Network Studies (part two)

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“Communities, Audiences, and Scale”
http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html
Clay Shirky

“The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”
http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
Clay Shirky

“The Toughest Virus of All”
http://www.shirky.com/writings/toughest_virus.html
Clay Shirky

“Institutions vs. Collaboration.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html
Clay Shirky

“How Social Media Can Make History”
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html
Clay Shirky

“Here Comes Everybody”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_1_of_4
Clay Shirky

“Social Networks and the Obama Campaign”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_2_of_4
Clay Shirky

“Social Networks and Politics”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_3_of_4
Clay Shirky

“Social Networks like Facebook and Myspace”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_4_of_4
Clay Shirky

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transfoms Markets and Freedoms
Yochai Benkler

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
Bruno Latour

No editing.

“Communities, Audiences, and Scale”
http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html
Clay Shirky

A community is difficult to maintain or form when the group in question grows beyond a size where every member could know every other member. Shirky explains:

As group size grows past any individual’s ability to maintain connections to all members of a group, the density shrinks, and as the group grows very large (>10,000) the number of actual connections drops to less than 1% of the potential connections, even if each member of the group knows dozens of other members. Thus growth in size is enough to alter the fabric of connection that makes a community work. (Anyone who has seen a discussion group or mailing list grow quickly is familiar with this phenomenon.)

According to Shirky there is no social networking technology, as of yet, that enables a true community to exist beyond the threshold described above. Every group that grows beyond that threshold fractures, and the conversations occuring happen on the edges and between in specific members of the group and not the entire group; communities become audiences where participation (the defining element) is not required and belonging to said group merely costs paying attention to the actions or discourse among an influential few.

If real group engagement is limited to groups numbering in the hundreds or even the thousands [4], then the asymmetry and disconnection that characterizes an audience will automatically appear as a group of people grows in size, as many-to-many becomes few-to-many and most of the communication passes from center to edge, not edge to center or edge to edge. Furthermore, the larger the group, the more significant this asymmetry and disconnection will become: any mailing list or weblog with 10,000 readers will be very sparsely connected, no matter how it is organized. (This sparse organization of the larger group can of course encompass smaller, more densely clustered communities.)

So, for a network to truly be called a “community,” the challenge of social networking technologies is to allow “groups to grow past the limitations of a single, densely interconnected community while preserving some possibility of shared purpose or participation, even though most members of that group will never actually interact with one another.” Scale kills.

Is this analysis influenced by the romanticized concept of community?

“The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview”
http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html
Clay Shirky

Shirky argues agaisnt the semanticweb in this piece since it would be built on syllogism. Here’s an example Shirky gives to demonstrate how syllogisms can go horribly wrong:

Syllogisms sound stilted in part because they traffic in absurd absolutes. Consider this gem from Dodgson:

- No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste
- No modern poetry is free from affectation
- All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles
- No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste
- No ancient poetry is on the subject of soap-bubbles

This 5-line syllogism is the best critique of the Semantic Web ever published, as its illustrates the kind of world we would have to live in for this form of reasoning to work, a world where language is merely math done with words. Actual human expression must take into account the ambiguities of the real world, where people, even those with real taste, disagree about what is interesting or affected, and where no poets, even the most uninteresting, write all their poems about soap bubbles.

Without ambiguity the user of the Web has to understand what are acceptable terms to search the Web effectively. This means sharing the same worldview as the Web, or more likely, the people who would design this new Web.

The Semantic Web was one of the earliest efforts to rely on the idea of XML as a common interchange format for data. With such a foundation, making formal agreements about the nature of whatever was being described — an ontology — seemed a logical next step.

Instead, it turns out that people can share data without having to share a worldview, so we got the meta-data without needing the ontology. Exhibit A in this regard is the weblog world. In a recent paper discussing the Semantic Web and weblogs, Matt Rothenberg details the invention and rapid spread of “RSS autodiscovery”, where an existing HTML tag was pressed into service as a way of automatically pointing to a weblog’s syndication feed.

This push for a world where everyone describes everything the same way seems laudable and utilitarian since it brings uniformity. Shirky explains the problem is that it’s not user friendly, and in the long run, it’s an attempt to revive the artificial intelligence project.

After 50 years of work, the performance of machines designed to think about the world the way humans do has remained, to put it politely, sub-optimal. The Semantic Web sets out to address this by reversing the problem. Since it’s hard to make machines think about the world, the new goal is to describe the world in ways that are easy for machines to think about.

For Shirky, worse is better. A system which isn’t as neat and tidy as the Semantic Web means variety and ease of searching–a system that can respond to a various numbers of users in ways that makes the interaction between network and user productive, not frustrating.

In an echo of Richard Gabriel’s Worse is Better argumment, the Semantic Web imagines that completeness and correctness of data exposed on the web are the cardinal virtues, and that any amount of implementation complexity is acceptable in pursuit of those virtues. The problem is that the more semantic consistency required by a standard, the sharper the tradeoff between complexity and scale. It’s easy to get broad agreement in a narrow group of users, or vice-versa, but not both.

The systems that have succeeded at scale have made simple implementation the core virtue, up the stack from Ethernet over Token Ring to the web over gopher and WAIS. The most widely adopted digital descriptor in history, the URL, regards semantics as a side conversation between consenting adults, and makes no requirements in this regard whatsoever: sports.yahoo.com/nfl/ is a valid URL, but so is 12.0.0.1/ftrjjk.ppq. The fact that a URL itself doesn’t have to mean anything is essential — the Web succeeded in part because it does not try to make any assertions about the meaning of the documents it contained, only about their location.

“The Toughest Virus of All”
http://www.shirky.com/writings/toughest_virus.html
Clay Shirky

Viral marketing is the virus referenced in the title. Shirky explains this is the best marketing, but difficult to execute since it relies on two things: “honesty and execution…Viral marketing only works when the user is in control and actually endorses the viral message, rather than merely acting as a carrier.”

Corporations want use this marketing on consumers since it requires no budget and because the growth rate (from a successful viral marketing campaign) is phenomenal (Shirky uses the example of Hotmail, PayPal, and the dating service, LoveMonkey). The basis for viral marketing is good service and interaction; only when people use the service or product, vouch for the service, and can convince others the service/product is a boon does viral marketing work. This is the most difficult thing for companies to inculcate in consumers since most services and products fall short of this requirement. Also, Shirky points out this doesn’t work for passive networks like cable television.

“Institutions vs. Collaboration.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html
Clay Shirky

Shirky discusses the benefits of using collaboration over institutions to meet objectives, eg, using Flickr to create a presentation on the Mermaid Day Parade versus hiring a photographer or contracting a studio. This also applies to Flickr itself, which is not an institution but a site that allows for photo retrieval through tagging. This process of tagging by Flickr allows for the coordination of 3100 photos by 118 photographers with very little overhead (for Flickr) and without the organization of a bureaucracy (institution) that Shirky utilized to create his presention on the Mermaid Day Parade, which in turn is how he’s discussing coordination without institutions.

The overhead is hiring two classes of employees, managers and workers, constructing buildings to house the institution, and the creation of a professional class. In this case it’s photographers, which means you have to pay more and exclude, that is, become exlcusive, and bar the majority of picture takers at the Mermaid Day Parade. Coordination through Flickr allows the taking of the problem of to the individuals–all of them that took pictures of the parade–without the need of all of the overhead of institutions. As someone looking to collect pictures, you loose the right to shape the work of the photographers but gain flexibility, and again, eliminate overhead cost.

You can drop the advanced planning and instead coordinate resources in the throes of a problem/situaion. (Cell phone example.)

Power law distibution comes into effect. A small minority produces the most pictures. This is a scale free network, so 80-20 rules comes into play. Institutions suffer through this, too, which means they pay for a majority of their employees to less than a small minority. The converse of this would be that instituions will drive out those who do very little work, and the problem is that those one or two ideas that the now unemployed worker has could be great. In an institutional model, you can’t afford to keep someone around for years for only one or two good ideas (think the Microsoft example); but this is possible in a coordination model like Flickr (one good picture from a low producer) or Linux. Deprofessionalizaiton.

The more rigid institutions are when it comes to controlling information, or maintaining their own life span without changing their institutional practices, the more they will adhere to long term planning and loose out on responding to needs and markets.

Downside: infastructure is becoming generic and is no longer framed by societial institutions that promote traditional social values. The pro ana groups and terrorist organizations.

“How Social Media Can Make History”
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html
Clay Shirky

Inventions become useful and make things happen when they’re no longer shiny and new. This is built on social capital, not technical capital. People can use 3G phones to doucment things like voter fraud since the handheld tech is mundane, people know how to use it, and how to share it is common knowledge. Tools that several people can use have social capital and will be utilized in interesting and useful ways.

This is what makes social media social–that and the Internet. The Internet is the first broadcast technology that individuals have access to which allow them to broadcast many to many. This is a change since things like television are controlled by a single, wealthy individual or an oligarchy. People can combine handheld tech and the Internet, both of which are mundane tech at this point.

As other media become digital every medium is next door to the Internet. This means the Internet becomes the mode of carriage for all other media. This makes the Internet a site of coordination. Everytime something is broadcast, the audience can be more than a traditional audience; they become an audience who can respond either through talk or the production of digital media in response to what they watched. Everyone connected to the Internet (which, lets all remember, isn’t everybody) takes on the dual role of consumer and producer. This is very different than television, radio, or even the telephone. In the current media landscape it’s as if a consumer that has a telephone with a button that allows the telephone to transform into a radio. Receive and broadcast. Individual citizens (the Chinese earthquake and the “Great Firewall of China” example).

Bundled, centrally controlled media messages is the 20th century model for media. Expensive. Currently, media broadcast is (relatively) cheap and ubiqutious. And everyone is connected. Tons of amateurs now have the power to broadcast their views, not professionals nor powerful oligarchies.

Shiky closes with an example of the Obama campaign, praising how President Obama and his staff handled the grassroots, Internet response to his stance on FISA. The protest was connected to myobama.com, and instead of shutting the site down, or denying the existence of a group of upset Obama supporters, Team Obama acknowledged the existence of the site and President Obama released a press statement acknowleding the group, but explaining why he was not going to change his mind on the issue. Shirky praises this action because it is the opposite of the Chinese response to Twitter; Shriky explains it is the mature and correct decision to make when dealing with dissent in the new media landscape.

“Here Comes Everybody”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_1_of_4
Clay Shirky

Opens with the HSBC and English student clash. HSBC tried to change their policy on interest free checking over the summer since they understood most students would be gone for the summer and unable to coordinate a backlash. HSBC did not figure on Facebook, which allowed a student to create a page, disseminate the informaiton, and then, using that page, propose a course of action. For Shirky, this is the way new media combines publishing and acting; media is just not info but coordination. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom assembly are comingled into a single medium.

Hipster model of the flash mob (US version, high freedom environment) versus the Belarus ice cream protest (low freedomd environment). LiveJournal becomes the way to fight the ruling regime. The software does what is in the mind of the user. It does not matter what was in the mind of the creator, it matters how users want to deploy it.

“Social Networks and the Obama Campaign”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_2_of_4
Clay Shirky

mybarackobama.com is not as social as other SNS. The communicaiton is not lateral, it is hierarchical (according to the an analysis by a group of Shirky’s students during the ‘08 academic year).

The hive mind does not exist according to Shirky. Nothing self organizes (SN, wikis, etc) where the scale is greater than a dozen. Admins to protest President Obama’s FISA stance established themselves, built a page, and then began recruiting others to their page. Joining was the act of protest. No big protest comes out of thin air, but the capability to organize quickly and gather support is now possible with little to no transaction cost.

“Social Networks and Politics”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_3_of_4
Clay Shirky

Concerning the Obama FISA protest: An audience member asks if this type of protest could be an underhandy tactic by the McCain campaign to create disorder among Obama supporters. Shirky answers it is quite possible, but if the protest was actually populated by Obama supporters it doesn’t matter how the protest came into being. The issue, not the personalites, are important.

“Social Networks like Facebook and Myspace”
http://fora.tv/2008/07/06/Clay_Shirky_Here_Comes_Everybody_4_of_4
Clay Shirky

Privacy changes in the new media landscape through convenience. It’s easy to know things about other using sites like FB and MyS due to the convenience of the newsfeed. The question is how do we create privacy in space where everything is recorded, kept forever, and easy to track with software and hardware. Conveniene equates to transaction cost. It’s cheap to get this type of info. No special steps have to be taken to spy or record or pick specific individuals that fit a desired demographic. A society with an Internet is like a society with a printing press; society is different and said society has to come to grips with how to navigate this new reality.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transfoms Markets and Freedoms
Yochai Benkler

Chapter 1 Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge

Benkler’s book is built on four points.

The first is that I assign a very significant role to technology. The second is that I offer an explanation centered on social relations, but operating in the domain of economics, rather than sociology. The third and fourth are more internal to liberal political theory. The third is that I am offering a liberal political theory, but taking a path that has usually been resisted in that literature—considering economic structure and the limits of the market and its supporting institutions from the perspective of freedom, rather than accepting the market as it is, and defending or criticizing adjustments through the lens of distributive justice. Fourth, my approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. (16)

Benkler continues on to discuss the affordances provided by technology and markets, and even discusses how he sees the role of the individual as the producer of information/artifacts/grass roots movements to better the world. The roadblock are the industrial information industries left over from the 20th century, and specifically, the film and recording industries. With their death grip on government officials (through campaign contributions I imagine) and the public’s mind on how information can only be shared for a fee, both are stopping the full blossoming of a more individualistic, engaged, and empowered individual that can use new communications technology to fabricate a better world. Benkler isn’t using a determinist model, but intimates that these changes can only be possible if individual users (well, humans. He’s fond of using the term in the liberal humanist sense) are allowed to have technology free of 20th century market models. He advocates civic wifi broadband service, and feels as long as the two above named industries control the physical layer (the wires,the routers, the servers) they also control the options avaiable when it comes to deploying the technology. People have to be allowed to play with the tech and develop new uses on their own.

First, I am concerned with human beings, with individuals as the bearers of moral claims regarding the structure of the political and economic systems they inhabit. Within the liberal tradition, the position I take is humanistic and general, as opposed to political and particular. It is concerned first and foremost with the claims of human beings as human beings, rather than with the requirements of democracy or the entitlements of citizenship or membership in a legitimate or meaningfully self-governed political community. (19)

The actual practice of freedom that we see emerging from the networked environment allows people to reach across national or social boundaries, across space and political division. It allows people to solve problems together in new associations that are outside the boundaries of formal, legal-political association. In this fluid social economic environment, the individual’s claims provide a moral anchor for considering the structures of power and opportunity, of freedom and well-being. Furthermore, while it is often convenient and widely accepted to treat organizations or communitiesas legal entities, as “persons,” they are not moral agents. Their role in an analysis of freedom and justice is derivative from their role—both enabling and constraining—as structuring context in which human beings, the actual moral agents of political economy, find themselves. In this regard, my positions here are decidedly “liberal,” as opposed to either communitarian or critical. (19-20)

I understand his ideas and like his concepts of civic broadband as a means to social justice, but his belief that society is held together by morality I find troubling. I’m a cynic. I think society is held together by rhetoric and law.

Chapter 12 Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy

The creation of a networked information economy that occurs outside the domain of industrials models of inforamtion sharing and corporate copyright is the natural extension of folk methods of sharing mundane resources and goods. The formal economy is now more in sync (ethically and methodologically) with what people do than with what industry does; this is a reversal of the trend tha has occured since the early 20th century. Sharing and exchange are the future of the economy, and also, the future of humankind if the correct steps are taking to make communication technologies and access more readily available to the masses. This means not only a change in market economies, but also the the opportunites and affordances available to indivudals. This happening both through the everyday practices of folks using these technologies and through the work of NGOs and corporations who have already shifted their respective business models from propreity information ownership to “the platforms, toolmakers, and service providers for and alongside the emerging nonmarket sector” (471). The use of technology for nonmarket activites is what will change the concepts and the practices of people and their particular socities; this change will make for more equtaible and just world–as long efforts are made to ensure that the backlash against this more egalitarian use of network technologies is quashed.

Part One The Networked Information Economy

The intro to this section recounts the history of communication technologies for the last 150 years (think the printing press, books, newspapers, and the rise of the telecommunications, broadcasting [tv and radio], and film industries) has limited the production of cultural artifacts to a select few who had the funds to buy the accoutrements needed to participate in the industries mentioned parenthetically. The Internet is presented as a technology that could give the power to less than wealthy individuals, and through this ability to now broadcast, the ability to not only shape cultural discourses but also produce artifacts which represent said society. This “basic change in the material conditions of information and cultural production and distribution have substantial effects on how we come to know the world we occupy and the alternative
courses of action open to us as individuals and as social actors. Through these effects, the emerging networked environment structures how we perceive and pursue core values in modern liberal societies” (30).

This shift means a change from the “industrial informaiton age” economy where all things made are packaged and sold as good in a marketplace setting to the “networked information economy” (32). In this area people can coordinate and offer things up for free (either out of love, pride, a sense of sharing, or just because the search engines of the info network make their products available).

As Jessica Litman demonstrated in Sharing and Stealing, hundreds of independent producers of information, acting for reasons ranging from hobby and fun to work and sales, produce information, independently and at widely varying costs, related to what you were looking for. They all coexist without knowing of each other, most of them without thinking or planning on serving you in particular, or even a class of user like you. Yet the sheer volume and diversity of interests and sources allows their distributed, unrelated efforts to be coordinated—through the Google algorithm in this case, but also through many others— into a picture that has meaning and provides the answer to your question. (33)

Here’s the most important section of the intro:

This part of the book is dedicated to explaining the technological-economic transformation that is making these practices possible. Not because economics drives all; not because technology determines the way society or communication go; but because it is the technological shock, combined with the economic sustainability of the emerging social practices, that creates the new set of social and political opportunities that are the subject of this book. By working out the economics of these practices, we can understand the economic parameters within which practical political imagination and fulfillment can operate in the digitally networked environment. I describe sustained productive enterprises that take the form of decentralized and nonmarket-based production, and explain why productivity and growth are consistent with a shift toward such modes of production. What I describe is not an exercise in pastoral utopianism.It is not a vision of a return to production in a preindustrial world. It is a practical possibility that directly results from our economic understanding of information and culture as objects of production. (34, emphasis mine)

What makes it all so special is that the engines for this new economy are in the hands of the masses.

Chapter Two Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation

Starting on page 43 are the different models of information sharing.

Benkler’s main position is that overcoming the conceptual models and practices engendered by the industrial information age (20th century) will open up a series of new niche markets. Not only will this be beneficial in a economic sense, but also beneficial on the levels of individual human potential and democratic participation. The move away (to paraphrase Shirky) of one to several broadcasting to many to many broadcasting is the best thing that can happen creatively and efficiency wise.

The issue is still, though, making ready for this better society.

Money quotes:

There are diverse motivations and strategies for organizing information production. Their relative attractiveness is to some extent dependent on technology, to some extent on institutional arrangements. (57)

But that is because they arise from a quite basically different set of material conditions. We must understand these new modes of production. We must learn to evaluate them and compare their advantages and disadvantages to those of the industrial information producers. And then we must adjust our institutional environment to make way for the new social practices made possible by the networked environment. (58)

Markets and freedoms are linked in this text. One engenders the other as markets based on information and information technologies produces affordances, modes, and practices.

Chapter Three Peer Production and Sharing

Benkler uses this chapter to dicuss what various peer productions models look like; they involves using information under the designation of a commons, not as private property. In the beginning of the chapter Benkler defines both terms–commons and property–and then explain how one is different from the other in practice. His examples include SETI@home and p2pmusicfile sharing, and these examples demonstrate how large, tradtionally professionalized task can be accomplished by amateurs quickly, efficiently, and without monetary compensation. This, Benkler asserts, is how nonmarket practices can come into being that perform work in an information based company and allow individuals to particpate without compulsion while utilizing their own individual talents and likes.

I hope these detailed examples provide a common set of mental pictures of what peer production looks like. In the next chapter I explain the economics of peer production of information and the sharing of material resources for computation, communications, and storage in particular, and of nonmarket, social production more generally: why it is efficient, how we can explain the motivations that lead people to participate in these great enterprises of nonmarket cooperation, and why we see so much more of it online than we do off-line. The moral and political discussion throughout the remainder of the book does not, however, depend on your accepting the particular analysis I offer in chapter 4 to “domesticate” these phenomena within more or less standard economics. At this point, it is important that the stories have provided a texture for, and established the plausibility of, the claim that nonmarket production in general and peer production in particular are phenomena of much wider application than free software, and exist in important ways throughout the networked information economy. For purposes of understanding the political implications that occupy most of this book, that is all that is necessary. (89-90)

Chapter Four The Networked Information Economy

As the platforms are improved to incorporate social production the lines between users and firms is blurred, and the what constitutes a “firm” working within a market chagnes. “And as these firms and social processes coevolve, the dynamic accommodation they are developing provides us with an image of what the future stable interface between market-based businesses and the newly salient social production is likely to look like” (127). Peer production, like IBM and Apache servers, appears to be what the networked info economy looks like in the present; another example would be eBay. This type of information economy not only changes what it means to work in a capitalist economy, but also “the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations—through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action…creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community” (92). This economy plays on peoples’ want to volunteer, to take on a small task to kill time, recognition within a community, or their sensation that they’ve helped to create something larger than themselves. It works on all those of those motivation or one or some not listed (depending onthe person and the situation at hand), but no matter what it plays on gratificaiton that isn’t monetary. Transactions of labor and reward do not have to be couched in the traditional capitalist paradigm.

Money Quotes

What has changed is that now these patterns of behavior have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship and mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and oganizing productive behavior at the very core of the information economy…It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations—through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action—that creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community. (92)

We need to assume no fundamental change in the nature of humanity;we need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviors and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere in their own patterns. What has changed is that now these patterns of behavior have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship and mutual recognition. (91-92)

The core technologically contingent fact that enables social relations to become a salient modality of production in the networked information economy is that all the inputs necessary to effective productive activity are under the control of individual users. (99)

Cooperation in peer-production processes is usually maintained by some combination of technical architecture, social norms, legal rules, and a technically backed hierarchy that is validated by social norms. (104)

[T]hree characteristics make possible the emergence of information production that is not based on exclusive proprietary claims, not aimed toward sales in a market for either motivation or information,
and not organized around property and contract claims to form firms or market exchanges. First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies…Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the industrial economy, are public goods—existing information, knowledge, and culture. Their actual marginal social cost is zero…Third, the technical architectures, organizational models, and social dynamics of information production and exchange on the Internet have developed so that they allow us to structure the solution to problems—in particular to information production problems—in ways that are highly modular.

Together, these three characteristics suggest that the patterns of social production of information that we are observing in the digitally networked environment are not a fad. They are, rather, a sustainable pattern of human production given the characteristics of the networked information economy. The diversity of human motivation is nothing new. We now have a substantial literature documenting its importance in free and open-source software development projects, from Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, Rishab Ghosh, Eric Von Hippel and Karim Lakhani, and others. Neither is the public goods nature of information new. What is new are the technological conditions that allow these facts to provide the ingredients of a much larger role in the
networked information economy for nonmarket, nonproprietary production to emerge. (105,106)

A newly effective form of social behavior, coupled with a cultural shift in tastes as well as the development of new technological and social solution spaces to problems that were once solved through market-based firms, exercises a significant force on the shape and conditions of market action. (122)

Part Two The Political Economy of Property and Commons

The next section focuses on an analysis between the utopic visions offered by technophiles and the what can be seen in various settings so as to seperate myth from fact and provide an accurate snapshot of the current technological landscape.

Chapter 5 addresses the question of individual autonomy. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 address democratic participation: first in the political public sphere and then, more broadly, in the construction of culture. Chapter 9 deals with justice and human development. Chapter 10 considers the effects of the networked information economy on community. (132)

Chapter 5 Individual Freedom: Autonomy,Information, and Law

The ability of individuals to use nonpropriety sources of info with reliable propriety platforms allows for access to diverse form of information while providing the “majority of materials, tools, and platforms necessary for effective action in the information environment” (133). Benkler sees this as a better situation for individuals in comparison to the situation of the individual user in the 20th century mass media environment.

These media do not seek to identify what viewers intensely want to watch, but tend to clear programs that are tolerable enough to viewers so that they do not switch off their television (165).

Benkler feels the “Babel Effect” of multiple sources of information can be overcome through every individual’s necessary set of personal filters. People, before the Internet and the Web, had to make choices about whom to trust and what information they considered important out of the number of things presented to them everyday; the difference now is that we’re used to the indutrial information model. It’s long stay with us has allowed us to romanticize its importance and become too trusting. Owners, editors, screenplay writers, and reporters are all motivated by their alligance to their various supervisors and material interests to provide truly “objective” or consistently credible information. The new platforms of information sharing which allow for the nonmarket production of info at an astonishingly low cost allow for better choices, and more critical reflection on the part of individuals looking to make decisions on varying issues; moreover, it allows them to create information, to be active, to not be passive consumers. For Benkler, this is the positive of a networked information economy since the side effect are affordances which make this type of “life tapestry” (175) weaving possible.

Benkler comes back to a brief talk about Everquest, UO, and Second Life to put the writer in mind of the type of life tapestry weaving he sees possible for individuals in the networked information economy.

The lack of understanding the informations commons lead to the adoption of propriety based networks in the early 1990s (154). The problem with this system now, as Sardar spoke on at length, is the ability for providers to shape the information available to users. Cisco has created the servers to filter out packets of information that are deemed detrimental to information flow (147); these packets are decided by the ISP, which means this power could be abused to “slow down” (virtually remove from the info flow to users) packets the ISP sees as competition, inappropriate, or violating the ideologoical leanings of the owners.

Chapter 6 Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media

The old mass media model was dominated by a network that resembled a wheel containing spokes and a center. Either government supported outlets or privately owned stations supporting themselves through advertising took up the expensive task of broadcasting shows and had a huge influence on the public sphere. There were communication technologies which allowed individuals to speak to one another about the issue constructed as pertinent to the public sphere (the telephone, the letter sent via a post office) but those kept the indiviudal on the outer rim of the model; they could not talk back to the broadcaster nor broadcast their own views-shows to many people at once like the private or state run broadcasters did. The Internet changes this model, allowing individuals who are neither wealthy nor state backed to reach many people with their broadcasts or talk back to representatives of the large media corporations.

Benkler closes the chapter demonstrating how privately owned stations create an artificial view of the world through their concern with garnering the most viewers through vanilla programming. This is programming of the lowest common denominator, which is neither informative nor thought provoking, and reifes the concept of American politics as divided along the contrived party lines of Democrats and Republicans. In contrast, the Internet holds the possibility of a space where trite (and often erronous) commonplaces are birthed and kept alive, and yet he does not envision the Internet as the cure all to the dirth of civil and meaningful discourse we now face in the public sphere.

One need not adopt the position that the commercial mass media are somehow abusive, evil, corporate controlled giants, and that the Internet is the ideal Jeffersonian republic in order to track a series of genuine improvements represented by what the new emerging modalities of public communication can do as platforms for the public sphere. Greater access to means of direct individual communications, to collaborative speech platforms, and to nonmarket producers more generally can complement the commercial mass media and contribute to a significantly improved public sphere. (210-211)

Criticism of the mass media beginning on page 197.
Herbert Hoover and his role in the creation of American radio is covered in this chapter.

Chapter Seve Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere

The basline comparison for the emerging networked public sphere is not the utopian fantasy bred in the 1990s, but the actual mass media market that constituted the public sphere throughout the 20th century. For Benkler, the current networked public sphere is not a sign that the Internet can not be a better public sphere than the mass media model. The current form is merely a medium that is “maturing” (215) and is markedly better than it predecessor/contemporary.

The charge against the Internet is that it fragments discourse and makes individuals more polemic or that it falls victim to the Babel effect, that is, too many voices with too much information making understanding what is happening in the world impossible. The network is creating ways to deal with these problems; people using the Internet are creating the filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanism traditionally provided by the large state or bourgeiose 20th century media outlets. Benkler explains:

We are seeing the emergence of filtering, accreditation, and synthesis mechanisms as part of network behavior. These rely on clustering of communities of interest and association and highlighting of certain sites, but offer tremendous redundancy of paths for expression and accreditation. These practices leave no single point of failure for discourse: no single point where observations can be squelched or attention commanded—by fiat or with the application of money. Because of these emerging systems, the networked information economy is solving the information overload and discourse fragmentation concerns without reintroducing the distortions of the mass-media model. Peer production, both long-term and organized, as in the case of Slashdot, and ad hoc and dynamically formed, as in the case of blogging or the Sinclair or Diebold cases, is providing some of the most important functionalities of the media. These efforts provide a watchdog, a source of salient observations regarding matters of public concern, and a platform for discussing the alternatives open to a polity…Ideal citizens need not be seen purely as trying to inform themselves about what others have found, so that they can vote intelligently. They need not be limited to reading the opinions of opinion makers and judging them in private conversations. They are no longer constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers, and listeners. They can be, instead, participants in a conversation. Practices that begin to take advantage of these new capabilities shift the locus of content creation from the few professional journalists trolling society for issues and observations, to the people who make up that society. They begin to free the public agenda setting from dependence on the judgments of managers, whose job it is to assure that the maximum number of readers, viewers, and listeners are sold in the market for eyeballs. The agenda thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in society—in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes. (271, 272)

The Sinclair episode is an example of a US, PC based protest. Lots of boycotting, emailing, and “how-to” posts.

On page 228 is an amazing recounting of a watch dog action concerning Diebold voting machines. Benkler calls it the “see for yourself” method instead of the mass media “trust me” type of reporting. It mimics the Linux open system of development; instead of one whistleblower providing all of the info, access is given to everyone and space is provided to they can share their finds (in this case Diebold software bugs that could be exploited or where backdoors to allow for corruption).

Swathmore and Diebold incident another example of e-activism in this chapter.

Critiques beginning on 233.

I concur with most of Benkler’s observations, but he seems to think the Internet and the World Wide Web exist in a vacuum. His analysis is strong and insightful, but what about the influecne of mass media broadcasters through their sites and blogs supported by them? What about the re-occuring phenomena of blogs (right and left) continually responding to issues deemed important by the mass media? While I applaud Benkler for foregrouding the baseline for his analysis the current mass media and not the public sphere of utopia, I do think not dealing with the mass media on the Web in his analysis is a fruitful area of inquiry he misses.

Adamic-Barabasi debate on 246 through 255.

The network topology literature treats every page or site as a node. The emergence of the writable Web, however, allows each node to itself become a cluster of users and posters who, collectively, gain salience as a node. Slashdot is “a node” in the network as a whole, one that is highly linked and visible. Slashdot itself, however, is a highly distributed system for peer production of observations and opinions about matters that people who care about information technology and communications ought to care about. Some of the most visible blogs, like the dailyKos, are cooperative blogs with a number of authors. (255)

The see it yourself culture engendered through the practice of linking does not allow for complete fragmentaiton and polarization. Even when people are arguing against a certain claim in this environment, they tend to link to sites/blogs that make the claim in question, meaning that eyes are reading over contrary opinions. This is not an argument for the Web and Net being a perfect public sphere, but it is certainly better than what occurs in the mass media setting. Talk radio hosts and callers (and any shows of that ilk put onto 24 hour news channels) do not have this type of conversational give-and-take.

Chapter Eight Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical

This chapter deals with the creation of culture and the importance of the ability to make culture, even a folk culture not created by the mass media market, to the health of a democracy, individuals autonomy, and liberal politcal theory. There are three claims this chapter persues: “that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject for a normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory” (276); “that cultural production in the form of the networked information economy offers individuals a greater participatory role in making the culture they occupy, and makes this culture more transparent to its inhabitants” (277); and “the relatively straightforward conclusion of the prior two observations. From the perspective of liberal political theory, the kind of open, participatory, transparent folk culture that is emerging in the networked environment is normatively more attractive than was the industrial cultural production systme typified by Hollywood and the recording industry” (277).

The Antidiltuion Act of 1995 changed the basic understanding of trademark law. With this act, trademark law went “from a consumer protection law intended to assure that consumers can rely on the consistency of goods marked in a certain way, to a property right in controlling the meaning of symbols a company has successfully cultivated so that they are, in fact, famous. This legal change marks a major shift in the understanding of the role of law in assigning control for cultural meaning generated by market actors” (290).

The claim I make here, as elsewhere throughout this book, is not that`nonmarket production will, in fact, generally displace market production, or that such displacement is necessary to achieve the improvement in the degree of participation in cultural production and legibility. My claim is that the emergence of a substantial nonmarket alternative path for cultural conversation increases the degrees of freedom available to individuals and groups to engage in cultural production and exchange, and that doing so increases the transparency of culture to its inhabitants. (292-293)

The flexibility with which cultural artifacts—meaning-carrying objects—can be rendered, preserved, and surrounded by different context and discussion makes it easy for anyone, anywhere, to make a self conscious statement about culture. They enable what Balkin has called “glomming on”—taking that which is common cultural representation and reworking it into your own move in a cultural conversation. (294)(think the Barbie and Wikipedia example)

Not everyone is even a reasonably talented musician, author, or filmmaker. Much of what can be and is done is not wildly creative, and much of it takes the form of Balkin’s “glomming on”: That is, users take existing popular culture, or otherwise professionally created culture, and perform it, sometimes with an effort toward fidelity to the professionals, but often with their own twists, making it their own in an immediate and unmediated way. However, just as learning how to read music and play an instrument can make one a better-informed listener, so too a ubiquitous practice of making cultural artifacts of all forms enables individuals in society to be better readers, listeners, and viewers of professionally produced culture, as well as contributors of our own statements into this mix of collective culture. (295)

What happened over the course of the twentieth century in advanced economies, and to a lesser extent but still substantially around the globe, is the displacement of folk culture by commercially produced mass popular culture. The role of the individuals and communities vis-a`-vis cultural artifacts changed, from coproducers and replicators to passive consumers… The time frame where elders might tell stories, children might put on a show for the adults, or those gathered might sing songs came to be occupied by background music, from the radio or phonograph, or by television. We came to assume a certain level of “production values”—quality of sound and image, quality of rendering and staging—that are unattainable with our crude means and our relatively untrained voices or use of instruments. Not only time for local popular creation was displaced, therefore, but also a sense of what counted as engaging, delightful articulation of culture. (295-296)

Chapter Nine Justice and Development

The networked based information economy provides way to lower the transaction costs for information, practices, software, and tools. This is in direct opposition to the patent heavy, intellectual property rights, international trade model used by the US and the EU. The welfare of people can be affected by the networked info economy as it provides the ethics and practices to circumvent the industrial model. Still, Benkler opens the chapter with this:

How will the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket, commons-based production in the information economy affect questions of distribution and human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, very little. Hunger, disease, and deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or class stratification will not be solved by a more decentralized, nonproprietary information production system. Without clean water, basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universal practical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings as fundamentally deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-based society will have little effect on the billions living in poverty or deprivation, either in the rich world, or, more urgently and deeply, in poor and middle-income economies. There is enough truth in this pessimistic answer to require us to tread lightly in
embracing the belief that the shift to a networked information economy can indeed have meaningful effects in the domain of justice and human development. (301)

Still, the idea is to judge the nonmarket, common-based production not against an envisioned utopia, but to see it as a possible hack to get around the entrenched 20th century intellectual property and patent model version of doing business. This model does is inefficient (consider the previous chapter where modular work distributed over serveral users is less costly and more powerful, eg, SETI@home) but for Benkler is also

[U]njust. Proprietary rights are designed to elicit signals of people’s willingness and ability to pay. In the presence of extreme distribution differences like those that characterize the global economy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A system that signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to these innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay, overrepresents welfare gains of the wealthy and underrepresents welfare gains of the poor. (303)

Information embedded goods, tools, information, and knoweldge begins on 311.

Information-Embedded Goods. These are goods that are not themselves information,
but that are better, more plentiful, or cheaper because of some
technological advance embedded in them or associated with their production.
Pharmaceuticals and agricultural goods are the most obvious examples
in the areas of health and food security, respectively. (311)

Information-Embedded Tools. One level deeper than the actual useful material
things one would need to enhance welfare are tools necessary for innovation
itself. In the areas of agricultural biotechnology and medicines,
these include enabling technologies for advanced research, as well as access
to materials and existing compounds for experimentation. Access to these is
perhaps the most widely understood to present problems in the patent system
of the developed world, as much as it is for the developing world—an
awareness that has mostly crystallized under Michael Heller’s felicitous phrase
“anti-commons,” or Carl Shapiro’s “patent thicket.” (312)

Information. The distinction between information and knowledge is a tricky
one. I use “information” here colloquially, to refer to raw data, scientific
reports of the output of scientific discovery, news, and factual reports. I use
“knowledge” to refer to the set of cultural practices and capacities necessary
for processing the information into either new statements in the information
exchange, or more important in our context, for practical use of the information
in appropriate ways to produce more desirable actions or outcomes
from action. Three types of information that are clearly important for purposes
of development are scientific publications, scientific and economic
data, and news and factual reports. (313)

Knowledge. In this context, I refer mostly to two types of concern. The
first is the possibility of the transfer of implicit knowledge, which resists
codification into what would here be treated as “information”—for example,
training manuals. The primary mechanism for transfer of knowledge of this
type is learning by doing, and knowledge transfer of this form cannot happen
except through opportunities for local practice of the knowledge. The second
type of knowledge transfer of concern here is formal instruction in an education
context (as compared with dissemination of codified outputs for selfteaching). Here, there is a genuine limit on the capacity of the networked
information economy to improve access to knowledge. (314-315)

Most of Benkler’s solutions is to move from property based to common-based defintions of medicine and agriculture; a non-propriety system of publishing in scientific journals; peer-to-peer development, non-profit research, and sharing of information when comes to pharmeceuticals coupled with the leveraging of university patents (think HIV and AIDS drugs); and copyleft and commons-based development when it comes to software.

Chapter Ten Social Ties: Networking Together

The Internet is not making people uprooted nomads, nor is it the pastoral village. Still, it thickens ties that exist in experiential reality by allowing cheap, fast communication with people in distant locations and allows for the connection to new networks that are based on causes or topics individual users find important.

The other mechanism we seem to be using to avoid drowning in the noise of potential chitchat with ever-changing strangers is that we tend to find networks of connections that have some stickiness from our perspective. This stickiness could be the efficacy of a cluster of connections in pursuit of a goal one cares about, as in the case of the newly emerging peer-production enterprises. It could be the ways in which the internal social interaction has combined social norms with platform design to offer relatively stable relations with others who share common interests. Users do not amble around in a social equivalent of Brownian motion. They tend to cluster in new social relations, albeit looser and for more limited purposes than the traditional pillars of community. (376)

“they are usually interest or practice based, and therefore play a more limited role in people’s lives than the more demanding and encompassing relationships with family or intimate friends. Each discrete connection or cluster of connections that forms a social network, or a network of social relations, plays some role, but not a definitive one, in each participant’s life. ” (365).

As Wellman puts it: “Communities and societies have been changing towards networked societies where boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive. . . . Their work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries.” In this context, the range and diversity of network connections beyond the traditional family, friends, stable coworkers, or village becomes a source of dynamic stability, rather than tension and disconnect. (366)

This does not mean these are connections floating on top of ideal, traditonal social connections. This new networked society allows for interpolation and flexibility of existing tradtional social connections and/or electronic relationships (example Japanese teenagers).

Part Three Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation

This forms the overview for the last two chapters of the book. For Benkler, the overwhleming choice of several of the countries with advanced economies well into the information network model has been to treat information like products produced in the 20th century industrial model. Patents have been extended, products are being built to meet copyright protocols, and relgulations have been created which favor corporations over individuals. This is important as Benkler begins to discuss the institutional ecology, which is the environment that favors the creation of technology practices that downplay the potential of an empowered user, that is, the antithesis to the passive consumer of traditional mass media. Markets and market products are favored from Benkler’s point of view; this will hamper the creation of non-market use for information technologies and therefore, the creation of non-market products that Benkler views as crucial to the creation of a more egaltarian and democratic reality. These concerns foreground Benkler’s claims that technology is not deterministic–having access to interconnected information technologies does not mean the world can move towards a more equitable place. There needs to be a conscious choice, and the stage where that choice can be made is only possible if the insitutional ecology is amenable to the creation of such a conceptual model.

They are not a deterministic consequence of the adoption of networked computers as core tools of information production and exchange. There is no inevitable historical force that drives the technological-economic moment toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe actually generalizes and stabilizes, it could lead to substantial redistribution of power and money. (379)

Together, these legislative and judicial acts have formed what many have been calling a second enclosure movement: A concerted effort to shape the institutional ecology in order to help proprietary models of information production at the expense of burdening nonmarket, nonproprietary production…It is also suspicious of, and detrimental to, the forms of nonmarket, commons-based production emerging in the networked information economy. (381)

Chapter 11 is devoted to an overview of the range of discrete policy areas that are shaping the institutional ecology of digital networks, in which proprietary, market-based models of information production compete with those that are individual, social, and peer produced. In almost all contexts, when
presented with a policy choice, advanced economies have chosen to regulate information production and exchange in ways that make it easier to pursue a proprietary, exclusion-based model of production of entertainment goods at the expense of commons- and service-based models of information production
and exchange. (382)

Chapter 12 concludes the book with an overview of what we have seen about the political economy of information and what we might therefore understand to be at stake in the policy choices that liberal democracies and advanced economies will be making in the coming years. (382)

Chapter Eleven The Battle Over the Instituional Ecology of the Digital Environment

The creation of a networked info economy which works on the model of 20 th century product control–to be effective–would have to cut off the basic human practice of sharing useful information. This would be exhausting and difficult to enforce, but Benkler does admit that it wouldn’t take a full scale progrom to make this model work. He explains it would only take a set of practices embedded within a group to force this type of behavior; if a group with cultural capital adopts the practices most likely several will follow suit, and in the converse, if a set of marginal groups is allowed to adopt “outlaw” practices (students, activists) this also creates a small cadre of users that allow the nation-state to point to and exclaim they do allow counterculture technology use. Benkler explains:

There is no need to assure that all people in all contexts continue to behave as couch potatoes for the true scope of the networked information economy to be constrained. It is enough that the core enabling technologies and the core cultural practices are confined to small groups—some teenagers, some countercultural activists. (385)

However, if there are to be gains in autonomy, justice, democracy, and the development of a critical culture to keep politicians honest, then the ”the practices of nonmarket information production, individually free creation, and cooperative peer production must become more than fringe practices” (385).

The biggest argument against this comes from those arguing for a closed network of communiation technologies on the basis of national security.  Creating routers that–out of the box–deny the ability for anyone to connect with the purchaser’s network, or creating devices that deny machines the ability to encrypt information are the types of restraints, both ideologically (remember, he’s talking about the institutional ecology which readily reacts to these types of notions) and materially would stifle cooperative, commons based, peer to peer production of information and cultural artifacts.  Benkler asserts that both the examples cited could be side-stepped qutie easily for those interested in doing so, and at the same time, actually hurt systems depended on not only by private citizens but the varying “first responder” groups that would immediately deal with any act performed by these imagined enemies.  Moreover, Benkler intimates this narrow of network security betrays a mind more concerned with the control of and continued subserviance of law abiding citizens.

Open wireless networks that are built from ad hoc, self-configuring mesh networks are the most robust design for a local communications loop currently available. It is practically impossible to disrupt local communications in such a network, because these networks are designed so that each router will automatically look for the next available neighbor with which to make a network. These systems will self-heal in response to any attack on communications infrastructure as a function of their basic normal operational design. They can then be available both for their primary intended critical missions and for first responders as backup data networks, even when main systems have been lost—as they were, in fact, lost in downtown Manhattan after the World Trade Center attack. To imagine that security is
enhanced by eliminating the possibility that such a backup local communications network will emerge in exchange for forcing criminals to use more anonymizers and proxy servers instead of a neighbor’s WiFi router requires a very narrow view of security. Similarly, the same ease of study that makes flaws in free software observable to potential terrorists or criminals makes them available to the community of developers, who quickly shore up the defenses of the programs. Over the past decade, security flaws in proprietary programs, which are not open to inspection by such large numbers of developers and testers, have been much more common than security breaches in free software. Those who argue that proprietary software is more secure and allows for better surveillance seem to be largely rehearsing the thought process that typified the FBI’s position in the Clipper Chip debate.(458)

Defintion of physical, content, and logical layers on 392.

Benkler advocates for “regulatory abstinence” so private citizens can use technology as a means to greater autonomy on 393.

This regulatory abstinence is not what’s occuring now, and has the affect of tilting all institutional (bureaucratic) discourse towards favoring the corporate and the market over the individual and the nonmarket.  The outcome, for Benkler, is the missed opportunity for the creation of cultural artifacts and practices that make for more critical, empowered citizens and commons based products that could prove superior to anything offered by corporations.  There can be no true liberal democracy nor free market if information technologies are advantageous only to the special few.  Things like linking and fair use manuevered to only be applicable if those who control copyrighted or patented information agree to the representation of this information/ artifact are acceptable advertising for their product; copyrighted materials or trademarked logos are only availble for use when paid for no matter how old or how small the material’s impact on the new assemblage.

In a series of instances over the past half decade or more we have seen attempts by people who control certain information to limit the ability of others to challenge that control by providing information about the information.  These are not cases in which a person without access to information is seeking affirmative access from the “owner” of information. These arecases where someone who dislikes what another is saying about particular information is seeking the aid of law to control what other parties can say to each other about that information. Understood in these terms, the restrictive nature of these legal moves in terms of how they burden free speech in general, and impede the freedom of anyone, anywhere, to provide information, relevance, and accreditation, becomes clear. (452-453)

Ticketmaster objected to this practice, preferring instead that sidewalk.com link to its home page, in order to expose the users to all the advertising and services Ticketmaster provided, rather than solely to the specific service sought by the user referred by sidewalk .com. At stake in these linking cases is who will control the context in which certain information is presented. If deep linking is prohibited, Ticketmaster will control the context—the other movies or events available to be seen, their relative prominence, reviews, and so forth. The right to control linking then becomes a right to shape the meaning and relevance of one’s statements for others. (452)

This overarching concern with control by a select few over the information technologies leads to errounious ideas concerning network security–the ideas above concering  national security and the Internet.  This would be the point of the chapter; an institutional ecology that believes in centralized control leads to centralized security which can lead to major methodoligcal and practical holes in post 9/11 “Internet defense” efforts, and concomittantly, the creation of social-political tyranny to match the industrial market oligarchy.

Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
Bruno Latour

Introduction: How to Resume the Task of Tracing

Latour explains the project of this book is to trace out the associations and connections between actors (actors can include humans and nonhumans alike).  For the most part, he appears dissatisfied with the current state of sociology which assumes there is something plastic and fixed as a social substance which explains all matter not covered by politcial science, economics, physics, biology, or medicine.  The connections between actors is what makes society; “social factors” can not be the boogey man which jumps out–conveniently–as the shorthand to describe the relationships between people, institutions, and tools.

Break down of the steps to be taken on page 16.  Amusing take on methods and methodologies on page 17; this serves as the explanation as to why Latour calls the book a “travel guide.”

Introduction to Part I: Learning to Feed off Controversies

In this section ANT is explained as a painfully slow process since all connections have to be empirically observed, and along with this, the ANT researcher does not force her objects of study to fit predefined sceanrios, but allows the actors involved to deploy their own worlds (ie, make their own connections to other actors).  Latour explains “[t]he task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst…the best solution is to trace connetions between the controversies themselves rather than try to decide how to settle any given controversy.  The search for order, rigor, and pattern is by no means abandoned.  It is simply relocated one step further into abstraction so that actors are allowed to unfold their own differing cosmos, no matter how counter-intuitive they appear” (23).

Latour uses a ton of analogies to describe what he’s asking ANT adherents to do.  In defending this concept of allowing actors to tell researchers about their experience, he employs cartography and the charting of new lands (no cartographer makes the land masses fit pure geometric world of triangles, squares and circles) and geologists (accepting that the cold plates slide on a molten core without empirical oberservation allows geologists to predict many events accurately).  Sociology should invent ”its own path” and not heed the call to “stick to the obvious” (24).  Sociologies failure to do this so far is built on a  “refusal to be theoretical enough and from a misplaced attempt at clinging to commons sense mixed with an ill-timed craving for political relevance” (25).  Continuing with the travel guide metaphor, Latour closes by advising the reader to be ready for a long, bumpy trip.

First Source of Uncertainity: No Group, Only Group Formation

The creation of groups is often done by sociologists with no regard for what the actors think of these contrived assocations.  Latour claims this occurs through the impulse felt by sociologists to influence politics and be more like  the practitioners of the natural sciences.  Early sociologists sidestepped observing their objects of study (which would have been the procdure defined by the scientific method) and began to:

sort out by themselves what were the most relevant units of society.  The simplest way was to get rid of the most extravagant and unpredictable ways in which actors themselves defined their ’social context’.  Social theorists began to play legislator, strongly encouraged in this endeavor by the state that was engaged in the ruthless task of modernizing. In addition, this gesture could pass for proof of scientific creativity as sceintists since Kant have had to ‘construct their own object’.  Human actors were reduced to mere informants simply answering the questions of the sociologist qua judge, thus supposedly producing a discipline as scientific as chemistry or physics. (41)

ANT practitioners should not define the building blocks that make up the world in advance of the actors.  They should be more like anthropologists, who allow their objects of study to deploy the world as they see fit, record what they (the anthropologists) observe, and develop theories based on those observations.  Essentialy, note the impetus and steps taken to form groups.  If the group isn’t being reformed and remade constantly, then the group is dead and no longer interesting; moreover, since groups are made through the controversy of defintion and position on an event (think the newspaper example in the beginning of the chapter) there is nothing left to see.  As the title says, no group, only group formation.

Defintion of intermediary and mediators on page 39.

How ANT differs from sociologists of the social concerning intermediaries, mediators, and social aggregates on page 40.

God ordained world versus a world dominated by markets and what that means for an ANT sociologist on 36.

Second Source of Uncertainty: Action is Overtaken

The actant is always working within a network which determines how and why said actant took the action he/she/it/they took.  All actants have to go through on figuration or another; all “ideo-, or techno-, or bio-morphisms are ‘morphism’  just as much as the incarnation of some actant into a single individual” (54), and a sociologist of connecitons has to be comfortable with this instead of assigning a role, name, or impetus pulled from the metalanguage of sociologists.  “Recording not filtering out, describing not disciplining, these are the Laws and the Prophets” (55, emphasis original).

There’s a strong emphasis on the getting away from classifying the actant’s/actor’s (not sure which term to use as Latour shifts back and forth) discussion of agency as “fake, archaic, absurd, irrational, artifical, or illusory” (56).  The actor will do this for the analyst on her own; the analyst does not need to use disciplinary language and thought to produce field acceptable descriptions of agency since the actor will explain to the analyst the “empirical metaphysics to which they are both confronted” (56).  This adds to Latour’s call for recording and not filtering, describing not disciplining.

Thrid Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency

Objects are the means by which power and dominance are spread and maintained within a society.  This runs counter to the scholar using sociology of the social who uses the amorphous concept of “social force” or the weak concpet of “social ties” to explain how a society’s current milieu came into being and is maintained (think the baboon troop example).  Objects matter in human relations; it is only because of the drawing of disciplinary lines that sociology has stepped away from objects and how they work in the social environment.  This has relgated sociologists of  the social into discussion on object only when design, or human, elements come under scrutiny, eg, how a person responds to the color red and why those choice of red on a switchboard evokes certain responses from a user of that switchboard.

Objects only speak when co-erced into speaking.  This isn’t different from humans since tricks have to be used to get them to speak and divulge their existence to an analyst.  Since objects (mostly tools, it seems) are used to maintain the social hierarchy and shore up weak ties, they are often intermediaries and not mediators; they are often not easily visible since their role is to be unnoticed.   There are four ways to make objects visible and speak.

The first solution is to study innovations in the artistan’s workshop, the engineer’s design department, the scientist’s laboratory, the markerer’s trial panels, the user’s home, and the many socio-technical controversies…Here, they appear more fully mixed in with other more tradiotnal social agencies.  It is only once they in place they disappear from view. (80)

Second, even the most routine, traditional, and silent implements stop being taken for granted when they are approached by users rendered ignorant and clumsy by distance–distance as in time, as in archaeology, distance in space as in ethnology, distance in skills as in learning…In those encounters, objects become mediatiors, at least for awhile, before soon disappearing again through know-how, habituation, or disuse. (80)

The third type of occasion is offered by accident, breakdowns, and strikes: all of a sudden, completely silent intermediaries become full blown mediators. (81)

Fourth, when objects have receded in to the background for good, it is always possible–but more difficult–to bring them back to light by using archives, documents, memoirs, museums collections, etc., to articifically produce, through historians accounts, the state of crisis in which machines, devices, and implements were born. (81)

Finally, when everythin else has failed, the resource of fiction can bring–through the usr of counterfactual history, thought experiments, and ’scientificiation’–the solid objects of today into the fluid states where their conections with humans may make sense. (82)

The three modes of existence for objects in traditonal sociology on page 84.

The use of object and social ties creates the architecture which brings power to bear down on individuals (to paraphrase Foucault). For sociology to be able to desribe how this architecture works, how society works to maintain its status quo, it has to ake both of these into consideration.  Only through this move is it possible to get out of the sociology of the social, a discipline that relies on “the magical ghost” of a “self-generated, self-explicative society” (86).

Fourth Source of Uncertainity: Matters of Fact vs. Matters of Concern

Matters of concern are the things that in science that cause disputes among researchers (examples on page 116), while matters of fact are things taken for granted.  Matters of concern are more important since they’re traceable, there’s something going on, some actions are being taken, groups are being formed,  boundaries are being drawn, and alligences are being professed.  Because all of this is occuring in the different fields of natural sciences, there is ample doucmentation and transperancy.  Moreover, this view of the natural sciences as something in flux, something where meaning was being constructed in aritificial environment like labs, where results of various studies had to be synthesized, where a hypothesis had to be created, presented, and then defended, helped break the dominance of the sociology of the social and give rise to the sociology of association (ANT).  Not only was there empirical observations to make using the ill-defined “social forces” stand in, behind, and provide the “real” reasons  why the work of these scientists was being formed(say like worshipping God is really a way to personalize Society and provide a social contract for adherents to follow which is advantageous to capitalism), but these informants (the old sociology term) also talked back and had enough social capital to challenge sociologists and their conclusions.  Latour refers to this as the time period where sociology had to work “up” and not “down”; there was no way to stand back and smugly assure the actors they were wrong concerning their own work as a collective.  This meant the sociology of society failed, and if it failed here it meant it had failed in other projects as well–meaning everything about the field needed to be rethought and reworked (like the physicists of the ether Latour is so fond of throughout these chapters).

With the break between sociology and the natural sciences, there is also room now to see the world is not neatly divided between these two branches of science.  The multiplicity (meatphysics) of the world actants/actors report can no longer be filtered by sociologists and then be explained back into a neat unity (ontology) by natural scientists.  Knowledge can no longer be seen as fitting into this neat dichotomy.  There are multiple worlds built on multiple networks.  Only through the explanaiton of the ties that are created through forming these networks as they react to stimulus can sociology move forward.

Fact as an outcome of experimentation and construction in a laboratory, why that’s not bad, and how it helps everyone to understand this process begins on page 90.  Super important and also very entertaining.  “[F]abrication and artificiality are not the opposite of truth and obejctivity” (124). 

The “to-do” list for the sake of navigation is on 118-119.

Fifth Source of Uncertainity: Writing Down Risky Accounts

Texts should be desrciptions and nothing more if the writer is tracing out the behaviors of mediators.   This work in itself will be difficult since mediators within networks translate and transform information.  If a writer needs to add something, like the tradtionally defined explanation, then the chance arises “frameworks”  and “social forces” will be added, therefore making the work not ANT but traditional sociology.  Latour explains the dichotomy between explanation and description is false; the only an “explanation” (for lack of a better term) shoudl do is state “that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further” (137).  The drive to get away from description is an attempt to be more like the natural sciences– one that should be dropped.

To put it very simply: A good ANT account is a narrative or a description or a proposition where all the actors do something and dont just sit there…As soon as actors are treated not as intermediaries but as mediators, they render the movement of the social visible to the reader.  Thus, through many textualinventions, the social may become again a circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of socity. (128)

Thus, the network does not designate a thing out there that would have roughly the shape of interconnected points, much like a telephone, a freeway, or a sewage ‘network’.  It is nothing more than an indicator of the quality of a text about the topics at hand.  It qualifies its objectivity, that is, the ability of each actor to make other actors do unexpected things.  A good text elicits netowkrds of actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many translations.  (129)

Network is a concept, not a thing out there.  It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described…network was a novelty thatcould help in eliciting a contrast with ‘Society’, ‘institution’, ‘culture’, ‘fields’, etc.  which were often conceived as surfaces, floods of causal transfers, and real matters of fact. But nowadays, networks have become the rule and surfaces have become the exception…Work-nets could allow one to see the labor that goes on in laying down net-works: the first is an active mediator, the second as a stabalized set of intermediates. (131,132)

Good ANT texts take everything into acount.  The work of the analyst and the creation of the text are mediators in and of themselves and must be accounted for, therefore, Latour recommends lots and lots of note taking.  He calls the places for these notes to be kept “notebooks” but then makes it clear it can be any medium that allows for easy storage and retrieval.  He recomends four notebooks; their roles can be found on 134-135.

On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog

Whether or not this actually occured, the dialogue shows the difficulties of applying ANT in a world used to either critical sociology or the sociology of the social.  The annoymous student in the dialogue (which occurs with Latour as the other participant) hopes ANT can, for intents and purposes, “efficiently muffle their informants’ precise vocabulary into their own all-purpose meta-language” (125), or in less dire language, provide a framework to decipher what the informants in the study are “really” doing.  Latour’s various objections demonstrate how ANT is at odds with traditional sociology and what constitutes “good” work in the field; Latour admonishes the student to write accurate descriptions while the student wants to write an explantion for what s/he observes so as to find “the hidden structure that explains the behavior of thsoe agents you thought were doing something but in fact are simply placeholders for something else” (153).  The dialogue ends with a frustrated student who decides not to use ANT for hir study.

Introduction to Part II: Why is it so Difficult to Trace the Social?

The quick answer seems to be the conflation of the body politic with the social collective.  Trying to describe the body politic as somehow involved with the collective and how it animates the collective, or serves as the “real” world behind the collective’s world, stops sociology from achieving what should be it’s three goals

it should be able to deploy the full range of controversies about which associations are possible; it should be able to show through which means those controversies are settled and how such settlements are kept up; and it can help define the right procedures for the composition of the collective by rendering itself interesting to those who have been the object of the study. (160)

How to Keep the Social Flat

So as to resist the move to move in circle, Latour recommends visualizing the social as flat, like a map (the travel metaphor again).  This ironing out of so many popular three dimensional models allows for the recreation of the social world–one that is free from the impulse to conflate the political with the collective (the circle) and allow for a tracing out of the relationship betweens actants.  This, hopefully, allows for a clear picture of how actants’ interactions form the collective free from the body politic and  society.

First Move: Localizing the Global

Keeping the social flat is done through localizing the global.  This is done by thinking of context not as the “big picture” that a local event falls into, but as the bonds that connect actants together (actants are not figured as of yet).  In ANT context would be the N, or network–better thought of as worknet, ie, the work that occurs to open or maintian relations between actants.

The ease of the above project with the ever increasing development of science and technology on page 180-181.

This localizing begins with the “clamp” of questions asked whenever someone speaks of some “big picture” concept, eq, structure, society, system, global system, etc.  The questions asked should be

In which building? In which bureau?  Through which corridor is it accessible?  Which colleagues has it been read to?  How has it been compiled? (183)

This forces conduits (mediators and intermediares) to show themselves, which in turn stops any creation of ultimate hierarchies that would preclude the actual tracing out of relationships by providing a preordained conclusion.

Oligopticas as the ideal metaphor for this type of work on page 181.

The dangers of panoramas and why they’re used as view to look out on the collective by those in power on 188.

Second Move: Redistributing the Local

Flattening out the local and demonstrating how it is constructed by a worknet allows for a new conceptual understanding of how the entire collective is nothing more than a long chain of mediators and intermediaries; and for short moments, when an analyst traces this out well enough, a valid oligotica or a panorama can be constructed.  The duration would be short since it would have to change as the conflict and stresses the actants deal with and change and therefore associations change, but with the flattening there is no more fear of context and structure.  All of this is only acceptable in ANT if things have been described well enough; if all the actants are figured; and if all the vehicles which carry and transport the effects of interconnected mediators are labeled.

This flattening means the outside “social forces” of traditional sociology and the inside mental forces of psychology are no longer placed into a dueling dichotomy.  The vehicles, the plug-ins, of the colelctive take up both of these roles and–whether human or not–have the potential (like mediators) to make actors do something.  Instead of running either to the sanctum of an imagined, ideal hermit existence where the individual is free, or being prey to the often used overdetermining, overdefining metaphor of a great social puppateer pulling the strings of individual puppets, there is now the actor-network, ie, the actor made of several connections (discourses/interactor ties) who exists in a worknet translating, transforming, and modifying the information and objects that come to it.  The concerns about agency and its converse, domination, become moot since the individual actor-network is always working within the collective, influenced by it many connecitons to the collective, making other actor-networks do something by its role within the collective as a mediator.  There is no inside/outside or individual/social–only the actor-network working within the worknet to sustatin the collective.  “The more attachments it has, the more it exists.  And the more mediators [individual actor-networks], the better” (217). 

Possession and all its synonyms are thus good words for the reworked meaning of what a  ’social puppet’ could be.  The strings are still there, but they transport autonomy or enslavement depending on how they are held.  From now on, when we sepak of actor we should always add the large network of attachments making it act.  As to emancipation, it does not mean ‘freed from bonds’ but well-attached…Whitehead [claims]…a society needs new associations in order to persist in its existence.  And of course , such a labor requires the recruitment, mobilization, enrollment, and translation of many others–possible of the whole universe.  What is so striking in this generalized defintion of societies is that the respective meanings of subjectivity and objectivity are entirely reshuffled.  Is a subject whatever is present?  Is an object whatever was present? So every aseemblage that pays the price of its existence in the hard currency of recruiting and extending is, or rather, has subjectivity.  This is true of a body, of an instituion, even of some historicla event which he also refers to as an organism.  Subjectivity is not a property of the human soul but of the gathering itself–provided it lasts of course.   (217,218)

Anything that causes another thing to make do has agency.  Society and Nature, the body politic and the social, inside and outside, object and subject , agency and submission are all terms refering to traditional sociology and used to either create the global context, the real world behind the material world, or the disconnected local.  Actants, however figured, are made real by the work they do to sustain the collective worknet.

The local is not so much flattened as redistributed.  The nonhuman mediators within the worknet dislocate the work of the individual actor network by brining other parts of the collective to the locale in question, ie, they bring work that needs to be done from other parts of the collective and make an individual actor network do it (eg, lecture halls as a strucutal template for the work to be done at a university within the confines of comp/rhet; think of what we profess to do and what the univeristy mandates us to do, and therfore, do).  From the wall to every piece of furniture, the hall conveys an idea of what we should teach, why, and how.  And, the materials making up these objects are from other places, too–meaning nothing in the room is essential local.

Why face to face interactions should not be seen as a defense against ANT (199).

“Plug-ins” constitute how human actors are composed.  We are made of a network by the information gathered at each scenario needed to navigate the scenario.  We learn how to be consumers at a supermarket through various measurements: “labels, trademarks, barcodes, weight and measurement chains, indexes, prices, consumer journals, conversations with fellow shoppers, advertisements, and so on” (210).  These can be “downloaded” on the spot as the scenario unfolds or gathered beforehand.

Cognitive abilites do not reside in ‘you’ but are distributed throughout the formatted setting, which is not only made of localizers but also of many competence-building propositions, of many small intellectual technologies.  Although they come from the outside, they are not descended from some mysterious context: each of the has a history that can be traced empirically with more less difficulty.  Each patch comes with its own vehicle whose shape, cost, and circulation ca be mapped out–as historians of accounting, cognitive anthropologists, and psychologists have so forcefully shown. (211-212)

Third Move: Connecting Sites

The connectors Latour alludes to (and from what I can glean the mediators, too) throughout the book he finally identifies in this chapter.  They are all the things the sociology of the social has discounted over the years; they are the non-social (they don’t deploy as an actor-network) things that actor networks often profess make them “do” things: art, politics, religion, patriotism, faith, etc.  These things fit the definition of a mediator and have yet to actually, using the scientific method, be explained through empirical observation and relentless tracing out–they have always been explained away, before the collection of data, as effects of “capitalism” or “patriarchy.” 

The terms above do serve a useful purpose as they are plug-ins which do provide actor networks with collective definitions of the knowledge needed to navigate certain scenarios in appropriate ways, and can (I thnk if I got this right) play into the “forms” (223) that have been passed from the sociology of the social to, well, the world.  The forms are helpful as they allow  for the “formatting” of reality and provide reliable guidelines for how actor-networks should interact within worknets they form to deal with different conflicts (232).

The core is getting to the work of describing the world as it is empirical observed and not as it is theorized to exist.  Even with this mandate, and the firm belief that activity is the litmus test for the existence of an actor (or actor network–the terms are interchangeable), there is something out there best described as the “plasma” (241) between the trails and conduits which make up the collective.  I would assume this is where the real as of yet named mediators exist and make actor networks do something (for examples see 245; the talk of empires disappearing and markets crashing in a few hours time).  While it seems quite spooky, I think it’s more of a rhetorical move to stress the idea that until the world can be described through systematic tracking there are things working in the minutiae of everyday existence which can not be named since they can not be fathomed–let alone seen.  The social must be reclaimed throught this tracking so new, possibly more interesting and most likely more usefully hypothesizes about how collectives work and should work can be disseminated.  Latour’s project appears to be recapturing  the utopian promise of the social sciences.  And I make the last statement without being snarky or jaded. I can dig it.

Conclusion: From Society to the Colletive–Can the Social Be Reassembled?

Here the social as the collective intersects with politics. ANT provides the view of society as a collective which makes clear that the social forces taught to actor networks via plugins “are made of smaller tie, whose resistnace can be tested one by one, that you might have a chance to modify a given state of affairs” (250).  If the sociology of the social’s prescriptions are followed, the social forces “invisible, untraceable, ubiquitous, and total” (250) and completely impossible to change.  If critical sociology prescriptions are followed, then  a small quiver of social forces will always thwart the actants from change.  Both options Latour finds masochistic.

The project of ANT is the attempt to pick up where sociology of the social left off and provide options where critical sociology does not.  The sociology of the social isnt wrong, but the work, the answers, the models, and the answers (ie social forces that can’t be empirical observed but move like invisible hands behind the scenes) are outdated.  New developments in sicence, technology, and the world require new paradigms to describe what is happening in the world.  The overall, and admirable, goal of ANT is to describe how actants/actors/actor networks are working together in experiential reality and what mediators are driving them so as to have suggestions–built on rationality and humanitarian impulses–for the actors within the collective to cohabitate in productive, peacful ways.

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Filed under Network Studies

Tags: Social Networks, Networks, Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Bruno Latour, Actor-Network-Theory, ANT