a bunch of dieters. Or a lyrical cook. Or fringe music Or a bunch of rhetoricians.

These people aren’t wagging the dog, and I suspect they really don’t care one way or the other. The majority of blogs are firmly situated in the long part of the long tail, in the funky little cultural crevices. They provide expression and community for writers who are, in one way or another, part of the cultural fringe, and they provide a means for the mainstream to stumble upon us. And I think that is what makes the medium so powerful, and so interesting.

Posted by kkennedy at 01:08 PM | Comments (1)

March 24, 2005

long tails

Chris Anderson makes the point that busineses that market to the long tail will succeed in the networked economy as more companies embrace both current stocking/marketing of hits as well as suggesting lesser known titles, for there are many more lesser known titles, which can lead to more sales/growth in an obscure category than the popular hit category.

There are just three things that I'd like to touch on with regard to the long tail: free content, software, and resistance (my own) to the long tail.

At the free content end of the long tail is the Internet Archive. The IA archives as much public domain content as possible. IT Conversations has a podcast by Brewster Kahle about Universal Access to All Knowledge (note: it's a long preso). In the presentation he talks about how inexpensive it is to digitize content. I really didn't realize that it only costs about $10 to digitize a 300 page book.

When reading Bnoopy's post, it made me think of the differences in small and large scale software development. I've worked for both types of organizations. For large companies in the head of the tail, they don't necessarily have to perform perfectly because there they have more room for error. That is, momentum will carry them along for a certain time period with little internal or external effects of even sizable mistakes. On the other hand, small scale development really means taking advantage of every dollar savings and cost improvement. A mistake of several thousand dollars can really mean the difference of staying in business or going under.

Once of the areas where I think businesses large and small are inefficient is the over-use of individual client apps as the sole project and knowledge management tools. Lots and lots of knowledge is buried just in people's email. When people leave a company, the people who are left don't go looking in the recently departed's email history for an answer; rather, they accept that the knowledge left with the employee. However, if companies developed more public content management and process documentation requirements and standards, then the situation would be better, especially for smaller companies that could then be able to capitalize on the long tail regarding software development. Heck, if developers would just comment their code, it would be one step in the right direction because it might mean the difference between starting over and modifying an existing app.

The last thing I wanted to touch on is viral marketing. Because of the long tail, we buy more stuff that we don't know we want, certainly don't need, and probably can't afford. For example, I go into a convenience store to buy a bottle of water or a Diet Coke and on the glass door of the cooler is a clear plastic display shelf for candy bars. They are suggesting additional products and really, I don't like it very much. I don't want to be offered a candy bar when I go in for a water or a diet coke. I just want what I came in for and that is it.

Sure, since I love books, it's nice that Amazon suggests other titles to me. But, it's also led to information overload. Now instead of 30-300 books on my to-be-read list, there are 3000. I don't have the time or money to ready everything I want to read. Heck, I have about 65 books on my shelves right now that I have bought over the last 5 years and haven't had time to read. Part of me is disgusted. The other part of me is overwhelmed because there are probably 500 books that I should really understand in the next few years. It's not going to stop (nor, obviously, do I want it to completely) so I need to learn better strategies for managing it. It's just that the long tail isn't all good -- as with everything else, it depends on your perspective.

Posted by mhansen at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)

Social networks as rhetorical situation

One of the things I have an eye out for as I read for our course is how network science might contribute to a modification of traditional rhetorical theory. Earlier, I was asking in my blog about the theoretical yield of studying network science. It’s been very helpful to see how thinkers in various fields are applying the model to illuminate the dynamics of the social networks they inhabit.

I see a parallel between Kuhn’s description of the structure of scientific revolutions and the descriptions being developed by network scientists like Watts. While it may not have altered the conduct of scientific activity on the small scale, Kuhn’s work has altered our broad understanding of

what scientists do and provides a framework for analyzing the cultural rhetoric of science. In defining a new paradigm for social context, network science seems to have a similar potential, especially since the models it constructs affect us all, not just a select group.

Here are some ideas for using the knowledge of social networks to modify our traditional understanding of rhetoric:

Invention. Blogs that serve as platforms for drafting documents like dissertations open a back door to feedback and collaborative contributions in the composing process and change the relationship between publication and composing. Text-mediated dialogue employed as a topos differs from simply passing a draft around for feedback. Conventional “one-mind” invention theories don’t speak to collaborative activity such as might take place with wikis.

Rhetorical situation. Network science offers a completely new paradigm for understanding the context in which utterances and persuasion take place. Bitzer’s idea of situation as the ground and exigence for rhetorical activity is rather narrowly defined; nevertheless, the new network paradigms provide a fresh perspective on an often disregarded aspect of Bitzer’s theory: constraints. These are “persons, events, objects, and relations which . . . have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (“The Rhetorical Situation”). Network characteristics like emergence, power law distributions, tipping points and the Matthew Effect re-map our understanding of the potentials and limits of the power of discourse to alter reality within social networks. Bitzer speaks of fitting the response to the situation, but this new knowledge would seem to call for an elaborated art of fitting strategies to situations, something akin to market research. For instance, the success of an innovation, according to Watts, may depend on the structure of the network.

Audience. Bitzer also speaks of audience as a key constituent of the rhetorical situation. New social relationships such as those defined by Weinberger and devices like trackbacks call for a re-examination of the relation of rhetor to audience. New network paradigms provide a framework for redefining certain audiences. Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, for instance, have benefited by recognizing the long tail as a particular type of audience (Bnoopy/Kraus).

Ethos. In any number of ways and contexts, the character and very identity of the rhetor become problematic on the Web. What is happening in terms of ethos, for instance, when an employee is fired for making remarks about his or her company in a blog? (Or we might ask it: What happens to ethos distributed across multiple, coexistent contexts?) How should we read popularity against credibility in the blogosphere? See Weinberger’s discussion of .Zannah (16) as the norm on the Web, and to his discussion of Web credibility (141).

Posted by hjjankie at 02:44 AM | Comments (1)

March 23, 2005

A different take on Shirky

Wow. Ty, your blog about the Shirky article is so different from my take on it that I decided to create this entry instead of answering your post as a comment. Sorry everyone about the possible breach in blog etiquette...put it down to my novice-ness.

To begin, I am quite sure the Shirky is not suggesting that "the idea is that we are so obsessed with social engagement that when we are offered variety (choice) we choose groupthink." (Ty's post) He is pointing out the phenomenon of power law distributions in terms of "any tendency towards agreement" [emphasis mine], which hardly translates into "group think," a term that seems to carry some negative judgement, yes?

Shirky explicitly writes that the power law distribution becomes reified not because users dogmatically defend the group/ideology, but because it's "the normal functioning of large unconstrained social systems [...] it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system" (Shirky)

In my anthropology courses, as well as my history courses, my profs talked about societies/social systems, (and blogs are social systems), cycling through homeostasis recursively, especially in western societies that think bigger/more is progress, and progress is better. Unconstrained systems eventually create inequality among actors in the systems. The system then has to transform or fall apart or both. I think they can even track the cycle in terms of maximum populations, a sort of tipping point into social disarray.

Shirky's outline of what transformations the blog-o-shpere may go through is fascinating--but you know, even the A-list-turned-broadcast outlet can choose to not be that, shift (I was going to write "retreat") to conversational blogging, or downsize in any number of ways. Funny how I'm having trouble thinking of words that aren't preceived as derrogatory, like "downsize" and "retreat."

Shirky's last comment of the essay is great--the original bloggers weren't necessarily thinking about equal distribution. They weren't being egalitarian; they were just doing what they do. There simply weren't enough folks involved at that point for any one blog to be very far from stardom...if that was the goal, it was more available then than now, because that's the nature of spontaneous systems. I don't think he's saying any more or less than that.

Posted by dwinslow at 07:44 PM | Comments (4)

Power Laws, Long Tails, and Social Change

Ok, so I do recognize that the power law and long tail are more descriptive than prescriptive in their abilities to determine how social networks move. And I also recognize that paying attention to these explanatory models can help change our ways of thinking about the world; even though they may not allow us to predict definite change. In other words, if we can begin to respect and acknowledge the long tail we can sell more items by just putting all the diversity out there, but we can never know or change which items will be at the top of the power law curve (the most popular) from the outset. With all of that said, I still want to push these models a bit further to help understand how particular ideas or beliefs in the social take on more significance than others. And if we can use these models to figure that out, will it ever be possible to begin to sway public opinion?

It seems as if iTunes and Amazon, according to Anderson, have done just that. By offering everything (which iTunes does not -- BTW -- try to find obscure '80s British or Canadian pop and you're out of luck!) these companies make more money, but as both Anderson and Derekmention it is not only through the commitment to the long tail that these companies have been successful, but it is through their ability to recommend, link, and connect one song with another based on affinity that sweetens the pot. So, then iTunes and Amazon are finding ways to use power law and small world models together to produce profit.

So far, so good. But then Huberman quickly reminds us:

while economic outcomes are the result of actions by people, they do not necessarily reflect their intentions (22).

Then iTunes can only create links between Beck and Matador at 15 because customers have purchased both, not because there is any inherent link between the artist and the album. This is not shady or even a poor representation of what is going on with purchasing music, but I wonder how useful this model is for explaining how public opinion changes and circulates.

Often liberals are stunned at the inherent contradictions present in the right's agenda, as is the right with the liberals agenda. And there are voices, or clusters, on each side that are infinitely more popular than radical or even moderate sites/blogs on both sides. So if we were to use power laws and small world clusters to predict changes in political climate and belief, could it be done on a mass scale. I am skeptical that it could only show us coronations and that then both sides would come up with their stories to fill in the blanks, so that we wouldn't make much progress on either side. (Ah, the database versus the narrative rears its ugly head again.) So, maybe what this line of questioning is really showing me is that I need understand better what the use value of these models are, and pushing them into predictive and prescriptive modes is really my own need to change the world. And then that's the beauty of the power law -- it could help me devise a strategy to change public opinion, but at the same time it could be helping someone diametrically opposed to me.

And then we are back to linking, clustering, and who is reading who to see the relative success and/or failures of this change.

Posted by jlwingar at 12:29 PM | Comments (1)

March 22, 2005

Huberman

They're mercifully short, and so I've gone ahead and pdf-ed chapters 3 & 4 of Huberman's The Laws of the Web. Sorry for the delay.

Posted by cgbrooke at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

Again with the Brenardo Huberman

And here's a little tiny BH bio

Posted by dwinslow at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)

The Bernardo Huberman?

I'm wondering if I missed an announcement, but how do I get the Bernardo Huberman The Laws of the Web selections?

I did find this review on the web.

Posted by dwinslow at 03:25 PM | Comments (0)

And now, the conference...

Did I pick the wrong sessions? Not entirely. But I did notice that some of the sessions I selected were typical of the ones I usually select...and these conversations seemed...spent, old, done-that-already-ish? Heck! I don't know. What I think is that I picked on overdrive and not from my newer interests, and what I found out is how much my focus (foci?) has (have) changed in the last two years.

For some reason the topics at conference seemed tired to me this year. That could be an artifact of how tired I am this year, trying to juggle four seminar classes per semester, fit into a new program culture, and relocate across the country by myself. It could also have been the conference venue, which was enough to make us all tired--no place to congregate and lounge and talk, big echoey spaces that defied human-scale interactions, no convenient watering holes, snacks, or coffee that didn't empty the wallet damn fast.

I found it heavily ironic that the conference was relocated to the Moscone Center in support of the hotel workers' strike at the Hilton, but that no particularly new insights were forth coming on our own discipline's employment and compensation dilemmas. [Not that we shouldn't support the hotel workers, and yes, I know there are folks working toward equitable working conditions and living wages for adjunct employees in composition]

But in any case, I realized that something was missing for me in the conversations about first-year writing classrooms and textbook and handbook choices and academic assessment. What were groovy to me were the conversations about community engagement and urban literacy centers, network theory with its centrifugal/centripetal mix, politics of part-time hiring and adjunct exploitation, WPAs and collaborative administrative models, "The Academy" providing its "public goodness" on the undertheorized platform of something we still call service learning.

But perhaps I'm just tired and jet-lagged...

Posted by dwinslow at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2005

King of the hill

I just finished reading Shirky's "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." About halfway through, I was reminded of some lyrics from Fugazi's "Burning Too": "We are consumed by society / We are obsessed with variety." These lines are stripped of their original context and are taking on a new meaning for me. I'm thinking about the way that Shirky names the possible reasons for social networks preferences. In particular, our obsession to join the conversation, so we tap into what everyone else is doing to build commonality. This idea seems to cross over between what Shirky dubs "a preference for marketing" and what he calls "a preference for 'soildarity goods.'" It also seems to me to point to an inherent laziness (but Shirky doesn't go there).

Anyhow, the idea is that we are so obsessed with social engagement that when we are offered variety (choice) we choose groupthink. I suspect this is why systems become self-policing, authorizing what is and is not accepted. It seems that in many cases we become dogmatically attached to defense of the group/ideology. But that seems oddly beside the point.

I am curious about Shirky's claim that "[o]nce a power law distribution exists, it can take on a certain amount of homeostasis, the tendency of a system to retain its form even against external pressures." I wonder where he has seen this outside of the weblog. History, at least in my mind, would disagree. Maybe not in the short term, and maybe it's not external pressures so much as internal tensions that will tip the balance and drag the person at the top off the pedestal. I read in Reason (and I hope I'm remembering this correctly) that over the last 20 years, the dominant media conglomerations have changed drastically but do not actually control more of the market, which seems to jive with Power Law dynamics. It stands to reason that the top 1/3 can only increase their holdings so far.

This is an observation that Shirky makes at the end of this essay, and one which makes me want to be a part of the long tail. Life at the top seems to miss what I want most from blogging: conversation. The people at the top lose control of their sites, their ideas, and the network decenters them into what Shirky calls "broadcast outlet, distributing material without participating in conversations about it." This is a very powerful idea to me and one that needs more mulling. There is a certain disconnection that happens on this level, and I don't find it surprising that Shirky's language dehumanizes the blogging experience.

Posted by trobryan at 04:47 PM | Comments (1)

March 18, 2005

Aspiring to the Curve

When we extend Chris Anderson's analysis of power laws and music sales to the blogosphere, I think we have to complicate the one-market model with small world dynamics.  Anderson's article calls the one-market model into question when he differentiates between mass audience and quality: "We equate mass market with quality and demand, when in fact it often just represents familiarity, savvy advertising, and broad if somewhat shallow appeal."  The one-market model, as I think of it, lumps all record sales or all weblogs into a grand order--a totality of the industry.  Continuing with the music sales example, the result is that garage bands (no matter local niche, regional celebrity and so on) take a spot in the long tail because they fuse into a curve with folks 50 Cent, J-Lo, Green Day and Destiny's Child occupying the head (tall end) of the curve.  Turning to the blogosphere, small world dynamics would charge us with recognizing lesser sub-spheres.  And although the lesser sub-spheres (we could also characterize these as interest clusters, perhaps) organize according to power laws brought about by preferential linking, growth resulting from new nodes, and fitness or the potential of new nodes to excite the lesser sub-blogosphere with new vitality or energy, such a model pushes us to a more exacted scale, such as the clustered sub-sphere of our own small collection of blogs, which are linked because of this course.  Similar sub-spheres self-organize around interest: disciplinary interest, social interest, etc.

What I'm trying to get at here is much like Adina Levin's critique of Shirky's essay.  Levin says that "the Power Law essay implied that A-list bloggers were the big winners in the peer ecosystem."  If, by winners, we mean the most highly trafficked sites (or chart-toppers, since I don't want to bail out on the music example set up by Anderson), then winner-success measures are easy to settle.  So Daily Kos gets 100k hits per hour, and my own modest EWM gets 20 per day.  Winner=Daily Kos (I call for a rematch!).  Levin goes on to say that Anderson's approach works better because "it suggests that the relationship between the head and the tail is symbiotic instead."  But I wonder whether we should factor in desire and contentment in the lesser sub-spheres.  Must we assume that everyone in the long tail is aspiring to the curve and on to the power law's head?  What follows this generalization--the generalization that everyone would prefer the stature (fame, celebrity?) associated with the head positions? In consideration of this, I would argue that it's incredibly important to distinguish mass attention from local, interested attention, granted that such a distinction is problematic and hard (if possible at all) to know.

Reading Anderson's essay, I was also struck by the account of the book Touching the Void climbing in the Peruvian Andes.  It was written ~ten years before Into Thin Air, but the spark of interest initiated by Into Thin Air carried Touching the Void along with it, and eventually sales of the older Touching the Void surpassed and eventually doubled sales of Into Thin Air. It reminded me that clusters are carried from the long tail toward the curve simply because of the resiliency of one or two proximal nodes. This is one way of explaining the importance of a blogroll, I suppose.  And it seems to happen all the time when a band comes up with a hit and the popularity reverberates through near peers, activating sales that had hitherto been idle.  Beg pardon for bringing in Vygotsky, but since I'm reading for another class, it's rather like the zone of proximal development, the hoist of a near peer.  Understood in these terms, simple linking might impose upon bloggers a kind of sociality (and resulting energy or excitement) that draws us collectively, in our lesser sub-spheres, from the long tail toward the curve in ways we can't overtly control.  With blogrolling, some agency shifts from the individual blogger to the lesser sub-sphere, at least inasmuch as the position in the power law graph is never purely individually derived.  Just one example of this would be the spike of more than three hundred visits on the day that Clancy posted notes about the talk I gave at CCCC.  Such simple acts of linking by more prominent weblogs, such as Clancy's, stimulate attention to lesser known weblogs like mine. 

Posted by dmueller at 11:28 AM | Comments (8)

March 13, 2005

Paying for words

Here’s something that’s a little weird to me…. I just read this article about Google extending interfaces to its search engine and indexes to companies paying for search marketing. That isn’t the weird part. In fact, it’s sort of cool – I’ve been working with the UC marketing department on a keyword schema for some of their upcoming ad campaigns.

What’s weird is the concept of bidding on words – more specifically, keywords. We’re all familiar with Google’s and others’ sponsored links. And most search engine users (I think) are savvy enough to figure out who’s paying for top billing even when it’s not clearly noted on the page. But this practice of paying for words has me thinking about the power a single word can weld. The web evolves around words, so to must the search-engines and marketers who want to exploit that function. Google, Yahoo and the rest are in it for the cash, so they literally “auction” keywords to the highest bidders, who then see their ads at the top or next to relevant search results. People are paying for WORDS!

So maybe it’s not as weird as much as it is funny. Consultants get away with this sort of stuff all the time – getting paid for their ideas. Novelists and poets get paid for their words, right? But paying for a single word –- really paying for the action associated with or the material equivalent of that word – that’s what I’m thinking about.

Posted by mfrascie at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2005

At the intersection

At the intersection of the grid and the network:

Today, climbing the lift that would carry him to Skinner's room, he had met the girl on her way to work, descending, her shoulder through the frame of her bicycle. She was a courier in the city.

Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous--in effect, a single descktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl's bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit. (William Gibson, Virtual Light 100-101, 1993).

I posted an entry to kubernetes about Tron (1982) (grid) vs. The Matrix (1999) (network) and made the comment that The Matrix was post-Gibson, and also heavily reliant on his breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984). So, last night while I was reading for fun (yeah, I make sure to do that every so often), I came across this passage in another one of Gibson's books. What fascinates me is the connection between Gibson's discourse and the way we think and talk about networks, particularly the Internet. Gibson, afterall, coined "cyberspace."

Posted by trobryan at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)

The Web of Law

I haven't had time to look at this yet, but if anyone's casting about for a little light reading over spring break, try Thomas Smith's The Web of Law:

This article proposes that the science of networks has important contributions to make to the study of law as well.

This article has three parts....Having introduced network theory in Part I, and having presented evidence that American case law is a scale-free network in Part II, I argue for the significance of this discovery in Part III. I hope that by the time they reach Part III, readers will already be realizing the potential richness of applying network theory to legal systems. In Part III, I describe some insights that appear from this application and suggest areas for future research.

At the very least, it might be interesting to measure what we've done so far against Smith's first section.

And no, I don't expect that you'll be posting here over Spring Break. Doesn't mean you can't--just that I don't expect it.

Posted by cgbrooke at 03:14 AM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2005

Previously, on Net Rhet...

I've been a little remiss in providing recaps of class discussion, not the least reason for which is the fact that the last several weeks have basically left me exhausted by Friday. I'm a little less so today, and so...

The other reason for a recap is that, this week, rather than attending very closely to the readings, I asked the class to engage in a little thought experiment with me. Partly, it was motivated by a question that Elisa raised a couple of weeks ago, namely, can this network studies stuff do anything to help us derive insight into the field? Also prompting me were some discussions round the blogosphere about academic hiring/tenure processes. (My links here don't do justice to the depth and breadth of this conversation, btw.)

So, anyway, what I wanted to do was to turn the morass of the academic hiring process (with which most of us--myself excepted--don't have experience yet) into something that could be conceivably studied, with the vocabulary and/or methods we've been working with. Want to know more?

Of course, I didn't go in expecting that we would somehow "make it all clear" over the course of a 2-hour conversation. Nevertheless, I hoped that we might develop some researchable questions--that even if there was no way to verify them, we might generate some hypotheses about academic hiring that could be tested, given enough time, energy, and data. I think we accomplished this, so I was pretty pleased.

Anyhow, it's an awfully complicated phenomenon to try and diagnose. Basically, we were asking whether or not it's possible to identify trends and patterns in hiring across our disciplinary network. We tried to isolate internal factors that lead to the decision, the kinds of externalities that Watts describes in Six Degrees, and then we talked about the various data available to us to quantify some of these things.

Easy, right?

Umm, no. I think that most people approach hiring from their local place in the network, either as a member of a committee or department that's hiring, or (obviously) as someone who's applying for positions. And that makes it doubly tough to spot trends at a disciplinary level, because our tendency is to project that experience. If we as a department are looking for a visual rhetoric specialist, then folk in the department are going to see that as a representative trend. And all of the local concerns (who's retired or left, where do you want your curricula to go, etc.) seem larger than they actually may be.

Externalities don't make it any easier, because it's tough to know how important a role they play. For example, the college or university may be looking to make particular statements and expect hires to fit in with those. A special issue of a journal or a conversation on a listserv may spark a committee chair's curiosity and interest. And so forth.

I think, ultimately, then, the most productive portion of the conversation came when we started thinking about what sorts of data exist. For me, perhaps the single most valuable source is the MLA Job Information List. Every year, people count the number of jobs, and whether it's gone up or down, but there's a great deal more in there that goes largely untapped. For our purposes, the prospect of taking 5-10 years worth of JILs and doing a basic keyword extraction seemed promising. And translating it into a graphic (like the NYT one from the DN and RN Conventions) might give us some sense of what specialties are emerging, which are withering, etc.

Armed with that information, I think we felt like we could really start generating some knowledge. Basically, our questions would then become questions of triggers or tipping points. Are there specific events in the field, or particular factors, that we could similarly chart and find points of resonance?

So, for example, every year at CCCC, that year's Chair delivers an Address to a fairly sizable portion of the membership. That Address is often published on the website, and eventually in the flagship journal. Given information about the waxing and waning of specializations, we could look at that data alongside the themes of the CCCC from the prior year and/or the Chair's address. If the Chair emphasizes technology in his or her talk, is there a corresponding bump the following year in positions that include technology as one of their areas?

Or, to take a different tack, we could mine the JIL data even further, and try to determine if there are any patterns that emerge within particular specializations. Where are the "cutting-edge" specialties first mentioned? Are there particular schools who, when they hire for a "new" specialist, trigger a cascade across the disciplinary network such that other schools will follow their lead?

Are there ways of controlling for specific regional needs (such as ESL and/or Basic Writing), say, in Texas and California? Can we isolate out different institutional data sets (community colleges on one hand, doctoral programs on the other, liberal arts schools on the third)?

The deeper you dig into a topic like this, the more complicated it gets. But I think that we accomplished a couple of things yesterday. First, we did a good job, I think, with the vocabulary. And second, I think we started to generate some concrete discussion of how "network thinking" (whatever that might be) might help us get some kind of grasp on a pretty intractable problem.

And as always, this recap is filtered through my own priorities and perceptions. Anyone else should feel free to add to it, correct it, etc.

Posted by cgbrooke at 06:24 PM | Comments (1)

Validation and Prediction

I just wanted to say that I thought last night’s discussion was really useful for me. Up to this point, I’ve been bogged down in the “theoretical construction” of the network and trying to imagine some operational measurements or metrics to validate that construct.

Invoking Foucault as we considered applying network analysis as a predictive activity was helpful because his work in TOOT focuses on the content and criteria of the networks/grids/concept maps he creates. And because I have this hang-up with needing to validate or “see” theory applied, I think Foucault provides a model or method.

Our on-board activity last night was an effort to validate the criterion of a network(s), which in systems-speak is often considered an effort to determine predictive validity. Here’s an example I like to use with instructional designers: The “validity” of a written driver’s test is determined by the relationships among the scores people get on the test and how well they drive (in this context we’re typically discussing ways to measure the validity of a course – knowledge transfer/knowledge applied). My point is that predictive validity is also applicable to our work last night – reconstructed or imaging some future network(s). I find these types of activities extremely useful because they allow us to cover a range of meanings and possibilities related to a wider range of concepts and topics.

Posted by mfrascie at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2005

Foucault as Epistemic Rhetoric

I just stumbled across this:
Foucault as Epistemic Rhetoric

Posted by hjjankie at 01:16 PM | Comments (1)

March 09, 2005

Grid Ubiquity

In his chapter "From Grid to Network," Taylor's objects for study draw mostly on architecture and Fordist/Taylorist efficiency models, those privileging linearity or departing from it toward an antitheses, nonlinearity (the lists do a better job than I have here of explaining the differences).  I have a lot of questions about the suggestion of a shift from grid to network, and many of them are questions I suspect Taylor answers later in The Moment of Complexity, which means I probably ought to add it in its entirety to the growing list.  By and large, I'm most interested in his dichotomous treatment of grid and network.  Even with a particularly timely network momentum (what should we call it, proliferation?), grid-based systems are a (perhaps permanent) fixture.  By this, I mean that no matter the architectural exceptions--many of which are high-priced urban novelties, the city-attractions designed to exude a kind of local and regional signature or difference--grids are fairly stable and pervasive.  I'm open to critiques of the logic of grids, but I am skeptical of the suggestion that network culture subsumes or displaces the grid. For one: Systems for numbering streets won't change because of network logics, will they? 

Our house in Kansas City (just before moving to Syracuse), for example, was unusually numbered--numbered in a way that countered the logic of the grid.  At 7519, it wasn't located immediately next to the 7400s, nor was it where we might have expected--7.5 miles north of the Missouri River--the baseline for street numbering in KC.  Because grid systems were all around us, characterizing the vast majority of properties in the metropolitan area (4700s, for example, name the vicinity of the plaza and midtown areas, 4.7 miles south...and so on).  The ubiquity of grid logics/systems encroaches on the network alterity.  And what follows can be quite messy--the spoils of confusion over mail, pizza delivery, drop-offs of friends, service people (says the plumber, "I'm where your house is supposed to be.  Where are you?"). Great big locational systems, including gizmos like satelite GPS, are a combination of grid (longitude/latitude) and network, no?  I'm sure I'm glossing over many of the subtle distinctions Taylor does well to account for, I ended the chapter wishing for more qualification of claims such as, "Grids, which might have worked in industrial society, are obsolete in network culture" (37).  What kind of obsolescence is this?  Ideological?  The emergence of network culture, I'd say, must constantly confront the residue of grid logics which still seem commonplace, even ubiquitous. 

Posted by dmueller at 10:16 PM | Comments (2)

Give a hoot! A post on TOOT!

This entry probably moves in the exact opposite direction that Mike's does; even so, I'm hoping to set it alongside rather than against it.

I'm hoping that those of you who read The Order of Things last semester (some of whom are preparing to discuss MF tomorrow in 611) are seeing the parallel between the epistemes that form the core of that book and the work being done by both Johnson and Taylor with respect to networks, and by Scott and Ehninger more broadly with respect to rhetoric. Taylor's chapter (and the book more broadly) invests pretty heavily in the idea of the network, while for Johnson, it's more akin perhaps to a trend.

But both, I think, see "the network" as a cultural archetype, and here's where I'm running counter to Mike's push towards quantifying and pinning it down. Could we argue, as a way of combining both positions perhaps, that Foucault accomplishes an analysis that allows epistemes the full run up and down the ladder of abstraction? (That's an honest question--several of you have read it more recently than I.)

I also think that the comparison with Foucault raises one of the risks of the trend towards networks. TOOT is by no means alone in this, but it is a much better look back than it is a primer for looking forward, and I say that having quoted myself his image of footsteps being washed out of the sand. In other words, I'm not asking here whether or not "networks are the new episteme," because even if they were, we aren't exactly brimming over with the perspective from which to make such a claim. Instead, I invoke Foucault here as someone who provides another context for thinking about the readings for this week. Nothing more, nothing less.

Well, that, and the chance to title my post thusly...

Posted by cgbrooke at 08:47 PM | Comments (5)

Pathologies of the network

In “From Grid to Network,” Taylor defines the “all-encompassing logic of the grid” (30) and shows how it operates as what Tyler Volk calls a “metapattern” in culture, analogous to the master narratives of postmodernism. The positive side to the logic of the grid was its increase in systematization, production, and egalitarianism. The dark side of the grid is based on the fact that “[t]he very structures that make possible democratic representation and egalitarian administration also create technologies of surveillance, control, and even repression” (30). In the humanities generally, the dark side of the grid is reflected in any number of modernist narratives of exploitation and alienation, and in post-war philosophies obsessed with despair at the rationality that gave us the Holocaust and the Bomb.

Taylor goes on to offer the network as antithesis to the grid’s thesis, but he offers it as a positive transformation. The other shoe never falls. That would be, What’s the dark side of the network? I don’t want to ask this as doomy and gloomy soul, but in service of understanding the Web. Almost everything we knew about the human brain (viz., neural networks) up to the fruition of brain imaging in the 1990s came from observing its pathologies. To ask this question is to ask for full knowledge.

Anarchy
This came up on our class list of terms. In the networks of heart cells it would be called fibrillation and could lead to cardiac arrest. However, anarchy seems more to describe a dissolution or disruption of the network, if not a catastrophic end state. It’s what the gridsters would call their loss of control. The Web seems more unruly than anarchic/chaotic, because social codes still act as a centripetal force to hold it together. Plus, it doesn’t have an overall project that requires absolute coordination. So what would the pathologies of the functioning network itself be?

Contagion
This concept is developed by Watts in Six Degrees. We want our good ideas to spread and we want to forge links that empower us. But there is plenty of cause to fear connecting to something infectious and undesirable: advertisers, stalkers, worms and viruses.

Paranoia
This strikes me as a perfect disorder for a connecting system. It is itself a form of negative connecting. Things connected with each other; threatening things connecting with me. On the Web, this might be any cluster. Who is reading my Web page or blog or lurking on a list? Who else is receiving the memo? Who is Googling me as I write? Who has my credit card number and medical records? How is the Patriot Act being enacted? In our centrifugal movement, we are putting ourselves out there, but who is reading us? Surveillance in the grid becomes fear of surveillance in the network.

Overconnectedness
Connection takes energy. In my experience, a small version of a power law, the trend is that connections lead to more connections and to more and more investments of energy. Were any of us more connected two years ago than we are right now? I just hope there isn’t a phase transition where the number of connections skyrockets. How connected can we become before we start to collapse? Furthermore, I am constantly offered connections (to worthy and interesting ventures) which I feel obligated to turn down by the dozens, simply because time is finite. Every one leaves me with a little twinge of guilt that I’m not fully engaging with my ever-expanding circle.

After my last post on "fatedness" and this, I promise I'll try to take up the next reading on a more festive note.

Posted by hjjankie at 08:40 PM | Comments (2)

This is an interesting article...

I found this while following the vaious links and references in Madeline's post...

"The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere"
"As blogging comes of age, what ethical standards should bloggers follow when offered payments or freebies -- aka "schwag" -- for buzz? By J. D. Lasica"

It's also pretty interesting to read the "About OJR.org" page of the site where this article is posted. Trying to strike an honest balance between tradition and innovation?

Posted by dwinslow at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)

Grids and Networks

I posted an effort to work through Taylor’s grid stuff over at my joint. I’m going to try something similar here in regard to his treatment of the network.

If Taylor’s grid is “the figure of the all-encompassing logic manifest through the marriage of social and mechanical engineering” (31), his network is a polar opposite; “a linked system that entangles everyone in multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is really in control” (23).

As I noted in my grid grapple, I’m a bit leery of this binary. Is the network, by its structure, nature, and function, more accommodating to contradictions than the grid? How does the rectilinear frame of the grid cause the structure itself to reject all contradictions?
Both the grid and the network assume implicitly that each node in the structure is a separate entity. But it seems we need a way to take into account the interactions between and among nodes if we are to quantify such interactions (isn’t this what Taylor is attempting to do through his architectural analysis?). To complicate it; do the metrics we use to quantify the interactions necessarily have to be verified by empirical data rather than the subjective metrics used in architectural analysis. My gut tells me this would be incredibly hard to do even on the micro-scales that were discussed in Six Degrees.

There are some simple metrics that have been used in object-oriented software design that might lend themselves to such an analysis -- specifically Yourdon’s Fan-in/Fan-out metrics (where fan-in is a count of the number of modules that call a given module, and fan-out is a count of the number of modules that are called by a given module). This model could be easily extended to apply to the nodes of a network or grid. In general, nodes with a large fan-in would be relatively small and simple, and are probably located at the lower layers of the network structure (as defined by Watts). In contrast, large and complex nodes will likely have a small fan-in. Therefore, nodes that have a large fan-in and large fan-out may indicate a weakness in the network/grid design (whether the design was intentional or organic). From the complexity and defect point of view (since I’m pretty sure that Taylor was exploring the “defects” of networked designs), nodes with a large fan-in would be expected to have negative or insignificant correlation with defect levels, and nodes with a large fan-out would be expected to have a positive correlation.

Holy cr*p, I don’t even think I can follow that without working through it four times. I’m just hung up on this need to quantify in order to analyze beyond subjective statements about function.

Posted by mfrascie at 07:53 PM | Comments (0)

More Blogging tips

I found this wonderful entry from brand strategist Jennifer Rice about building one's blog.

Notice, fellow composition teachers, Ms. Rice's comment, the first one on the list, on what will instantly disqualify a blog from her link eligibility.

Posted by cageyer at 07:36 PM | Comments (4)

networks: a personal genealogy

I wrote this a week ago over on Arete and meant to cross-post it over here, but somehow didn’t manage to. (Perhaps the medication hadn’t worn off as much as I would have liked to think.) Anyhow, here it is.

I’m poking along behind everyone else with Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age since I’m still not up to speed with my reading. I’ve been meandering along, thinking about how life on the Network has affected my own networks. When I started in this discipline, I only knew the people in my former department. I became very good friends (and fell in love with) one of them. He introduced me to blogging, and I started out by poaching reads off his blogroll. This situated me in the old U Blog community, as seen on one of AKMA’s ancient sidebars. This group was interdiscplinary and largely postacademic. Since I was a new blogger who possessed precious little social capital, I knew more of them than knew me. Now, two years later, I still read and/or talk with perhaps eight members of that community: AKMA, Mister Boyfriend, Dorothea, Tom, Steve, Joe, The Happy Tutor, and Mark Woods. I feel fiercely loyal to those eight. And eight people translates to a huge number within Watts’ network theory.

From that original network, I eventually followed links to a few Rhet/Comp bloggers. One of them was Clancy, who, if memory serves, I found through either AKMA or Michelle, who I know IRL. This was a good amount of time before I even considered applying to UMN. She linked me back. Then, quite by coincidence, Mister Boyfriend and I applied here. Because of the fact that we all read each other, it was fairly natural for Clancy and I to meet when I came up here to visit twice last year. And she introduced me to other departmental bloggers (Amy, Laurie, and Cristina) who all blogrolled me as a colleague before I ever formally showed up on their doorstep. It allowed me a friendship with Cristina, who moved to Philadelphia right when I moved here. In pre-blog days, I would have entirely missed her. Reading each other provided an impetus for Laurie and I to finally insist on having lunch together. And, particularly because of Clancy’s early efforts, I never had to feel like I didn’t know anyone here.

My growing connection to (and fondness for) the Syracuse Rhetoric folks is equally serendipitous. Through the Blog SIG Listserv launch, I met Derek, who was shopping for PhD programs at the same time I was. I’m not sure if I found Collin through him or Clancy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either of them. Becky found me through Collin, and vice versa, and she and I have cheered each other on through our recent accidents. And my blog-connection with Collin allowed me access to the Network(ed) Rhetorics course, which gave me to opportunity to meet Madeline, Mike, Tyra, Dianna, Chris, Jen, Ty, Elisa, and Henry, plus Marcia at Mizzou.

Somewhere in there, I went to C’s and met a bunch of other bloggers in my discipline, including Scott-In-The-Flesh, who I’d talked to forever. (Because of Scott, I know Shelley.) And way back in the day, the Happy Tutor led me to Mike.

So. Started out knowing and reading one person. Ended up knowing all these people, which is just the people I remember how I found*. Also ended up with a 200-link blogroll consisting of people I know well and people I don’t know at all. Most of the Rhet/Comp people also know each other, since we are our very own small-world phenonmenon. It’s been an interesting exercise to puzzle all this out, remembering who came from where. Watts suggests that networks are small worlds, clustered together and interlinked within and without. This geneology seems to support that.

Posted by kkennedy at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

Public and Private, Knowledge and Space

I've been trying to get a coherent paragraph out of this for weeks now, and I'm finally ready to just post it and let it be what it is. What I've been trying to do is "go somewhere" with the distinctions between private and public when it comes to knowledge creation and ideas about space. Collin commented that the web affords "place without space," which is an intriguing path all its own. Then Madeline grabbed a snippet from Weinberger that I loved about the Web flipping private to public and went on to say that notions of "rights and ownership" are the results of exclusionary systems. Her argument is that in the web "space" if all own it, no one "owns" it, that ownership is not applicable in such a space. We said in class that the threshold for membership in web communities is interest (well, and access, or course...)

With me so far? This part is largely recap, I know.

So then in another class I was reading Habermas (yes, I have finally read some Habermas), who argued that through the public sphere, the "passive" public became the "critical" public. This notion of public sphere is tied to conversations we're having about global civil society, and what will count as the public sphere in a global sense. Back to Weinberger, who wrote:

what counts as ‘the public sphere’ has changed. It now includes the Web. We’re just not sure how (14).

Then I'm thinking, as Madeline did, about Weinberger's 100 lb. backpack, and how light you can be if you let go of individualism, realism, relativism, and solipsism, which seems to me to be part of the necessary condition to be able to "think outside the box" or become the kind of self-healing organization or community or even person described by Watts in the Toyota story. That sort of knowledge can't be taught, but it has to be learned, not by procedures and rule books, but by being open to ideas and alternatives and newness. As Watt wrote:

The trick is to focus not on the stimulus itself but on the structure of the network that the stimulus hits (249).

The nature of the network on the internet is one of paths and links and ends--of connectedness within a few steps (or degrees). This connectedness facilitates socially constructed knowledge, which is itself a form of public knowledge, which by definition isn't private, and if you follow Madeline's logic isn't actually "owned" by anyone, but is accessible to everyone. And because it's public, because it is constructed from many foci, the potential for a cascading effect increases. So back to Weinberger, who said:

the Web also returns knowledge to its roots in heated arguments in the passageways of Athens. Knowledge isn’t a body of truths stamped with a seal of justification. Knowledge on the Web is a social activity. It is what happens when people say things that matter to them, others reply, and a conversation ensues (140).

This conversation is what can produce the cascading effect.

This class is, I think, about imagining academe is a new and innovative way, about sharing knowledge and ideas and facilitating through the social network of the internet knowlege that couldn't come about with each of us working alone or even in our relatively limited physical spaces. We work with traditional elements, like publishing, citing, and credit, but look for new ways to make it work. We find some brand new elements, and look for ways to bring them into our traditions. How far can we reach? How much of the hollow sphere can we collapse and how many new ways can we see our doings?

I guess that's it for now. I'm not sure I've really gone anywhere with all this, but I'd like to, so if anyone can help me make sense of it, your comments will be appreciated.

Update (4/20/05): This entry has now been x-posted to DawgNotes.

Posted by cageyer at 12:41 PM | Comments (1)

March 08, 2005

network rhetoric (what happens when we get paid to blog)

Maybe too obvious, since that is, essentially, the title Collin has given this course. I came across this article via Marqui, which I linked from Liz Lawley who has been contracted to post sponsored entries.

Interestingly, the posts themselves that Lawley offers are not particularly celebratory in the way conventional endorsements sound. In fact, she is a tad critical at times.

But the endorsement is about linkages. It's about Lawley and every other contracted blogger creating new avenues within the network that point to Marqui (because LINKS don't have value; they're there, or they're not, right?); by upping the number of links, she's scooching Marqui to the top of search results.

The network can't do discourse analysis; the network can't be critical of values and assumptions; network rhetoric is about numbers. Somebody argue with me here.

Other interesting aspects of this article: the characterization of journalism vs blogging. King shines journalism in what I would call a masculinist light, while he puts blogging on a kind of feminist methodological vector.

Posted by mryonker at 09:14 PM | Comments (6)

March 07, 2005

Emergence

I added this site to the course del.icio.us site, but thought I'd put it here because it's more visible. I put "emergence" into google and this is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" hit.

I haven't explored it very far, and I hope I'm not front-winding or duplicating something someone else has already uncovered (which would mean I just totally missed it and should hang my head in shame).

Posted by trobryan at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2005

Readings for March 10

I've updated the course schedule, dropping in some links to pdfs. For next week's class, we'll be taking a look at chapters from Mark Taylor's The Moment of Complexity and Steven Johnson's Emergence. Also, I've created pdfs of a couple of relevant articles more specifically from rhetorical studies, which I hope will help frame the Taylor and Johnson chapters. We'll also be finishing up our discussion on Watts.

A final note. I've run afoul of cluster reservation policy, and forgotten to reserve the cluster for all of our remaining class periods. Next week, and the week following spring break, we'll be meeting in 020 instead of 227. We'll still have wireless access, for those of us with laptops, but we'll be round the table instead of in the cluster for the next couple of weeks...

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:31 PM | Comments (3)

fragility = robustness (?)

Just some things while I have a quick moment:

In Chapter 10, Watts asks how a network can be both robust and fragile at the same time. He offers 9/11 and Cantor Fitzgerald's amazing recovery after having lost nearly 3/4 of their employees in the tragedy as an example of a network that is exceedingly vulnerable AND amazingly resilient. CF lost all the employees who knew the necessary passwords to access the backup systems, so the remaining employees convened and, through intense discussion ABOUT the lost employees' (who they were, what they liked, what they talked about, etc), were able to GUESS the passwords.

OK, that's a big wow for me.

It seems that the fragilites in a network (the flexiblity, the weak links, the human factor AKA the PERSONAL residing within the PUBLIC) also proves, in this case, to be also the same components that allow the network to "bounce back."

This is how they can be both fragile and robust. Fragilities can be what makes a network robust.

More on this later.

Posted by mryonker at 01:30 PM | Comments (1)

Reproduction

So I've posted two links to news stories that I get from friends or find through other news aggregators and I'm wondering what the state of reproduction is in the network. What exactly am I reproducing and how much am I accountable for it. For example, will the university, the instructor, and I all get in trouble if CBS or C-Net or some other source finds the posting of a link back to their "original" site. I hope it would only be me, but since I have no capital, I make a terrible example.

I'm rethinking ideas like space-less places from Weinberger and how those ideas apply to concepts of original, authentic, and even copyrighted. I suppose this also intersects with the first article I posted on regulating the blogosphere. Does my linking to that entry constitute another reproduction?

Often, when I think about networks like Napster that threaten copyright and other notions of production/ownership I think about two things: scale and reproduction (specifically quality). Growing up, I copied albums from my sister onto cassette tapes, I made compilations for friends and recieved crappy, fourth generation tapes of some of my favorite bands. I suspect that everyone, including the RIAA, knew this was going on, but there was no move to stop it, at least none that I'm aware of. Then came the ability to copy CDs, and the quality of reproduction was exact. The generation of the artifact didn't matter. There was no degradation, no signal loss. But the files were massive, and so it wasn't until the .mp3 format made the files small enough (which happened to coincide with the emergence of broadband) that sharing music with near CD quality (but a quality that was infinitely reproduceable) became a problem. So here is the scale issue. Not only am I reproducing the song with the same quality, I'm now sharing them with 1,000 of my "closest friends," most of whom I have no other contact with and don't really know, instead of my 10 closest friends who all share many similar interests.

I suppose this gets back around to social software and the ways in which people want to control information. With social software like Napster, I side with the artists, not the RIAA and not the people sharing files. But then, a quick study of who owns the copyright on the music shows just where the artists stand (nowhere). Other social software (from listservs to blogs to Blackboard) are also about controlling information. I am reminded of a Master's Thesis that a friend of mine is completing in which he argues that there really was no election process. I'm not going to get into the specifics of it (because I'm completely unqualified to talk about it) but it reminded me of the book No Debate, by George Farrah, another which is on my must read list for the summer. Basically, the book is about an organization similar to the FEC, except it's not a government appointed organization. Rather, Farrah contends that the Commision on Presidential Debates is a group of people who decide the structure and content of presidential debates. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this group also gets into the fray over the political information exchanged online as it would break up their monopoly on such publicly traded info.

My naive understanding of the initial purpose of campaign finance reform is that it was supposed to make things more transparent, so that we (the general public) would have a better understanding of where the money was coming from. As part of that, a decision was made to limit massive corporate, lobby, and individudal donations so that that general public's interests would get more time. But then, I sometimes hide in a slightly idealized world. I am, however, wondering if this isn't a case of appropriating a law to stand in for a perceived other need, namely so that organizations like the CPD can continue to dominate the dissemination of information.

Posted by trobryan at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

Hacking Your Way Into School

I don't know if you have seen this news story, but it ties into the discussion we began in class on Thursday. We were talking about the ethics of performing Google searches on prospective students or employees (depending on the level of application). It ties into a larger thread in this course (and others dealing with rhetoric) about the blurring of public and private. However, this news story reverses the roles a bit.

Hacker Hits Top Business Schools

When we apply to schools (either for jobs or for degree programs) we write to the prompts each particular school gives us in an attempt to present ourselves in a certain manner. To a large extent, the Internet and the Web make this easier as more information is available. We were able to look at faculty, course materials, resources, the graduate school, the university at large, the town, houses and costs of living, etc. Exchanging e-mails with program directors and faculty gave me a better sense of where and how we'd fit in. As a result, Nebraska fell out of our search early because their American studies program is focused on Native American and Plains Indian studies, which is fantastic, but not my area. I've digressed from the point, which is that this information helped us tailor the image we wanted to present.

As we blog or design Web sites and participate in online communities, we might modify or change those images, sometimes in ways that could detract from the interaction that we would otherwise have with a particular institution. This isn't to argue that we can successfully compartmentalize our lives and that my other selves don't creep into all of my interactions. However, it does seem important that when we try to make impressions we are self-editing.

I suppose where I'm headed with this is that if I knew my status at one school before my visit to another, it would certainly change the way I approached those interactions. It might be something as benign as being more relaxed while talking through my ideas because I already know I'm accepted somewhere else.

I suppose, though, that this isn't what motivated the applicants to business schools to hack the system and see if they made the cut. I suspect that it is more along the lines of instant gratification, which is another feature of having the immediacy of the Internet at our fingertips. I'm constantly laughing at myself when the connection slows down and I get impatient because I had to wait all of thirty seconds to get my comics.

I wonder if these students percieved their actions as such a severe ethical violation (according to the universities). Probably not or they wouldn't have done it. Is there something in that lack of assessing appropriate consequences?

On a total tangent, I'm very interested in the networks of hacking. Kevin Mitnik's big secret was his ability to call people on the phone and talk them into giving him the information he needed. It was more people networking skills than electron jock kung fu, though the latter plays a big part because you have to know how to use the technology. I heard at one point that Mitnik evaded capture for so long because he had rigged up a rotating network of phones that were daisy chained together so that his signal was never broadcasting from the same source for too long. I really need to get a copy of his book this summer.

Posted by trobryan at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2005

Regulating the Blogosphere

This article presents an interesting attempt to regulate blogs via campaign finance reform laws. It seems to me, though I've just skimmed the article, that this battle will ultimately fall to a question of freedom of speech, and may also serve to make blogs more transparent (who is funding them, who is writing on them, etc). The idea of regulating blogs in this manner raises several interesting issues for me, and for network theory, but I'm too tired to articulate them now. Please feel free to bat it around, and hopefully I'll find my way back here to include some deeper thoughts:

The Coming Crackdown on Blogging.

Posted by trobryan at 10:12 PM | Comments (2)

Network, Rhetoric, and Design

Last year in a discussion about neural network designs and the software development processes built on them, Robert Danberg said to me, “It’s rhetoric Mike. All things are rhetoric.”

I'm trying to link Robert’s comment (which has some staying power for me) to T’s musings on the differences of Rhetoric and Rhetorics and something I read this morning in Wired…

As all things are conceivably rhetoric, so too could all “things” be Network (intentional initial cap singular). I’m not making much sense here, but let me drop in this paragraph from the Wired article about the grassroots growth of Firefox and the nature of open-source communities (networks?).

Whatever success Firefox sees, it will come from social engineering as much as software engineering. Firefox has been the product of a massive get-out-the vote effort. While Goodger [the current principle programmer on the project] was refining Firefox code, Ross [the former principle who initially worked on the Mozilla Group project] started Spread Firefox, a community site that hosts Firefox blogs and gives points to a volunteer army of operatives for converting the masses. SpreadFirefox.com functions as a clearinghouse for marketing and recrutiting strategies, a coordination center for coders, banner designers, and evangelists. The site was built on Civic Space, software developed by … Chris Messina for the Howard Dean online campaign. “Software development is a political process,” says Messina.

There are a lot of threads in this blip relevant to all that Watts discusses – particularly the social aspects of networks and their organic yet controlled nature. For me, this also raises some interesting questions about the role networks play in design. My inclination is that design (document, software, systems, etc.) is a more humanistic endeavor than I’ve come to understand it.

Posted by mfrascie at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

vertically integrated organizations

One quick thought on Watts’ description of the Toyota crisis in chapter 9. In describing how all the companies involved possessed a common understanding of how problems should be approached and solved, Watts is describing an integrated organization – which has been an overused catch phrase in management and leadership courses for years. The goal for a lot of these management/process egg heads is to design and implement self-healing systems at all levels of an organization. These designs attempt to link all components of the organization (as integrated system) in such a way as to operate as a single entity – exactly what Watts described.

The problem, however, is that the goal of the self-healing system is rarely reached because the integration emphasizes coordination through “agreements” among components of the organization. Which makes me wonder a bit about the role culture plays in the network. Was Toyota able to heal itself because of a particular corporate culture?

I got systems on the brain... so you'll have to forgive me.

Posted by mfrascie at 10:16 PM | Comments (1)

March 01, 2005

in 14 days...revised...

my previous post didn't make any sense, i know. thought that i had selected "draft." anyway...what i was trying to post about was march madness, one of my favorite times of the year, and a wonderful example of how networks become.

let me admit this at the beginning. this is my attempt to make sense of network theory, so there may be some points where i'm completely off the mark. my neighbor, a ph.d. student in the math department, and i had a conversation--heated at some points--about watts. before our conversation, i thought i had things under control. not so much anymore.

the big dance starts with 64 teams. over the course of several rounds, teams are eliminated: from 32 to the sweet 16 to the elite eight to the final four and then the last two teams remaining play for the national championship. year before last, we were the national champs. i thought we were going to do it again last year, but alas...uconn had something else in mind. a moment of silence, please. anyway...each round can be considered a small world. or maybe a bracket is a small world.

so, in a few weeks, the selection process for the big dance takes place. generally, the champions from the 26 different conferences are invited plus the remaining at-large bids, the other "best" teams in the nation. there's a random element to this selection process. an inevitably, one team becomes the "cinderella" team--the one team that surpassed all expectations and predictions. in 1996, austin peay was the "cinderella" team.

clustering coefficient -- the degree to which things in a network are inter-related. let's look at the big east. in our conference, there's a large clustering coefficient because all conference teams play one another, and i'm using the conference schedule to define the teams' relationships. if a big-east conference team plays a team from outside the conference, like we did this season, that can be considered a kind of "solaria" relationship--one that is "random" and "independent." if we expanded our gaze and look at all the teams in the ncaa, the clustering coefficient is much smaller since not all teams in the ncaa, or in the tournament for that matter, will play one another. so i guess the big-east example is analogous to the cave scenario, and we can contrast that with the ncaa/solaria example: "Back on Earth, life is lived in the security of interlocking and mutually reinforcing ties, and intiating a relationship with a random stranger would be inconceivable. But on Solaria, all interactions are equally accessble, and prior relationships are relatively unimportant to the establishment of new ones" (74-5).

at this point, i'm using watts' network theory as a way to understand how networks form, and that especially makes sense coming from my/our disciplinary affliations. we can chart our various memberships in various networks. however, it seems to me that in other places, like at the nih, network theory can be used in a more preventative fashion, like trying to predict a pattern of infection. how can we use network theory in our field? would our uses be prescriptive or descriptive?

Posted by emnorris at 08:58 PM | Comments (2)

Rhet/comp targets for network analysis

If we’re thinking about applying the analysis in Watts to the field of rhetoric and composition, I think it behooves us to ask, What network/objects in the rh/comp field can we identify as targets for analysis? Some ideas:

1. The research community--the distribution of scholars in schools and programs.
This would be the prime and probably most sensible example, echoing the use of other communities and social networks in the book. Collin already has shown us how the theory could be applied here.

2. The movement of ideas/memes through the scholarly network
This would be similar to the contagion scenario. Every scholar in the network dreams of propagating ideas (contagion) and promoting a cascade (widespread recognition of an idea by susceptible nodes). Is it fair to say that intellectual histories of the field are attempts to show how ideas move through the network? (In fact, Watts also is doing this in his text as he describes his networking with other researchers.)

3. Connections among texts
Watts already suggests this in cases where researchers were considering using citation indexes as databases representative of connections within the scientific community. However, texts are not actors. What do the citation indexes tell us about the patterns of actors doing the citing? On the other hand, this would be the closest project to tracking connections among blogs.

4. Statements in a controversy
Since I teach with arguments in the contexts of controversies, I would like to think there is some way to map the moves in a controversy as a network. However, I think this would take more than single-type links and nodes. Why is it assumed in these models that the links are all of one kind? Neurons certainly don’t work that way. And again, would it make more sense to view the actors as the nodes, rather than the texts?

Posted by hjjankie at 02:36 AM | Comments (6)

in 14 days...

the selection process for the big dance--march madness--is in

Posted by emnorris at 12:51 AM | Comments (2)