Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks
Mark Buchanan

Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society
Stephan Fuchs

No editing done.

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks
Mark Buchanan

Prelude

Complexity theory–In an abstract sense, an collection of interacting parts–from atoms and molecules to bacteria, pedestrians, traders on a stock market floor, and even nations–represents a kind of substance. Regardless of what it is made of, that substance satisfies certain laws of form, the discovery of which is the aim of complexity theory (18).

The prelude covers a lot of ground that I’ve covered with my other readings in this area. At one point Buchanan explains:

As we will see, there is a kind of innate intelligence in these network structures, almost as if they had been finely crafted and laid out by the hand of some divine architect. Scientist are only beginning to understand where this intelligence comes from, how it can arise quite naturally, and most of all, how we might learn from it. (20)

This makes me think about the ideas I’ve gleaned from other texts on this list. Is it less that’s there’s a divine architect (and I’m sure Buchanan is only being hyperbolic at this point), but that each node only does localized work without having to be aware of the larger, global outcome? Barabasi claims nodes only need immediate gratification to continue performing the same action repeatedly (and this gratification can come in any form, from pleasure to efficiency to survival), while Latour would say one node is being coerced into action by another node (the mediator role). Does there need to be an innate, grander scheme? Is it possible to move from a unifying theory to a localizing theory?

Chapter Two The Strength of Weak Ties

Random graphs fail to explain the small-world phenomenon unless they factor in weak ties. Without accounting for weak ties, the only thing random graphs display is the clustering that occurs between nodes with strong ties. Weakly tied nodes often form the bridges to other networks; since they are not as intensely bonded to small cluster “A” (an etended family, a group of church parishioners) they have ties to other networks they do consider close confidantes. “Without weak ties, a community would be fragmented into a number of isolated cliques” (46).

Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society
Stephan Fuchs

Introduction

In the intro it appears Fuchs is pitching a new type of sociology–the sociology of culture. In this version of sociology, society is seen more as a network with nodes being the outcomes of networks. This new sociology is built on a combination of antifoundational positivism, pragmatism, and constructivism (full explanation on 8). In this system of networks humanism and agency metaphysics are overcome with a strong move toward relationalism (hence, networks). In this version of sociology “‘[p]ersons’ are not the source or origin of society; rather they are outcomes of some networks, but not others” (8) as they’re the nodes in the networks.

Key points that resonate with other readings, or put a new spin on them:

• Networks are dynamic, they fluctuate and change.
• An individual nodes relations with other nodes within a given network define what that first mentioned individual node “is.”  It’s identity is given to it by the network it exists within; if changes networks, then its identity changes.
• Networks actually exist at different levels; some are embedded within others. Small nodes are groups and embedded within organizations, and these organizations house encounters which occur between groups. Organization are not as orderly as they appear–they must expend tons of energy to keep these groups contained, speaking to one another, and give the appearance that they’re all part of a unified front. Organizations provide purpose and the construct of unity. (Think Collin and the talk about the discipline, coupled with a Fuchs talk about Science with a capital “S” on page 6).

Chapter One Theory After Essentialism

Fuchs explains a sociological theory of culture and science moves from essentialism by using the opposite strategy of relationalism.   This, coupled with a network concept of how society and science works, moves away from an idea of absolutes and closer to the idea of variation–things are not different in kind but in degree.  Localized interactions make things happen, not an overarching grand design and goal worked towards by the individual nodes within the network (16).   As observers come out of different networks to analysis another network (the second level in Fuchs’ scheme) they bring with them pracitces and ideas that shape the unstructured reality of the network of nodes working in a localized scheme (nodes work only towards immediate gratification not towards nor under some theoretical goal); the observer assigns purpose and boundaries to groups and organizations.  Purpose is provided by these constructs, and observers/scholars from within groups (which if large enough coalsce to the size of organizations) perform the same work in house to provide identity, purpose, and therefore, unity to organizations.

Observers can be human and non-human, affiliated with an academic discipline or nodes living performing their work within the work-net.  Observers make sense of unstructured reality and either a) report back to their network/discipline their observations or b) use their observations to their immediate benefit.  For Fuchs, the important piece is that when that observer dies or her information is no longer shared within her disciplinary work-net, the information and view of unstructured reality goes disappears.

All practices in society/organization/discipline/network are fluid; all the boundaries and practices of the networks are fluid and changing.  When a network (and again this means society/organization/discipline) is allowed to work within a system of variation and gradation, artifacts or concepts often seen as fixed or oppositional within that worknet are seen as products of their relations to other nodes (artifacts/concepts) within a network.  There are no essential qualities that make the nature of the nodes different, therefore:

There are difference in degree just the same, such as in scale, size, range, and diversity of of networks.  These are differences in degree, not kind, and allowing for variation both between and within networks makes the search for “essentially modern,” as opposed to the “essentially traditional,” vacuous and pointless.  (52)

When networks see themselves as closed off and above reflexivity, it’s merely the outcome of feeling sure of an identity; the network is in a period of stability.  This is only a type of mental gymnastics.  Network are always in flux, one thing is becoming something else in accordance with its position to other nodes within the network.  Things are not evolving, only adapting.

Chapter Two How to Sociologize with a Hammer

Fuchs continues his explanation of variation as the key to a sociology of culture and science.  In this chapter Fuchs explains how using variation gets around the troubling issues of metaphysics and dualism; variation does away with both.

[W]e do not need a new metaphysics to overcome essentialism and dualism if we make full use of the sociological arsenal.  In fact, a new metaphysics does not solve any problems, but simple displaces them to another level, such as the middle kingdom of collectives of quasi-objects.  Instead, once we allow for variation, we can observe nature and society, subject and object, persons and things, interpretation and explanation, or hermneutics and science as the poles in a continuum of social attribtuion and construction.  (110)

Much like Latour, Fuchs is espousing the virtues of sociology and explaining how a revamped sociology can make a substantial difference in how knowledge is made and how that knowledge is utilized.

Chapter Three Cultural Rationality

Variation is applied to rationality to demonstrate that rationality is not found within an actor who uses her agency to act rationally.  Rationality is the not the cause of any one thing but is contingent upon the network of forces an actant exists within; the actants relation to other nodes within the network shapes the actants choices.  Rationality is not a universal constant, it is something that exists only in network where unstructured reality has been simplified, easily quantifiable, and is the choice that appears most efficient and profitable using this simplified take on experiential reality.

In sum, rationality is a variable, not a constant.  It is a mode of observing and communicating about action, not a natural property of acting itself.  Rationality prospers when the relevant world has been simplified and quantified, concentrating the attention space on a small and domesticated set of well understood variables and parameters.  (137)

I would like to stress, however, none of this makes Fuchs a postmodernist.  He deplores the idea of such a position as the dichotomous opposite of the modernist tradition (or, if you like, use the terms foundationalist and anti-foundationalist).  Both are essentialized, hardened positions that do not allow for variance–the key to his project of a creating a new and better sociology.

Chapter Four Foundations of Culture

This chapter explains how the what is traditionally considered a cultural artifact–Art (capital “A” intended) for example–has no essential quality.  The system which exists within a society, the one composed of critics, artists, scholars, and academics and deals with “Art,” decides what art is through their designations of an  object as such.  The closer such an artifact is to the center of such a network, the smaller chance this object will fall out of favor as art when the network adapts and changes.  These observations are made from the second level, meaning the questions asked when making these distinctions are not “why” questions but “how” questions.   Fuchs also covers other designations such as genius (187), author (185), and ideas (139) in this chapter, to0; and like art, they follow the same patterns.

Chapter Five Modes of Association I: Encounters, Groups, and Organizations

This chapter goes through and explains how each of the three designations above are nested–one into the other.  What this means breaks down something like this: encounters happen between individuals; if the encounters happen regularly, this usually leads to the formation of groups who use these encounters as the  basis for their group; groups often occur within organizations (grad schools, corporations, professional organizations, firms, etc) since the organization gives the groups a shared meeting place and a shared social world where several individuals can meet and communicate.  As in all the other chapters, there is a de-emphasizing of postmodern skepticism and a constant refrain against seeing individual nodes within networks as “people” or more importantly, an individual node as a “person” as defined by liberal humanist thought and tradition (also, “liberal” does not connect in any way, shape, or form to the current US political spectrum.  Think James Berlin and his talk about the academy in the 19th century).

The emphasis here, again, is on variation.  To go with humanist thought means to parse things down to essential qualities where no change is possible; to work with postmodernist/post-structuralist thought means to bog down into philosophical discussions about agency and the iron cages of bureaucracy.  Neither in Fuchs estimation allows for second level observations (asking “how” questions) and moves the observers eyes away from the seeing things in terms of networks.  The use of networks as a  conceptual model for human interaction demystifies how society and the organizations within it work and shape and produce individuals.

Emotions as the appropriate way to communicate to a larger network 197.

Turbulence 210.

Technology 221.

Social Movements 222.

Centrality 248.

Looming large in this chapter is the talk of “front stage” versus “backstage.”  As the names suggest, there is the public and the private face, but in this text there is also a discussion about how the front stage is important not only for unaffiliated nodes and groups moving in other organizations, but also for those groups and nodes which are affiliated with a specific organization (lets call it  “Org A”).  Front stage space gives purpose and identity to the nodes and groups found in Org A.  If the core of Org A becomes weak, then the backstage and front stage areas are markedly different. While the front stage area is still filled with official proclamations of what Org A believes is its overall goal, the backstage is filled with gossip, critique, and articulated statements questioning if the goals of Org A  are possible.  Fuchs, as he has in the rest of the book, argues that this often occurs only in organizations where the center is fluctuating (as in a paradigm shift) or exceptionally weak and nearing death.  Also, as can be found in other chapters of this book, Fuchs stresses this happens in academic disciplines which are oftentimes young, or enamored with postmodern critiques of knowledge production, or unstable due to its position in relation to other disciplines within the academy.

Modes of Social Association II: Networks

This chapter describes the life cycles of networks, how nodes become cores, and how cores develop institutions to lengthen the core’s, and therefore the network’s, life span.  While my explanation may appear very conspiracy theory, Fuchs does explain why the core must exist explaining:

The core contains that which is taught to new generations as unproblematic and established fact.  It includes Kuhnian exemplars, textbooks, demonstration experiments with predictable outcomes, and bureaucratic examination or grading rituals…cores do not consider the possibility that there might be a world in which the core no longer applies.  This unwillingness or inability to learn, however, is itself a condition for learning, especially for cumulative advances, since learning occurs only if not everything changes at the same time.  If it does, there is not progress but breakdown. (286, 287)

Since networks are often needed to navigate and make sense of the unstructured reality of the world, the core is allowed to do this type of work since it benefits the individual nodes of the network.  It’s efficient and provides tangible benefits for the nodes revolving around a particular core.  As Barabasi points out, nodes within a network (and here nodes could be webpages linking to a search engine, or the organelle of a cell) adhere to a specific setup since it benefits them; it gratifies them; provides sustenance; or even means basic survival.  In the more academic sense, the core also produces the methodologies used to create new knowledge.  While this statement may seem redundant when compared to what’s written above, it is important to stress this since this means for a set of nodes within a given network these approved methodologies are real and binding–their survival depends on it.

For an observer, or someone looking to challenge these methodologies from within, this amounts to understanding not to attack the work of the network, but its methods as being untrue to accepted methodologies.  Nodes in networks only understand information presented in ways deemed acceptable by the core.  To challenge, say the work of early 19th century anthropology and make it mean something for anthropologists now, means a dissident would be better off challenging the data or the methods in juxtaposition to the stated methodology supposedly guiding a 19th century anthropologist’s work then claiming, wholesale, that all work from this time period is merely scientific racism.  Networks, and the organizations they help create, only understand information (whether it be directly from the experiential world or a critic) which looks like something they would produce.  Methodologies are not fictions, but appropriate sets of mental gymnastics to make something Science or Art or Music or Rhetoric (capital letters intended).  There is no essential quality making an object the output of any of the listed networks, nor is it absolutely true (nor empowering) to think of every criteria set forth by these disciplines as unfounded fictions made up by the elite of each discipline to merely protect their positions.

Cores can, however, overextend and kill a network.

Cores might also decay from overextension or stagnation, thereby turning success into failure.  As a core swallows larger and larger parts of the network, this network no longer generates interesting, or non-routine, puzzles.  Its nodes and links become brittle with age, and the entire structure “freezes” in the winter of a dying civilization.  (292)

Cores become cores not through any essential property, but through redundant and multiple links to a small number of nodes.  The ability to so closely knit allows for a type of clique to form where theories, ideas, and worldviews become things beyond examination.  The values, beliefs, ideas, theories, and worldviews of the core become absolute truth and transcendental–they describe reality as it really is, have evolved from disorder in an orderly and teleological fashion, and are protected from shocks and turbulence through various buffers of dogma and bureaucracy surrounding the core.  The outlying nodes within the network, usually further out from the core but still well-connected to the core, is where all dynamic, sacrilegious, cutting-edge work occurs.  This work is often performed by those designated “stars” within the network, and since these stars reputations travel through the links of the network, they are often recognized as such throughout the entire network.  This work is still forced to conform to genre/discipline specific styles of transmission and must be explainable by the core principles in some “essential” sense.

Chapter Seven Realism Explained

For Fuchs realism means “externalization and attribution of a network’s outcomes not to the network, but to the world itself, or that part of the world which constitutes the network’s referential niche” (296).  Realism is also the device used by networks to “curb or prohibit second-order observing” (296), ie, asking “how” questions, as a way to stop the interrogation of a network’s core beliefs.  The rest of the chapter is demonstrating realism by juxtaposing realist networks to constructivist networks; in the end the ultimate realist networks are the ones which constitute the hard sciences, while the most constructivist are the networks which form the humanities.

In Ward’s terms, realist cultures develop a “logical” as opposed to “rhetorical mode of operation.  A strong emphasis on logic, codification, and consistent conceptual closure with “minimal authorial self-reference” is the mark of secure institutional embedding.  Meaning is more likely literal than ifgurative or metaphorical.  When meaning becomes “purely symbolic,” disassociated from things and objects, a “rhetorical” mode emerges, signaling much weaker authority.  (299)

Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
Steven Shaviro

Toward a Structural Theory of Action: Network Modes of Social Strcuture, Perception, and Action
Ronald S. Burt

Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition
Ronald S. Burt

Theories of Communication Networks
Peter R. Monge
Noshir S. Contractor

Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness
Duncan J. Watts

No editing done.

Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society
Steven Shaviro

Shaviro is using science fiction as a way to describe network society in the same way Marxist theorists used realist novels to further their scholarly projects. He sees theory and science fiction connected since both types of writing “seek to grasp the social world not by representating it mimemticaly but by performing a kind of ‘cognitive estrangement; upon it…so that structures and assumptions that we take for granted, and that undergird our own social reality may be seen in their full contingency and historicity” (x).

The metaphor of network has been taken up by corporations since it provides the backdrop for both a perfect, self-regulating environment, but also touches on the plug-in which makes agressive predation and social Darwinism acceptable, and moreover, provides a “logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible acheivement, as it happens, the contradition is real)” (Levi-Strauss qtd in Shaviro 4) that “reconciles the conflicting imperatives of aggressive predation on one hand, and unquestioning obedience and conformity on the other” (4).

Concepts evoking Latour on page nine, bottom of the page. Everything has the same ontological status and distance/perspective. This is not to say Shaviro is using Latour’s ideas about networks. In fact, Shaviro seems to be moving towards the sociology of the social.

Nice description using the text Noir to explain how viral marketing works. (14)

Continuing through the book it becomes apparent that Shaviro’s discussion on media is pretty important. Using McLuahan’s terms like “cool media,” Shaviro describes TV as an inviting but not altogether passive experience for users. While the user (a la Benkler) can not make anything and broadcast artifacts back on the same television signals, it allows the user to participate in a public discourse free of penalites. The user can yell, talk back, or turn off the machine, and yet it’s still there and often the touchstone source for inofrmation going on beyond the user’s immediate locale. It presents only certain points of view and a small number of choices to deal with the conflicts it often brings to the user; it indoctrinates the user into a worldview that becomes the user’s worldview–it’s a soft boot camp.

The Internet and the Web are also cool media, but they are so unfinished they become more involving and beckon the user to create content or add content or explore the frontiers of it (surf) to see the spectacle of the mediea frontier. The Internet is a “haptic” space, one where the user is constantly involved watching every minute detail and touching everything with her disembodied finger synched to her mouse. She must read, click, choose, wait for downloads, type quickly to maintain her own in a chat room discussion; in short she must focus on the machine and she must always be multitasking. This, of course, makes the Internet more inviting (addictive) than TV. (6-7)

The talk of control society on page 31-34 is interesting.  Here Shaviro is discussing the work of Deleuze; specifically his work on the control society.  The control society is different from Foucault’s disciplinary society because of the way it uses instant communication and the constant gathering of information to shape the behaviors of those existing within its bounds.  The process of control through networks is what Deleuze refers to as “modualtion” ( 32), a “self-transmuting moudling continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (Deleuze qtd in Shaviro 32).

On 34 Shaviro echos Latour in claiming that all of society is now flat since it’s all part of one larger network.  There is no more doubling between the documents that signify a person since in an information based society that information equates to the person; that information is used as a mediator to press an individual actant into a particular action.

The subject no longer exists as an “empirico-transcendental doublet”; its structure has collapsed back onto a single plane.  All the familiar features of the network follow from this collapse into immanence: representation gives way to simulation, creation ex nihilio is displaced by mixing and sampling, murky depths give way to glittering surfaces.  (34)

Surveillance camera on 36 would be an instance of how the control society works.  In the next few pages is an example of resistance, the Surveillance Camera Players.  It’s a small hack when they perform different politcial charged pieces in front of the cameras; the infect it with the network wit their  ideas and force the surveillance network to become the ultimate audience at no overhead to them.  It’s a hack in the sense of harnessing a network and forcing to do what it does efficiently, but not for the purpose it was designed.  In this case, the cameras are setup to deter and record crime.

Digital technology promises access to everything, and this–according to Shaviro–is a lie.  The promise is given with market sensibilities as the protocol to decide who has access.  On pages 42 and 43, Shaviro recounts how hip hop has suffered from this arrangement: artists are punished for sampling, even small amounts within limits of traditional fair use laws, as they use the technologies of the digital age to remix and rewrite culture.  Free speech and the ability to create are not covered in the instances he (Shaviro) recounts.  I would suppose, though, this comes from the fact that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights protect you and your interactions with State and Federal governments, not corporations or private individuals wanting to sue you for copyright infringement.

47–an interting take on Digital Right Management (DRM).  The best way to control info is not to censor it, but embed within the info itself the means to stop an actant from accessing the information.

50-51 is the recounting of decisions through the Supreme Court to protect the First Amendment rights of corporations.   While I don’t doubt this happening,  I do find it appalling that corporations–entities made real through the filing of paper work to limit damage to primary investors in case their enterprise fails–should be given the rights of a living, breathing citizen.

Jeter’s Noiris built on a dislike for the gift economy and open software or copying.  It’s the antithesis of Shirky’s work concering how collectives get thigns done (think about Shirky’s example of the programmer who creates the fix for MS Outlook).

Unlimited copying is now techinically possible, but so is a system of tracking so precise, and so extensive, that not a single byte, in any machine, anywhere, will escape being identified and accounted for. (62)

Each individual may be a node in the network, but the corporation is the network itself.  The more corporations are recognized as persons, as has increasingly been the case under United States law, the less unincorporated indviduals are able to be so recognized.  (63)

Shaviro calls the “mediasphere” our “nature” since we know, understand, and connect to the products, logos, and Hollywood icons found only in the mass media.  “That is to say, the electronic media are the inescapable background against which we live our lives and from which we derive our references and meanings” (64).  On page 70 Shaviro disagrees with Debord in the concept of a grand spectacle which detaches people from a directly lived life.  For Shaviro, life has always been a time where images were taken from their original context and used to form the world people must navigate to survive.  Shaviro agrees with Warhol that television hides nothing, but makes viewer aware that everything “we see, hear, and feel is just a representation” (71).  Shaviro continues on to claim that life isn’t made up of one grand spectacle but several tiny spectacles, each a monad which is connected to the other through the network.

Shaviro’s concept of people having to make a small spectcle of themselves through their webcams (78-80) so others know their alive matches up with Latour’s talk about the worknet and the individual actor networks.  As Latour explains, the only way for anyone to know and indivudal actor network/actant is alive is by their ability to respond to the mediators which have are making them do something, ie, translate, transform, or produce an artifact with the information or materials given to them throug their connections to the worknet.  The difference here is Shaviro’s emphasis on the digital network and the Internet.  Still, it seems Shaviro is working towards the same point but staying with within the confines of the Internet and the Web.  Everything is a node, everything is information, and everything has some sort of agency in the network.  Also, evey small section that composes the book appears to be a monad that connects to the others through the network that is the book.

Each time we extend ourselves technologically, some part of the real gives way to the virutal.  This is why every cultural innovation is attended by an ambivalent sense of loss.  And this is also why we tend to equate virtual with disembodied, even though it would be accurate to use it as an equivalent for prosthetic.  In a certain sense, then, we ahve always been cyborgs, even if, by the strictest meaning of the term, the transformation only happened recently, when our prostheses became “electromechicanical devices.” (104)

The space of flows is an intersting way to conceptualize the world of virutal space.  In the space of flows nothing remains of traditional concepts of space; the space of flows if “exhilarating, disorientating, or oppresive” (131) but is still different than a traditionally defined room or building working with a spcecific design ethic to exude one sensation or mood.  Most importantly in the space of flows: there is no conswquence of duration, and therefore, no distance, and this makes all communciation instantaneous.  “Proximity is no longer deteremined by geographical location and by  face-to-face meetings, but rather by global flows of money and information,  The predominant form of human interaction in this space is networking…the develpment of eletroinic communictations terchnology frees this sort of networking from its dependency upon specific locales and specific time; now netowkring can flourish on a global scale” (131).

133 and 134 are outlined the three different layers of virtual space.  All are directly taken from Castells, and it’s all depressing as the virtual is dominated by those connected to the market, and conversely, everything considered worthwhile is connected to them through this network space (money, art, entertainment, services).  Also, the “medium is the message” slogan of McLuhan resonates with Latour on 133 through Shaviro’s explanation of it.

Film noir as the bulwark against postmodernist emptiness and inauthenticity on 142-148.  The male hero’s eventual betrayal is a recreation of the Christ story, and for the protagonist, is the onlyway to know he exists is thorugh emulating Christ’s eventually betrayal and death at the hands of the larger social-political system.  Shaviro explains how even the genre of noir is a product of postmodernist thought using Gravity’s Rainbow, and therefore a futile attempt to escape the postmodern world of connectivity and transnational capitalism.

The discussion of zombies as workers (best definition on 168-169) and slake moths as capitalists slurping human creativity, taking it as their’s, and then protecting the right to own the creativity under the banner of “intellectual property” they’ve acquired the rights to (170) is one of the better metaphorical explanations of late stage capitalism ever.  “But the crucial point…is that it is nothing more than a monstrous intensification of the “normal” functioning of the system…they are just capitalism with an (appropriately) inhuman face.  They are literally unthinkable, yet at the same time, they are entirely immanent to the society that they ravage” (170, 171).

Shaviro sees the network as akin to our galaxy–a large system with a black hole in the center of it (173).  All information falls in and disappears.  This would make the network monolithic, something that can not be resisted.  There is no chance at agency.

An interteresting critque of capitalim on pages 222-223.  The internal conflict of overproduction/underconsumption Marxists have continually hoped would force capitalism to break down have been continually used as a moment of crises that leads to some new territory to be found and conquered.  Shaviro hypothesizes capitalism’s goal is to oversatuarate the Earth, and then paraphrasing Ken Macleod, head into outerspace.

The drug metaphors and the crisis of capitalism appear to be leading to this revelation: in moment of crisis the network can be hacked.  There is the potential for change within the network since becoming something is traversing the lines between the nodes, and there is space between the nodes without anything but dark matter.  The overall concept of the book appears to be the network society is the new, postmodern form of capitalism.  When crisis occurs within the market system there are still those with the right skills, right worldview, and the right abilities to make the world as they see fit, a Nietzchian will to power in which the individual manipualtes the network to get what s/he needs.  Like Tron.

Or since these are all only little monads, that ’s the just the conclusion of a string  of them.  For good chunk of the rest of the book there is a discussion about the “exubernce” of society built on capitalism, that is, the luxurious, wasteful spending and living (wasteful also in the sense of creating tons of waste).  From about 225 to 235 there is a long discussion concerning genes and memes, and for a bit it seems as if he’s trying to argue that memes are the reason for the exuberence of capitalism.  In the concept of waste, or going against a Darwinian version of life, celibacy is seen as a meme that is utterly detrimental.  The meme serves itself and does not care that if it is successful, it will not only run humanity out of existence but itself since there wouldnt be any more vehicles (humans) for the meme to travel, parasite like, and infect new minds.  This talk is eventually dismissed as if it’s silly that everything (meaning nonhumans) within the network could have agency.

This lack of agency seems to extend to humans as well.  The network is capitalism, and everything in the network is merely the coercive forces put into place to make the human nodes within the system consume.  Capitalism is monolithic.

“So this is what it means to live in the network society.  We have moved outof time and into space.  Anything you want is yours for the asking,  You can get it right here and right now.  All you have to do is pay the price” (249).

Toward a Structural Theory of Action: Network Modes of Social Strcuture, Perception, and Action
Ronald S. Burt

Burt is advocating a structural theory of action that will bridge the atomistic and normative action theories. Structural theory appears to be built on several small mathematical models that predict how inidividual actors make decisions in their own best interests within a given context, which can then be tested with empirical data collected using various methods germane to sociology (10).

Atomistic theory:As an individual, or social atom, an actor exists today in reference to his previous conditions and evaluates alternative future actions in reference to his current conditions.  An “atomistic” perspective assumes that alternative acitons are evaluated independently by sepersate actors so that evaluations are made without reference to other actors.  For purposes here, the atomistic perspective is defined by separate actors having exogenously formed interests, one actor’s interests, or preferences, being analytically independdent of another’s…Such a perspective lays the foundation for twentieth-century lilberal democratic theory as it is based on the property concept that Macpherson terms “possessive individualism”…This is the perspective that Smith develops in The Wealth of Nations to elaborate market mechanisms in terms of supply and demand.  (5)

Normative theory:As a member of society, an actor exists within a system of actors and evaluates alternative actions within that context.  A “normative” perspective assumes that actions are evaluated interdependently by separate actors as a function of socializing processes that integrate them withing a series of actors.  For the purposes of this discussion, the normative perspective is defined by separate actors within a system having interdependent interests as social norms generated by actors socializing one another. (5)

Empirical data back normative action theory, and yet this work compiled by experiments, surveys, and ethnographic studies can not be made clear conceptually.  Atomistic action theory works better in the realm of economics, and therefore, these social scientists have established deductive theories which do not match empirical studies coming out of other social sciences.  This causes a schism in the social sciences, and makes for two very different explanations of how actors work in society.  Burt is looking to remedy this cacophony of voices coming out of the social science by providing structural theory; structural theory is “deductively superior to normative action since its use of network models provides a rigorous algebraic representation of system stratification from which hypotheses can be derived,  It is descriptively superior to atomistic action since it explicitly takes into account the social context within which actors make evaluations” (8).

I have chose a deductive approach to theory construction combined with the strategic use of empiricial data.  I alternate conceptual and applied chapters,  in the former, three items are presented:

1. Initial ideas are introduced aspects of a component in Figure 1.1 to be captured.
2. These ideas are formalized as a mathematical model.
3. Some of the model’s empirical implications are then derived as hypotheses, and the model, together with it implications, is illustrated with heuristically hypothetical data. (11)

In short, I am making strategic use of empirical data.  Particularly, relevant data are used to empiricially inform each proposed model as well as to demonstrtate some way in which the model informs ongoing substantive research.  However, the data are in no sense used to justify proposed models as empirical generalizations.  (12)

Chapter 2

Network Structure: The Social Context

The models presented in this chapter are based on social topology.  For Burt, these models describe the materiality of experiential reality, and moreover, are not based on hypotheticals but empirical data.  In this case, Burt is describing the social differentiation among actos within a given system–which is important since he’ll be using these models to analyze and describe the social differentiation among actors in two different social networks.  The models in this chapter–according to Burt–serve as a connection between micro and macro theory “as well as an epistemic link between abstract concepts and empirical research” (19).

Chapter 3

Stratification in Elite Sociological Methodology

In this chapter Burt attempts to demonstrate the ties between those who create an “invisible college,” a “system of scientists tied to one another less b their common instituional affiliation than by their interpersonal relations of advice and collaboration” (95).  Once that’s accomplished, Burt’s purpose is to “describe the stratification within the invisible college of elite experts in sociological methodology” (95).  In a move which illustrates concept and empirical observation, Burt’s models (supplied with the correct data) prove “Mullins interpretation of speciality prominence” (127), a theory suggesting “that the prominence of a group of scientists is a fucntion of the colleague and teacher-student ties among scientists in the group.  Groups are prominent to the extent that the have dense colleague relations and to the extent that “founding fathers” in a group prolifically generate graduate students to continue their work” (127).  Similarity in training and topic of inquiry coupled with direct lines of descendency seem to be how those in the “first tier” of this field gain dominance and (at least in the scale of academia) fame.  Burt finds this troubling since some groups, like the social statistics elite, could maintain the glare of the spotlight based on the continuation of the status quo while “the mathematical sociology elite could continue to pursue myriad different substantive interests, generate new experts within each of these interests, and remain an invisible group: a group better known for its label than for its accomplishments and members” (128).

Burt appears to favor a more meritocratic system within sociology, and yet his findings would also link up with the work of Barabasi; Barabasi at certain points within his monograph Linked explains that the big stay big because they started within a network leveraging the social politics of said network to their advantage.

Chatper 4

Stratification in American Manufacturing

The purpose of this chapter was to describe how the different boards of various manufacturing companies were connected through sharing common members.  This chapter varies from the last one in that it uses data from a small group of actors.  This is do to the size of the American econonmy, the network topology in question.

The sharing of board members served the needs of particular corporations in various ways (most of them obvious if you think of oligarchies and monopolies), and also in the most interesting: the co-optive sense.  Co-optation is described as “the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy-determining structure of an organization as a means of averting threats to its stability or existence” (Selznick qtd in Burt 132).  Burt, early in the chapter, gives the example of the Tennesse Valley Authority.  The TVA avoided potential showdowns with local groups by “appointing representatives of the organizations to positions in the TVA desicion-making structure” (132).  At the end of the chapter, Burt explains the firms most likely to use this strategy were those that were large, controlled by dispersed interest groups, and often unable to dominate their boards with either their own handpicked management or anyone with kinship ties to the CEO (think family firms).

Again, and since I’m horrible with the equations in the book, I’d have to read Burt’s work through the lens of Barabasi.  For Barabasi, nodes in the network interconnect due to efficiency and stability.  While it runs counter to the myth of meritocracy and egalitarianism, it also shows just that–both are a myth and the only thing governing these systems are the ability to thrive and survive in a specific environment.  This, of course, does not mean these nodes are shock proof, just well-adapted to the work of the network at that moment.

Chapter 5

Interest: The Perception of Utility

My purpose in this chapter is to propose a model of the way in which his perception of advantage is contingent on the context in which he makes the perception.  I begin by distingsuihing two aspects of actor interests–subjetive evaluation of concrete stimuli versus social context–and discuss algebraic representations of these aspects.  The two are then brough together in a structural model of perception.  Under the proposed model, acto interests are patterned by the positions of actors in social structure…Moving to  aless general level of abstraction, one with clearer empirical implications, I show how the dervied social norms and deprivation effects can be used to clarify some conceptual ambiguities in diffusion research while simultaneously extending that research to include new substantive results.  (173)

Chapter 6

Conformity and Deviance with Respect to Journal Nomrs in Elite Sociological Methodology

Journals are not judged as superior or inferior by the interactions of elites with said journals nor with the interactions with other elites through said journals; it is the relationship between elites and their arbitrarily defined and shared idea of what constitutes a  “good” journal that makes a specific journal “good.”  If they aren’t socially constructed as “good” they just don’t exist.

This is way to re-affirm the stratification in the invisible college.  The journals read are an indicator of status, or at least the status the reader aspires to.  There is no articulated standard of excellence for a journal, merely the folkloric concept that “everyone” of note reads this journal because it has the “best” articles by the “best” writers.  It all boils down to cultural capital bestowed by a small group of elites.

Chapter 7

Autonomy and Cooptation

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate a nodes structural autonomy within a network, “their ability to pursue and realize intyerests without constraint from other actors within the system” (265) while still recognizing there are relational patterns at play that individual actants have to navigate.  The model Burt creates is not designed to “capture all nuances of the ideas commonly referd to as oligolpoly and conflicting group affiliation” (287), and yet Burt does claim that if “a substantive area conforms to the model’s limitations, I believe the model can be a rewarding guide for empirical research” (287).

Chapter 8

Market Constraints and Directorate Ties with Respect to American Manufactoring Industries

In this chapter Burt attempts to illustrate what advantages come from shared directorate ties among corporations.  His conclusion:

Interindustry differences in successful cooptation do not add to the prediction of industry profit margins by market structure alone.  This does not rule out the possibility that directorate ties changed the nature of competitionin the economy, but it does show that the mere strategic placement of such ties did not distinguish unusually profitable manufacturing industries from those in which low profits werre typically obtained.  (324)

There are two possibilities with the information Burt does collect using his model.  First, that this arrangement helps the efficiency of production within the market.  The other, and the one I would ascribe to, predicts that there is a decrease in efficiency due to the a selective flow of information which only reaches favored trading partners “so as to suppress innovation [from upstart rivals] while ensuring markets for overpriced commodities” (325).

Chapter 9

Toward a Structural Theory of Action

I have worked toward a structural theory of action by focusing on its internal features in order to demonstrate that such a theory is plausible at a high level of coneptual rigor while maintaining considerable substantive promise.  Shorn of details, the logical structure of this enterprise has been very simple: stat e the premise, identify the most basic issues contained in the premise, and present empirically acceptable, mathematically simple models providing some resolution to these issues.  (329)

I have only scratched the surface.  Representing status/role-sets and structural interests within the social topology of a system as described in Chapters 2 and 5 provides rather general models within a structural theory of action.  My preceding remarks docus on these models. The structural autonomy models is not at all the same class of generality.  As I stressed in the conclusion to Chapter 7, the model is an arbitrary simplification, a plausible baseline midle for empirical research that describes how relational patterns constain the ability to act.  Not only are there many directions in which this model could be generalized, there is the concept of structural power to be considered, namely, the ability to act despite constraint (as opposed to the structural autonomy, which is the ability to act despite constraint).  Power and autonomy together would underlie transformational changes in social structure as described in the preceding.  (356)

Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition
Ronald S. Burt

Introduction

Structural holes is a theory about actants leveraging the information and resources they have that others don’t.  This ability to have info/resources within a network not available to everyone is the evidence of hole within the network; only certain actants have to information that would be commonplace if a node were present to either pass along these resources or make info available for leverage by others to perform mundane tasks specific to the system in question.

There are four characteristics jointly characteristic to the structural hole argument:

1. Competition is a matter of relation, not player attribution.
2. Competition is a realtion emergent, not observed.  The structural holes in which competition develops are invisible relations of nonredundancy.
3. Competition is a process, not just a result.
4. Imperfect competition (the competition of reality, not the bucolic competition of theory) is a matter of freedom, not just power.

The social structure of comeptitiotn is not about the structure of competitive relationships.  It is about the social structure of the relations for which players compete.  The structural hole argument is not a theory of competitve relationships.  It is a theory about competition for the benefits of relationships.  To explain variation in competitive success.  (5)

The distribution of structural holes around around the relations that intersect in a person or an orgnaization determines the player’s enterpreneurial opportunities and thus the player’s comeptitive advantage.  Holes create inequality between organizations as they create inequality between people.  (2)

Chapter 1 The Social Structure of Competition

Burt’s ideas and uses of the concept understood as network are different from Benkler, Shirky, Spinuzzi, Barabasi, or Galloway and Thacker.  While those writer-theorist see the network as a larger interconnected set of nodes getting work done through co-ercion and processing power, Burt defines networks as contacts developed around key, individual players and the manipulation of the network is for the betterment of the solitary entrepreneur looking to profit. Efficiency is gauged by how much energy it takes the entrepreneur to cultivate and sustain useful contacts within a given network and the energy it takes for the entrepreneur to leverage the holes within the network to his advantage.  The ideal relationship for the entrepreneur is the tertius gaudens–the third person between any two other actants who can leverage either goods and information that neither of the other two have to extract the most profit, or the person who can effectively play actant A against actant B and ensure the tertius in the scenario can create competition between A and B that somehow profits the tertius.  The goal is to create competition, leverage products from the structural hole to get the upper-hand in this competition, and at the same time use the contact within the given network which are not being played to speak well of the tertius so as to trade on reputation as trustworthy.  Burt calls this “referrals.”

The substance of information benefits are access, timing, and referrals .  The player’s network provides access to information well beyond what the player could process alone.  The network also provides that information early, which gives the player an advantage in acting on the information.  These benefits concern information coming to the player from contacts.  Referal benefits involve the opposite flow.  The network that filter information received by other abuot the player.  Referrals get the player’s interests represented in a positive light, at the right time, in the right places…The structural holes that generate information benefits also generate control benefits, giving certain players an advantage in negotiating their relationships.  (47)

Burt often uses the second person when describing how all of this works, and makes it clear the entrepreneur in the best position is the one who has no structural holes around him but access to various networks filled with structural holes.  In this state, the entrepreneur has structural autonomy in opposition to lowly structural equality.  Also, Burt is not concerned with tracing out how the network was created or what motivates a person to manipulate structural holes for profit.  He assumes, it seems from my reading, that all of these social practices common to a society based on the market and amenable to capitalism.  What is interesting and new for Burt “is the expression of competitive advantage–in economic, political, or social arenas– in terms of structural holes as an elemental unit clearly defined in theory and readily operationalized for empirical research” (49).

Chapter Two Formalizing the Argument

There are three points in the creation of a structural autonomy model.

1. The relations that span the control benefits of holes are teis of exclusive access.
2. Structural autonomy is a nonlinear function of constraint, decreasing most sharply at low levels  of constraint with the initial loss of structural holes.
3. The boundary around a competitive arena is an issue for players outside the arena.  To obtain the benefits, players outside the arena have to take on a strategic partner established in the arena.  (81)

The potential of a player’s network is summarized in three ways.

1. Effective size is the number of nonredundant contacts in the network.
2. Structural autonomy is an interval scale measuring the extent to which the player, relative to others in a study population, has unconstrained access to structural holes.
3. A hole signature summarizes the distribution of opportunity and constraint across each relationship in the network. (81)

Chapter Three Turning a Profit

The analysis performed in this chapter illustrates ways to demonstrate competition, and also could be used for the more “practical tasks of distinguishing customer segments for marketing strategies, understanding competitive pressures on potential buyers in each segment, and understanding the profit potential of a product” (82).

Three points are established within the chapter:

1. Profit margins are eroded by structural holes among producers and enhanced by structural holes among suppliers and customers.
2. Hole effects are nonlinear and multiplicative in the final structural autonomy model predicting profit margins.  Structural holes have their greatest effect as completely unconstrained action begins to be constrained.
3. The bulk of business for most producers is concentrated in no more than a handful of critical transactions.

Chapter Four Getting Ahead

“Managers with networks rich in structural holes get promoted faster and at a younger age than do their peers…The kind of analysis that follows is useful for the social science task of styudying competition and occupational achievement, as well as the more practical tasks of understanding how specific kinds of individuals rise in the firm, detecting barriers to achievement for kinds of individuals within the firm, assessing the leadership abilities of individuals or groups, and developing programs to enhance leadership abilites in target individuals or groups” (115).

Managers who want to take advantage of the structural holes need to play the role of the tertius and focus on developing networks that stress referrals from higher up in the hierarchical structure and highlight/enable the manager’s ability to leverage various network human and corporate resources to complete projects.

Five points should be taken away from this chapter.

1. Managers with networks rich  in structural holes tend to be promoted faster, and they tend to reach their current rank earlier.
2. Hole effects are most evident for managers operating on a social frontier.  A social frontier is any place where two social world meet, where people of one kind meet people of another kind.
3. The most serious frontier is the political boundary between top leadership and the rest of the firm.  Structural holes affect the early promotions of high-ranking men in a way different from their effect on the early promotions of women and entry-rank men.
4. On the other side of the political frontier, competition has a more personal flavor and it serves the climbing tertius to ensure they have a strategic partnership with “built around a strategic partner other than the immediate supervisor, reinforced with extensive socializing within the immediate work group” (165).
5. Although the reported differences between manager netowrks have clear implications for promotions, there are no differences among managers in their tendencies to have one network rather than another…In other words, a manager’s physical or functional position in the firm is less a cause or consequnece of the manager’s network than it is a context defining the manner in which the network contributes to promotion.(163-165)

Chapter Five Player-Structure Duality

“The unit of analysis in which structural holes have their casual effect is the same at a macro or micro level of analysis.  It is the network of relations that intersect in a player” (192).

“The distribution of structural holes around the relations that intersect in a person or organization determine the player’s entrepreneurial opportunities, and so the player’s competitive advantage.  Structural holes create inequality between organizations as they create inequality between people” (192).

Using this theory of structural holes allows Burt to create a method of analysis that uses the individual as the unit of analysis for understanding how networks engender or constrain power within its confines.  Since the network intersects in a player, there is the ability to analysis both levels (micro and macro) in one fell swoop.  It seems these models are ways to interpret empirical data often found to be unwieldy.

Chapter Seven Commit and Survive

Important to remember:  A “player” for Burt can be any entity.  It’s either a person or a company; hence, the ability for the structural hole theory to cut across micro and macro level analysis.

“The commit hypothesis is that low-autonomy players conform more closely, under threat of being excluded from relationships, to behavior characteristic to their location in the social structure…The commit hypothesis is an occasion to develop a bridge between the strucutral hoel argument and the interface model of markets…The lower the structural autonomy of players in a market, the greater their commitment to the market schedule characteristic of their market” (226).

“The corollary survival hypothesis is that higher rates of change, new players replacing old, occur where there is little structural autonomy precisely because there is little room for error…The survival hypothesis is an occasion to develop a bridge to population ecology analysis…Illustrative evidence on American markets shows that market leaders survive longer as leaders in more autonomous markets and that structural autonomy decreases the mortality of organizations new to the market.  The lower the structural autonomy of a market, the greater the odds of players being forced out of the market” (226-227).

Theories of Communication Networks
Peter R. Monge
Noshir S. Contractor

Preface

The field of network topics has no overarching framework for integrating conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work.  Currently, the field borrows from heavily from the social sciences to develop and and test network hypothesis, more often implicitly than explicitly.  This book is an attempt to provide that framework. (xii)

The impetus for the book is based on a few key problems the authors hope to remedy:

1. Problem: Few network studies utilize theories as the basis for formulating research hypothesis. Those that do only use single theories.  This, in turn, accounts for relatively small amounts of network variance.  Solution: The development of a multitheoretical perspective as a way to help compare and integrate diverse theories and to increase the explanatory power of research efforts.
2. Problem: Most research is conducted at a single level of analysis, typical the individual or dyad and rarely at the entire network level.  Networks are multi-leveled and with components and properties at each level.  To explain this there needs to be information contributions from all levels.  Solution: The framework for network topics developed in this book is multitheoretical as well as multilevel.  By multilevel, the authors mean “all the typical levels within a specific network at both a given point in time and at earlier points in time.”  Also, they include in the framework the other networks to which the focal network may be related, as well as the attributes of people who comprise these networks.
3. Problem: While many researches are exploring challening issues within emerging system properties, this has yet to occur in network research.  Solution: The introduction in this book of complex adaptive systems perspective.  This is done through an agent-based modeling framework.  Starting with a network and tracing out the actors that make up the network, the claim is these agents follow probabilistic rules that may be interconnected or dependent.  The agents observe other agents in the network they are connected to and respond to them.  As the agents follow the rules, network structure emerges.  If the rules and/or the interconnections are changed, then the structures change.
4. Problem: Most network analysis is static and cross-sectional.  Solution: The use of Blanche computer program to study co-evolutionary dynamics.  Using the program allows for the creation dynamic simulations of network evolutions, and then these simulations are used to “generate interesting hypotheses and to analyze research data” (xiii).
5. Problem: The ability to empirically test the ideas and framework presented in the book.  Solution: The use of the p* statistical framework and PSPAR computer programs.  In the space of this book, however, the authors only provide “illustrative examples rather than definitive results” (xiv).

Chapter breakdowns can be found on pages xiv-xv.

Chapter 1 Network and Flows in Organizational Communication

The opening is a rehash of the intro, but under the heading “Communications Networks and Flows in a Global World” is a great overview of the varying theories talking about the effects of the collapse of space and time due to instantaneous communication, the shift to a networked information society (due in part to communications technology), and the ability of actants within this system to create virtual organizations–groups no longer tied to specific locales, times, or events (4-7).

Emergent networks is the designation given to organic, actant formed networks that deal with a specific problem, project, or topic.

Mandated networks are the formal networks often found within corporations or similar workplaces.  Orders travel down these strict hierarchies, while (ideally) information flows up.

Empirical research shows that most problems in work situations are solved by emergent networks.  The social and power stratification of workers and the distance from those considered at the top reduces the incentive to communicate with those outside of the immediate work group–even with those designated as “problem solvers” in the upper echelons of the company.  At most, mid-level employees receive info from those working on the ground.

There has been much debate and research over the formal versus the emergent network, and more talk about a bias within these studies to champion emergent networks as the way things “really” get done since the actions of emergent networks are often at odds with the formal networks they reside in (that is counter to workplace goals).  M&C explain this may all be moot as workplaces are becoming less formal in their organization.  Shifts in management philosophy, team-based forms of organizing, “the adoption of matrix forms of organizational structure, and shifts to network forms of organizing” (10)–all under girded by the growth and adoption of communication technologies that support lateral communication–have dramatically changed the ways firms operate and conceptualize themselves.  Networks within this work setting are now “network organizational forms” (11) because they’re based on an “interactive form” and have interconnections which “span accross the entire organization, unimpeded by preordained formal strcutres and fluid enough to adapt to immediate technological demands.  These relations can be multiple and complex. But one characteristic the share is that they emerge in the organization, they are not preplanned” (Krackhardt qtd in Monge and Contractor 11).

Break down of chapter on pages 20-25.

Chapter 2 The Multitheoretical, Multilevel Framework

Most of the chapter is limited to the definitions of terms germane to network analysis.  The following are quotes from the chapter with the heading they appeared with leading off the quote so as to give context to the quote.

Network Concepts and Measures

“The relations, such as “communicates with” or”provides data to” are represented as lines connecting the various nodes” (35).

“The second property is strength, which indicates the quantity of the relation…Alternatively, it could represent the frequency with which they communicate, for example,, once a month, once a week, daily, or their satisfaction with the communication on a numerical scale” (35).

“When relations are studied one at a time, the are called uniplex.  Two or more relations studied together are considered multiplex” (35).

Measuring Network Properties

Wasserman and Faust suggest there are five distinct levels.  The individual actor level is the level of the participants represented by the nodes or points in the network, whehter indvidiuals, groups, or organizations…The dyad level examines pairs of network members together with their relations…The triad level examines three nodes at a time, focusing perhaps on the level of balance among all triads in the network.  The fourth level is the subgroup…The [fifth and] final global level is the network as a whole.  (37)

Individual Level of Analysis

Degree, Indegree, and Outdegree

The number of nondirectional ties associated with a node is simply called degree…In a directional communication network, a node’s outdegree coudlbe interpreted as “expansiveness” while the nodes indegree would signal its popularity…Nodes that have a degree of zero arereferred to as isolates; that is, the have no ties to others in the network. (38)

Betweeness

While degree metrics gauge the extent to which a node is directly connected to all other nodes in the network, betewwnness measures the extent to which a node is directly connected only to those other nodes that are not directyly connected to each other…In a communication network, a node with a high betweenness is often interpreted as deriving power by interpretation of that information. (38)

Closeness

[C]loseness measures the extent to which nodes are directly or indirectly connected to allother nodes in the network…Closeness is thereofre interpreted as a useful measure to assess a node’s ability to efficiently access information directly or indirectly “through the grapevine.” (39)

Dyadic (or Link or Tie) Level of Analysis

For valued relations, mutuality measures the similarity between the values of the links between two individuals.

Distance and Geodesics

For any pair of nodes, two types of links can exist: direct and indirect.  Direct links are connections between any pair of nodes that involve only those two nodes.  Indirect links occur between any two nodes by virtue of their connections with other nodes.  A direct link between two nodes is said to be a one-step connection.  The smallest indirect connection is two-step, which ties together three nodes with two direct links.  Here the first node is directly connected with the second node, the second is directly connected with the third, which leads the first and third nodes to be indirectly connected to each other with a two-step linkage or two degrees of separation. (41)

The shortest distance between two points is called a geodesic.  The largest distance is called the diameter…First, reachability is the shortest path (or the geodesic) that connects two individuals in a network…Second, redundancy measures the number of alternative shortest paths (or geodesics) that connect two individuals indirectly.  A high redundancy score would indicate a greater likelihood that information will flow from one individual to another via one of the multiple indirect paths.

Triadic Level of Analysis

Transitivity and cyclicality measure the extent to which every set of three actors, say, A, B, and C, in the network demonstrates certain structural patterns…A network is cyclical when A Directs a tie to B, B ties to C, and C in turn links to A, thereby completing the cycle.  (42)

Subgroup Level of Analysis

Components and Cliques

More [than] likely, the graph [AKA network] is unconnected or disconnected, meaning that is it not possible to get to all points in the graph from the other points.  This implies that there are subsets of points in the network that are connected to one another, call ed subgraphs; it also implies that the subgraphs are not connected to each other.  These conneted subgraphs of the network are called components of the network. (43)

[A] clique is defined as a maximally complete subgraph, that is, the maximum number of individuals in the network who are all directly connected to one another, but are not all directly connected to any additional individuals in the network…An n-clique includes the maximum number of individuals in the network who are all directly or indirectly connected to one another via no more than n links.  Further, the are not directly (or indirectly) connected via n or fewer links to any other additional individual network. (43)

While n-cliques relax the requirement of a direct link to all members to the clique, k-plex relaxes the requirement of a direct link to all members in the network.  A k-plex therefore includes the maximum number of individuals in the network who are directly connected with, at least, all but k of the individuals in the group.  (43)

All the different models in which the various theories can be used as the generative mechanism are be found 55-69.

Chapter Three Communication and Knowledge Networks as Complex Systems

There’s a general overview of various system models on pages 79-85.  Things get interesting on 89 with self-organizing complex systems.  These systems have four features:

1. At least one of the copnents in the system must exhibit autocatalsis, that is, self-referencing.
2. At least two of the comopnents in the system must be mutually causal.
3. The system must be open to the environment with respect to the exchange of energy and matter.
4. The system must operate in a far-from-equillibrium condition.  (89)

Essentially, these systems have to be self-organizing without intervention from a bureaucratic office nor the leadership of a charismatic, central leader.  The example given in the text the self-organized system call slugs (89-90), a carpooling system which organically sprang up among DC commuters.

Knowledge networks as complex systems might be useful for future projects.  This model envisions knowledge networks as interconnected computers, and counts human and nonhuman actants as part of the network.  This work seems to echo the ideas of Latour and Syverson.

Even more interesting: knowledge networks as complex self-organizing systems.

In knowledge networks that are formed on the basis of social networks for generating and sharing knowledge, there are two types of components in the system that exhibit autocatalysis, the knowledge per se and the people.  As discussed before, human cognizance plays a key role in the creation of new knowledge.  Through complicated cognitive processsess, new knowledge can be generated by the accumulation of new information and intergration with preexisting knowledge.  The social netowrk is self-generative in that the charisma or reputation of a person can by itself serve as a strong magnet to attract more particiapants to the network.  (95-96).

The chapter ends with Contractor calling for “system thinkers [moving] beyond a metaphorical fascination for definitions, conceptualizations, and collecting analogies.  In addition, schoalrs need to think about what new insights would be gained if the theoretical mechanisms of self-organization were to be used to study organizations” (97).

Chapter Four Computational Modeling of Networks

Computer simulations have often been used to predict the performance of systems with dynamic relatiionship among various elements of said system.  The problem, M&C point out, is “[t]heses characteristics are typically obtained from theory and then articualted in the simulation as difference or differential equations. The goal of engineering simulation is then to assess the dynamic performance of a system based on a priori knowledge of the dynamic relationships among the various elements of the system…while this approach has produced a considerable number of studies…many the results of these models have been criticized for specifying relationships that were at best untested and at worst flawed” (99).

An emerging trend is the use of computers to “augment and assist theory building” (100).  Computational organizational theory (COT) follows this research process path: Theory–>Formulate Logics of Emergence–>Run Dynamic Simulations–>Deduce Hypothesis from Simulation Data–>Empirical Validation. This is in contrast to traditional research process, which looks more like this: theory–>Verbally Deduce Hypothesis–>Empirical Validation (101).  C&M stress “the results of a computer simulation are not a surrogate for empirical data.  Rather, they help to identify the emergent process implied by the theory” (100).

One simulation program C&M discuss at length is Blanche.  Blanche attempts to take into account the evolution of an agent’s attributes and relations over time through the use of nonlinear differential equations.  Blanche is publically available and can be found at http://www.spcomm.uiuc.edu/Projects/TECLAB/BLANCHE/.  The ethical and responsible use of such program is linked to two other projects:

1. A research design to collect the empirical data of the phenomena being examined, and
2. The use of appropriate statistical techniques to specify and test the likelihood of obtaining the observed realization of the network from among the set of possible configurations.  (109)

M&C recommend stochastic modeling versus determinstic modeling (as the name suggests, determinstic isn’t very realistic).  Stochastic modeling seeks “to determine the probability rather than the the actual value of an agent’s attribute or the realtion between two agents…As one would exect, repeatedly executing sochastic computational models will not necessarily yield the same emergent outcomes. Instead, the outcomes will vary and can be summarily viewed as a distribution with some emergent outcomes more likely to occur than others” (110).

There is a difference between modeling for social phenomena and modeling for a network.  There are special issues involved in modeling for a network; according to M&C these “constraints arrive fromthe recognition that relations within a network are not independent from one another” (112).

Strategies of Empirical Validation of Computational Models (118).

Computational models can be validated through the comparing of empirical data from a longitudinal study on a network.  This is the most direct method, but also the most expensive and time consuming.  The work around is to create “virtual” experiments, where a network is created complete with virtual agents.  These studies are used to “examine the transient and long-term emergent charateristics of a set of theoretical propositions” (119).  Using these virtual experiments allows for the modification of hypotheses (which would include the setting bench marks for the degree of intensity certain theories work withing a network), as well as come to an understanding how various initial conditions could effect the emergent characteristics of the real network in question.  Changing the initial  conditions of the virtual network and re-running the experiment also allows for the creation of different hypotheses based on different initial conditions (again, this is all virtual.  A responsible use of this technique would be to develop the hypotheses and then apply to the version of the material version of the network in question).

Here are three other ways virtual experiments could be useful:

1. They can also be used to determine how emergent characteristics are altered by parameter changes, that is, the relative influence of the variables on one another.  The parameters that are used for modeling virtual experiments may be based on prior field and experimental empirical studies.
2. They can also be used to study transient and long-term influence of interventions (such as the introduction of a new technology) on an ongoing social system.
3. Virtual experiments are excellent approach to explore the conditions under which a system will transition from a state of chaos to a state of self-organization, or move from a stable equilibrium state or a self-organized far-from-equilibrium state into a state of chaos.

It is important that nay inferences made by the researcher derive entirely from the rules or generative mechanisms in a computational model.  These rules reflect the tenets of the specific theory.  To the extent that the rules implemented in the model fail to reflect the specific theory, the inferences drawn by the researcher are suspect.  (121)

Results from the field studies can be used to specify effect sizes that are used as parameters or weighting coefficients in the computational model.  Further, field studies can provide the initial data that can then be used in the computational model to consider various possible outcomes.  (122)

Chapter Five Theories of Self-Interest and Collective Action

The overall goal of this chapter is to define what the generative mechanism, or the prime mover, in theories of self-interest and collective action is.  For the large category “theories of self-interest,” the three theories under scrutiny are social capital, transaction cost economics, and network organization.

The generative mechanism in social capital is structural autonomy, the ability to exist within a network, be an active entrepreneur in said network, and have the ability to profit through unconstrained, strategic moves.  This generative mechanism relies heavily on Burt’s structural holes theory.

Transaction cost economics (TCE) attempts to examine how firms (traditional organizations using various levels of bureaucracy) profit within a market.  TCE asserts a firm’s ability to organize information and communication so as to find the best buys within a market offset the coordination costs associated with such a centralized organization like a corporation.  Exchange and reciprocity are the elements which make up the generative mechanisms in this theory.

An alternative form of organization, the network organization, can reduce both information search costs in markets and administrative costs of hierarchies.  Network organizations seek to maximize joint value of exchanges with the organizations to which they are linked.  Network organizations are themselves embedded in larger networks of organizational relations that make economic behavior neither over- nor undersocialized.  (159)

The collective action theories described in the second half of the chapter are the collective action and mobilization theory and the collective action and the adoption of innovations theory.  Both rely on the mechanism of the public good, that there is some public good which must be contributed to and developed so whatever the public good is, it survives through management and replenishment.  M & C stress these network work best in a centralized communication network, one where all actants are connected, informed, modeling, and communicating with one another through the center or through mutually strong ties to all nodes in the network.  M & C hypothesize this stops the abuse of the public good as well as stops the problem of “free riding,” where actants take from the public good but do nothing to maintain it.  Coupled with their emphasis on high/low reach and high/low selectivity, M & Cs ideas about collective action appears to be what Shirky is arguing against–it’s the old model of organizing.

Chapter Six Contagion, Semantic, and Cognitive Theories

Contagion theories seek to explain networks as conduits for “infectious” attitudes and behavior.  Semantic theories attempt explanations on the basis of networks that map similarities among individuals’ interpretations.  Theories of cognitive social structures examine cognitions regarding “who knows who” and “who know who knows who,” while theories of cognitive knowledge structures examines cognitions of “who knows what” and “who knows who knows what.”  Finally, cognitive consistency theories explain how metworks are understood on the basis of individuals’ cognitions of consistency or balance in their networks.  The remainder of this chapter discusses each of these areas and their extensions.  (173)

Chapter Seven Exchange and Dependency Theories

This chapter opens with a talk on network exchange theory, which is built on a calculus of exchange of material or information resources as the under-girding constant of all human interaction.  “Network exchange theory posits that the bargaining power of individuals is a function of the extent wot which they are vulnerable to exclusion from communication and other exchanges within the network” (209).  This theory is not the same as theories of self-interest as self-interest theories conceptualize the individual as maximizing their individual investments independent of its exchange value; in NET this is a major concern and is part of the equation when deciding with whom to ally with.  Due to this, there appears to be a big emphasis on separate entities (firms, corporations, individual actors) within a network and the executive ties between firms.  This concern is mollified by a newer concept that fall underneath the umbrella of exchange and dependency theories: network organizations.

Rather than being organized around market or hierarchical principles, network organizations are created out of complex webs of exchange and dependency relations among multiple organizations…network organizations differ from their predecessors (functional, multidivisional, and matrix forms) in four important ways.  First, rather than subsume all aspects of production within a single hierarchical organization they attempt to create a set of relations and communication networks among several firms, each of which contributers to the value of the product or service.  Second, networks are based on a combination of market mechanisms and informal communication relations…Third, members of networks are often assumed to take a proactive role in improving the final product or service, rather than merely fullfilling contractual obligations.  Finally, a number of industries are beginning to form network organizations along the lines of Japanese keiretsu, which links together producers, suppliers, and financial institutions into fairly stable patterns of relations. (219)

There are six essential qualities to network organizations:

1. The use of information technology to integrate across organizational functions.
2. Flexible, modular organizational structures which can be readily reconfigured as new projects, demands, or problems arise.
3. Use of information technology to coordinate geographically dispersed units and members.
4. Team-based work organization, which emphasizes autonomy and self-management.
5. Relatively flat hierarchies and reliance on horizontal coordination among units and personnel.
6. Use of intra-and inter-organizational markets to mediate transactions such as the assignment and hiring of personnel for projects and the formation of interorganizational networks. (Poole qtd in Monge and Contractor 220)

Through these qualities networked organizations become “boundary-less” (220)–a space where the point that one actant begins and another ends is difficult to tell.  Since several things are being shared (information, goals, resources, personnel, and finances through communication technology), so highly collaborative work arrangements must be established because it’s the only way to “transfer embedded knowledge” (220) integral to the project’s success.  According to Poole, there’s a high cost to this non-traditional set-up; there are problems “maintaining a sense of mission, committment, loyalty, and trust, and dealing with increased levels of work stress and burnout” (qtd in Monge and Contractor 221).

The rest of the book is more in-depth talk about the theories which can be used as generative models.  In chapter ten there’s a fairly complex summary (298-306).   The overall gist of the book is to use the models in chapter two in conjunction with the theories spoken about at length throughout the rest as a way to provide structure for different data sets–I think. Coming from the humanities this all seemed exceptionally convoluted.

Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness
Duncan J. Watts

“The small-world phenomenon formalises the anecdotal notion that ‘you are only ever six ‘degrees’ of separation’ away from anybody else on the planet’” (4).

Based on Miligram’s mail experiment, tons of work has been done considering the small world phenomenom. Most of the theoretical and empirical work has endeavored to determine for social groupings:

• The characteristic number of “handshakes” between members,
• The expected number of “friends” that each member has, and
• The structure of the group which relates one member’s “circle of friends” to those of other members. (4)

While Watts feel the work done has been interesting, he also feels it’s “suffered from a number of methodological and phenomenological difficulties” (5).  Namely:

1. Detailed data of “who knows whom” is extremely hard to come by for sufficiently large groups.
2. People are notoriously bad at estimating the number of “friends” the possess.
3. Some friendships are more important than others, and some people are vastly more significant than others in connecting a network (for example, Kevin Bacon owes much of his eminent connectbility to his appearances with superstars like Jack Nicholson and Rober DeNiro).
4. Friendships are not symmetric: that is, subordinates are more likely to regard themselves as connected to their superiors than vice versa.
5. The whole notion of “friendship is highly dependent upon both the social cnctext (Amish famers in rural Pennsylvania probably have quite different views of what a friendhsip necessitates than do Hollywood stars) and the nature of the question being asked (that is, friendship for the purpose of borrowing money is quite different from friendship for the purpose of spreading rumors). (5)

This may seem like nitpicking, but the issue becomes one of validity and reliabilty when work based on the Miligram study can be attacked on these grounds.  Studies coming from this linneage appear to “hang on arbitrary assumptions and so does not necessarily indicate much about the world in general” (5).

Chapter two is a brief review of what is understood about small world phenomenon, and is an attempt to answer Watts reformulated set of questions concerning small-world theory, ie, “Do we actually live in a small world?  What are the most general conditions under which the world can be small?”.  This is done through considering a broad range of netowrk structures and identifying where, if anywhere, in the family of possible “worlds” dramatic changes in global network characteristics occur.

Chapter three is a space where these questions are approached through the indtroduction of two classes of graph-theoretical models: relational graphs and spatial graphs.  “Despite apparent differences, both in motivation and construction , these two models exhibit an underlying structural simlarity that can be captured by the idea of random rewiring and that allows their statistical properties to be expressed in a model-dependent fashion.  This motivates the construction of a third model, which embodies the random rewiring concept explicitly and which unifies the properties of the alpha and beta models.  The main result is the identification of a class of graphs–small-world graphs– that appear to embody the defining characteristics of the small-world phenomenom” (6).

Chapter four works off of the intuitions gained from these simulations.  A heuristic is constructed that “yields analytic approximations for the relevant statistics of both spatial and relational graphs” (6).

Chapter five deals with length and clustering properties of three real world networks.

Part II asks “why should anyone care about the small world phenomenon?”.  Chapter six deals with a simple model of the spread of disease through a structured population.  Chapter seven examines the impact that random rewiring has upon the global computational capacity of a cellular auomata.  Chapter eight is a tentative exploration of the emergence and evolution of cooperation on graphs, using the iterated, multiplayer Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Chapter nine broadens the scope to include continuous dynamical systems, examining the conditions under which systems of coupled phase oscillators can spontaneously lock into macroscopic, mutually entrained clusters.

The interest in this book–contrary to many socially texts worried about entrepreneurs, promotions, effective marketing schemes, etc–is “how systems behave and how that behavior is affected by their connectivity” (7).

Chapter Two An Overview of the Small-World Phenomenon

The two important things from this chapter:

1. Weak ties, as defined by Granovetter, are important to the small-world phenomenon since they form the bridges between two densely knit clumps of friends, “these clumps would not, in fact, be connected to one another at all were it not for the existence of weak ties” (Granovetter qtd in Watts 15).
2. The creation of visual graphs to augment a network analysis  “enables the observer to gain more insight into the relationship between members than would be possible by staring at a large matrix of numbers (17).

[I]n terms of social networks, the only networks who statistical properties are analytically tractable are those that are either (1) completely ordered (for instance, a d-dimensional, hyper-cubic lattice) or (2) completely random (such as Rapoport’s random webs).  (20)

Because the methodological basis of measuring distances in the network sense, solely in terms of who is connected to whom, rests on much firmer ground, both theoretically and empirically, network distance wil be treated here as the sole measure of distance, at which point all talk of either non-Euclidean or nonmetric spaces instanly disappears.  A network does not necessarily exist in any particular space at all, but as all network distances must certainly conform to the triangle inequality, then…an embedding is guaranteed by an algorithm that is described briefly in Section 2.2.3.  (22)

Chapter Three Big Worlds and Small Worlds: Models of Graphs

Graphs of the networks in question are appropriate because they display “the nature of the elements of the ’system’ is unimportant–all that matters is the fashion in which they are connected” (41).

There are two possible graphs possible for this project 1) relational and 2) spatial.  Relational graphs readily display small-world phenomenon, while it takes spatial graphs with more “exotic” (42) distributions to display small-world features.  Relational graphs, therefore, are the better choice.

Three successive graph models are presented in this chapter.  The third model, the phi model (the first two being alpha and beta), is:

motivated by a desire to unify the observed properties of a the [alpha] and [beta] models, in terms of a model independent parameter [phi], as a function of whicl all such models display the same characteristic transitions.  This result leads to a better understandingt of the small world-phenomenon through the introduction of a class of small-world graphs: highly clustered graphs with small characteristic path lengths.  (42)

Social space is the space where these graphs are considered to be occuring; the axioms needed to justify this concept are found on page 43 and are number one and two.

The two extremes in social space are Caveman world and Solaria world.  In Caveman, everyone “you know knows everyone else you know and no one else” (44).  In Solaria world “the influence of current friendships over new friendships to be so slight as to be indistinguishable from random chance” (44).

Chapter Five “It’s a Small World After All”: Three World Graphs

In a small world, everyone seems to be the center, because everyone is close to everyone else.  Kevin Bacon isn’t the center of the Hollywood universe, he just appears to be in a network which can be traced out with some certainty and is somewhat manageable when it comes to graphing it.  After comparing the Kevin Bacon network to the networks of the C. elegans nervous system and the Western States Power Grid, Watts exclaims “[S]omething interesting does appear to be going on. There does appear to be a common thread linking these systems together in terms of the qualitative arrangements of their connections, and regardless of it consequences, that is a remarkable thing in itself” (162, emphasis original).  The next part of the text should answer the question, “So what?”

Chapter Six The Spread of Infectious Disease in Structured Populations

The message here is that the highly clustered nature of small-world graphs can lead to the intuition that a given disease is “far away”, when ,on the contrary, it is very close.  The fact that so few short shortcuts may be required to achieve this small-world effect is important, because such tiny alterations to the network configuration could be impossible to detect from the perspective of an individual.  (175)

Connecting typologies of given networks are the key to linking.  Two things factors come into play

a) The nature of the attractor is determined by the coupling topology, or b) The time taken for the systems with different coupling topologies to reach the same attractor (characteristic transient time) is determined by the coupling topology.  Specifically, spreading occurs faster in systems with shorter characteristic path length. just as one might expect intuitively.   (180)

Chapter Seven Global Computation in Cellular Automata

Cellular automata (CA) are the descendants of John von Neumann’s self-reproducing auotmaton.  These are one dimensional cells which work with  a general algorithm (GA) to locally process info so as to complete a project global in nature (global here meaning within the confines of the system they exist in).  Often these tasks would be trivial if there existed a central processor within the CA, but there isn’t.  The GA forces them to evolve and create solutions as they evolve.  The “firing squad synchronisation [sic] problem” is an example and can be found on page 184.

Starting with CA, the chapter evolves into discussing how to solve global computational problems with locally connected systems by manipulating the architecture of the system rather than its rule base.  Watts concludes deciding the point may not be to affect the system using GAs or with systems that are only one dimensional.

But perhaps this is the point: natural computational systems are not strictly one-dimensional architectures.  In fact, Chapter 5 suggests that the  connectivity of many natural networks is better represented by small world graphs than by many other plausible models, including one-dimensional architectures.  Hence elegant and attractive though the one-dimensional GA/particle approach may be, the broader project of understanding the computational capabilities of real, locally connected computational systems should probably account for the dramatic effects of small world architectural topologies in which the traditional two-dimensional space-time diagrams cease to be meaningful.  Perhaps the most fruitful approach to solving these kinds of problems might be the application of genetic algorithms to the combined space of all possible rules and all possible connectivities.  (198)

Chapter Eight Cooperation in a Small World: Games on Graphs

Cooperation doesn’t do too well in random graphs since they’re “poorly clustered” (222).    Since cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma and Tit-for-Tat require trust and cooperation with a small clique against a hostile world, once a few defectors can use shortcuts to others without worrying about intermediaries, the project crumbles.  In small world graphs, however, cooperation seems to organically grow as a strategy–as long as the small world graph is not random.

“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.

“The Manufacture of Dissent: What the Left Can Learn from Las Vegas”
Andrew Boyd and Stephen Duncomb

“The Web Rewires the Movement”
Andrew Boyd

“Truth is a Virus”
Andrew Boyd

“Spank the Bank”
Andrew Boyd

“Extreme Costume Ball: A New Protest Movement Hits the Streets in Style”
Andrew Boyd

“The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist”
Edward PJ Corbett

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, Volume I
Ed. Joseph A Buttigieg
Trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari

“The Manufacture of Dissent: What the Left Can Learn from Las Vegas”
Andrew Boyd and Stephen Duncomb

In this article Boyd and Duncomb propose the Left (of the American political spectrum) should learn from Las Vegas and the Right. The truth is out of style. Borrowing from Guy Debord, they suggest using spectacle as a way to persuade; from their point of view the Left is waiting for the “mythic republic of of letters and reason of the 18th century” (6) to materialize and when it does they (the Left) can rely on their normal strategy: be reasonable, be rationale, embody the values of the Enlightenment, and point out to the masses how they’re being fooled. This isn’t working–in fact it’s backfiring. As Boyd and Duncomb explain:

In our fetishization of the truth and our seeming unconcern for presentation and popular desire we merely confirm the stereotype the Right has created of the Left: (snobby) Experts with (inhuman) Ideals; supercilious school principals telling the rest of us to do our homework. If the masses like Las Vegas, then the Left has got to figure out what it is about Las Vegas they like. (4)

Here’s the spectacle they propose:

This is the popular vernacular we should adopt: creating spectacle which is understood as spectacle; one that still has symbolic power but lets the reader in on the production. Such a spectacle is open ended. It doesn’t portray itself as “The Truth” but instead allows each spectator to imagine for herself, to build their own truth. It is a spectacle that is semiotically participatory…It will be a different type of spectacle, one which would be sincere without laying claim to The Truth, democratically acknowledge the constructedness of the spectacle without slipping into cynical irony, and speak to the imagination without becoming a completely imaginary politics. This is our design challenge. (5)

Examples of this would be the Billionares for Bush, the preachings of Rev. Billy, or Reclaim the Streets.

“The Web Rewires the Movement”
Andrew Boyd

“The Web Rewires the Movement” is Boyd’s recounting of how United for Peace and Justice borrowed the tactics and social networking technology of MoveOn.org to organize multiple, concurrent anti-war protest in 2003. Using email mailing lists, an organizational website, and online “organizing tool kit” (available through their website and made available to individals who wanted to organize a protest in their town) United for Peace and Justice organized a simultaneous worldwide anti-war protest with few paid staffers and no attempt to start brick-and-mortar branches.

Towards the end of the article Boyd concedes there are issues with using the Internet and echoes the article on CMC when he explains “[t]he Interent is best for pulling together a coalition when there already is a broad sense of agreement–as there was for the UFPJ and MoveOn around the Iraq war” (5). Boyd continues on to claim that the best type of collective movement using is on that is a hybrid of traditional pavement pounding and social networking technology. Citing that the UFPJ not only used their website to reach people, but also distributed “1.2 million pieces of literature in six languages in every corner of New York City” (5), NYC being the organizations physical home location and a locale where–according to Boyd–400,000 people turned out for the event (1).

Money quotes:

the Internet won’t replace traditional organizing, but it does alter the rules in important ways. Because e-mail is near-instantaneous and costs just fractions of a penny, one can communicate very quickly with a lot
of people at the speed of word of mouth. (5)

Because it [the Internet] is still an open-publishing model, free from the constraints of corporate-owned media, it can carry the channels of alternative information essential for sustaining social movements. (5)

Although MoveOn does not track member demographics, anecdotal evidence suggests that its base is disproportionately white. (Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, for example, faired poorly in the group’s recent “primary.”) This reflects the persevering digital divide, in which, according to a recent Pew survey, a full 24 percent of Americans are totally offline, and those who are online still tend to be younger, whiter, suburban, better-off and better educated…With only 3 percent of the world’s population online, the divide is even more pronounced in international campaigns. (3, 5)

“Truth is a Virus”
Andrew Boyd

In this essay Boyd uses memes as the way to transmit media viruses, and links the creation of such viruses and the injecting of them intothe cultural pysche through protest networks. This concept of media virus ties directly into Boyd’s work with spectacle and for examples he uses his own “Billionares for Bush (or Gore)” on pages one through four. Boyd explains:

For activist viruses, the viral shell is often a model of participatory action. For RTS [Rcleaim the Streets] the ideological code was a utopian demand to resist capital and liberate public space; the action model was a militant street carnival. It was the RTS action model that drove its viral explosion. People across the world grabbed onto the carnival, replicated it, and mutated it in their own way. As with Critical Mass, the RTS ideological code was elegantly embedded in the action itself. By doing the action, participants live the code themselves as well as deploy the code for others to reckon with. In the Billionaires campaign, the action model, though an important component, did not drive the campaign; it was more the sly and funny propaganda packaging of the ideological code. (5)

From my point of view, it would seem Boyd is saying the best rhetorical act embodies the ideology of a protest group. To take part in a performative act and for that act be a direct expression of the group’s ideology is to have the individual actors make the ideology part of their navigational schema, and at the same time, spread the idea to observers watching.

Here’s Boyd’s take on protest groups based on memes, which seems to match the defintion of flash/smart mobs from Rheingold:

Because they coalesce around an idea and/or a mode of action, rather than an organization, movements based on memes tend to be “cheap, fast, and out of control” (to borrow a phrase often used to describe the life-like behaviors of complex systems and dense information networks). Cheap and fast are generally good qualities for a grass-roots movement. Out of control is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, they tend to spread quickly; on the other hand, they sometimes die just as quickly. This was the case for the Women’s Action Coalition, the dynamic feminist direct action group. At its height in ‘93 WAC had 300 women coming to weekly meetings (in New York alone), a furious barrage of actions and press coverage, and copy-cat chapters around the world, but by ‘95 it had folded. Meme-based movements may generate passionate community and a white-hot intensity of action, but unless there’s an ongoing mass ritual such as monthly Critical Mass rides or unless they develop some kind of organizational infrastructure they tend not to last. (5)

So it would seem this is a collective action with no larger meaning besides of the moment groundswell of anger, disapproval, or discontent. Coupling this with the other articles by Boyd, it would seem to match his message that for this type of protest to be part of a larger movement these acts and groups performing them must be seen as part of the ecosystem or network of a social movement, but they can not be expected to make social change in and of themselves. While Boyd approves of and utilizes the DIY organizing methods of smart mobs, he does not see them as sustained spectacle to make lasting change–even if they inject a media virus. The media cycle is quick and short, ergo, constant injections must be made using the method over and over.

“Spank the Bank”

In this short piece for the Village Voice, Boyd reports on his time at the Ruckus Society’s “Alternative Spring Break Direct Action Training Camp” in 2001. During this camp Boyd came in and taught some on guerilla theater techniques while others instructed protest minded students non-violent protest techniques. The target was Citibank due its predatory lending practices and insitutional practices of underservicing neighborhoods dominated by people of color.

In the article the students and trainers are up front about their political leverage as white college students, and they intend to use it performing evasive protest techniques–techniques that don’t seem to rely on the concepts of spectacle as discssed by Boyd in other texts. While this is all well and good (sometimes there have to be direct action protests to make an issue visible), the very element of whiteness may work against the continued participation of these students in these types of organizations. Unless they pick careers with a conscious, most of these students will buy into the system and take jobs that use the same practices they’re protesting against now. Also, this type of militant action is why the Left is vilified.

“Extreme Costume Ball: A New Protest Movement Hits the Streets in Style”
Andrew Boyd

This short article is another piece for the Village Voice and is again a bit older. In “Extreme Costume…” Boyd explains the new aesthetic behind protest: carnival. In this style of protest, direct action is mixed with theater and comedy; protesters with arms linked through metal tubing and chanting slogans are mixed with fellow dissenters dressed as banker landsharks to point out the predartory policies of the WTO.

While this may work in getting media attention and attracting recruits, how is this taken up by observers? Are protests with this type costuming seen as serious reactions to events by the general public? Or does this create an ethos of foolishness, that is, people who can’t be taken serioiusly and are nothing more than rabble?

“The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist”
Edward PJ Corbett

In this article Corbett defines the open hand as “old” rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Greece and Rome where the speaker spoke to an audience and made the rhetorical moves necessary to ingratiate himself to the audience. This ingratiating included word choice, appearance, topics, tropes and figures used, and even politeness strategies. This, in Corbett’s estimation, is the opposite of the “new” rhetoric, that is, the rhetoric of the closed fist. The new rhetoric, Corbetts says, is abrasive, fragmented, not dependent solely on the word but utilizes music, film, television, and simple slogans, and most of all, is a rhetoric of the body. Using the body to demonstrate, to stop normal operations, to take over buildings, is the”new” method for opening channels of communication.

Corbett is writing this in the 60s, and understands that the rhetoric of the closed fist is often used by people and groups in American society who did not (and still don’t) have regular and consistent access to the channels of communication that lead to the ruling class. Essentially, he’s describing Boyd’s (and to an extent Debord’s) theories that protest from the Left must be spectacle to persuade fence sitters on issues. Still, Corbett fears that the rhetoric of the closed fist, while appropritate at times, has become the rhetoric of choice and that its use shows that the new rhetoric is primarily coercive and not persuasive. Instead of a copious amount of choices to solve a problem, there’s only either one or the other, and because of this hard line there is no attempt by rhetors practicing the new rhetoric to use logic nor reason nor rationality nor the attempt to by opposing parties to meet on a common, mediatory ground.

While Corbett makes some interesting, erudite comments, the final section of the article betrays his real issue, which is the use of the closed fist by college students. Corbett appears distressed that even those with access to the culture of power–the elite young–have adopted the new rhetoric. His recommendation is to go back to the old rhetoric and develop a confrontational rhetoric that use both the old and the new rhetoric in an attempt to make an intelligent, ethical way of resolving conflict.

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, Volume I
Ed. Joseph A Buttigieg
Trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari

Introduction

Buttigieg stresses history in presented in the notebooks as an experience, not as contemplation. This is not only due to the stress of historical materialism as a lived experience focused on the particular and rejecting the universalizing of metaphysics, but also on the concept espousing “‘experience upon which the philosophy of praxis is based cannnot be schematized’” (64). Because of this, the notebooks should not be read looking for the “true” Gramsci, nor should they be imagined and edited in a way to foreground one ideal version of Gramsci, eg, the Leninist Gramsci, the liberating Gramsci, etc. The text is a product of a lived reality and reflects the situation Gramsci found himself in; the same event shaped how he brought order to the unstructured reality he found himself in.  The notebooks themselves are a moment of material history/reality.

Gramsci’s idea of a “disinterested point of view” has little to do with an objectivist or positivist stance when observing experiential reality.

Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis demanded a crtiicism full o f passionate intensity, a criticism that takes sides…Once he found himself exiled from the political arena, Gramsci wanted to pursue the same topic on a much larger scale, unconstrained by the tactical needs of the moment–hence the plans to examine the role played by the intellectuals in Italian history, their contribution to the formation of social groups and classes, their solidarity with each other, their function in sustaining the existing hegemony, their various types, and their changing status in an industrialized soceity.  An inquiry of these dimensions requires a very broad perspective, a virtually limitless investigative range, a special vantage point–in these respects, then, a “disinterested” point of view.  (11)

Gramsci’s ideas about analyzing and understanding culture appear to match up with the ideas of writers like Fuchs and Galloway and Thacker.  Knowing how a network speaks, writes, communicates, presents, and values allows for the creation of effective strategies for changing the network–either from working within the network for epistemological change or hacking into the network and exploiting said network’s work ability for your own counter-hegemonic goals.  You have to understand the network to change the network; if you don’t understand its idiosyncrasies, then you will fail to make lasting change.

Gramsci’s concern with intellectuals and his foregrounding of them throughout the notebooks comes from his intuition that intellectuals provide the necessary foundation for a nation-state’s hegemony to exist.  If intellectuals do not question commonplaces, then there is no questioning by anyone with any culture capital concerning if a government’s actions are ethical or beneficial to the largest number of a nation-state’s citizenry (31).

Gramsci never intended the notebooks to be anything more than the notes for a larger, more organic in appearance monograph.  By notebook eight he’s questioning his methodology and reviewing his work.

Gramsci stresses the problem with “scientific” work of the late 19th and early 20th century in sociology and criminology, while actually proporting to be progressive and aligned with socialist/Marxist goals, actually hurt the Italian left since it gave:

“scientific” legitimacy and contributed to the perpetuation of the deterministic (and fatalistic) belief that certain indviduals (criminials, for instance) as well as certian groups…are “barbaric” or primitives by nature, that is, biologically.  One important consequence of this kind of sociology is that it blocks the possibility of constructing an account of the history or repression–biology replaces the politics of power and domination as an explanation of the condition of the underprivleged.  (48)

The way around this scientific racism is to start with a particular incident, tie it to a bigger phenomenon, and then return back to the smaller incident.  Do not look to make the incident you start with part of some larger pattern or plan.  Explain the small, not make a connection to the unseen architect.  In the practical sense these types of explanations made the masses pawns in a larger game; localized tactics to change their immediate situation were impossible since everything was pre-ordained.

Buttigieg streses Gramsci’s uses a philological methodology–a minute attention to detail, the drive to understand every element of a single event.

To be sure, complex netwrowrks of relatins are established among these details and they, in turn, give rise to general concepts and theories–the most famous of which is “hegemony.”  However, if the detailed record of the particualr were allowed to vanish, if the relationship among the fragments were permanently fixed, then the concepts and theories would run the danger of becoming crystallizied into dogmas.  (63)

Through focusing on the little things within events, and refusing to try to ascribe events to larger, unifying theories, Gramsci felt he was avoiding dogmas and mystification, the tools which allowed for the continuation of the social-political status quo.

Chronology

The chronology is an enactment of historical materialism.  Buttigieg gives the pertinent info about Gramsci to make Gramsci and his work an object of study taken up the same way Gramsci takes up the subjects of his notebooks: an individual artifact that must be understood as the product of a set of historical developments which can not be attributed as the outcome of some essential quality or part of a larger plan made by an invisible architect.

The religious motivations for the status quo on page 100.  Basically, it’s the argument that 1) the poor are part of God’s plan; 2) the poor drive the wealthy towards a more ethical and moral life since they must provide alms and charity to the poor.  It’s a large ecosystem where ever piece has its purpose.

The creation of a loyal armed force from the ranks of the peasants page 103.  There seems to be a similar phenomenon even now.

Discussion of the Italian universities on pages 106-107.  Again, things aren’t that much different now.

On the bottom of 108 continuing onto 109, Gramsci explains there must be a go at the idyllic (by Enlightment standards) of a democratic republic before there can be a return to the monarchy or the beginning of fascist regime.  Once it is felt by enough of the middle class that the project is a failure, ie, their poorly defined interests are not severed, then there can be an abandoning of the Enlightenment project.  The context is France and the monarchist party, but I think it’s easy enough to apply this to all societies.

Page 115–examples of various theorists and monographs that claim they are there to help the common person, but in the long run essentialize and are used to disenfranchise various marginal or unpopular groups.

Marx’s positive sarcasm on page 118.

Examples of a “Lumbroso-ite” on page 119.  Notice the absurd claims.

Every political movement uses its own language to describe the world outside of it; the movement only acknowledges those who speak in those terms (126).  Reminiscent of Fuchs ideas concerning the core of networks.

This idea extended to the education of citizens (nodes); the education is not positivist or objective–it’s the indoctrination into the values of the dominant hegemony (core) (128).

There are no “explosions” in the social sphere if the observer is instilled with a critical sense (129).

In a period of crises the most marginal sections react first (130).

Classes must lead before they assume power (136).  Those who already lead can coerce since they control the superstructure.  This echos Zinn and his ideas about the leaders of the American Revolution.  Often, they term their ideas in the form of being progressive.  Very often intellectuals of note come from this class, and these intellectuals subordinate the intellectuals of other classes.  This subordination occurs since the intellectuals of the lesser classes want to identify or be identified by intellectuals of the progressive class; this is a major piece of how dominant hegemony works.  Intellectuals stop a class conscious from evolving–salvation (the transcendence of social ills) comes from concepts that only reify practices and ideas which don’t benefit the lesser classes.

The masses outside the ruling class must be pressed into army service to protect democracy (140).  This is the penultimate god term.  Poorly defined and so amorphous it can mean anything, this idea is the carrot on the stick.  It teases those who don’t actually profit from it, and, in the case of Italy, is often used against them (see the earlier section of the necessary conditions for fascism).

144–an example of how postivist sociology hurt the Left in Italy.

145–due to their shared worldview and similarity in position and ideas, it’s easier to start political work with the intellectuals.  Once you can gain critical mass among them things move quickly; one identifies with the other, see themselves consubstantial with other intellectuals, and wants to produce work other intellectuals will see as intellectual work.

Broad terms like “unity and independence” mean nothing but are broad enough anyone can project their own values onto both words.  It means something for intellectuals and resonates with the larger culture outside the academy (146).

Successful political parties leverage the bourgeoisie.  This means the survival of the party since they keep them happy, and this happiness turns into funding or support (147).  If the English had kept Washington and the other Founding Fathers happy, there most likely wouldn’t have been a revolution.

153–Education and pedagogy coerce the masses into seeing the dominant hegemony as “natural.”

160–describes the moves being made now in the US by the more conservative party.

163–Moral/religious leaders speak for those who are not represented by any of the parties.

169–hegemony comes from the workplace/market place for most everyday folk.  They see their fortunes tied to either/or and will follow whatever seems ensures their continued livelihood.

171–History of Sexuality tie in.

The levelheaded are needed when trying to create a new social order.

All the most ridiculous daydreamers descend upon the new movements to propagate their tales of hitherto unrecognized genius, thereby casting discredit on them.  Every collapse brings along intellectual and moral disorder.  it is necessary to create sober, patient people who do not despair in the face of the worst horrors and who do not become exuberant with every silliness. Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.  (172)

Common sense changes and adapts over time to the milieu.  It is not steady, and takes into account “scientific notions and philosophical opinions which have entered into common usage.  ‘Common sense’ is the folklore (that is, as it is understood) and the philosophy, the science, the economics, of the scholars” (173).

187–Ruling class ideas can be re-arranged into folklore, and then transferred from one person to another, and then made normal and real.  Gramsci also recommends folklore be systematically studied so educators can understand the environments they enter when they take teaching environments.  More than anything, Gramsci stresses folklore must be treated as real, not myth, nor superstition to be mocked and eviscerated by educators and intellectuals.  The divide between modern culture and popular culture (folklore) can only disappear if educators deal with folklore head on by using it to make more effective teaching methods.  It has to be taken seriously.

On page 198 Gramsci makes an interesting observation.  He links Marx’s historical materialism and the modern judicial system (the use of evidence, reason, and juries instead of torture and confession).  It seems he’s claiming there’s a connection–that Marxism is part of a larger social movement.

Military leadership has to drum up support from the masses in time of war.  It’s not just strategy a general must worry about, but also morale of his troops and his citizenry (198).

211–schools and pedagogy.

213–three types of war and how Ghandi’s work in India matches all three.

220–bold war (arditismo) and the difference between what was happening in India and Ireland.

Political struggle and military war…Political struggle is enormously more complex: in a certain sense it can be compared to colonial wars or to old wars of conquest when, that is, the victorious army occupies or intends to occupy permanently all or part of the conquered territory.  In that case, the defeated army is disarmed and dispersed, but the struggle continues on the terrain of politics and of military “preparation.”  Thus, India’s political struggle against the English (and to some extent that of Germany against france, or of Hungary against the Little Entente) knoes three forms of war: war of movement, war of position, and underground war.  Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes a war of movement at certain moments and an underground war at others; the boycott is a war of position, strikes are a war of movement, the clandestine gathering of arms and of assault combat groups is underground war…Therefore, in these mixed forms of struggle, which have a fundamentally military character but are above all political (every political struggle, however, always has a military substratum), the use of the arditi requires the development of an original tactical concept for which the experience of war can provide only a stimulus, not a model…These forms belong specifically to [weak but exasperated] minorities opposing well-organized majorities, wheras modern arditismo presupposes a large reserve force, immobilized for various reasons but potentially effective, which supports and sustains it with individual contributions. (219-220)

Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action
Eds. Mario Diani and Doug McAdam
Introduction
“Why do Networks Matter? Rationalist and Structuralist Interpretations”
Roger V. Gould.
“Cross-talk in Movements: Re conceiving the Culture-Network Link”
Ann Mische
“Beyond Structural Analysis: Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Social Movements”
Doug McAdam
“Networks and Social Movements: A Research Programme”
Mario Diani

“A Theory of Structure, Duality, Agency, and Transformation”
William H. Sewell, Jr.

A Thousand Plateaus
“1. Introduction: Rhizome”
Gilles Deleuze
Felix Guatari

Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications
Clay Spinuzzi

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

Linked
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart
Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day

“A Simple Model of Global Cascades on Random Networks”
Duncan J. Watts

“A Theory of Relational Signals in Online Groups”
Uwe Matzat

“Community and Social Interaction in the Wireless City: Wi-Fi Use in Public and Semi-Public Spaces”
Keith Hampton and Neeti Gupta

“CommunityNetSimulator”
Jun Zhang, Mark S. Ackerman, and Lada Adamic

“Cooperation in Evolving Networks”
Nobuyuki Hanaki, Alexander Peterhansl, Peter S. Dodds, Duncan J. Watts

“Information Exchange and the Robustness of Organizational Networks”
Peter S. Dodds, Duncan J. Watts, and Charles F. Sabel

“Localizing the Internet”
John Postill

“Mail Art: Networking Without Technology”
Seeta Pena Gangadharan

“Mapping the Blogosphere”
Stephen D. Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun, and Jaekwan Jeong

“Myth and the Zapatista Movement: Exploring a Network Identity”
Adrienne Russell

“New Media, Networking, and Phatic Culture”
Vincent Miller

“Online Networks of Student Protest: The Case of the Living Wage Program”
J. Patrick Biddix and Han Woo Park

“Structural Holes are Good Ideas”
Ronald S. Burt

“The Contingent Value of Social Capital”
Ronald S. Burt

“The New Science of Networks”
Duncan J. Watts

“The Social Capital of Opinion Leaders”
Ronald S. Burt

“The Very Small World Well-Connected”
Xiolan Shi, Matthew Bonner, Lada Acamic, and Anna C. Gilbert

“The Virtual Geography of Social Networks”
Zizi Papacharissi

No editing done.

Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action
Eds. Mario Diani and Doug McAdam
Introduction
At the end of the first paragraph Diani states “Social movements are in other words, complex and highly heterogeneous network structures” (1), which seems a direct tie-in with the work of Shirkey and Rheingold.

“The very expansion of network studies of social movements renders an assessment of the applicability and usefulness of the concept an urgent and useful enterprise. The first reason for doing so is that empirical evidence is not universally supportive to the thesis of a link between networks and collective action” (2).

The simple acknowledgement of a relationship between the social networks of some kind and the development of collective action (whether in the form of personal ties linking prospective participants to current activists, or of defense counter-culture networks affecting rates of mobilization in specific areas) is no longer sufficient. Instead, it is important to specify ‘how networks matter’, in relation to both individuals participation (e.g. What is their relative contribution vis-a-vis individual attributes such as education or profession, broader political opportunities, or emotional dynamics? What types of networks do affect what type of participation?) as well as in relation to interorganizational dynamics (e.g. what does the shape of interorganiztational links tell us about the main orientations of specific movements?). (2-3)

The above quote is a series of this book’s goals, along with this one: “the book also addresses–albeit more indirectly–the question of ‘to whom (in the social science research community) should (social movement) networks matter’. We claim that they should matter to a much broader community than those identifying themselves as social movement researchers” (2-3).

The concept of network has become popular in the social sciences since it allows for flexibility; it allows for researchers to deal with the phenomena of change which are “difficult to contain within the boundaries of formal bureaucracies or nation states, or at the other pole, the individual actor” (4).

The search for social mechanisms (like networks) that help explain individual actors actions has moved the term “social movement” to the “set of phenomena” (4) in which actions occur that might be of interest to social scientist. The phrase has become denotative and sterilized.

Gradually, a different version of network analysis has also emerged, which does not emphasize empiricism and concreteness, and highlights instead the inextricable link between social networks and culture. Following Harrison White’s seminal contributions, social ties have been treated as consisting of processess of meaning attribution…Here linkage exists only to the extent that a shared discourse enables two or more actors to recognize their interdependence and qualify its terms: ‘a social network is a network of meanings’ [White 67]” (5).

Diani recommends using network analysis/network perspective as a way to “illuminate different dynamics, which are essential to our empirical understanding of [social] movements” (6). There is no unitary theory of how networks and movements work together, and according to Diani, most of the contributors to this specific book feel there isnt a need for one. This allows for the discussion of a wide variety of groups looking for social transformation, and allows scholars to apply a network perspective to any and all groups of individuals banning together for a common cause.

The section entitled “Networks of Individuals” (7) directly references Rheingold (8) and talks about media counts as a social network link. There are other writer-scholars listed who work in this subfield in the same line as Rheingold.

On page eight the concept of “strong” and “weak” ties comes up; the debate is whether the strength of the ties between individuals in an individual’s network should matter. Strong ties are expected to be important for high risk behaviors, while weak ties are hypothesized as important since they may “facilitate the contacts between a movement organization and a constituency with more moderate or at least diversified orientations, and/or the diffusion or the spread of a movement campaign” (8). This would seem to be the optimal tie for smart mobs.

Individual networks often form the ways that recruitment occurs (9).

Movements seem indeed to consist of multiple instances of collaboration on campaigns of different intensity and scope, with both the reoccurring presence of some actors and the more occasional presence of others…It is actually very difficult to think of a movement consisting of one organization, or at least as having one organization in a totally dominant position. When this happens, as in the instance of the …National Socialist party in Germany it is more appropriate to drop the term ‘movement’ altogether and concentrate instead on the concept of political organization. (10, 9)

Networks facilitate the movement of resources and the creation goals along with the sharing of information, but networks do not necessarily create mutual recognition nor do they promote the meaning of an incident and it importance equally to all members of the network. Shared identity is the key difference between a movement network and a coalition network. (10)

Think of networks as the old node network node representations. Networks do not equate to movements. Networks are the tracing of the architecture of connections that can form between individuals; between individuals and groups; between groups and organizations; between organizations and international organizations; or between international organizations and political parties (or any combination of a with b).

Network of Collectivises and Events on page 12 may be a point of interest (and therefore all the writes/scholars mentioned therein). Collectives and events are talked about in the idea of shared identity–the creation of a shared identity and solidarity through time together. How does this work with smart mobs? What if there is no real shared identity except the identity of momentary ally for a specific day and time? Are all smart mobs anonymous, or does an identity develop in the case of the Belarusian smart mobs?

Pg 15–protest cycles (Oliver and Myers); changes in patterns of relationships (Tilly and Wood).
pg 16–Seciton with Gould in brackets would be good to investigate.
Pg 17– Section with McAdam underlined sounds interesting.

Explorations of the networks-mobilization link in social movements have prompted broader reflections on the relationship between structure and agency and relational approaches to social theory.

Embrayer, M. (1997). ‘A manifesto for a relational sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 281-317.

–and Goodwin, J. (1994). ‘Network analysis, culture, and the problem of agency’, American Journal of Sociology, 99: 1411-54.

–and Mische, A. (1998). ‘What is agency?’, American Journal of Sociology, 103: 962-1023.

– and Sheller M. (1999). ‘Publics in history’, Theory and Society, 28: 145-97.

The intersection of individuals, organizations, and protest events over time has also been explored.

Bearman, P. and Everett, K.D. (1993). ‘The structure of social protest 1961-83′, Social Networks, 15: 171-200.

Mische, A. (1998). Projecting Democracy: Contexts and Dynamics of Youth Activism in the Brazilian Impeachment Movement, Doctoral dissertation, New School for Social Research.

– and Pattison, P. (2000). ‘Composing a civic arena: Publics, projects, and social settings’, Poetics, 27: 163-94.

Franzosi, R. (1999). ‘The return of the actor. Interaction networks among social actors during periods of high mobilization (Italy, 1919-22)’, Mobilization, 4: 131-49.

Osa, M. (2001). ‘Mobilizing structures and cycles of protest: Post Stalinsit contention in Poland, 1954-9′, Mobilization, 6: 211-31.

A strong interest in the network dimension of political action at large.

Prakash, S. and Selle, P. eds. (2003). Investigating Social Capital. New Delhi: Sage.

Action theory

Bordieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Giddens, A. (1984). A Contemporary Critique of Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sewell, W. J. Jr. (1992). ‘A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation’, American Journal of Sociology, 98: 1-29.

White, H. (1992). Identity and Control. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tilly, C. (1994). ‘Social movements as historially specific clusters of political performances’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 38: 1-30.

Diani, M. (2002). ‘Network analysis’, in B. Klandermans and S. Staggenborg (eds). Methods in Social Movement Research. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Norris, P. (2002). Democratic Phoenix. New York: Cambridge University Press. (ch 10)

The application of a network perspective could generate important insights on the process whereby events become a movement, through meaning attribution and recognition of commonalities, that is, through processes of identity construction.

Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging Codes. New York: Cambridge University Press

McAdam, D, Tarrow, S. and Tilly, C. (2001). Dynamics of Contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tilly, C. (2002). Stories, Identities, and Political Change. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

“Why do Networks Matter? Rationalist and Structuralist Interpretations”
Roger V. Gould.

Gould’s piece within this anthology is a way to meld the rationalist (def on 240) game theory models (lots of equtaions and prisoner dilemna situations) with the structuralist (def on 238) social construction theories to examine recruitment within activist causes. Using the empirically observed and oft documented phenomenon of recruitment through strong friendship ties, Gould demonstrates how rationalist scenarios fail to describe how this occurs; Gould proves his claim that in the prisoner’s dilemna only weakly tied acquaintances should be recruitment fodder since the only thing the recruiter has to offer is a stronger bond, while in the converse, strong tie friends can only suffer the severing of friendship ties. Gould returns to the empirically observed and documented incidents of recruitment in social activist movements to show how this theory fails to describe experiential reality, and then combines the structuralist ideas of friendship, the possibility of new friends within the new organization, and the social narratives of activism as a higher, more intense bond of camaraderie to explain how already anchored, strong, and long term friendships become the best options for recruitment to a social cause. To back all of this, and to ensure an amount of cachet among sociologists, Gould describes these relationships with long, intense equations that can be found throughout the article. Each appears within the body of text to symbolically represent his concepts and to allow for a RAD method which will help other scholars make predictions about social activist networks they (other scholars) are studying. This ability to predict is the exigency for this chapter. Gould is attempting to produce a theory that allows for the creation of RAD scholarship; he wants something more than two competing theories which use different methods but both claim success when applied to events after the fact.

How does the use of technology to form flash/smart mobs complicate the ideas of recruitment? No one has to be a friend, they need only to be loosely associated through a website, listserv, advertised cause, or virtual “word of mouth.”

“Cross-talk in Movements: Re conceiving the Culture-Network Link”
Ann Mische

This seems a bit like socio-linguistics and concepts of power between interlocutors, relationships, and framing of events through the creation of experiential reality via talk (this is based on my one class during my Master’s program–apologies if this is way off base). Her contribution is that talk delimits the network, that is, defines the parameters for what makes network A different from network B with speaker X inhabiting both.

Mische continues on, explaining that once the networks are defined through talk, the individuals that make up the networks use talk and different discourse strategies to position themselves within these networks (covered on pages 269-273). Mische, like Gould, is attempting to meld structural and rational. Misch advocates using the more rational approach to map out the network relationships while using the discourse analysis to understand what rhetorical strategies allow for success as interlocutors navigate the various discursive/political/social movement networks they belong to. Mische differs from Gould in that she does not stop with recruitment, but looks at alliances and solidarity building among individuals from different groups interacting with one another as representatives of another group (and therefore social network). Another difference: no equations.

“Beyond Structural Analysis: Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Social Movements”
Doug McAdam

McAdam uses the space of this essay to explain the history behind the social turn in social movement studies, and through this, explain why the turn has been beneficial to the field. The impetus behind this, according to McAdam, is to counter the backlash of scholars who feel the structural bias (social construction) has become too common.

Interesting fact: social movements against the status quo were considered the provenance of abnormal psychology; the US was–according to the dominant political science models–a pluralist nation where power was shared equally (281-282).

McAdam claims the social turn has provided much in the way of understanding how social movements actually work, and he feels that if more network researchers employed ethnography as their qualitative method (several use case study), then there would be a better example of what happens at the meso level of networks to create alliances across different networks (organizations) in different and disparate locales. In particular, McAdam wants to find empirical evidence of the mechanisms that exist which make this happen; he feels they exist on the meso level, and researchers are focused either on the micro level (the individual joining a network) or the macro level (event studies which allow for reverse engineering to describe how the movement worked, which is fine for hindsight but horrible for future predicitons). The mechanisms McAdam postulates exist for scale shift (when a movement, or cause, moves from a local setting and one network to another network which may be geographical distant) is listed on page 294; interestingly his stages he calls “attribution of similarity” and “emulation” read and work much like Burke’s identification and consubstantiality. It isn’t a one-for-one fit, but it seems close.

This chapter combines several of the concepts from the previous chapters of the book. What I find interesting is what McAdam terms “mechanisms” I would call “rhetorical moves.” It seems empirical evidence and not formal representation is what McAdam is after.

Structural analysis is not, at least in this chapter, the same as a cultural analysis. McAdam intimates the structural perspective is a view which takes into consideration a network’s use of the available structures and the resources those structures provide. While there is an element of what I’d call social construction, it isn’t on par with the connotations that is often associated with that term in bad humanities scholarship–saying something is socially constructed isn’t the badly cobbled together finale to an argument.

“Networks and Social Movements: A Research Programme”
Mario Diani

Diani closes the book advocating for a “radical way to reorganize the insights and inputs coming from the different chapters of this book” (318), which means using a network perspective of movements to place “the attention more squarely on the connectivity between events, both in terms of meaning attribution and in terms of chains of actors (connected by events) and events (connected by actors)” (305). These are the unspoken, but prevalent, assumptions Diani overtly challenges with this chapter:

1. that the study of social movements is tantamount to the study of the organizations active within them;
2. that network forms of organization are distinctive of (new) social movements focusing on issues of identity rather than political change; and
3. that social movements tend to coincide with the public challenges conducted against authorities and opponents on specific sets of issues. (317)

Diani explains these assumptions are pointless as they conflate many elements of social movements and lead to scholarly dead ends.  Instead, Diani claims a network perspective of social movements creates a research programme that has the basic following points:

1. recognition of the duality of network processes as a recondition to appropriate multilevel investigations;
2. attention to the network processes connecting events, activities, and ideas, and not only to those linking individuals or organizations;
3. recognition of the multiplicity of networks potentially linking different actors or events;
4. attention to the time dimension in network processes;
5. recognition of the value of current approaches to social movements in the investigation of homophily processes.  (318)

The above mentioned lists, along with the network illustrations–and their designations and explanations on pages 307-313–are the most important sections of this chapter.

“Social Networks Matter.  But How?”
Florence Passy

In this essay Passy answer her question by illustrating how social networks work in recruiting new members to organizations, and more importantly, how network factors shape the new recruits definition of the social/political issue at hand; the identification of the individual recruit with the organization; how the individual sees the organizational and individual effectiveness in dealing with the issue; the intensity of an individual recruit’s participation in the cause; and how the recruit sees themselves in relation to governmental agencies. Essentially, she presses for a phenomenological approach to researching networks and their effects on social movements, which also leads to her push for qualitative research methods (also, she recommends certain types of methods, discusses the roadblocks to using such methods, and then through the essay demonstrates how to satisfactorily circumvent said roadblocks). This approach, in turn, allows her to foreground social networks as all important since the demarcations of these networks provide the visible tracings of how social movements occur, and at the same time, these networks bridge the distance between rationalist and structuralist approaches to studying social movements.

Here are three network functions Passy finds central in social movements:

1. the social function–creates an initial disposition to participate; it frames issues in a specific way that allows potential participants to identify with certain political issues (24).
2. the structural-connection function–networks play a mediating role by connecting prospective participants to an opportunity for mobilization and enabling them to convert their political consciousness into action (24).  The function occurs before prospective participants join a social movement organization.
3. the decision-shaping function–the crucial nexus between individual decisions and social relations: the decision to join collective action is influenced by the action of other participants.  (25)

Network connections change potential participants perceptions of experiential reality and ready them for a role in collective action.  How do the above mentioned functions work in a flash mob situation?  Are social networking technologies part of the network, and do the qualities associated with technology prep participants for finite events?  Are flash mobs effective only as part of a larger strategy for a brick and mortar organization, or can they be used in a social movment without a central organization for lasting change (the Belarus example)?  This essay deals with individual networks, but what about the essay in this text that work on the inter organizational level? Are smart mobs more effective when coordinating the efforts of several groups like in the Battle for Seattle in ‘99?

“Networks in Opposition: Linking Organizations Through Activists in the Polish People’s Republic”
Maryjane Osa

Osa’s chapter comes out of the “Interorganizational Networks” section of the anthology. As such, Osa looks at the networks formed by various special interest, radical, and activist organizations that formed in Poland from the years 1965-1982. She divides this time period into three distinct networks and explains the positive and negatives of each interorganizational network formed in this time period. The key concept to take away from this chapter: The more embedded the organizations were within a social network, and the more complex the social network, the more likely a true protest cycle (protests on the same or related topic across all social strata) would form, and the more protected all the organizations (and their members) were from governmental reprisal.

An interesting proposition Osa makes at the end of the chapter: “the presence of marginal, radical groups (e.g. rebels or national separatists) can benefit mainstream opposition groups as long as the government sees the mainstream opposition as a less dangerous alternative than the radicals” (101).

Money quote:

The general finding of my study is that network development is related to the protest arena in the following way: protest peaks arise when the interorganizational structures in the opposition domain reach the highest degree of development, that their is most complex form. ‘Complexity’ is measured by the size of the domain, the number of cliques in the structure, the level of membership overlaps, and the number of brokers. This suggests that as the measures of network structural complexity increase, there will be a greater likelihood of sustained protest mobilization. (101)

“Networks, Diffusion, and Cycles of Collective Action”
Pamela E. Oliver and Daniel J. Myers

In this chapter Oliver and Myers are trying to create formal models of the empircal data they’ve gathered concerning moments of protest (it appears the cycles of protest is interchangeable with cycles of collective action).

“Social Movement Networks Virtual and Real”
Mario Diani

Diani defines social movements as networks since it:

identifies several dimensions of social movements that CMC [computer mediated communications] may be expected to shape. These include (a) the behaviour of specific movement actors, individuals or organizations; (b) the relations linking individual activists and organizations to each other (Diani 1995; della Porta and Diani 1999: chapter 5) (c) the feelings of mutual identification and solidarity which bond movement actors together and secure the persistence of movements even when specific campaigns are not taking place. (387)

and also makes clear how each movment has developed in regards to its immediate locality, culture, and public sphere. For the most part, the article is concerned with how CMC (coming into its own when this article was written–2000) affects these networks, and in what ways CMC is actually useful to a movement. Diani makes a distinction between social movement organizations (SMOs) using the criteria of what resources they mobilize; the first being professional resource mobilization (acquiring funds from passive members), the second being participatory resrouces (getting bodies to participate in demonstrations or volunteer time for business functions), and the third is transnational networks which mobilize for a broadly understood or generally socially acceptable causes and relying on a relatively small core of professionals to keep the movement going.

Diani is trying to decide if virtual communities where the masses can organize into specific, effecitve movements is possible. Diani concludes–using the terms of Virnoche and Marx–that it is possible, but the most effective CMC undergirded organizations are those who have face to face interactions in material reality and only use CMC as an extension of the community they’ve established in experiential reality. There’s three variables possible, and here’s their definitions:

Community networks: situations in which actors share the same geographical space regularly (e.g. members of an urban community) or
Virtual extensions: sitautions where actors intermittently share the same geographical space (e.g. employees of the same firm, students of the same school, or members of voluntary associations) or
Virtual communities: situations where actors never share the same geographical space (e.g. people sharing some broad world-views, interests, or concerns, but lacking opportunities for direct, face-to-face interaction). This is often characterized by potentially anonymous and purely mediated patterns of interaction. (392)

Diani’s final verdict is that virtual communiuties built on CMC are least radical in their platforms and goals; essentially it’s like the “Causes” app on Facebook where people support the broad goal of educating women in Africa, or finding a cure for cancer. It isn’t that these things aren’t important, but they aren’t causes that need the support of a SMO to make it happen, ie, who would argue against finding a cure for cancer? With no need for an advocate, these groups can function as a virtual community where there is no physical contact nor need for trust. At best, CMC strengthen ties within a network of people forming an SMO and who have at least intermittment physical contact.

“A Theory of Structure, Duality, Agency, and Transformation”
William H. Sewell, Jr.

In this article Sewell sets out to redefine the term “structure”, which is used heavily in sociology and yet difficult to define, and when it is defined, is often given the connotation of determinism. In Sewell’s definition, structures are made of both cultural schemas embedded within actors and “sets of resources that empower and constrain social action and tend to be reproduced by that action” (27). The point of this defintion is to demonstrate that the social status quo is promoted by the structures within a society, but at the same time those structures can be manipulated by actors to promote social change. This reconfiguring of cultural schemas (commonplaces, ultimate terms) and resources by an actor is what Sewell claims constitutes agency, and therefore, means that structure(s) in a given society do promote the status quo and can also be utilized to create societal change. Sewell explains:

Agents are empowered by structures, both by the knowledge of cultural schemas that enables them to mobilize resources and by the access to resources that enables them to enact schemas. This differs from ordinary sociological usage of the term because it insists that structure is a profoundly cultural phenomenon and from ordinary anthropological usage because it insists that structure always derives from the character and distribution of resources in the everyday world. Structure is dynamic, not static; it is the continually evolving outcome and matrix of a process of social interaction. Even the more or less perfect reproduction of structures is a profoundly temporal process that requires resourceful and innovative human conduct. But the same resourceful agency that sustains the reproduction of structures also makes possible their transformation-by means of transpositions of schemas and remobilizations of resources that make the new structures recognizable as transformations of the old. Structures, I suggest, are not reified categories we can invoke to explain the inevitable shape of social life. (27)

In this way agency is a direct outcome of structure. Sewell pulls the mental gymnastics needed to return agency to actors in a discipline heavily influenced by French structuralism and Marxist readings of empirical data.

If “network(s)” is substituted for “structure(s)” in Sewell’s article, does it connect with Gunkel’s “Hacking Cyberspace“? Are collective actions and social movements easier to to conceptualize as the blasphemer who “comprises a calculated response that understands, acknowledges, and continually works within an established system. Like a parasite, the blasphemer is not an alien proceeding from and working on the outside. The blasphemer is an insider, who not only understands the intricacies of the system but does so to such an extent that she or he is capable of fixating on its necessary but problematic lacunae, exhibiting and employing them in such a way that disrupts the system to which the blasphemer initially and must continually belong. Although these operations can be reduced to and written off as mere adolescent pranks, they comprise more often than not a form of serious play” (801)?

Money quote:

I do see agency as profoundly social or collective. The transpositions of schemas and remobilizations of resources that constitute agency are always acts of communication with others. Agency entails an ability to coordinate one’s actions with others and against others, to form collective projects, to persuade, to coerce, and to monitor the simultaneous effects of one’s own and others’ activities. Moreover, the extent of the agency exercised by individual persons depends profoundly on their positions in collective organizations. (21)

A Thousand Plateaus
“1. Introduction: Rhizome”
Gilles Deleuze
Felix Guatari

Here’s the definiton of a rhizome and here’s how D&G introduce it:

A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. (6)

From here, D&G run with this concept and speak out against organizational structures (physical or conceptual) that resemble trees–trees mean hierarchy; it means either/or thinking; trees mean dichotomies; trees means a worldview incompatiable with experiential reality. Rhizomes promote the concept of multiplicity which is the exact opposite of trees. Rhizomes match reality in complexity and ephermal quality, and as a mental schema–unlike trees–allow actors to “ceaselessly [establish]
connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles…The tree is filiation, but the
rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance” (7, 25).

What’s interesting is that rhizomes, according to D&G, have no long term memory. They work in the here and now, in the middle of the moment, as part of a plateau within an episode of a milieu. This is the most optimistic version of flash/smart mobs, but does this work when the rest of society is arborescent?

Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications
Clay Spinuzzi
Chapter 1: Networks, Generes, and Four Little Disruptions

Spinuzzi shares what questions drove him to write this book in the first few pages of this book: “How on earth does this compnay function when its right hand often doesn’t know what its left hand is doing? How do such knowledge work organizations function and thrive, and how can we develop a better theoretical and empirical account of this sort of work?” (2). To demonstrate how this happens, Spinuzzi goes over four disruptions that are pretty common within the network, and as the chapter goes on, explains the two methods he’ll use to trace out these types of disruptions, actor-network theory and activity theory. Both are at times seen as antithetical to the other, as Spinuzzi explains “they…have sharp disagreements, and in airing those disagreements, and in those disagreements we can productively examine many of our assumptions about work organization and structure” (4). Utilizing the shared commonalities of networks and genre, Spinuzzi figures he can answers his questions.

Important definitions:

Network: An assemblage that makes up Telecorp (Spinuzzi’s object of study): Internet Help Desk workers, computers, fibers, sales reps, telephones, software, folders, Credit and Colletions workers, computers, fibers, sales reps, software, vice-presidents, routines, credit reports, wires, hallway conversations, servers, folders, cubicles, and so on…what interests me is not the network so much as the net work: the ways in which the assemblage is enacted, maintained, extneded, and transformed; the ways in which knowledge work is strategically and tactically performed in a heavily networked organization. (16)

Genres: typified rhetorical responses to recurring situations–do much of the enacting that holds a network together. They do this work not by virtue of being simply text types or forms but because the are tools-in-use. That is, in this analysis, I stress genre as a behavioral descriptor rather than a formal one…As relatively stable ways of producing and interpreting texts, genres impart some measure of stability to the networks in which they circulate. But at the same time, genres develop, hybrdizie, interconnet, intermediate, and proliferate to support developments in those networks, providing the flexibility that networks need if thet are to extend further and enroll other allies or activities. Genres are made up of texts. The word text comes from the root word textre, to weave together, and I suggest that’s exactly what texts do: weave together these networks. (17)

Discussion of actor-network theory versus activity theory 5-8.
Bakhtin and social language 26.

The main difference between activity theory and actor-network theory is that activity theory emphasizes and traces out the social-cultural-historical network of an organization, while actor-network theory stresses and traces out the political-rhetorical network of an organization. Also, activity theory is more structured, more rigid in its conceptualiztion of social networks; activity theory is more inclined to describe social networks as rhisomes, fluids, ecosystems with no hierarchical top or bottom. For Spinuzzi’s work with Telecorp (a fictious name by the way) cherry picking from each theory does not destroy his anlaysis since Telecorp “built a single sociotechnical network, for though there is an abstract difference between these two sorts of network, there is no practical difference” (28); and while he does not promise “a ‘just right’ solution” he does use genres “as a way to frame the stability [activity theory]/instability [actor-network theory] dialogue more productively. Genre supplies an account of stablity-with-flexibility that is more fleshed out than fluids, modes of coordination, and regimes and at the same time leverages the notion of inscription that is so important to actor-network theory” (23).

Text of note used by Spinuzzi: The Body Multiple by Annemarie Mol. Mol argues that “the things we take as settled, scientifically quantifiable, and observable phenomena are not really just objects-in-the-world; rather they always multiply. Reality, she says, multiples when we focus on artifacts or practices” (14). Spinuzzi explains this by describing Mol’s example of atherosclerosis (14).

Chapter Two: What is a Network?
Spinuzzi answers this question with the example of a dog who dies during a Telecorp service call and an explanation of who within Telecorp is responsible for this death by examining how Telecorp works from an activity theory and actor-network theory perspective.

Using this approach, Spinuzzi demonstrates how the Telecorp is a woven network, one that has a cultural-historical development cycle (activity theory–all of its pertinent background and foci can be found on pages 42-46) and similtaneously a spliced network–one where an existing network has different nodes jacked in as more interested parties find the existing network beneficial (actor-network theory–all of its historical and theoretical info can be found on pages 39-42). Activity theory emphasizes individual agency and how that agency develops over time; actor-network theory focuses on all pieces (human and non-human) that became actants and join a network for their political and social advantage (this also means rhetoric is important as these actants persuade one another to form or break alliances with other actants).

For Spinuzzi both abstract, theoretical concepts can be seen working at Telecorp; the thick, sticky connections that bind all of the nodes and act as the mediatory ground for all nodes are texts. Texts “weave relationships between individual actors (both human and nonhuman) and collectives. Texts translate the actors in such a way to define them and to facilitate smooth, predictable relations” (Calon qtd. in Spinuzzi 48). These texts transform the bewildering and diverse information put into the network into workable narratives the actors in the network can decipher and use; texts become the information networks transform and make into something useful and material. This transforming of information to something of material value is net work.

Spinuzzi calls out four characteristics of networks.

1. Heterogeneous (46)
2. Multiply Linked (47)
3. Transformative (48)
4. Blackboxed (49)

These are the four things that AT and ANT can agree on about networks, and the four characteristics Spinuzzi puts–in his words–in conversation throughout this chapter.

Chapter Three: How Are Network Theorized?

This chapter is more work justifying the use of both activity theory and actor-network theory to explain the Telecorp network.  To do this, Spinuzzi gives the history of each project and how these respective histories shape the way each set of theoretical adherents see, describe, and value the transformative work of networks.

Activity theory.  This network connects through “the weave” since it’s concerned with the cultural and historical development of networks.  It comes out of ed., ed. psych, and psych with a dash of Frederich Engels Maxist dialectics and Soviet scholarship.  The specifics can be found on pages 74-84.

Actor-network theory.  This network connects through the splice, and is based in the practical sociology forwarded by Machiavelli (yes, the guy who wrote The Prince).  Spinuzzi explains:

[A] spliced understanding of networks invloves understanding them as becoming interconnected in ways that are not necessarily organic, self-contained, or unified.  Like dialectics, a spliced or rhizomatic understanding rejects simple cause-effect relationships; unlike dialectics, t assumes multiplicity rather than immanent unity in everything and understands change not necessarily as development.  (81). 

The specifics can be found on 81-93.

Chatper Four: How Are Networks Historicized

Spinuzzi walks throught the history of Telecorp using both activity theory and actor network theory to demonstrate how both differ but both provide useful insights into how the network that is Telecorp came  into being and how that history effects the net work (work done within a network that deals primarily in information) done by Telecorp.  The largest thing to be taken away from the chapter is how activity theory works through dialectical contradictions to make transformations traceable, while actor-network theory sees translations as the key to making transformations viewable.

Here’s what an activity theory analysis looks like:

[A]ctivity theory understands history as development driven by contradictions that develop within and among activity systems.  In this woven understanding, activities become morem complex overtime and forge increasingly wide networkds with other activites, periodically forming and then dealing with contradicitons.  In dealing with these contradictions, activity systems transform themselves and their networks.  Here, history develops linearly, unrolling like a scroll and bifurcating like a tree.

In an activity-theoretical reading, the different articulations of universal service were responses to contradictions in th edeveloping activity network of US telecommunications, and each articulation set the stage for the next contradiction.  (118)

Here are the differences between both in Spinuzzi’s words:

An actor-network analysis of the same history looks quite different.  In contrast to activity theory’s dialectical account of history as a series of contradictions, actor-network theory’s rhizomatic account is that of translations.  This account is not developmental, as activity theory’s is, although it is still material and transformational.  it provides a spliced understanding, one that highlights contingencies and stabilizd-for-now settlements.  Here, actants are continuously being defined (ie they are continually defining each other) and continuously converging, intersecting, and splicing.  This splicing strengthens the network by locking actants into roles and stabilizing them, so the longer the network becomes the stronger it becomes.  Of course, there is alays the potential for treason: any actant can pull out of the settlement and necessitate a renegotiation.

Unlike an activity network, an actor-network does not assume a common object or motivation.  What keeps an actor-network together is the way in which a situation is problematized and the ways in which actants are defined, enrolled, and mobilized within that problem space.  This negotiation is always tentative and somewhat unstable, and therefore it is always reversible (in theory, at least)…these alliances accumulate like layers of sediment: it becomes harder to undo a settlement when other layers of sediment have accumlated on it. (123-124)

Chapter Four is a space to understand Telecorp’s “strategic stance” (134) within the telecommunications industry based on the history of the industry using activity theory and actor-network theory.  Spinuzzi explains that Chapter Five will be the space where we look at Telecorp’s tactics.

Chapter Five: How Are Network Enacted?

The tactics alluded to in the last chapter are explained more fully here.  “Telecorp’s net work [intentionally seperated by Spinuzzi, not a typo] is enacted through standing sets of transformations, transformations that include textual representations in different genres” (171).  For Spinuzzi net work is information work, and this information oftne comes across as different types of text that are transformed in different ways to make the information meaningful for different actants within the network.  Spinuzzi explains that

texts (from textere, to weave together) both weave and splice networks…Texts weave and splice [networks together] because they are inscriptions, concrete traces that represent phenomena in stable and circuable ways.  They appear in genres, regular responses to recurren situations that can connect activities in continuous, developmental ways while accomodating changes and that function ecologically.  And they are boundary objects, artifacts that serve as mutual reference points across different activities while retaining different meanings whithin these activities…we can trace the trajectory of genres as they circulate through and build networks of human acitivity. (145)

Texts can come in three different forms.

1. Inscriptions.  Inscriptions are “relatively immutable media that resist transportation” (Callon, 1991, p 135).  This resistance leads some actor-network theorists to call them “immutable mobiles”: referential inscriptions that can circulate from one locale to another while resisting deformation (Latour, 1987, p 227).  These circulating representations undergo standing sets of transformations, weaving and splicing together the material assemblage that is the sociotechnical network…In representing phenomena, inscriptions link those phenomena to particular activites…multiplying inscriptions mutilplies the relaities that they decide…Recall Annemarie Mol’s study of atherosclerosis…As Law argues [2004a], ”Multiplicity is the product or effect of different sets of inscription devices and practices…producing different and conflicting standards about reality” (p 32).  And these different realities overlap and interfere with one another. (145,146) 
2. Genres.  Inscriptions provide a way to fix, record, and dominate phenomena by capturing representations.  But for those iscriptions to circulate more widely and regularly, and for them to interact in predictable ways with other inscriptions, they can’t be entirely idiosyncratic.  Types of inscriptions tend to develop over time within particular activities to meet recurrent needs.  These genres provide a developmental, stabilizing influence on human activity…Genres tend to be living, constantly adapting and hybridizing with other genres in order to fit more particular and restricted situations while providing regularity and stability.  Genres are, then, woven or developed over time to respond to recurrent situations but also spliced or hybridized to adapt to local conditions and intersecting activities…Genre, in the sense I am using it here, is a behavorial rather than a structural construct, a tool-in-use. (146,147)
3. Boundary Objects.  Star and Griesmeter define boundary objects as “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a constat identity across sites” (1989, p 393).  Boundary objects are material links between two or more activites, functioning differently in each activity, providing a productive difference and often a coordinating role…Boundary objects can be texts, but they are often other objects that take on a representational function. (147-148)

Spinuzzi sums up:

So texts are inscriptions that represent phenomena, belong to genres that constrcut relatively stable relationships, and fucntion as boundary objects that bridge among different activities.  Texts create circulating representations: representations that themselves become represented by other representations (Latour, 1999b).  In doing so, texts help define the groups that they weave and splice together.  Circulating texts means circulating relatively similiar texts types (genres) that splice activites by forging a connection where one did not exist and weave activites by serving as a boundary connection in a developing activity. (148)

The rest of the chapter is Spinuzzi demonstrating the net work of Telecorp through tracing genres in four differnt case studies; the genres are being discussed with an eye towards how “they characterize texts and relations and as they function as boundary objects circulating among activities” (149).

135-144 Interesting take on workers in the information age.  There is no more modular style factory work, ergo, no more stability, no lifetime employment, no one lifetime position, no concept of competency and expertise, and no way to organize since all workers are indivduals constantly in competition with one another without any one entity to rally against as everyone is constantly employed by a new company on a regular basis.  Companies which perform net work have their employees amassed on the borders of the company, and in the case of Telecorp, working under different banners but working together since they are working with (or selling and reselling and leasing from other companies different services) the same telecommunicatons network/services to different customers.  Every worker learns the lingo of the other worker’s employer since they often work collaboratively, and because these employers offer services and not products, all the workers must work as if they are one company so the customer is not confused about who provides her services.  The interconnection and interlinking of these companies is “blackboxed”, and this blackboxing means that the workers form assemblages that ensure services reach individual customers.  This set up carries through on all levels of knowledge work, meaning “[t] he new social and economic organization based on the information technologies aims at decentralizing management, indvidualizing work, and customizing markets, thereby segmenting work and fragmenting socities” (Castells qtd in Spinuzzi 139).

Chapter Six: Is Our Network Learning?

Continuing the talk of workers earning a living through knowledge work, Spinuzzi lists all the things these folks must endlessly learn (new social languages, new procedures, new technologies, etc) at an amazing pace to keep their jobs.  In this vien, Spinuzzi quotes scholars who’ve created terms to describe this constant learning on the job. Deleuze calls them “dividuals”; Haraway calls them “deskilled”; Catsells terms them “reskilled”; Zuboff and Maxmin designate these workers as engaging in “lifelong learning” (173).  Spinuzzi reiterates these workers, like the networks they form as actants, are assemblages of the different texts, tools, identities, multiple links, infastructure, beliefs, trainings, and rules that make them net workers (he also comments these knowledge workers are exactly like Haraway’s cyborgs; this is in the previous chapter, I think).  This constant learning is the product of  workplaces which do net work; workplaces such as these have endless turnover and retrainings with no expectation of long term (not to mention lifelong) employment.  The configuration of Telecorp as an interpenetrated network creates this environment.

This also causes problems in training at Telecorp.  Since Telecorp does knowledge work and not modular factory work, it organizational shape is more rhizomatous than arborescent, and when it comes to creating a systematic knowledge base, not stable enough for a comprehensive training program.  This makes for a hodge-podge of training techniques (trial-and-error, stories, apprenticeship) that should, in theory with so many different things to be learned, create trajectories that lo0k like spirals (if they were mapped out).  Spinuzzi claims these paths–due to the hit-and-miss application–are more like eddies since the training is always “disconnected, divided activites and ‘heterogenous patchworks’” (189).

The chapter closes with Spinuzzi explaining how employees of Telecorp do learn what they need to know to perform their job.  In a moment of actants exhibiting the same qualities of the networks they constitute, Spinuzzi claims the employees at Telecorp learn how to do their jobs: through the four elements of networks (heterogenous, mutiply linked, black-boxed, and transformative) (192-195).  Since the employees learned, and since the employees are the actants within the network that makes up Telecorp, the network can does learn.

Even with this learning there are problems.  Spinuzzi explains:

Telecorp’s learning and training measures were better suited to a smaller organization with less turnover and consequently stressed contingencies rather thn principles.  The result was an organization whose learning was tactical rather than strategic and reactive instead of proactive…Yet–and I emphasize this again, because it’s easy to forget–Telecorp still worked. The network still learned…And that brings us back to the question I asked at the beginning of this book: How on earth does Telecorp function when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing? (196) 

Conclusion: How Does Net Work?

The conclusion gives advice to workers (200-202), managers (202-204), and researchers (204-205).  Below are the hot topics for each.

Workers.  Workers have to live this deskilled, always on the border existence that comes with net work.  Spinuzzi recommends they learn three things: Rhetoric, Time Management, and Project Management.  When discussing rhetoric, Spinuzzi asserts workers need to become strong rhetors, and that the commonplace which says rhetoric is lying needs to be dropped in favor of the defintion which explains rhetoric as argumentation and persuasion.  Spinuzzi says “net workers sorely need to udnerstand how to make arguments, how to persuade, how to build trust and stable alliances, how to negotiate and bargain and horse-trade across boundaries.  In net work, which is intricately and unpredictably conencted with everyone on the border, workers coudl find themselves doing this rhetorical work with nearly anyone. Like Machiavelli, they must persuade locals to show them the hidden passagees that allow them to accomplish their work” (201). 

Managers.  Managers live almost a precarioius existence as workers, and the skills Spinuzzi recommends mangagers learn is black-boxing, strategic thinking, and training.  Black-boxing, as describe when discussing the network that is Telecorp, is the facade of a stand alone mechanism which handles all information internally and magically produces results.  This often isn’t the case, and for managers this is something they can create at their individual level by producing “stabilizing regimes” such as liasons (workers/positions that develop to create stable connections across groups within the network), APIs (application program interfaces on a material level, that is, tools, routines, protocols that may be applied to various situations to create desirable results), and aggregations (applications that allow for the aggregation of organic work practices, eg, tagging parts of data by workers to trace why and how the data is used in specific ways and what transformative practices were applied.  This should allow for the creation of folksonomies that workers can fall back on and managers can use in training).

Strategic thinking.  Essentially, this is empowering workers to take over leadership roles and sharing project information with them.  This creates a sense of ownership for the workers and project buy-in for the managers.

Training.  Most important, training should mimic the horizontal structure that net work takes on as it reaches and knots with other networks and net workers (eg BigCorp), or even crossing departmental boundaries within (for example) the Telecorp network.  Boundary crossing is the norm for all net work, and that should be stressed in the training.

Researchers.  Spinuzzi recommends researchers fight the urge to bind their case studies artificial (I assume this is common due to researchers wishing to make the project managable for them).  Spinuzzi advises resarchers to “follow the actors and texts, the contradictions, the disruptions, and especially the genres” (204).  Spinuzzi also stresses the importance of working with the subjects of the case study, ie, research participants should be allowed to define the events and genres involved in thie own work, to collectively construe the units and boundaries involved in their work” (205).

The book closes with Spinuzzi arguing for activity theory as the best theoretical lens to study networks with.  While he admits it has limitations in it currect form (dialectics, contradiction, development, modular work, implied dialectical synthesize with a consequential evolution, arborescent, structural explanations of activity), Spinuzzi sees promise in work utilizing Bakhtin’s dialogism.  Spinuzzi explains his advocacy saying ” Yrjo Engestrom and his colleagues have started to use dialogism to charactie how activities interact without dialectical synthesis…dialogism provides a way to better acknowledge and deal with rhetoric in net work.  It provides a way to better way to build in, rather than implicitly squeeze out, the multiplicity of perspectives and n-dimension articulations among activites” (206).

This use of activity theory, according to Spinuzzi, makes for a strategic stance that allows researchers to survey “the ground for possibilites” and come up with ways to allow workers, managers, researchers, and theorist to “retain the dynamism and flexibility necessary to cope with net work” (207).

The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

Prolegomenon
“We’re Tired of Trees”

This opens with a talk about the importance of networks within society, and is especially harsh on any type of version that portrays networks as liberatory (this isn’t to say they think networks are a tool of the state, but they do see them as neutral–they are neither liberatory nor tolitarian).  Here are the questions they see as important:

First query: What is the profile of the current geopolitial struggle? Is it a question of sovereign states fighting nonstate actors?  Is it a question of centralized armies fighting decentralized guerillas? Hierarchies fighitng networks?  Or is a new global dynamic on the horizon? 

Second query: Networks are important.  But does the policy of American unilaterialism provide significant counterexample to the claim that power today is network based?  Has a singular sovereignty won out in global affairs? (4-5)  

Their answer isn’t definitive (and they do admit it).  Here’s the answer in their words:

We cannot begin to answer the question definitively.  Instead we want to suggest that the juncture between socereignty and networks is the place where the apparent contradictions in which we live can best be understood.  It is the friction between the two that is interesting.  Our choice should not simply be “everything is different” or “nothing has changed” [the two poles they see as doggedly presented everytime networks and politics is brought up]; instead, one should use this dilemma as problematic through which to explore many of the shifts in society and control over the last several decades.  (5)

G&T’s argument has three steps:

1) The modern period is characterized by both symmetrical political conflicts waged by centralized power blocs, and also asymmetrical political conflicts in which networked actors struggle against centralized powers.

Many have further suggested that asymmetric conflict is in fact a historical response to the centralization of power.  This type of asymmetric intervnetion, a political form bred into existence as the negative likeness of its agtagonist, is the inspiration for the concept of  “the exploit,” a resonnant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert the dominant political diagram.  Examples include the suicide bomber (versus the police), peer-to-peer protocols (versus the music conglomerates), guerrillas (versus the army), netwar (versus cyberware), subcultures (versus the family), so on.

2) The present day is symmetrical again, but this time in the symmetrical form of networks fighting networks.

A new sovereignty, native to global networks, has recently been established, resulting in a new alliance between “control” and “emergence.”  Networks exist in a new kind of global universalism, but one coextensive with a permanent state of internal inconsistency and exeptionalism.  In this network exception, what is at stake is a newly defined sense of nodes and edges, dots and lines, things and events– networked phenomena that are at once biological and informatic.

3) To be effective, future politcal movements must discover a new exploit.

A wholly new topology of resistance must be invented that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network was in realtionship to power centers.  Resistance is asymmetry.  The new exploit will be an “antiweb.”  It will be what we call later an “exceptional topology.”  It will have to consider the radically unhuman elements of all networks. It will have to consider the nonhuman within the human, the level of “bits and atoms” that are even today leveraged as value-lade biomedi for proprietary interests.  It has yet to be invented, but the newly ascendant network sovereigns will most likely breed the anitweb into existence, just as the old twentieth-century powers bred their own demise, their own desertion.  (21-22)

This topology must come into existence since the US (according to G&T) are the “contemporary figurehead of sovereignty-in-networks” proving that old superpowers can use networks to maintain their superordinate position on the global scene.  G&T assert this has happened through the transformation of “elusive networks” (Deleuze and Guattari qtd in Galloway and Thacker 21) that in the past threatened power centers.  Borrowing from Deleuze, they note a new network form came  into being, one where “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control” were leveraged by the US.  Through these new networks the US was able to derive its own sovereingty using:

the curious dual rhetoric of the “international presence” in peaekeeping operations combined with an “American-led” force, an equivocaiton held together only by the most flimsy political fantasy.  This flimsy assimilation is precisely the model for sovereignty in networks.  (21)

Nodes

Galloway and Thacker open this section pointing out the concept of connectivity is “highly privleged in today’s society” (26).  The problems is that no one has explained what this means, nor how it this phenomenom might be critiqued; the lack of an explanation means that information technology is often seen as a black box which fosters a general willingness to ignore politics witin a networked world.

To remedy this, G&T take up the work of Hardt and Negri and note that H&N’s concept of “empire” casts empire as “fluid, flexable, dynamic, and far-reaching” (27), implying that the ability to control networks comes not from technology alone, but the control of everything that make up networks.  This everything means everything.  G&T look for a way of “comprehending networks as simultaneously material and immaterial, as simultaneously technical and political, as simultaneously misanthropic and all-too-human” (28).  They articulate this further, saying “So by “networks” we mean any system of interrelationality, whether biological or informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or natural–with the ultimate goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of pairing” (28).  Using this defintion of network, G&T go one step futher and try to flesh out the how networks are connected to H&N’s concept of empire by introducing the concept of “protocol” as the mechanism as that is leveraged to control networks.  G&T explain “If networks are the structures that connect organisms and machines, then protocols are the rules that make sure the connections actually work…[they] may be defined as a horizontal, distributed control apparatus that guides both the techinical and political formation of computer networks, biological systems, and other media” (29,28).

Bullet points explaining  how protocols emerge and function on page 29.

Networks help create the new (late 20th century) “societies of control” (35) which have emerged in contrast to Foucault’s “societies of discipline.”  Societies of control “are based around protocols, logics of ‘modulation,’ and the ‘ultrapid forms of free-floating control.’  For Deleuze, ‘control’ means something quite different from it colloquial usage” (35).  In this network version of society, control is modulation.  “People are lines…as lines people thread together social, political, and cultural elements” (Deleuze qtd in Galloway and Thacker 35).

While in disciplinary societies individuals move in a discrete fashion from one institutional enclosure to one another (home, school, work, etc), in the societies of control, individuals move in a continuous fashion between sites (work-from-home, distance learning, etc).  In disciplinary societies, one is always starting over (initiation and graduation, hiring and retirement).  In the control societies, one is never finished (continuing education, midcareer changes).  While the disciplinary societies are characterized by physical semoiotic constructs such as the signature and the document, the societies of control are characterized by more immaterial ones such as the password and the computer. (35)

Individuation is the way control as a form of modulation occurs.  Individuals become “dividuals”  while the masses become “samples, data, markets, or banks” (Deleuze qtd in G&T 39) ripe for change when change is needed. 

What follows from this is that control in networks operates less through the exception of individuals, groups, or institutions and more through the exceptional qulaity of networks or of their topoloiges.  What matters, then, is less the character of the individual nodes than the topological space within which and through which they operate as nodes.  To be a node is not solely a casual affair; it is not to “do” this or “do” that.  To be a node is to exist inseparably from a set of possibilities and parameters–to function within a topology of control. (40)

This topology is fused with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. 

1. To begin with, bioplitics defines a specific object of governance: “the population.”

“Population” does not just mean the masses, or groups of people geographically bound…Rather population is a flexible articulation of individualizing and colelctivizing tendencies: many individual nodes cluster together.  Above all, the population is a political object whose core is biological: the population is not the individual body or organism of the subject-citizen but rather the mass body of the biological species…the existence of the state is consonant with the “health” of the state.  The main issu of concern is therefore how effectively to control the co-existnece of individuals, groups, and relations among them.

2.  Biopolitics defines a means for the production of data surrounding its object (the population)…Taken together, the two elements of biology and informatics serve to make biopolitical control more nuanced, and more effective.

It is not a contradiction to say that in societies of control there is both an increase in openness and an increase in control.  The two go hand in hand…Thus if any single node experiences greater freedom from control, it is most likely due to a greater imposition of control on the macro level.  At the macro level, the species-population can not only be studied and anlayzed but can also be extrapolated, its characteristic behaviors projected into plausible futures (birth/death rates, growth, development, etc.). 

The methodology of biopolitics is therefore informatics, but a use of informatics in a way that reconfigures biology as an information resource.  In contemporary biopolitics, the body is a database, and informatics is the searc engine.

In other words, biology and informatics combine in biopolitics to make it productive, to impel, enhance, and optimize the species-population as it exists within the the contets of work, leisure, consumerism, health care, entertainment, and a host of other ativities.

3. After defining it object (the biological species-population) and its method (informatics/statistics), biopolitics reformulates the role of governance as that of real-time security.

[S]ecurity means being held in place, being integrated and immobile, being supported by redundant networks of checks and backups, and hence is a throughly information-age idea…Biopolitcs also remains consonant with neoliberalism in its notion of humanitarian security in the form of health insurance, home care, outpatient services, and the development of biological “banking” institutions (sperm and ova banks, blood banks, tissue banks, etc.)  (71-75)

 This section of the book closes out with talk of how biological viruses and computer viruses are the same in the way they exploit the networks the come into contact with.  Both are effective since they use the network they infect against itself; neither virus fights the network as so much utilizes the network for what said network is good at (the best example G&T present is the SARS virus on pages 88-94).  The best way to exploit a network is to use it against itself.

The following is a defintion of the exploit as an abstract machine.

• Vector: The exploit requires an organic or inorganic medium in which there exists some form of action or motion.
• Flaw: The exploit requires a set of vulnerabilities in a network that allow the vector to be logically accessible.  These vulnerabilites are also the network’s conditions for realization, in becoming-unhuman
• Transgression: The exploit creates a shift in the ontology of the network, in which the “failure” of the network is in fact a change in its topology (for example, from centralized to distributed).  (97)

Viruses are an example of “life resistance” (77), the productive aspect of living versus the security of the control society.  Life resistance does not have to be human, hence the example of SARS (also, G&T stress this resistance to protological practices–demonstrating, speaking out, striking, and organizing should still be used for effecting change to non-protological practices).  The virus (biological or computer) is the best example of the “strategy of maneuvers” where “the best way to beat an enemy is to become a better enemy” (98).  By pushing the network to work at its full capacity and using that capacity to its (the virus’s) advantage, the virus is practicing hypertrophy and using the technology, security, and control elements of the network against itself.  Through this kind of work the technolgoy that form our current networks can be pressed into an “injured, engorged, and unguarded condition” (98-99), a state where “life-itself” as defined by those most in control of the network can be sidestepped and replaced.  This means soceity “must scale up, not unplug” because in this new and vulnerable state the techonologies of control “will be sculpted anew into something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and desires of its users” (98-99).

The book closes suggetsting a shift in scale when it comes to thinking about networks.  G&T assert that current thought about networks palces too much emphasis on the actions of individuals within networks or individual nodes within netowrks, and they advise a more coherent and cogent examination of the “very distribution and dispersal of action throughout the network, a dispersal that would ask us to define networks less in terms of the nodes and more in terms of the edges–or even in terms other than the entire, overly spatialized dichotomy of nodes and edges altogether” (157).  G&T claim until this happens our understanding of networks will remain “all-too-human” (157). 

This ending seems to to intimate the current understanding of networks is a projection of traditional, human society onto diagrams which represent networks; that all that has been done so far is  a projection of humanity onto an unyet understood assemblage of things human and unhuman; the current material world has been reproduced onto the concept of “network.”  This would by why G&T describe this monograph as an ontology of networks–through their theorizing and essentializing (where does the protocol that runs a control society come from? how do nodes interact with each other, and how do the activities they participate in define them in realtion to one another?) they try to create a metaphysical treatsie on the nature of being within a network and the state of  networks as actual living beings made of the human and the unhuman.

Linked
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Every chapter in this book in called a “link” since the monograph is about networks.

The First Link: Introduction

This link is a general introduction to the book.  The Internet appears to be the big focus of the book, with Barabasi saying “[y]ou will come to appreciate how the Internet, often viewed as entirely human in its creation, has become more aking to an orgnaism or an ecosystem, demonstrating the power of the basic laws of that govern all networks” (8).  It seems this book will echo Galloway and Thacker with the idea that networks are made of both human and unhuman actors, all contributing to the networks and survival and procreation.

The Second Link: The Random Universe

Paul Erdos and Alfred Renyi created the random network model in an effort to describe systems that exist naturally in the world.  Barabasi explains the Erdos and Renyi model is random because “different systems follow such disparate rules in building their own networks, [and therefore] Erdos and Renyi deliberately disregarded thisdiverstiy and came up with the simplest solution nature could follow: connect the nodes randomly.  They decided that the simplest way to create a network was to create a network was to play dice: Choose two nodes and, if you roll a six, place a link between them” (17).  Barabasi explains this is false; “nature resorted to a few fundamental laws” and promises these laws “will be revealed in the coming chapters” (17).  For Barabasi, the work of Erdos and Renyi is important since it was the first step in trying to describe how networks enable the world to work in all their complexities.  The problem Barabasi has with Erdos and Renyi’s work is the emphasis on randomness.  For Barabasi this element is due to their love of “the mathematical beauty of random networks than by the model’s ability to faithfully capture the webs nature created around them” (23).  For Barabasi, these models are flawed since they don’t explain empirical data.

The Third Link: Six Degrees of Separation

As the link’s title suggets, this chapter is all about how small the distance is between nodes in networks (think “Six Degrees of Serparation to Kevin Bacon”). Barabasi’s claim is that networks obey the small world concept (aka the six degrees model) due to their innate structures.  Links are make nodes closer than imaginable in a Euclidean mindset of distance (explanation on page 35).  The bigger the network the more nodes and smaller the distance between two nodes.  This exists in all networks.

The Fourth Link: Small Worlds

Watts and Stogratz ’s cluster model of networks offered an alternative to Erods and Renyi’s random model of networks.  In the cluster model complexity and observed patterns of natural networks are better explained.  Instead of randomness as the driving force between the connecting of two or more nodes,  a small order of  nodes is connected to more far-flung nodes through a few nodes of said order containing “distant” links to other nodes outside their immediate local order.  Still, this model contains no accounting for the rationale behind the links between nodes, and like the random model, provides a skewed view of networks as egalitarian structures “whose links are ruled by the throw of the dice” (54).   Randomness is equated to egalitarianism in this text.

The Fifth Link: Hubs and Connectors

Connectors are nodes with “anomalously large number of links” that are “present in very diverse complex systems, ranging from the economy to the cell” (56).  Barabasi considers them a fundamental property of most networks, and these “highly connected nodes requires abandoning once and for all the random worldview” (56).  He continues on, saying

Just as in society a few connectors know an unusual large number of people, we found that the architecture of the World Wide Web is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, or hubs.  These hubs, such as Yahoo! or Amazon.com, are extremely visible–everywhere you go you see another link pointing to them…The hubs are the stronget arguement against the utopian vision of an egalitarian cyberspace…Compared to these hubs, the rest of  the Web is invisible.  For all pracitcal purposes, pages linked by only one or two other documents do no texists…Even the search engines are biased against them, ignoring them as the crawl the Web looking for the hottest new sites.  (58)

These hubs (made up of connectors) are easist seen on the World Wide Web and form Barabasi’s strongest argument against an egalitarian structure to networks.  Hubs are also always a short distance from any nodes in a network, and hubs can reach any node in less moves than going node to node.

The Sixth Link: The 80/20 Rule

From this point on Barabasi uses every word to discredit the random and cluster models of networks in favor of his prefered version, scale-free.  In this sixth link Barabasi describes the 80/20 rule as a way to demonstrate networks are not egalitarian in any way, shape, or form since the 80/20 rule is a short hand way to describe a power law distribution; his proof is his empirical evidence (gathered by a bot combing the Web) that many nodes had only a few links, and “a few hubs with an extraordinarily large number of links” (67) was the actual  lay of the (virtual) land on the Web.

In random and cluster models of networks, there are only a set number of nodes within a network and these nodes (hypothetically) should follow a bell curve when it comes to the degree of distribution.  In a bell curve, most nodes would have the same number of links–it would be an egalitarian arrangement since a majority of the nodes would fall into the center of the bell curve.   Barabasi’s research team, using their bot to graph (map) the Web, found that most nodes (in this case web pages) had only a few links connecting to other pages while a few highly connected hubs (like Yahoo or Google) served as highly connected hubs.  This is a demonstration of the 80/20 rule, ie, a power law distribution.  80 percent of the web is available through only 2o percent of webpages.  This is also exciting (for Barabasi) since this type of movement is also displayed in networks of molecules as they move from one state to another; for example, when water hits the phase transition stage and moves from a liquid form to a solid form (ice) (73-74).  This is described as move from disorder to order. This means the Web and water follow the same network laws; and the Web, althoug a human made object, performs this transition phase with no help from a central, human authority.

The Seventh Link: Rich Get Richer

Barabasi and his team develop two laws which govern all real networks (real networks meeting the criteria of scale-free network discussed last chapter): growth and preferential attachment.

• Growth: For each given period of time we add a new node to the network.  This step underscores the fact that netowrks are assembled one node at a time.
• Preferential attachment: We assume that each new node connects to the existing nodes with two links.  The probability that it will choose a given node is proportional to the number of links the chosen node has.  That is, given the choice between two nodes, one with twice as many links as the other, it is twice as likely that the new node will connect to the more connected node.

Barabasi and his collaborators stress these are the building blocks to any network (organic or inorganic); also, there are benefits to the preferential attachment–it allows for efficiency and defense.

Thge Eigth Link: Einstein’s Legacy

In this chapter Barabasi discusses the fitness model within a scale-free network (scale-free means it can and does constantly add nodes).  In a scale-free model the first node is the winner; the first node(s) grab all the links, become connectors, then hubs, and essentially becomes a winner in the 80/20 distribtuion–said hub is one of the ruling 20 percent.  Conversly, any node that comes later (according to this model) should never have the opportunity.  Google’s debut onto the World Wide Web troubles the scale-free model since it was a late comer who eventually became a hub.  Barabasi adapts the scale-free network of the Web by introducing the fitness model.  Acording to Barabasi, this explains Google’s dominance because:

The fitness model predicts a [this] behavior.  It tells us that nodes still acquire links following a power law, t [exponent] b. But the dynamic exponent, b, whch meaures how fast a node grabs a new link, is different for each node.  It is proportional to the node’s fitness, such that a node that is twice as fit as any other node will acquire links faster because its dynamic exponent is twice as large.  Therefore, the speed at which nodes acquire links is no longer a matter of seniority.  Independent of when a node joins the network, a fit node will soon leave behind all nodes with smaller fitness.  Google is the best proof of this: A latecomer with great search technology, it acquired links much faster than its competitors, eventually outshining all of them.  (97)

The chapter is entitle Einstein’s Legacy since Barabasi eventually ties this network to another network, a Bose gas undergoing a Bose-Einstein condensation.  When a gas reaches absolute zero, all particles rush towards the lowest energy level within the gas; the node (molecule) that is the fittest has the lowest energy level.  For Barabasi, this means that two very different netowrks follow the same, universal laws.

Barabasi sums up what this all means within the context of the book:

The scale-free model reflects our awakening to the reality that networks are dynamic systems that change constantly through the addition of new modes and links.  The fitness model allows us to describe networks as competitive systems in which nodes fight fiercely for links.  Now Bose-Einstein condensation explains how some winners get the chance to take all…In networks that dispaly fit-get-rich behavior, competition leads to a scale-free topology…The winner shares the spotlight with a continuous hierarchy of hubs.  (106)

The Ninth Link: Achilles’ Heel

Topological robustness of networks is created through a highly complex and interconnected network.  In the case of of scale-free networks, small nodes, connectors, and hubs are all interconnectedwith few moves needed to get from one to the other.  When this is the case, taking out small node, one connector, or even one hub does not hurt the network.  The workload of the network is re-routed.  The Achilles’ Heel Barabasi refers to with the title of this chapter is two fold.  First, there is a premediated attack on a network where all highly connected hubs are removed at once.  Second, there is what Barabasi calls a cascading failure.  In a cascading failure:

a local failure shifts loads or responsibilities to other nodes.  If the extra load is negligible, it can be seemlesly absorbed by the rest of the system, and the failure remains unnoticed.  If the extra load is too much for the neighboring nodes to carry, they will either tip or again redistibute the load to their neighbors…Failures can go unnoticed for a long time before starting has inevitable consequences, however, as those cascades that do suceed are then more disruptive. (119,121)

The Tenth Link: Viruses and Fads

Sacle-free networks are vuneralbe to infection by hitting hubs (infect a hub, let the network do the work to spread the infection through its only internal structure).  In the converse, randomly infecting  small nodes within a network does some damage but will not shut down an entire network.

The Eleventh Link: The Awakening Internet

The Internet is growing according to the scale-free model, and this creates a few problems.  First, taking out the hubs which make up the Internet could bring the whole thing crashing down.  Second, there’s no oversight.  It grows one node at a time each time a new node links up.  Due to the programs that control info exchange, and the fact it’s a network connecting to computers, it’s possible to utilize large parts of it for parasitic (mailicious) computing, distribution of malignant programs (viruses/worms), or simple denial of service attacks that could block necessary connections.  All of this is due to the network structure of the Internet; like Galloway and Thacker discuss a network can be forced into hypertrophy and be forced to work against itself.

The Twelfth Link: The Fragmented Web

Code–or software–is the bricks and mortar of cyberspace. The architecture is what we build, using the code as building blocks.  The architecture is what we build, using the code as building blocks…Code can curtai lbehavior, and it does influence the architecture.  It does not uniquely determine it, however…Most of the Web’s truly important features and emerging properties derive from its large-scale self-orgnized topology…But the science of the Web increasingly proves that this architecture represents a higher level of organization than the code.  Your ability to find my Webpage is determined by one factor only: its position on the Web.  If many people find my page interesting and they link to me, my node will slowly turn into a minor hub, and search engines will inevitable notice.  If everybody ignores my Website, so will the search engines. (174, 175)

The Thirteenth Link: The Map of Life

Barabasi is now seeing the scale-free, fit model of networks in everything.  In this chapter he links this model to cells.

The Fourteenth Link: Network Economy

This chapter is another example of how networks are present in even more mundane aspects of modern life in a capitalist society.  The concepts he descibed hitherto are now called the “robust” and “universal laws” that “govern nature’s webs…greet us” in the economy.  “The challenge” Barabasi explains, “is for economic and network research alike to put these laws into practice” (217).

The Last Link: Web Without a Spider

Like Spinuzzi, Barabasi recommends researchers now focus on the activity that goes on between nodes in networks.  Only through understanding how nodes work together can the complexities of networks be understood.

Afterlink: Hierarchies and Communities

This afterlink proposes one more dimension to scale-free, competitative/fit networks.  To better describe the “multitude 0f functions” or multitasking that networks do–especially networks like cells–Barabasi introduces the concept of hierarchical clustering (a good explanation can be found on 233 with a corresponding graphic).

Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart
Bonnie A. Nardi and Vicki L. O’Day

Chapter One: Rotwang the Inventor
Nardi and O’Day share with the reader the working metaphor for the book, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis. In particular, the closing scene of the film. In this scene the hero of the story tries to make his father, a master in the fictional society, to clasp the hand of a foreman form the working, underclass of the fictional society. For Nardi and O’Day, this epitomizes what they see as the purpose of establishing informtaion ecologies: to suggest “a new future in which the minds that plan and the hands that work do not live in seperate worlds, but are mediated by the human heart” (11). It seems technology is part of the “minds that plan,” and I figure they’re saying it would be great to create environments where technology is part of work gets done, not spaces where technology is the driving force behind inhumane work practices and draconian methods based on technophile dreams of efficiency. Technology should be designed (or evolved through on-going fine tuning) to fit a particular situation, not vice versa.

Chapter Two: Framing Conversations about Technology
In this chapter Nardi and O’Day describe the technophile and dystopic camps of technology critics, and find fault with both. Since each of the two camps are on the extreme ends of the spectrum on the issue, they leave position for people who have to work with technology in everyday situations. N&O are working for a middle ground where these everyday folks can have some agency in their interactions with technology, and to do this they introduce the concept of information ecoloiges. To think of the everyday situations where technology is used in this way forces people to stop, focus, and notice the routines and habits they’re involved in as they go about their day and in what ways technology helps or hinders. By being critical (stopping, focusing, and noticing) N&O believe people can thwart the rhetoric of inevitability that comes with either view of technology (technophile or dystopic) and allow them to develop holistic, sustainable practices when using technology–practices that create harmony, not frustration.

Chapter Three: A Matter of Metaphor
Every metaphor used for technology have implicit design and use concepts embedded within them (here the three most common are represented).

The tool metaphor:

The tool metaphor also offers pointed suggestions to technology designers. Part of the delight of doing technology design is working with the materials (software, computer displays, networks) and making them do interesting, unexpected, and clever things. Thinking about technology as a tool helps deisgners remember that there is someone on the other end–people who are using the tool…The tool metaphor is useful for questions and discussions about utility, skill and learning. We need to keep this metapor in mind, but we also need to look outside its boundaries…It is not enough to think about the too’s inherent elegance and capabilities; one has to think about the handles it offers users. (29, 30)

The text metaphor:

Prescriptions are written into technologies when they are designed. Prescription in the Latourian sense does not mean that a technology says once and for all how it will be used–or that it will be used at all–but rather that it makes claims on our attention in a particular way. Technological artifacts have a certain authority and presencse…Textual analysis suggests different tactics than the tool metaphor does. now we are encouraged to read the technology to understand its messages and imperatives…it is useful to remember that talk is a form of action and action is a form of talk. But the metaphor doesnt tell us how people’s judgment, creativity, and values can or should come into play when they chose to act. The text metaphor is useful as a way of prompting discussions of intentionality and meaning, but other discussions require further conceptual support. (32, 33).

Technology as system: This is based on their readings of a few different scholars, but in a nutshell technology as system is a “complex systemic perspective” that when viewed with this lens “yields provocative analysis of the pervaisve influence of technology in our lives” (33). While there are different version of this perspective, the one that N&O seem to react to the most is that of Jacques Ellul.

Ellul’s argument turns on his notion of what he calls technique…a cultural mindset in which pure, unadulterated efficiency is the dominant human value…Technology comes into play because machines are so efficient; they are the standard of excellence in the world of technique. Everything else is to be compared to them. Everything–even people–evolves in the direction of mechanical efficiency…most troubling…is that technique is autonomous, that is proceeds under its own momentum without significant control by people. (33,34)

The “process of technical dominance” that continues through technology as it “begets more technology” ( the polluted river example on pages 42 and 43) is too complete as it makes “[t]he technological system” we currently navigate seem like “the water we swim in” which has become “life sustaining and almost invisible” (43). The system metaphor for technology “does not address with enough force the possiblity of local and particular change” and leaves readers without any practical advice in how to balance humanity with technology.

Chapter Four: Information Ecologies
The ecology metaphor names several moving parts within the networks that involve human and unhuman (technological gadgets) nodes. This brings order to the empirically observed, local settings that N&O discuss later in the book, and allows for productive, practical advice on how to make their interactions with technology more humane and sustainale. Essentially, the net value is the ability to make fruitful observations and probvde answers to challenges readers of this back may face, while at the same time making the work that occurs between the nodes in this network (the links) describable to others. The description for the various elements that make up an information ecology can be found on pages 50-55; the most interesting is the “keystone species” (53). When keystone species are removed from an info ecology, the ecology either adapts or falls apart. This sounds alot like Barabasi’s talk about connectors and hubs within networks; hubs are the biggest connector nodes that make it possible to travel the network to any other node within a minimum number of moves that is considered efficient (defintion dependent on the size of the network). While N&O don’t cover this extensively, I figure if these keystone species were removed all at once the ecosystem would implode like a scale-free network does when all major hubs are destroyed simultaneously. With a few modifications, this text seems like a work describing the work of specific networks, ie, talks about networks as they exist and not the theoreical (a la Barabasi or Galloway and Thacker).

Chapter Five: Values and Technology
N&O stress that the local values of the people who form part of their specific eco ecology must be forgrounded as they grapple with how to make technology work for them.

The application of human values in information ecologies brings to bear a different dynamic that that of biological ecologies. We make deliberate, conscious choices about how we want our values to influence practices and technologies in information ecologies. There is a complex dance between two nonnetural forces at work here: technology with its choreography of the dance is up to the human side of the equation, but only if we choose to “overcome necessity” by engaging our values and commitments as we shape our information ecologies. (64)

This is how the people control technology, and do not allow the rhetoric of inevitability to herd them.

Chapter Six: How to Evolve Information Ecologies
Evolving info ecologies comes from these practices: Working from core values (67); paying attention (68); and asking strategic questions (70).

Quesions need to ask not only how technology can be implements, but more importantly why technology needs to be implemented within a specific, localized setting. There’s also the subset of when questions, ie, when is the use of technology (sometimes specific technologies) are appropriate and best for the people working in the ecology. Examples of these questions can be found on pages 72-74.

The part we often focus our attention on is the technology: computers, networking, applications, handheld communications, applications, handheld information gadgets, instruments, monitors, widgets ad infinitum. We look at the shape, color, texture, and functions of the technologies, and we think creatively about how to make them more usable, appealing, and effective. But it is the spaces between these things–where people move from place to place, talk, carry pieces of paper, type, play messages, pick up the telephone, send faxes, have meetings, and go to lunch–that critical and often invisible things happen. As we look at information ecologies, whether they are examples in this book or examples from our everyday lives, we need to be mindful of those spaces. (66)

Chapter Seven: Librarians

There are ueful and complementary relationships between information seekers, librarians, and technology in the library. The diversity of the library information ecology is exemplary in its excellent mix of people and technological resources working together well. The presence of human guides and experts in the library is crucial. As more peole gain access to online information services, even more guides will be needed to help. As in the library, we believe that such guides willbe keystone species wherever they are found. (104)

Librarians are a “keystone species” in information ecologies; this translates over to the “hub” concept from Barabasi. N&O assert if you remove a keystone species, the entire ecology collapses, or at the least, re-adapts but in ways not amenable to people within the information ecology (one thing never discussed, but intimated, is that there are human and unhuman peices in the information ecologies. It seems the focus is on quality of life for the people in information ecologies). This fracturing also means a loss of efficiency; in this case study it’s asserted the loss of librarians means an informtation retrieval service that is either frustrating or useless.

Is this type of work what Barabasi call for at the end of his book? Is this a case study of the work that networks do?

Chapter Eight: Wolf, Batgirl, and Starlight
Pueblo is the ideal version of an info ecology for Nardi and O’Day (explanation of the Pueblo virtual community project on page 112). The values of the physical world that exist at Longview Elementary are forgrounded and installed in the virtual world of Pueblo. This happened through a series of dicscussion (formal and informal) and the asking of questions similiar to the ones N&O prescribe on pages 72-74. All the users, due to this critical examination of the information ecology they’ve created, are able to manipulate the technology they use as needed–as it fits the users needs.

Chapter Nine: Cultivating Gardeners: The Importance of Homegrown Expertise
Gardeners are the people within information ecologies who make things happen; they “take on the responsibility of customizing software tools for local conditions and assisting their co-workers in using the tools” (141). The cultivation of these folks creates “diverse, robust, information ecologies” (151) that are efficient, adapted to their local setting, and can evolve as new types of challenges or technologies enter the information ecology. Gardeners appear to be a keystone species within information ecologies.

ChaptersTen and Eleven are two more case studies. Ten deals with a digital photography class and Chapter Eleven is an example of “a dysfunctional ecology” in a hostipal. The digital photography class suceeds since it matches the model of construction and practices N&O prescribe for a successful info ecology; the info ecology in the hostipal fails since it does everything counter the model.

Chapter Twelve is titled “Diversity on the Internet.” It brings up some ideals that are laudable, but fails to deal with the practicalities of the Internet. For example, they call for amateur sites that promote social justice.

Looking at real human activity at local levels often tells a different–and more empowering–storythan looking at social forces in the large. We find inspiration in the activities of Burmese exiles fighting the junta, Kuna promoting environmentalism, Maya defending their land and culture, and Inuit women taking on issues of health and housing–all aided by the Internet…If we nuture and defend local ecologies, the global network enabled by the Internet will avoid becoming a monocultural hegemony primarily devoted to commerce. The active participation of local nodes, mundful of their potential global connections, will lead to strength and vitality in a global network. We can take the exhortation of th eenvironmental movement, “Think globally, act locally,” a step further now. (202,207)

And while this is all possible, their insistence that the creation of this these types of sites will change the basic composition of the Internet from a heavily commericial enterprise seems a bit naive. The hubs which connect the Internet (search engines specifically and the more popular websites less so) don’t often connect to these activist sites. These sites can be found, but usually only those with the values of those sites in experiential reality will know where to find them on the Web. While I can be completely wrong and just in a mood, there seems to be a vein of putting the information on the Internet will enlighten everyone who uses the Internet. This isn’t the case, since most heavily used sites don’t do activism very much; it’s considered depressing or controversial or inappropriate. The users’ values, much like in info ecologies, must be forgrounded in the site or at least identifiable to the user in question. To wit, commericial sites are the search engines of the Internet that make the Web accesible to users. As Barabasi asserts, the rich get richer in network(s). Economic base, superstructure, etc.

“A Simple Model of Global Cascades on Random Networks”
Duncan J. Watts

Cascades in this article are defined as upheavals to the status quo of a network. This can be several things, eg, the popularity of an indy song not backed by a huge advertising budget, choices by citizens to vote in ways counter to their traditional patterns, individuals deciding to join a social change organization, or the failure of a power grid. Global cascades occur when the system undergoes a widespread change (number of nodes effected). Watts’ concern is creating a mode which describes these occurences, which he asserts is based on the ability of some nodes to influence other nodes within a given network to not only make a simple yes/no choice, but also change the nodes state–the actual chagning/preparing the actant(s) to choice yes or no on a given event. A cascade occurs when several nodes (either human or unhuman) can surpass their threshold for resisting change. Once this occurs, herd-like behavior can kick in the action of a node’s neighbor can tip said node from one state (a return to status quo) to another (change).

This type of change is highly dependent on innovators being connected to a large contingent of early adapters within the network (5767).

Watts uses the model to explain why networks observed empirical which experience large perturbations on a regular basis do not experience global cascades on a regular basis:

The upper boundary, however, is different. Here, the propagation of cascades is limited not by the connectivity of the network, but by the local stability of the vertices. Most vertices in this regime have so many neighbors that they cannot be toppled by a single neighbor perturbation; hence, most initial shocks immediately encounter stable vertices. Most cascades therefore die out before spreading very far, giving the appearance that large cascades are exponentially unlikely. (5770)

“A Theory of Relational Signals in Online Groups”
Uwe Matzat

Abstract
The outcomes of interaction in online communities depend to a large extent on finding solutions to typical problems of interaction, such as free-riding and lack of trust. This article presents a theory which argues that a member’s online behaviour sends signals about how (s)he regards the relationship to other members and to the group. Under specific conditions, members take the signal sending into account when they decide
whether to contribute to group discussions and to participate in trust-demanding online activities. Community administrators can use the insights to influence members’ behaviour by using social control. Three forms of social control are distinguished. Group conditions influence which form is more adequate for
diminishing free-riding and lack of trust. A theory-guided typology of online groups and communities clarifies what type of community is more likely to suffer from problems of interaction and the effects of each kind of social control. (375)

Money quotes:

Theories of computer-mediated communication (CMC; Kiesler et al., 1984; Postmes et al., 1998; Walther, 1996) are difficult to apply in order to derive predictions about the effects of such group conditions outside of the laboratory. What would be useful is a theory which can establish easily the link between the behavioural mechanisms that regulate online interaction and the social characteristics of online groups on the internet. (376)

Two types of interdependency
What often makes interaction in online groups problematic is the fact that an individual’s goal fulfilment is not only dependent on his/her own behaviour, but also on other individuals’ behaviour within the group.
Some form of interdependency characterizes the situation. The more an individual’s goal achievement depends on other actors’ behaviour, the stronger the interdependencies are (and vice versa). These interdependencies can be characterized as situations with coordination difficulties, or with conflicting interests between the actors (Lindenberg, 1997). In the first situation, for example in a self-help group, all actors prefer to choose the same alternative, whereas in the second situation, for example in an online
auction, different actors prefer different alternatives (Lindenberg, 1997). (378)

Three typical problems in online group interaction
• opportunity problems, including free-rider problems (Jones and
Rafaeli, 2000; Kollock, 1999a; Kreijns et al., 2003);
• problems of trust (Ardichvili et al., 2003; McLure Wasko and Faraj,
2000); and
• problems of loyalty (Etzioni, 1999; Komito, 1998; Suler, 1999;
Ward, 1999). (378)

First, people are more likely to join and stay in a group when membership is useful to reach more aims at once. The more goals that the group fulfils for the member, the more difficult it is to substitute it for another. This holds even more if the multifunctionality for the member includes relational interests. The relationships as such, then, have a value that is hard to replace. Accordingly, in multifunctional online
groups there will be fewer loyalty problems than in single common interest groups. Second, in groups that fulfil multiple functions at once there is a higher degree of interdependency than in single common interest groups. As explained previously, a high degree of interdependency in turn raises the degree of relational interest. Again, this argument presupposes that the interdependencies do not comprise too many conflicting interests between members. The first two dimensions, social embeddedness and multifunctionality, lead to the following typology of online groups. (385)

This leads to the following hypotheses. The effects of frame stabilizing and indirect monitoring tools on the stimulation of active member participation are larger in embedded (or multiple common interests) than in pure (or single common interest) online groups. The effects of direct control tools are larger in pure (or single common interest) than in embedded (or multiple common interests) online groups. (386)

The more the online group resembles a transaction group, the more direct social control will be accepted and increase membership participation. The more a fantasy group has conflicting elements in its environment, the less frame stabilizing tools will increase the membership participation. In interest groups and groups of relationships, changes in the degree of embeddedness or multifunctionality have a larger impact on the degree of relational interests than in transaction groups. (389)

“Community and Social Interaction in the Wireless City: Wi-Fi Use in Public and Semi-Public Spaces”
Keith Hampton and Neeti Gupta

Key Definitions
True Mobiles–For ‘true mobiles’, wi-fi coffee shops functioned as a backdrop for activities focused on the completion of ‘work’ (studying, paid work, etc.).True mobiles identified the cafe as a ‘space of productivity’.They typically would suggest that the store offered a change of setting that helped them to focus or provided a source of creativity. (839)

Placemakers–In contrast with true mobiles, the primary activity of ‘placemakers’ was ‘not to engage in paid work’.They came to wi-fi coffee shops to ‘hang out’. The coffee house was not intended as a direct or indirect place of productivity…They were drawn by what one subject described as the ‘inherently casual sociability’ of the physical setting. Placemakers used their laptops as a premise to enter and engage in the ‘social hubbub’ of the space. This could mean direct co-present participation with existing members of their social network, unplanned encounters or the pleasure that Lofland (1998) ascribes to ‘public solitude’ and ‘people watching’. (841,842)

The key conflict presented here is between true mobiles and placemakers, and what the use of technology by both of these groups means for the concept of “community”in publice spaces. True mobiles are often conencted to people not in their immediate space, and the Hampton and Gupta are trying to decipher if this means a move towards public privatism a wi-fi (paid or free) becomes more ubiquitous and available in public and semi-public spaces. The opposite profile of public wi-fi users are the placemakers, who use seem to be working towards a “glocal” scene, ie, a connection with those in their immediate environment and with those they are connected to via their laptops who are nowhere near their (the placemaker’s) physical location. True mobiles use interaction shields in public spaces to ensure they do not engage with individuals in their immediate locale; usually this interacion shield is the true mobile’s laptop. The final conclusion twofold. First, wi-fi is not a determining factor in and of itself. Free or not, individual users decide their tribe. Second, the movement towards public privatism (also known as the networked individual) and the movement towards glocalization are both strong. Further study needs to be done.

Method (836).
“[W]hat attracts people is other people” (846).

“CommunityNetSimulator”
Jun Zhang, Mark S. Ackerman, and Lada Adamic

The CommunityNetSimulator provides the baseline for studying online communities that are based on information sharing (ask and answer like sites like the pseudo “JavaHelpers”). While it isn’t dead on describing the empirical data gathered from these sites, Zhang et al assert it describes these type of online communities much better than Barabasi’s model or the model of Watts and Strogatz; it provides terms, concepts, and statistics much closer to material reality. CommunityNetSimulator is still a work in progress, it’s being refined as its being run against the ethnographies Zhang et al are doing concurrently with CommunityNetSimulator.

“Cooperation in Evolving Networks”
Nobuyuki Hanaki, Alexander Peterhansl, Peter S. Dodds, Duncan J. Watts

In this article Hankai et al are trying to develop a model that describes the evolution of networks and the behavior of the people interacting in such networks that are experiencing the traditional social dilemma (how to continue cooperating enough for the common good when there’s the problem of free-riding). They maintain their findings (based on their model as a way to describe the seemingly random work that occurs in networks) are counterintuitive. They assert cooperation can occur at in sparse, dynamic networks of unlimited size; networks with strutural holes (missing direct links from one node to another) actually support higher levels of cooperation versus networks with local density, ie, clustering; and that cooperation tends to fare better in larger networks instead of smaller ones. For Hanaki et al, this means cooperation is scalable; this explains why networks like eBay are successful. All of this is built on the trade-off of two effects, expansion versus reinforcment. “Roughly speaking, this principle states that the maintainence of a high global level of cooperation requires that two conditions be satisfied: (a) cooperation is reinforced by assortative matching of cooperators; and (b) the cooperative community must expand by ‘recruiting’ defectors” (1049).

The element of triadic closure bias (meeting a friend of a friend) becomes important as it makes the evolution of a network non-random, and info regrading potential partners is available in juxtaposition of meeting a stranger (1038). This type of interaction eventually builds trust. It creates a “full information” scenario, where the player trust another player through introduction by third, trusted player (the model takes place in prisoner dilemma games). This, in turn, leads to te “no information” scenarios where trust is built through these types of triad interactions. In an environment where the player feels safe and cooperation appears the norm for the entire network, said player will trust players with no one vouching for a stranger–a no information situation.

One reason for the scalability of trust in large, poorly connected networks is the inability for several nodes (in this article, players) to quickly learn of the benefits defecting can bring within the lifespan of the prisoner’s dilemma game. Sparse, poorly connected networks means info travels slowly. Players will continue to trust and cooperate since they know no better, and the benefits of continued cooperation in the environment of a high stakes, huge network have the constructed value of safety and continued profit. Also, partner updating happens more often in these situations as an indirect form of ostracizing other player-partners. Interactions may occur fewer times with the older player-partners, but there is still the sense and an amount of cooperation among the updating player and her older partners within the game, therefore, there is still cooperation which tilts the percentage pariticipation in favor of larger networks (think SNS like FB–very rarely are friends removed from a list and means said friends, although not occupying a prime spot, can be leveraged later).

The preferred network, according to this model, is one that branches. This means that groups of two and three can interact with other and learn from each other, perform the actions talked about above, and be coerced into continued cooperation since nodes (players) are poorly connected to other palyers who may teach defecting as a more advantgeous strategy. This type of network is often disliked since it takes only a few breaks to destory the network . It is not a robust network, but “can be desirable if what it is spreading is (colletively) undesirable” (1048).

Section 5.3 seems the most interesting part of the article.

“Information Exchange and the Robustness of Organizational Networks”
Peter S. Dodds, Duncan J. Watts, and Charles F. Sabel

This article is arguing for multiscale networks since they are “ultrarobust” in that they can weather information congestion and the removal of various nodes without breaking down. They define this as congestion and connectivity robustness, that is, ultrarobust since they can handle both challenges. The position of Dodds et al is that some work about networks has been concerned with efficiency, and therefore, work only with network models that focus on:

efficiency rather than robustness. As a result, the economics literature on organizations has focused almost exclusively on multilevel hierarchies: acyclic, undirected branching networks that originate at a single root node and descend through a series of levels or ranks to their terminal leaf nodes…Under these circumstances, the chief problem facing an organization is not efficiency, understood roughly as being maximized by minimizing the number of costly links needed to support a defined burden. Rather, the challenge is robustness: on the one hand, protecting individual nodes from being overtaxed by the direct and indirect effects of changing and unpredictable patterns of collaboration; and on the other hand, protecting the organization as a whole from disintegration in cases where individual failures occur regardless. (12516)

Multiscale: Finally, we identify a fifth, qualitatively distinct class of networks that arise in the central region of Fig. 2 [i.e., intermediate values of (A, c)]. We call this class multiscale networks because, unlike the four classes of networks defined above, whose connectivity is dominated by a single scale [either
local (team) or global (random) ties], these networks display connectivity at all scales simultaneously. Multiscale networks, however, do not display uniform density of links at all scales: link density decreases monotonically with depth, such that the top rank (the core) exhibits the highest density, thus distinguishing
multiscale networks from earlier “small-world” network models (29) in which random links are distributed homogeneously. This difference is critical for the problem at hand because, in a wide variety of environments, the hierarchical nature of organizational networks tends to place the burden of information exchange disproportionately on higher ranks. Thus multiscale networks and core-periphery networks have much in common. But by exhibiting connectivity across all other ranks as well, multiscale networks also embody the salient features of local team and random networks, a combination that, as we show below yields desirable robustness properties. (12518)

The graph that accompanies this quote shows a multiscale network to take the shape of a pyramid. It would seem these are networks where there is an obvious chain of command but everyone shares in the information work of the network evenly. Nodes from all levels have access and can perform the processing of heavy amounts of information as well as their neighbor. Experiential examples are the Internet and airport terminals. This is not a perfect system. Removing enough links will eventually destroy the network, but it would take the removal of a huge number of links to do so. Since all nodes are on equal footing when it comes to processing, it seems this type of network can bypass cascading failures.

The article closes:

No other class of organizational networks studied exhibits both congestion and connectivity robustness: core-periphery networks handle congestion well but are easily disconnected; random and random-interdivisional networks are difficult to disconnect, but easy to congest; and local team networks are bad in
both senses. Hence, multiscale networks are not only ultrarobust but appear to be uniquely so. (iv) Multiscale networks achieve ultrarobustness efficiently in the sense that most of the attendant benefits are generated by a relatively small number O(N) of additional links. (v) The superior robustness of multiscale networks also conveys better scaling properties than other classes of networks in that, for a given level of environmental volatility ,L, multiscale networks can grow to much larger sizes before suffering failure. (vi) The properties of multiscale networks are themselves robust in the sense that they are insensitive to small
(or even quite large) changes in the network parameters A, ~, and m. Networks resembling multiscale networks may therefore be expected to arise in real-world business firms and bureaucracies, at least some of which do appear to display properties that resemble our notion of ultrarobustness (20, 24, 25). (12521)

The research was funded by by the Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation Grant 0094162, Legg Mason Funds, and the Intel Corporation. (12521)

“Localizing the Internet”
John Postill

This article concentrates on the third challenge. How can we conceptualize the relationship between technological and social change at the local level? More specifically, what conceptual tools do we have at our disposal to study the emergence of new internet-related forms of local sociality? To address these questions, first this article reviews the existing literature on internet localization, suggesting that the progress of this research area has been hampered by an overdependence on two key notions: community and network. Both notions have had uneven careers as social scientific terms, careers that are yet to be critically debated in the internet literature, and which are outlined below. However, more important than their strengths and limitations is the unrivalled paradigmatic status that these paired notions currently enjoy among scholars of internet localization.This article suggests the need to think beyond the community/network paradigm by broadening our analytical lexicon to do some justice to the plethora of forms of sociality that anthropologists and sociologists have identified down the decades…It explores the potential uses of concepts that lie outside the community/network paradigm (e.g. field, arena, forum) by means of a fine-grained analysis of emergent forms of residential sociality, arguing that this kind of ground-up conceptualization reveals the inadequacies of overly general notions such as ‘community sociality’ or ‘network sociality’ (Wittel, 2001). (414)

Postill’s recommendation appears to be the use of the term arena a “‘bounded spatial unit in which precise,
visible antagonists, individual or corporate, contend with one another for prizes and/or honour’ (1974: 132–3).Arenas are ‘explicit frames’ in which ‘nothing is left merely implied’ and major decisions are taken in public view(1974: 134)” (426). and the explicit naming of the activities socialization occur around. This literally means “x sociality”, eg, “committee sociality” or “ritual sociality” (424). Through this renaming of the spaces in which the people of his study interact, Postill thinks a model can be created which provides a more realistic description of how the Internet is used in the most banal sense as a tool to navigate mundane, suburban existence. The concepts of network and community are too polluted with narrow connotations to be of use.

“Mail Art: Networking Without Technology”
Seeta Pena Gangadharan

Gangadharan describes how mail art started and its affect on early cybercommunities like the WELL. The major claim is that culture clears the way for new concepts and new ways of thinking which in turn allow for new ways of being in experiential world; essentially, networking as a way to share information and transform material objects came from mail art and allowed early cyberspace pioneers to conceptualize what the Internet could be used for and the values and ethics that would govern it.

Culture here isnt the sum of the behaviors and beliefs of a particular race, ethnic group. or age group, but what is considered excellent in art. Also, Gangadharan sees the early Internet as a truly egalitarian and wholly democratic space; this perfect place is a direct copy of the mail art movement. This occured through the “productive clashes” experienced at mail art showings. In particular, members of the WELL were supporters of this art movement.

Description of mail art on page 281.
Culture as “meaning making process” on 282.
La Mamelle and the WELL begins on page 291.

“Mapping the Blogosphere”
Stephen D. Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun, and Jaekwan Jeong

The present study analyzes these patterns in the emerging weblog zone, especially the highest profile area concerning news and political debate, and examines the relationships among the citizen-based and more traditional professional journalistic components of that zone. Specifically, we content analyze six of the major news and political blogs, those sites that generate the most traffic and links within the online community. We also trace the sites they link to, including not only other blogs but also traditional online news media sites, and the manner in which they refer to them. This gives us a picture of one area of the vast web-based news and political commentary network formed by these interlinking sites. As the news arena expands globally we are also interested in the international and ideological pattern of linking, and whether blogs engage a cross-national dialog across political lines. (236)

In the end they find out that many of these blogs are connected to the major media outlets and these blogs often depend on the work of professional journalists for their own armchair analysis (since several bloggers dont have the research skills nor connections to perform investigative journalism themselves). They also find that it’s difficult to determine whether or not blogs cross-national boundaries since an individual blogger’s ISP and blog platform doesn’t correlate to her physical location. While I find manyof this article’s objectives naive, more troubling is the conclusion, which claims the blogosphere is a place that “has great potential in meeting the normative expectations we have of the public sphere: access that does not depend on economic resources, autonomy from both state and market forces, and ability of participants to communicate across professional, political, and geographic boundaries on the basis of reason” (259). I have to disagree. Users still have to have the funds to buy the equipment, the ability to make monthly payments, and still deal with corporations who sell you the ability to get online. And how are these blogs seperate from state and market forces? Most of the work on blogs, by their own admission, is based on the stories from traditional news outlets. These traditional outlets are most definitiely a part of the state and market forces. The media has been exceptionally soft on the Federal govt for all of its militray actions over the last eight years, and have even run with stories that come directly from the State Department concerning miltary actions with no fact checking invovled; the market shapes the content of blogs since the “Foxification” of news dictates the content made available to the general public and even how that content is delivered. This entire peice appears to be based on the technophile version of the rhetoric of inevitability. The article seems to be written with the undergirding philosophy that the act of blogging alone is shaping how these “citizen journalists” couch their arguments or use the resources available to them. It is not using an ecology metaphor a la Syverson; bloggers create identities and arguments based on their position within the social-political spectrum inherent in American politics. Technology does not suddenly give bloggers a blank slate where they suddenly are able to shed the identities they perform in material reality.

“Warblogs” writing on the Iraq War not using alternative media sources (240).

Ultimately, bloggers compete for ‘authority’, not so much in destroying what was closely held by professionals but by redeploying it across a broader area. Mainstream news reports can now be rapidly challenged, not only by other media but by the wired audience, which can engage such reports through
online communities – an extended communication infrastructure that constitutes the global new arena. It is in the cross-referencing, pooled consensual understandings, in the interactive ‘conversation’ that authority now resides. (240)

So professional news is referenced often and, when it is, typically taken at face value and used to develop larger points. (252)

the blogosphere incorporates professional journalistic voices as a complementary part of the network, and is not the source of relentless criticism of press bias that one may have sensed from some higher profile anti-media moments. These bloggers, for the most part, simply engage the facts and information carried in news accounts, accepting them at face value and using them to form their own arguments, reinforce views, and challenge opponents. They rarely challenge specific reportorial techniques and larger media structures. We may thus regard them ironically as in some ways preserving and reinforcing professional norms of journalism as they disseminate content generated by traditional reporting practices. (257)

It would seem this study confirms power law distribtuion ideas about the Web as a network. It’s 80/20, and the material, social network is reproduced on the network that is the Web.

“Myth and the Zapatista Movement: Exploring a Network Identity”
Adrienne Russell

Mainstream media traffics in archetypical myths in a way that re-affirms the political and social status quo. Protest groups, like the SDS, who don’t fit into the box created by these myths often loose control of their public image and become ineffectual when trying to spread its message to the masses. The hack for this network is uthe use of new media, that is, websites, listservs, email, YouTube, SMS, and social networking sites. Each allow the protest group to present themselves in ways unperturbed by the corporations that own traditional media outlets, and when coupled with the saavy implemetation of heroic myths and hip products as stand-ins for the groups experential identity, then protest groups are able to incur the favor of the masses. One such example would the Zapatistas.

The Zapatista image is built on three key myths:

(1) Subcommander Marcos, the movement’s spokesman, portraying him as a timeless uberhuman figure, referred to here as the ‘universal Marcos’;
(2) indigenous peoples, in this case the Mayan Indians of Chiapas, holding them up as anti-modern postmodern, paradoxically backward and advanced, as victims but also as heroes, as ‘noble warriors’ from the past fighting for the future; and
(3) so-called neoliberal trade policy, the ideology behind transnational legal agreements and corporate and state actions that seem to many to extend beyond the reach of individuals and the national governments that are supposed to represent them – this ideology and its manifestations represent in the world of the network a thus-far unslayable dragon, or what is referred to here as the ‘neoliberal beast’. (562)

Through effecitve use of myth, the Zapatista are able to use “the space beyond the websites run by the news and entertainment industries, the space often described as ‘decentered’, ‘freefloating’ and ‘anarchic’” (561), essentially using the network propped up and made possible by industries and companies that are apathetic, if not opposed to, the message of the Zapatistas. Through this parasitic (and I don’t mean this in a bad way) use of the web, the “Zapatista network is a sort of rival myth factory, where power flows among the member-participants, a force for resistance to rival myths but also for control of the network itself” (575).

A 1998 RAND report to the US military called the Zapatista uprising an information ‘netwar’ where new-communication technologies would be more effective than military arms (Ronfeldt et al., 1998). In such a war, dissemination and narrative power are the weapons that matter. The Zapatistas have integrated the latest techniques, providing savvy examples of idea and image commodification, cross-media campaign strategies that include news reports, art, literature, cartoons, music and product tie-ins such as posters, T-shirts, stickers, condoms stamped with Marcos’s face and ‘authentic’ action figures made in Chiapas by real peasants. Myth provides the flexibility needed to successfully garner support in the expanded media landscape. (562)

Universal Marcos begins on 564.

The myth of the Universal Marcos not only attracts people with a
diversity of interests and agendas to the movement, but also helps to make
sense of how they can come together to form a network. Marcos’s
widespread appeal and his compelling articulation of the commonalities
among local movements under the pressure of global politics and economics,
establish the movement as a hub for international activists, at once drawing
people into the movement and expanding it to include new causes and
issues. He is a powerful political leader, more complex by design than his
government and corporate adversaries. He wins support through his art, his
association with other causes, his resonance with various realities. Listservs
are filled with users who spend hours unraveling his ideas, discussing his
essays and children’s books, his looks and background, his interviews and
photospreads. In an information ‘netwar’ it is this cross-fertilization of
groups, causes, ideas, identities, products and media that make the
movement innovative and difficult to suppress. (566)

The Noble Warriors (566).

Colorful clothing, distinct faces, dramatic contrasts – mules and machine guns – this is the stuff of icon. In the energy that it expends pursuing these representations and in the immeasurable rate
at which it reproduces them, the Zapatista network raises these images and the stories that they tell to the level of myth in order to rally support. (569)

This part fof the myth works through strategic essentializing. It romanticisizes the indigenous people as a way to fight the netwar–it persaudes people to consider their position and to take their side as it automatically paints the other side as the mechanized monolith of corporate capitalism. While this may disempower the Indian population of Chipas is specific ways, it also makes them likeable underdogs who can use the images already in play–often against them–to their advantage.

Neoliberal (laissez-faire capirtalism) Beast (569).

But, as mentioned above in reference to marches, raves and readings in San Francisco, the network is not locked into cyberspace. People following the conflict online traveled to Mexico during the first days of the uprising to help shield the Zapatistas against the advancing Mexican military (Cleaver, 1998a). Worldwide protests against President Zedillo’s order to break a ceasefire with the Zapatistas in February of 1995 were organized online (Castells, 1997; Cleaver, 1998a; Robberson, 1995). In 1996, 50,000 Italians used the internet to facilitate a rally in support of the Zapatistas in the Piazza del Pololo in Rome (Chiapas95 Archives, 1994). And groups such as the Chiapas–Albany Solidarity Alliance, based in New York, hold fundraisers, conduct awareness campaigns and organize ‘safety nets’ or groups of people prepared to
mobilize quickly to assist human rights workers in Chiapas (www.zapnet.rootmedia.org/~albanycasa/). (572)

Seatlle DAN and consultation of Zapatista strategist on page 573.

The Zapatista movement also works to make its methods and methodolgy in netwar useable by other groups (573-574).

The analysis performed by the scholar emphasizes the concept of myth and romanticizaiton, not the Zapatistas themselves.

“New Media, Networking, and Phatic Culture”
Vincent Miller

Phatic communication: “communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture” (388).

In the drift from blogging, to social networking, to microblogging we see a shift from dialogue and communication between actors in a network, where the point of the network was to facilitate an exchange of substantive content, to a situation where the maintenance of a network itself has become the primary focus. Here communication has been subordinated to the role of the simple maintenance of ever expanding networks and the notion of a connected presence…The movement from blogging, to social networking, to microblogging demonstrates the simultaneous movements away from communities, narratives, substantive communication, and towards networks, databases and phatic communion. (399)

Lev Manovich (2001) among others argues that we are in the process of a shift from narrative forms (as epitomized by the novel or the cinematic film) as the key form of cultural expression in the modern age, to the database as the prominent cultural logic of the digital age…In contrast to narratives, the database form, as the foregoing passage suggests, is presented as a collection of somewhat separate, yet relational elements. Because databases are in essence collections or ‘lists’, they are theoretically endless and always ‘in progress’. In addition, since databases consist of relational elements, their order or combination in terms of consumption or use is determined by the user as a co-author, rather than rigidly designed by one author. Therefore, databases are (potentially) infinitely combinable in their use. (391, 393)

Karin Knorr-Cetina (1997) has used the term ‘postsocial’ to describe not only the
phenomenon of the disembedding of modern selves (and the flattened, thinned out social
forms that have resulted), but also the current expansion of object-centred environments.
In what amounts to a merging of indvidualization theory and actor-network theory, Knorr-
Cetina argues that with individualization we have not experienced a ‘desocialization’, but
a shift in late modern social relations to ones that are increasingly sifted through, or
mediated, by objects. This serves to increase the distance of the concept of ‘the social’
from a focus on human groups to something that takes into account our increasing
engagements with a variety of objects, tools and technologies (such as mobile phones,
computers, blogs and social networking profiles), which not only allow us, but encourage
us, to engage with others through them. Human relationships become increasingly
dependent on, and even displaced by, objects. Thus, the technical means available has
contributed to a postsocial situation where we use objects (whether it be phones, or
MySpace profiles, or blogs) as communicative bodies to be in constant conversation with
other represented bodies or postsocial objects. In the process, such relationships, and the
‘work’ needed to maintain them, become transformed.

Licoppe and Smoreda (2005) note that one way in which these transformations take
place is through a change in the notions of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, which occur in an
age where many people are continually ‘in touch’ through networking technologies.
These technologies essentially ‘stand in’ for them, making one almost continually
contactable. Licoppe and Smoreda refer to this blurring of presence and absence as
‘connected presence’. Their argument is that a new sociability pattern of the constantly
contactable, one which blurs presence and absence, has resulted in relationships
becoming webs of quasi-continuous exchanges. (395)

To answer this ‘why?’ question, one has to return to the concept of information as
a commodity. In blogging, personal information was used as a commodity to build
relationships. Within social networking and microblogging, the value of information is
based more on the generation of large amounts of small bits of data, which can be
analysed easily in the marketing process. Strategies such as data mining, consumer profiling,
‘buzz’ monitoring, and reading brand relationships are much more compatible with
the small bits of ‘data’ exchanged in brief phatic exchanges than the narratives and
dialogue associated with, for example, blogging. Phatic communication is much easier to
put in a database, and much easier to package and sell to those looking to market
products or gain consumer insights. (399)

Miller uses the concept of “community” as a harkening back to some more pure time of human interaction, but with his straightforward explanation for the design of social networking sites that emphaize short bursts of phatic communication (the bloc quote above), anything could be more pure than the contrived world of Facebook or Twitter.

“Online Networks of Student Protest: The Case of the Living Wage Program”
J. Patrick Biddix and Han Woo Park

This article finds that student protest organizations have a longer life with the use of websites; not only do the websites serve as dessimination points concerning plained off-line activity, they are also important as tools to link and connect to other student and non-student organizaitons with the same goals and objectives. Moreover, they serve as anchoring points and repositories during periods of organizational latency–something common to student run groups due to graduation, therefore, turnover. Email, instant messaging, and text messaging are also helpful during a protest event.

The drawback of using technology listed on page 884.

The results seem obvious. What’s most important in this piece is the methodology; it’s a mix of ethnography and network analysis. This article serves as an excellent example of how studying networked protest groups can be done efficiently and thoroughly. A full description begins on page 874.

“Structural Holes are Good Ideas”
Ronald S. Burt

This article outlines the mechanism by which brokerage provides
social capital. Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within
than between groups, so people connected across groups are more
familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Brokerage
across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of options
otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage
becomes social capital. I review evidence consistent with the hypothesis,
then look at the networks around managers in a large
American electronics company. The organization is rife with structural
holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates. Compensation,
positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are
disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span
structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express
ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to
have ideas evaluated as valuable. I close with implications for creativity
and structural change. (349)

There were numerous opportunities for brokerage
(fig. 2 and fig. 3), and managers were rewarded for brokerage in
the sense that compensation, positive performance evaluations, and promotions
were disproportionately given to managers who brokered connections
across structural holes (fig. 4). (386)

Stories about the creation of a good idea are often heroic, distinguishing
exceptional people from the mundane. The creator is attributed with great
intellectual ability, a fresh perspective, a productive way of thinking, a
creative personality, or some other quality that enabled him or her to
generate the good idea. Every discipline has its heroes and heroines and
stories that serve productive ends other than truth. (387)

An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another. In our age
of ready technology, people often make the mistake of thinking that they
create value when they have an idea born of sophisticated analysis. That
is not true. An idea is as valuable as an audience is willing to credit it
with being. (388)

This is a familiar phenomenon in academic work (e.g.,
see Stigler [(1982) 1986] on the quick acceptance of his economic analysis
of information, or Lamont [1987] on the popularity of Derrida’s work in
culture markets as different as France and the United States). We specialize
by method, theory, and topic. It is impossible to keep up with
developments in other specialities. It would be inefficient even if it were
possible. So there is a market for the information arbitrage of network
entrepreneurs, and the evidence of their work is that valuable new ideas
in any one specialty are often a familiar concept in some distant specialty. (389)

My summary conclusion is that good ideas emerged, as hypothesized,
from the intersection of social worlds, but spread—in the organization
studies here—in a way that would continue segregation between the
worlds. There was a brokerage advantage in producing ideas, and company
systems were working correctly to reward brokers who produced
good ideas. However, the potential value for integrating operations across
the company was dissipated in the distribution of ideas. (394)

“The Contingent Value of Social Capital”
Ronald S. Burt

Burt open by differentiating between human capital and social capital. Social capital is created between people, while human capital is a quality of individuals (339). “With respect to consequences, social capital is the contextual compliment to human captial. Social captial predicts the returns to intelligence, education, and seniority depend in some part to the location of a person’s location in the social structure of a market or hierarchy” (339).

Burt combines this with the structural hole argument; in networks that dispersed and have blatant gaps, social capital is “awarded” to the individuals who can bridge those gaps and bring across ideas or resources socially constructed as valuable on one side of the structural hole. These are the “brokers” mentioned in the previous article. Dispersing these brokers in the right places are beneficial to the manager who can deploy them in ways that help their projects (this appears to be written in the context of a business firm).

The value of social capital in a structural ecology is dependent on two things:

First the value of social capital decreases with an increasing number of people doing the same work. Second, the rate at which peers erode the value of social capital is steepest where social capital is most valuable. (356)

The article closes with what these contingencies mean for future research. Any study that has several managers doing the same work can be seen as “ill-designed” (362) and discounted. Studies which focus on managers with few peers should be studied closely. Studies reporting

different strengths of association between managerial success and social capital can be integrated in terms of the relative extent to which managers in the seperate studies work with different numbers of peers. This is precisely the kind of analytical power needed to establish social capital explanations on a par with the human capital explanations on which we were weaned. (362)

Burt is attempting to explain, within an ecology metaphor and network analysis, how people actually get ahead within corporations (or fail) in ways that are closer to experiential reality and not reliant solely on generic explanations and socitieal commonplaces.

“The New Science of Networks”
Duncan J. Watts

Watts explores the “new” science of networks coming to the fore in fields like biology and the social sciences and demonstrates how several of the new studies occuring in these fields match work done in other fields using similar methodologies (Watts claims this type of work has been going on in mathematics and physics for some time). Watts closes the article explaining

if the science of networks is to live up to its early promise, then the other disiciplines–sociology in particular–must offer guidance in, for example, the interpretation of empirical and theoretical findings, particularly in the context of policy applications, and also in suggesting measures and models that are increasingly relevant to problems at hand. (264)

Throughout the article Watts breaks each of the more popular network models down.

“The Social Capital of Opinion Leaders”
Ronald S. Burt

This article combines the concept of brokerage along structural holes and the model of two step communication. Two step communication is “a process of the moving of information from the media to opinion leaders, and influence moving from opinion leaders to their followers” (38).Two step communication works on the idea of contagion; infecting opinion leaders means they will infect their immediate networks.

Cohesion refers to the strength of the relationship between ego and alter. For example, cohesion would be high between two friends. Contagion by cohesion occurs because of socializing communication. The more frequent and empathic the communication between ego and alter, the more likely that alter’s adoption of a new idea or behavior will trigger ego’s adoption. (39)

The familiar two-step flow of communication is a compound of two distinct network mechanisms; contagion by cohesion through opinion leaders gets information into a group, then contagion by equivalence triggers adoptions within the group. Thus, opinion leaders are not people at the top of things so much as people at the edge of things, not leaders within groups so much as brokers between groups. (51)

“The Very Small World Well-Connected”
Xiolan Shi, Matthew Bonner, Lada Acamic, and Anna C. Gilbert

Shi et al are creating equations which allow for the break down of large networks and the study of small pieces of said network (referred to as a graph) so as to study the entire network in a manageable way. In this way the relationship between nodes in the graph (wehter blogs or webpages) can be described in terms of information exchange, linking, and position as a hub or a connector within the network under examination. The termminology used to described these networks (which, by the way, are networks found on the Web) is the type discussed by Spinuzzi early in his monograph; nodes, edges, and vertices are the terms most often deployed.

In this paper, we propose a new approach to analyzing and studying large online networks, vertex-importance graph synopsis. Given a set of important vertices, we extract a much smaller subgraph from the original network, containing those important vertices. We attempt to place this process on a rigorous footing and show that even simple versions of the graph compression problem are hard (but that
there are reasonable heuristic algorithms). Unlike previous methods which evaluated the fidelity of the“graph abstract,” this approach utilizes the subsets of important vertices and edges and the information they could provide in large networks. We argue that they can make information accesss and management more efficient in real applications. These observations suggest future work in using graph synopses for information retrieval and information flow detection.

From our empirical analysis of three real online networks, we find a number of interesting properties. The important vertices are much more closely and densely connected to each other. They also have significantly shorter pairwise paths, which do not heavily depend on the rest of vertices in the networks, (i.e. their pairwise shortest paths in the subgraphs induced by themselves are close to those in the original graphs). Finally, their relative ranks are almost all highly correlated to their ranks in the original networks. Although our experiments show that the properties of vertices of different importance measures in different networks
do vary in some ways, the observations stated above are consistent no matter the type of networks (either social or technological), and regardless of the importance measure we choose. Thus, we may use vertex-importance graph synopses as small but accurate representatives of the important vertices in the larger graph (and, sometimes, of the larger graph itself). Furthermore, the real online networks are relatively
easy to compress while preserving important graph properties (they do not exhibit the worst-case behavior of our theoretical analysis).

In addition to empirical studies, we use analytical discussions to show how these properties of important vertices in online networks differ from random graph models. What is more, we also use heuristic algorithms to measure the complexities and trade-offs of requiring some properties of the real networks to be guaranteed in the compressed graphs. (69)

“The Virtual Geography of Social Networks”
Zizi Papacharissi

Papacharissi argues that the architecture of social networking sites affects not only the individual user’s presentation of self (ethos), but also determines the user’s behavior while spending time online and on their SNS of choice (the article analyzes Facebook, LinkdIn and ASmallWorld).

While not entirely neutral, fluid architecture highlights technological affordances without definitively determining behavior.The more flexible, although not utterly flexible, architecture of Facebook highlighted the social affordances of the technologies, whereas the more defined LinkedIn and ASmallWorld produced a more definitive effect on human behavior. Neither good nor bad, neither restrictive nor liberating, nor neutral, technology-as-architecture communicates the inherent promise and predisposition of online spaces. (217)

This flexibility allows for choices in self-presentation, the spontaneous creation of personal networks, interpersonal relationships, and the ability “to create symbolic codes that facilitate communication and create what Castells (2000) termed a culture of ‘real virtuality’” (202) that is used to perform the above described acts.

The methodology involves discourse analysis and is built on four points: “private/public balance present in each social networking site, styles of self-presentation in spaces privately public and publicly private, cultivation of taste performances as a mode of sociocultural identification and organization and the formation
of tight or loose social settings” (200).

In spaces where validation of offline identity is a requirement for admission, how is the liberating aspect of online expression compromised as individuals enter networks with their real-life baggage, carrying with them class, gender and ethnic assumptions that characterize them in their offline existence? How is space used to communicate, reiterate or de-emphasize gender, class and ethnic distinctions? What is the historical significance of all this, and how may the growing popularity of online networks influence the course of the internet as a medium? Do some spaces become ‘more equal than others’, as access to technology and literacy are no longer enough to bridge a digital divide that is unfolding in a new direction, supporting an online information caste system? These are the questions that guide this discourse analysis. (206)

Dicusson of the difference between the three sites on 209-210. Facebook is generally open to anyone with Internet access and willing to divlge certain pieces of private offline info; Linkdin is open to everyone but through its design and mission statment draws professionals or future professionals (the article refers to it as a “Rolodex); ASmallWorld is a completely gated community which prides itelf on its exclusive membership. Membership in ASmallWorld can only be gained through invitation by a current member who has been awarded inviting privleges.

Goffman’s concept of presentation (“faces”) is presented as a way to describe how each SNS’s architecture enables ethos (210-213).

Discussion of tast performance on 213.

Looseness, tightness, and organic creation of social norms by users on 214.

Public and private space discussed on 207. The essay claims there is a blurring of these spaces online.

Electronic media are characterized by their ability to remove, or at least rearrange, the boundaries between public and private spaces, affecting our lives not so much through content, but rather ‘by changing the ‘situational geography’ of social life’ (Meyrowitz, 1986: 6). In describing this effect, Meyrowitz (1986) employed an architectural analogy and asked his audience to imagine a world where all walls separating rooms, houses, and offices were removed, thus combining several distinct situations.This merging of private and public (or the confluence of public and private boundaries) carries behavioral consequences for individuals, who must adjust their behavior so as to make it appropriate for a variety of different situations and audiences. As a result, the realm of interaction and self-presentation fostered by electronic media conveys a lack of a situational place to orient the individual or, as Meyrowitz terms it, ‘no sense of place’. The confluence of private and public is especially pronounced on a medium such as the internet, and is particularly relevant to interaction developing in online social networks (e.g. Barnes, 2006; boyd and Heer, 2006; Donath and boyd, 2004). (206-207)

The Rhetorical Tradition 
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds.
“Maria W. Stewart”

“Maria W. Stewart”
Stewart (born Maria Miller) was a free African American woman who was orphaned at age 5, worked as an indentured servant for a clergyman until 15, and was educated in Sabbath schools, ie, schools designed for basic reading and writing instruction so individuals could read Scripture and keep journals concerning their reflections on how Scripture connected to their lives. She was married in 1826 to James W. Stewart (well-off ship outfitter, Bostonian, and African American community leader) at the age of 23 (he was 46). After his death, and the death of her minister, she decided her life’s mission was to work in the African American community.

Stewart connected with William Loyd Garrison who published her work in The Liberator, and eventually began speaking in Boston–most importantly was one of the first women to speak publicly to mixed audiences (think Cult of True Womanhood from 751). Stewart is often overlooked in favor of the Grimké sisters, most likely due to race and socio-economic class (Stewart was swindled out of her inheritance from James and lived as working class poor for the rest of her life, serving as sometime teacher, community worker, and speaker/writer). Her oratorical style is described by B&H as “black jeremiad,” that is, “announced religious inspiration, biblical echoes and referecnes, especially to Jeremiah and the Book of Revelations” (1035); and she preached betterment for African Americans through education, hard work, and social activism to end slavery/institutional racism.

Lecture Delivered at the Franklin Hall

• Example of jeremiad on 1037 first column.
• Call for gender equality and access to education for women bottom of first column into second column on page 1037.
• 1038 top of the first column and 1039 at the end of the speech–the prophet admonishing sinners (Anglo American on 1038, African American on 1039) with scathing examples of how they fall short in doing work beneficial to themselves and God.

Mrs. Stewart’s Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston

Example of religious inspriation on 1040, top of first column.
1040 into 1041 example of religion as way to express her desire for social change and as a way to legitimate her goals of community improvement.
Interesting play on Paul’ misogony and a turning of the true womanhood concept from domestic angel to social activist–first column mid-way on 1041.
End of first column into second column, Stewart begins to use historic examples to support her claims that women should be allowed to speak in public on social issues.
Bottom of 1041 Stewart chastizes those who are scandalized by her public speaking.

The Rhetorical Tradition
Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
“Richard Whately”
From Elements of Rhetoric

“Richard Whately”
Whatley retells the history of rhetoric and delineates specific rhetoricians as the key figures of rhetorical history. Specifically, he calls out Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian, Bacon, Campbell, and Blair as the rhetoricians worth mentioning; the problem is that few have pushed rhetoric to new heights, meaning that rhetoric has stayed primarily the same since Aristotle.

Whatley sees rhetoric as the offspring of logic, and wants to make rhetoric more systematic. Rhetoric should have a theory that demonstrates each stage of conviction. To do this means understanding language and psychology, and Whately claims these are “the bases for rhetoric” (1000), and therefore, all rhetorical study should fully interrogate these subjects.

Whately is a defender of the faith, and he is molding rhetoric as a way for the faithful to counter sceptics. One way he does this is through using the methods of language and observation against science; the other is his orientation on what science does and what it should be doing. According to Whately, “[m]odern science has emphasized knowledge of facts and has neglected logic” (1000). Using logic as a way to compose and arrange arguments was Whately’s way of refuting science using the tools of science, but also it’s a way to prove there’s a position within logic for religious argumentation and that arguing against the very en vogue discipline of science was a rational, reasonable, and thoroughly normal activity sane men could take up (I say men since most of these rhetoricians in this time period spoke only of men in the public sphere).

“Like Campbell, he maintains that much scientific knowledge is based on the same kind of reasoning as moral knowledge and that linear demonstrations of causality do not constitute the whole of logic” (1001).

“Causal demonstration, moreover, is not appropriate to arguments about most of life’s affairs. Rather, a ‘progressive approach’ to the truth must be used. Rhetoric’s proper province is therefore to argue for truths found by other means–by science or revelation” (1001).

Part I is the Elements of rhetoric, mostly discussing how audiences react to different types of evidence, and specifically, testimony. Audiences do not always react to logic.

Part II focuses on appeals to emotion. It is necessary to “stimulate emotions such as hope, fear, and altruism because they lead to worthy aims” (1002).

Part III is a handbook on style which stresses clarity and correctness.

Part IV is made up of Whately’s advice on elocution. Whately follows Sheridan in stressing natural style (which means speaking habits which appear more natural).

From Elements of Rhetoric
In the intro Whately has several things going. First, that there needs to be a system of Rhetoric and Composition (and he is speaking overtly about composing written documents) that is based in observation of those who are successful in persuading using either mode. Second, he is taking what he wants from the history of Rhetoric and then using certain rhetoricians/rhetorics as a way to elevate his own system of rhetoric. Third, he is making the argument, towards the end, for the correct way to teach students.

All of this sounds strangely familiar. Not just the recent history of modern Rhet-Comp, but also some of the pedagogical warrants that undergird Whately’s claims. There is a belief in one dominant culture, and that a student’s understanding of said culture, along with her consent, is a given, and therefore, compositions created by such a student should be exercises in demonstrating profieicney of the pedagogy Whately is proposing. Because of this, student compositions can be “puerile” concerning certain subjects since this is to be expected of the young. I find problematic the lack of any qualifying statements which explain to what degree and in what ways a student composition can be naive.

Also, there is the idea that this pedagogy is founded in good intentions. The system is a way to make plain those things that appear mystical, a way to allow anyone who has access to understand how persuasion works and how they can make it work for them (1008-1009). While I assert this isn’t overtly articulated, I think this is the reasoning for the project; Whately is exceptionally concerned that new rules of rhetoric and composition b created which do not “cramp” the faculties of writer-speakers–they should, at all times, “assist” the writer-speaker as he argues for his claims (1008-1009) (claims by the way formed through Philosophy and Logic [1005]).

Part I, Chapter II is primarily about forms of evidence–specifically testimony. There are subsections naming each type of testimony, and the exposition following each heading explains how a speaker/writer could use each type to his advantage. They’re self-explanatory for the most part, but put in the light of the intro, the importance that Whately puts on each makes sense since he was explaining how to defend the faith against sceptics who were using science and philosophy to question the validity and usefulness of religion. Testimony, I figure, is important since Whately would be using the “testimony” recounted in the scriptures, or individuals claiming to have witnessed a miracle in Whately’s time.

Chapter III

Chapter three is concerned with Presumption and Burden of Proof.

“According to the most correct use of this term, a “Presumption” in favour [sic] of any supposition, means, not (as has been sometimes erroneously imagined) a preponderance of probability in its favour, but, such a preoccupation of the ground, as implies that it must stand good till some sufficient reason is adduced against it; in short that the Burden of proof lies on the of him who would dispute it” (1019).

Interestingly, Whately makes the argument for tradition and traditional institutions as in a position of strength in the first few pages of this chapter (1019-1020), and this claim colors the rest of the chapter. This returns to the concept of defending the faith. In 1022-1030 the Whately gives advice for the individual, with an emphasis on how to move through an argument so as to defend traditions and institutions. There is also a a few sections that explain how individuals can be led astray (Grounds of deference, deference as to particular points, presumptions for and against the learned, Fallacies). The rest of the topics are strategies or elements of arguments that should be emphasized or utilized to argue against those who have the Burden of Proof within the argument, ie, those who are attacking the concept of Christianity.

Rhetoric in the European Tradition
Thomas Conley
Chapter Seven: “Eighteenth Century Rhetorics”

The Rhetorical Tradition
Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
“Thoman Sheridan”
A Course of Lectures on Elocution
“George Campbell”
From The Philosophy of Rhetoric
“Hugh Blair”
From Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

Rhetoric in the European Tradition
Thomas Conley
Chapter Seven: “Eighteenth Century Rhetorics”

188-189 Swift works to satirize the Cartesian ideas of dualism and the theory that words affect the body by mere physiological force; in the example Swift mentions vowel sounds, belching and farting as ways to move audiences.

Bottom of 189 qand into 190, Conley describes how Swift’s comical send up of representation theory was a hyperbolic take on the work of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, but then explains how Swift’s sarcasm can be seen as the logical, extreme conclusion of such theories.

First full paragraph of 190=the mission statement of the chapter.

Conley asserts “[r]hetoricians [had] appropriated the vocabulary of the New Philosophy because they had already become convinced…such things were precisely what persuasion consisted in” (190), meaning that rhetoricians of the time period believed that persuasion was achieved through simplicity and clarity. Because of this, Conley explains “We will not therefore take the view that the New Philosophy itself brought about radical changes in rhetorical theory” (190).

The problem for rhetoricians in this time period was the solipsism which came with the New Philosophy. If all that could be known is the self, and if all that can be proven to exist is the self, and all that can be communicated is consciousness of the speaker, how then can a speaker be clear and move “others’ souls” (196)?

Buffier gets around this by creating the principle he called “common sense.” He defines it as “the disposition which nature has put in all men, or clearly in the greatest number of men, to form…a common and uniform judgment concerning objects from the objects of one’s own consciousness” (Buffier qtd in Conley 196).

Buffier makes this common sense self-evident. “[T]here is something in men which is called truth, wisdom, and prudence, and it is not something wholly arbitrary”; “all men are not in conspiracy to deceive me”; “what is affirmed through the experiences and testimony of all men is incontestably true”; “a fact attested by a very large number of reasonable men who claim to have witnessed it cannot reasonably be revoked by doubt”; and all of this was “something of a spiritual nature” (196). This, according to Conley meant “[t]he essence of the art of rhetoric…could now be grounded firmly on ’self -evident’ truths, as could the faculty of taste” (197).

So if moves can be made in rhetoric’s past to respond to issue which threaten its efficacy at that moment, then how is Glenn’s use of Aspasia somehow disingenuous as claimed by her critics? It seems a common enough move in all the periods we’ve studied this semester. Rhetoricians of the past are forgotten or for-grounded, as well as elements of rhetoric, as the needs of the milieu required so rhetorical study could survive through being viewed as as a vibrant and useful course of study. Isn’t that all that’s going on in Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold in a very broad way?

DuMarsais is important to rhetoric as he freed “meaning from the limitations of the representational theory of meaning by demonstrating the rational principles of association that govern meaning even where the meaning is not literal” (198).

There is evidently no need, in Bouhours’ view, to take all that New Philosophy into account since, in the final analysis as it bears on eloquence, it supplies nothing new and only complicates matter by formalizing something that can be made obvious simply by looking at the ways various authors express themselves…it provided a relatively painless and accessible way by which a reader could sharpen his (or her) sense of good literature– that is–acquire taste. (200)

The above quote seems to match the issue in this time period Lois alluded to last class–the beginnings of literary studies as a way to teach rhetoric and make people familiar with the various rhetorics popular throughout Western Europe.

Rollin–French–audience is the focus, and the use of the simple style ensures that the rhetor can have affect on the audience (201-202). This also is at the time of the bourgeois honnete homme, the educated, gentil, member of polite society. Rhetorical training was important as it cultivated the mind and speech (think Quintillian), and just was important was aesthetic taste; this was achieved through a familiarity with many intellectual endeavors, especially belle lettres.

Buffier and DuMarsais made conscious adjustments to the New Philosophy, while Bouhours and Rollin may be seen as the “classicizers” who ignored the doctrines being promoted i nthe name of reason.

French cultural dominacne occurs through the rhetorics coming out of France and the need for philosophers and examples of strong, absolute monarchs working without the doctrine of divine approval. The Reformation threw the social order into flux, and all things French still promoted a strong central authority. The eventual rebellion was less about philosophical/rhetorical schisms and more about the desire for other Europeans countries to speak their own languages in “polite society.”

Education, and especially university education, used for the purposes of national identity/cultural hegemony building and a way to pacify the new merchant class and the old money nobles (still a new thing) (204).

Rhetorics from the Hinterlands (the fringes of the British Isles) is built on the English system of social aspiration and possibility for advancement on the social ladder. Speaking well for all “polite” and governmental situations was a concern for these provincials. From this movement comes Campbell and Blair.

One thing [the New Philosophy] was able to provide [for] some rhetoricians…was a psychological model that could be appealed to in order to show how rhetoric works. But the new New Philosophy had to be adjusted and revised in order for it to be used because, in itself, it made rhetoric virtually impossible or, if possible, then disreputable. (224)

The idea of common sense and belle lettres seems to carry across all of England and the Continent in this period; the figure of the honnetes hommes was so strong it survived no matter the culture or the language. This, too, would be the beginning of literary study. Contrary to popular belief, modern English Studies comes from rhetoric, not vice versa.

The Rhetorical Tradition
Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
“Thoman Sheridan”

Sheridan received a classical education from his father, Dr. Thomas Sheridan; mentoring from his godfather, Jonathan Swift; an MA from Trinity College (Dublin); and was an actor of note before becoming an advocate of correct elocution–in English. It was his believe and claim, like all things related to education, that correct elocution would improve the moral fiber, the ethical practices, revive the fine arts, raise religion to its proper place within English society, and encourage sincere support for the British constitution (why is this the only rhetorical strategy to drum up support for education?)

He argues, too, that just as language is the medium of reason, so voice and gesture are the “natural language of the passions.” John Locke had demonstrated the former connection, but the latter, says Sheridan, need further philosophical investigation. Sheridan’s lectures appeal to science, reverence for the ancients, linguistic anxiety (the popular passion fir speaking correctly), and morality, bringing to bear every possible argument for the importance of elocution. The very excess of this insistent overevaluation of elocution led to criticism and undervaluation of Sheridan’s project. (879-880)

[Sheridan] cautions against reading-pronunciation (eg, pronouncing “often” with the “t”) and urges speakers to attend to the meaning of sentences to determine the placement of emphasis and pauses. Gestures should also be natural. But, he notes, the meaning of gestures is conventional; they are actions attached to ideas: Natural therefore means “not mechanical,” rather than “springing from human nature.” (880)

A Course of Lectures on Elocution
Bottom of column one of 881 into the top of the second column Sheridan gives a very wide and seemingly untroubled (read: no interference by the New Philosophy) definition of language.

The claim at the end of the piece (888) appears to be the power of language as an affective tool to move people, and whether this is due to my knowledge of his career as an actor I don’t know, but it seems to match Conley’s discussion in chapter seven of a unilateral style of rhetoric. There is convention, but it is up to the speaker to utilize that convention and move the passive audience through the performative act of speaking.

Sheridan makes a long account of animals and how making utterances is natural, there is no real need for explanation beyond the fact that all animals, including man, have this power and have learned to utilize it for the common and individual good. On 885 Sheridan explains that the ear is designed to pick up tones and decipher the intentions of a speech act by the mere intonation of the speaker’s voice. Here, it seems Sheridan is working from Buffier’s ideas about common sense, ie, there are certain self-evident truths about experiential reality and man as a social animal that do not need a rational explanation. What’s important it to work with those truths so as to make audience members malleable and amenable to your proposed course of action.  For Sheridan, this means speaking in ways to rouse the emotions, to present one’s self as credible, and to speak in a manner that is affective.

“George Campbell”
Campbell served as a minister for the Church of Scotland before he became the principal of Marischal College, his alma mater. Campbell also served as a professor of divinity at Marischal. Campbell helped to found the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen; the group criticized but also admired the work of Scottish philosopher David Hume (Campbell’s Dissertation on Miracles is an answer to Hume’s attack on religion).

See chart on page 898.

For Campbell, rhetoric must “address all the mind’s facilities–the understanding, the imagination, the passions, and the will–to achieve persuasion” (898) (this is quote is found in Book I of The Philosophy of Rhetoric).

The path to persuasion, in Campbell’s theory, passes through each of the faculties in turn. Therefore, rhetoric must appeal first to the understanding and produce conviction, without which persuasion cannot follow. Convincing arguments are based upon reasoning, of which, says Campbell, there are two kinds: scientific and moral. Scientific reasoning relies on general principles, such as mathematical axioms or inductive generalizations. From these principles, it demonstrates a conclusion by a chain of logical links. But in all human affairs that concern “pleasure and pain, wisdom and folly, beauty and deformity” and in disputes where there is real evidence on both sides of the case, moral reasoning takes precedence over scientific reasoning. (898-899)

It would seem this is the carry over we experience now. Only when it is a question of with more than one possible answer will interlocutors in the current time eschew scientific reasoning; unfortunately they often turn to well-worn arguments based in the value system of the dominant hegemony.

For Campbell, persuasion is more than a casual chain; it’s a bundle of evidence that must be used to convince the audience and then move, through the stages as listed in the chart on 898, to persuasion. “Reasoning thus becomes the a natural part of rhetoric: Rhetoric begins with the search for truth and then proceeds to persuasion, the attempt to move the will to ethical action” (899).

Syllogism and the stages of composition are unnecessary in Campbell’s rhetoric. There are only two stage of persuasion: 1)exciting some desire or passion in the hearers and then 2)satisfying their judgment that there is a connexion between the action to which he would persuade them, and the gratification of the desire or passion which he excites (899).

Book Two deals with grammar and makes the bold claim all grammar should be descriptive, not prescriptive (and descriptive is limited to the educated classes and their conventions). In Book Three he makes a similar argument about style.

syntax: the study of the patterns of formation of sentences and phrases from words.

diction:style of speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words.

From The Philosophy of Rhetoric

“All the ends of speaking are reducible to four; every speech being intended to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the will” (902).

Reaching the heart is all important for Campbell. Being affective is the way to gain “consent of the will” (905). According to Campbell, this makes rhetoric akin to a force of nature, or a piece of “heaven’s artillery” (905).

There are three types of intuitive evidence according to Campbell:

1. Mathematical Axioms (907)
2. Consciousness (908)
3. Common Sense (909)

“The first may be denominated metaphysical, the second physical, the third moral; all of them natural, original, and unaccountable” (912).

All rational or deductive evidence is derived from one or other of these two soures: from the invariable properties or relations of general ideas; or from the actual, though perhaps variable connexions subsisting among things. The former we call demonstrative, the latter moral. Demonstration is built on pure intellection, and consisteth in an uninterrupted series of axioms…Moral evidence is founded on the principles we have from consciousness and common sense, improved by experience; and as it proceeds on this general presumption or moral axiom, that the course of nature in time to come will be similar to what it hath been hitherto, it decides, in regard to particulars, concerning the future from the past, and concerning things unknown from things familiar to us. (912)

“The proper province of rhetoric is the second, moral evidence; for to the second belong all decisions concerning fact, and things without us” (912).

Difference between deductive and moral evidence 912-914.

There are four subdivisions of moral reasoning:

• Experience
• Analogy
• Testimony
• Calculations of Chance

The rest of the text continues on in this fashion, ie, listing, teasing out, and explaining how Campbell’s theory of rhetoric works in a way that a speaker can apply them to the everyday speech act. Everyday, it turns out, means the everyday rhetorical situation a minister (religious sense), a lawyer, or a politician would find himself in; Campbell gives these professionals ways to present themselves to an audience and methods so as  to read an audience.  The reading allows the professinal to develop the most persuasive strategy for that specific kairotic moment. During this section, Campbell places an emphasis on convincing and moving; Campbell makes it clear you can convince without moving, which means no action will come from the speaker’s performance; in the converse moving without convincing an audience of some specific purpose will lead to emotion with no worthwhile outcome (the worst case scenario is to incite some mindless action like violence or immoral/unethical acts).

In the very end Campbell explains the orator with the heaviest burden is the minister (makes sense considering Campbell himself was a man of the cloth).

“Hugh Blair”
Blair, like Campbell, was a minister in the Church of Scotland (hence I suppose all the unitateral, informative, affective theories of rhetoric).

Blair connectcs his rhetori to the leading ideas of the period: to reason, human nature, the need to cultivate,taste, and moral improvement. This scheme clearly links rhetoric and belles lettres. Rhetoric seeks to persuade through appeals to reason and the passions; criticism, in turn, evaluates aesthetic objects on the basis of their appeals to the same faculties. Good taste is thus at the root of both, and human nature is the foundation of taste…In pursuing this model Blair is at pains to reject received notions of eloquence and style and to build instead on modern psychology. (947)

Here I think it means Blair is moving away from the notions found in Renaissance rhetorics–the idea that there are certain modes to follow to endear oneself to the denziens at court or the salon(s). Rhetoric, if I’m reading this correctly, means speaking clearly so as to move the listener without the use of learned ornamentation, and an overall moral improvement through study and understanding of the humanities.

Still, knowing what I know about early pschology from The Mismeasure of Man, the basis of rhetoric on “modern psychology” is troubling. Rhetoric has always been theorized, written about, and knowingly practiced by the powerful (yes, even uni profs are powerful in comparison to the average hoi polloimaking her way through the world), the sciences at this time were making moves to essentialize the socially constructed, racist, classist qualities attributed to the colonized and the working class; these theories also reified the heavy handed institutional racism and political disenfranchisement that existed at that time.

From Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres
“Knowledge and science must furnish the materials that form the body and substance of any valuable composition. Rhetoric serves to add polish; and we know that none but firm and solid bodies can be polished well” (951). It seems it is impossible to use rhetoric to make knowledge through probabilistic reasoning in Blair’s rhetoric.

Articulated split between Rhetoric-Composition and Belle Lettres on the top of the second column on page 951.

“True rhetoric and sound logic are very nearly allied. The study of arranging and expressing our thoughts with propriety, teaches us to think, as well as to speak, accurately” (952). Blair doesn’t say “correctly,” but as the text moves forward his take of accuracy and taste seem to presuppose there is a standard of accuracy that equates to good taste and is built on a transcendental signified of “good” or “bad” writing. I have not, as yet, read a disclaimer that all ideas of good and bad are built on social convention, on cultural episteme like other rhetoricians from this week’s reading.

By 954 good works become products of genius, not the work playing on conventions. Couched in his later (in the final lecture) on “natural,” it would seem that genius is not something that denotes a speaker/writer capable of moving audiences through affective rhetoric, but through some divinely given attribute probably best referred to as “talent.”

Also, on 954 there is talk of rhetoric as a diversion from the hard work of science to discover (not make) knowledge.

“The indirect method of making an impression is likely to be more successful…This can often be accomplished more happily in a few sentences inspired by natural warmth, than in a long and studied address” (976). The problem here is that “natural” is nothing more than the social conventions a speaker/writer has noticed and is leveraging to his advantage. Most likely, there has been a long term of study–even if it’s not methodical, it’s people noticing how to coerce others within their immediate context by observing custom. It’s mundane, something people learn as children without knowing it. What is this “natural” Blair is referring to? Is there only one way?

On 977 Blair intimates that writing, to be natural, should occur in a rush of emotion. There may be some validity to this, but it does paint writing as creative art, not a way to make knowledge. There is no rigor. There is only emotion, and this–except only in specific spheres and situations–subtracts cultural capital from writing.

Lecture II on “taste” appears to argue that there is a universal, undefinable, but real standard that stands outside mundane reality for what is beautiful and good when it comes to art. Blair and Barthes seem closely aligned here; something must move, or “puncture” the beholder. These refined folks in the know are found only “in polished and flourishing nations” (961) since they have the resources available to develop the natural good taste of (and the right living, healthy minds and bodies) of good men.

Lecture XIV is about figurative language, and is much less troubling. It’s a straightforward and clear account of how and why figures and tropes are used. Still, in reading this I notice a difference between Blair and Campbell: Campbell realizes that a speaker is trying to move an audience with emotion after gaining their conviction, and that the source for that conviction–even with science and New Philosophy–is still debateable. Blair seems to forgo that conceit; he seems convinced that common sense is the same as taste, and the educated listener/reader will automatically be moved by someone else who understands the truth of the subject at hand.

Lecture XXV–the interesting part is how Eloquence, or Public Speaking, is made to evolve into Persuasion, and Persuasion takes on a very Campbell-esque quality; moverover, that Persuasion is seen as something that can only occur in free states. This idea is tied to antiquity; Greece had it but Egypt didn’t. Sounds very extreme Aryan model (a la Bernal).

The Rhetorcial Tradition
Bizzell and Herzberg, eds.
“Francis Bacon”
From The Advancement of Learning
From Novum Organum
“John Locke”
 From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
“Giambattista Vico”
From On the Study Methods of Our Time

Rhetoric in the European Tradition
Thomas Conley
Chapter Six: “Rhetoric in the Seventeenth Century”

“Francis Bacon”

Bacon was born to a connected family. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon and a statesman in the service of Queen Elizabeth while his mother, Lady Bacon, posessed a good humanist education and a Protestant faith. Bacon was home taught and sent off to Cambridge at 12. He eventually became a lawyer and by 23 was seated in the House of Commons during Elizabeth’s reign; under James I, Bacon becomes Lord Chancellor. In 1621 he enters the nobility as Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans. It seems Bacon was the consumate Renaissance rhetor/rhetorician who leveraged the family name, his education, and his interaction with those in court to construct a meteoric rise in social class. Bacon would be the physical manifestation of what the etiquette books of the day taught was possible.

Bacon used a concise, aphoristic speaking/writing style in contrast to the popular, neo-Ciceronian copious style popular at that time. He also kept a sizable library full of the aphorisms from the commonplace books of the day; using aphorisms (adages) was important for Bacon since–according to scholars–Bacon recognized “the heuristic quality of the writing process itself…commonplaces are intednednotfor mere decoration but as a means of investigating how our knowledge can be formulated in effective language, in discourse that shapes our beliefs and actions” (739).

Bacon argued against Scholasticism and used Ramism when it suited his purposes, but he was not a supporter of Ramus. Bacon did not agree with the seperation of dialectic and rhetoric (737).

Bacon believed in “vigorous empirical study” in contrast to Scholasticism. Bacon “warned against narrow empiricism or what would later be called positivism, an uncritcalacceptance of the idea that sense perceptions constituted reality” (737).

Seperation of faculties, perception is not infallable, nor are mental operations neutral, and the four branches of logic (which sound a lot like the five canons of rhetoric) on 737.

“[S]cientific discourse is a technical treatment of truth, whereas rhetoric links knowledge to social concerns” (738).

“Rhetoric is a serious art and a great responsibility, for it brings knowledge into play in the world. It links morality with reason, although Bacon notes that this is not sufficient in and of itself to enforce ethical behavior” (738).

From The Advancement of Learning
Section on Preparation and Suggestion on 740. Here he begins the oblique attack on Scholasticism by taking on Aristotle. Aristotle disliked pre-made thesi, so Bacon goes about showing how Aristotle’s claims against them are refuted by common sense, Christ, and Cicero. Preparation and Suggestion appear to be subdivisions of Invention; Invention for rhetoric is Remembrance. Rhetorical acts are using knowledge already understood as a way to practice probabilistic reasoning.

Judgment is discussed on the bottom of 741 (first column). It seems this is the one section of reasoning where it is alright to use syllogism since it can stop fallacious claims.

On the bottom of 741 (second column) is the defense of commonplace books. Bacon seems to qualify this defense only extends to commonplace books which describe reality and not the stilted, pedantic scenarios of school.

The top of the second column on 742 discusses Delivery. Bacon describes Delivery as “expressing or transferring…knowledge to others” (742). There are three parts to Delivery (which he also calls Tradition):

1. Organ
2. Method
3. Illustration

Only Organ and Illustration are described.  The Organ of Tradition (Delivery) is Speech or Writing.  The Illustration of Tradition (Delivery) is “that science we call Rhetoric, or Art of Eloquence” (742); it would appear that rhetoric illustrates the ways people can deliver knowledge to others.

In the first column of 743, Bacon explains “the duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply Reason to Imagination for the better moving of the will.”  This would appears to be how Bacon differs most from Ramus; rhetoric is a part of knowledge production and, later discussed, the ways to parlay the status that comes with knowledge into power and direct others how to live–again using Delivery (743 middle of second column after bloc quote).

For as in buildings there is great pleasure and use in the well-casting of the staircases, entries, doors, widows, and the like; so in speech the conveyances and passages are of special ornament and effect.  So may we redeem the faults passed, and prevent the inconveniences future.  (745)

With the above quote Bacon claims that speech (therefore delivery-tradition) is important and should be more than superficial ornamentation or pedantic demonstration of eloquence.  Still, does Bacon’s model privilege the speaking subject as the conduit of all information?  Is the audience/individual listener nothing more than a passive recipient?

From Novum Organum

Idols are the fetishized objects, ideas, theories, and terms that stop people from understanding experiential reality.  There are four:

1. Idols of the Tribe
2. Idols of the Cave
3. Idols of the Market-place [sic]
4. Idols of the Theatre [sic]

The way to work around these idols is to use induction.  As mentioned in the intro, Bacon believes in empiricism but not positivism (the refutation of positivism will be made clear in Idols of the Tribe definition).

Idols of the Tribe–a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things.  All perceptions as well of the sense as the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe (hence, positivism is flawed in Bacon’s paradigm) (745).

Idols of the Cave–idols of the individual man.  Every man has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature; a man’s education or his conversation with others also serve as a cave which refracts and discolors the light of nature–as well as the books he’s read and whom he esteems and admires.

Idols of the Market-place–Commerce and the going-ons of business often bring men together, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of this vulgar activity.  Words have the power to confuse when used without training; words “force and overrule…understanding” of the material world “and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies” (746).

Idols of the Theatre–these are idols “which have immigrated into men’s minds form the various dogmas of philosophies and also from the wrong laws of demonstration” (746).  Bacon calls these Idols of Theatre because he sees “all received systems [as] so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion” (746).  This applies to ancient systems of philosophy and religion as well as current ones.  Bacon appears to be calling for constant vigilance and the continued rigor of science on all parts of the world–even the accepted axioms of science.  Only through this type of self-reflexive activity can the Idols of the Theatre be side-stepped.

Idols of the Market-place are the most dangerous as they are the most insidious.  Through the association of words and names to objects these inexact words become commonplace and make their ways into science and philosophy.  

The idols imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds

1. either names of things which do not exist (there is no observable material of the signified)
2. they are the names of things which exist, but yet confused and ill-defined, and hastily and irregularly derived from realities.  (746)

An example of number one would be the term “humid” (747).

An example of number two would be terms like Fortune, Prime Mover. Element of Fire.  These words and the misunderstandings they create are built on “false and idle theories” which can be expelled through empiricism (747-748).

“John Locke”

One of Locke’s many degrees was in philosophy, which was still the study and practice of Scholastic disputation.  Dissatisfied with this curriculum and interested in experimental science, Locke studied medicine and eventually set-up an amateur practice.

Like Bacon, Locke believesthatthere is a real external world and that knowledge of it is possible, but only if we understand the processes by which we come to such knowledge…We have direct sensations, of course, but only of our ideas of these sensations; all other ideas are formed by reflecting upon the primary ideas caused by sensory perception.  Reflection is the act of relating our ideas to one another, forming mental associations, and examining the mental processes of which we are aware: thinking, doubting, believing, and so on.  These operations of the faculty of understanding are the source of all our knowledge. (814)

 Beacuse of his belief in this process, Locke finds the syllogism useless since it “neither describes nor conforms to this process of achieving knowledge” (814).

Since words are the signs of our ideas, and individuals have to reflect to understand the world around them and how they came to make the knowledge base that governs their reality, Locke is carried into discussing language.  Because all we know is “only our ideas and their relationships to one another…ideas are the signs of real things [and] words are the signs of our ideas” (814-815), Locke is forced to reflect upon language and how it works to make experiential reality.

Book 3 is excerpted within the reading.  While several things are going on in the text, one main thing to focus on is how Locke insists on clarity in language.  “Words…carry cultural connotations–or even personal ones–that complicate the relationship between communicated word and signified idea” (815).  For this reason, Locke attack Scholastic philosophy “for creating obscurities through disputation, and he attacks rhetoric for increasing ambiguities through excessive ornamentation” (815).

In Book 4 Locke creates a method “for examining the internal coherence of propositions, on the assumptionthat verbal propositions stand for mental ones and that mental ones stand for real external phenomena” (815).  Locke takes a nonrelativistic view of knowledge, which means that knowledge is something external to culture/society, and more importantly “Knowledge itself is independent of language” (815).  Rhetoric and Scholastic philosophy are merely barriers to reaching true Knowledge.  B&H explain this drove several  rhetoricians of the age to retort with the explanation good style emphasized perspicuity, or clarity, and also to develop “a psychological theory of persuasion and taste” (815); “Vico, Sheridan, and Campbell, as well as a number of philosophers, pursued Locke’s suggestive but incomplete account of the relationship of language and knowledge, though never far enough to link rhetoric explicitly with the process of creating ‘true’ knowledge” (816).

From An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Locke makes a running distinction throughout this text between civil or philosophical purposes.  While in both sets of discourses words are problematic since they are based on flawed conceptions of the objects they speak (humans can not know the true essence of something so the sounds assigned to the object don’t actually signify the object) and since there is no one, universal language everyone uses (nor even a uniform usage by all the speakers of one language–speakers “abuse” words), these flaws are exceptionally detrimental to philosophy.  Philosophy is the one way to get at “real” truth and “real” knowledge which exist separate from language, culture, society, and time; therefore this activity is held back by the shortcomings of people–not that this touchstone doesn’t exist. 

When it comes to the topic of rhetoric, Locke calls for clarity and order.  Anything else is dangerous as rhetoric in its mot eloquent form deceives and plays on the vice that humankind has in being pleasurably deceived; “wit and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry truth and real knowledge” (827).

“Giambattista Vico”
Vico argued against Descartes’ claims that math and science were the only legitimate sources of knowledge and that the “other branches of human inquiry…law, history and the arts” (862) were inconsequential. Vico’s position, due to the temperament and popularity of Descartes’ work at the time, earned him the label of “reactionary.”

“Vico argues that rhetoric provides a superior philosophy of knowledge, for all knowledge, even the scientific, is based on argument and conviction” (862).

In “On the Study Methods of Our Time,” Vico seeks to reconcile humanism…with modern but non-Cartesian science. He objects to Descartes’s insensitivity to the function of language in producing knowledge. Without language, says Vico, the human knoweris lost. Language reveals the processes of reason, passion, and imagination, as well as the social conventions and historical circumstances that shape our concerns. The etymology of the national language reveals our social history; similarly, language socializes each individual…The Cartesian method is useful, Vico concedes, but it cannot be allowed to overpower the kind of sensus communis or common sense that the study of eloquence stimulates with its appeals to imagination and memory and its practice in the commonplaces of argument. (862)

Here is a small list of Vico’s charges against Descartes’s theories:

1. Mathematical proof is ultimately based on our acceptance of the system of axioms created by human beings; we can point to no demonstration of the applicability of the axioms to the world itself
2. The Cartesian method of division focuses ideally on isolated particles of knowledge, stifling the kind of analogic thinking that generates so many insights.
3. The Cartesian model of the isolated inquirer precludes dialogue, which fertilizes thought.
4. The Cartesian method fails to encourage independent discovery, proceeding instead on a plodding course from axiom to proof.  (862-863) 

Vico feared if this model was accepted as the only educational model it would prevent teaching other types of inquiry and knowledge making, and in a circuitous way, devalue pragmatic subjects like public affairs and create leaders with no clue how to govern a nation-state.

Vico’s concepts interconnecting language, history, science, and culture is now seens as invaluable to philosophers and rhetoricians.  “Vico unites ethics and eloquence through his concept of sesnus communis, a “common sense” that is both epistemological in function and culturally based.  Thus Vico forges a link between rhetoric and philosophy that contemporary thinkers are still exploring” (864).

From On the Study Methods of Our Time
In this tract Vico is asking for a humanist education that does not use Cartesian based sciences. Although he never directly mentions Descartes nor his theories, his references to the (then) current philosophical approach is Vico’s method of censure; this censuring works by comparing the current pedagogical (philosophical approach=philosophy of education) to the standard of “the Ancients.” By comparing and contrasting the two pedagogical approaches, Vico attempts to convince the reader of the shortcomings of the Cartesian method of study and the benefits of blending the received practices of the Ancients (still alive in rhetoric, history, art, and law) with sciences not based on the individual knower and formal logic.

The most interesting (at least to me) section of the text is where Vico describes the shortcomings of the French. Through demonstrating how language defines how things can be arranged and in what style, Vico claims that thought and understanding of the material world is exceptionally different in France than in other European countries. It reads as racist and nationalist, but since France is a former empire and a large player in the modern European Union, I think it’s safe to focus on the understanding of probabilistic reasoning-language-thought connection and not the pejoritization of the French nation-state and its people (874) (also, I figure this is another covert attack on Descartes since it’s his home country).

The interesting complication of Vico’s system, something not taken up the introduction, is his championing of a unitary social system–something akin to what currently happens in places like France and the United Kingdom. Vico states:

I would suggest that our professors should so co-ordinate all disciplines into a single system so as to harmonize them with our religion and with the spirit of the political form under which we live. In this way, a coherent body of learning having been established, it will be possible to teach it according to the genius of our public polity. (876)

Vico builds this off the idea that in ancient Greece there were only single instructors teaching all subjects and most were exceptionally patriotic. While I understand this system and its advantages, and how it works on a large level to govern an entire society, it seems something intentionally left out of the introduction; in the introduction Vico reads more as an egalitarian populist.

The multitude versus the wise man–column two, page 873.
Rebuttal to imagined critics–column one, page 873.
The practical man as the sage and the man best suited to make his way through everyday reality in a way that benefits him–column one page 872.
The difference between abstract knowledge and prudence–column two, page 871-872.
Projected outcome of a good humanist education–column two page 870.

Rhetoric in the European Tradition
Thomas Conley
Chapter Six: “Rhetoric in the Seventeenth Century”

In this chapter Conley asserts that the seventeeth was only slightly less chaotic and bloody than the sixteenth, saying “only five years of the sixteenth century were free from political conflict: for the seventeenth, the total is four. This century saw radical political upheavals and protracted wars in every European country” (151). These wars and upheavals shaped philosophy, literature, and rhetoric in ways–according to Conley–have just recently been reconsidered.

The emphasis during the first part of this century was affecting the emotions; this was a product of the Reformation and the Counterreformation as clergy from both sides looked to gain followers. Conley refers to this as the Baroque mentality, which was heavily influenced by the Jesuits. The Jesuits stressed “the communicative potential of the arts, their ability to have an effect on the audiences, to move it and involve it” (156). There are three forgotten rhetoricians from this time:

1. Caussin (155-157)
2. Keckermann (157-159)
3. Vossius (159-162)

All three focused on emotion. This was a switch from the controversia/dialecitcal of the previous age as it was more unilateral; it become more so with the philosophical emphasis on strong monarchs (Hobbes 166-167), emphasis on rhetoric as persuasive delivery and not a knowledge making art (Bacon 167-171), and Cartesian science (171-173; dualism, individual knower, thesis to proof, the possibility of only true or false outcomes).

While several other historians of rhetoric have blamed this big three for the (lowly) position of rhetoric within the current academy, Conley asserts it’s the rhetoricians who used the work of the above three philosphers that moved Rhetorica from the top of the hierarchy to the basement.   Citing a few rhetoricians he thinks little of , Conley names Bernard Lemy as the embodied death knell of rhetoric.  Lemy uses the work of Descartes to “explicitly” revise “the whole notion of rhetoric, transforming a means for handling controversia into a unilateral process of influence” (176).  Lemy does this by divorcing persuasion from argumentation; persuasion now occurs by Cartesian proofs and not probabilistic reasoning.

One thing Conley stresses is the misconception that the move to “plain style” during this period was an all out rejection of rhetoric–that moving away from copiawas a sign of deficiency and corruption in comparison to the rhetorical study of previous periods.  Conley refutes this by explaining:

the retreat from metaphor and from highly amplified prose was not a retreat, from a rhetorical standpoint, from affective prose, but an improved way of achieving emotional impact and moving wills.  The plain style can be more effective because it is more concrete (therefore impressing the imagination more deeply), easier to follow (hence more directly affective), more precise in its diction (see “concrete”), and better fitted, as they thought, to the way the mind, appetites, and will of man work psychologically. (170)

According to the episteme of the time, Conley asserts, rhetoricians developed rhetorical strategies they felt effective, as suasive methods meeting the kairotic moment.

The Rhetorical Tradition
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg
“Renaissance Rhetoric–Introduction”
“Desiderius Erasmus”
From Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style
“Peter Ramus”
From Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintillian
“Thomas Wilson”
From The Arte of Rhetorique

Rhetoric Retold
Cheryl Glenn
Chapter Four: “Inscribed in the Margins”

The Rhetorical Tradition
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg
“Margaret Fell”
Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed by Scriptures
“Madeleine de Scudery”
Of Conversation
Of Speaking too much, or too little. And how we ought to Speak.

Rhetoric in the European Tradition
Thomas Conley
Chapter Five: “Rhetoric and Renaissance Humanism”

“Renaissance Rhetoric–Introduction”
Secular humanism is defined as “[t]he intellectual movement [which emphasizes] human powers to know and change the world and insisted on scholars’ rights to pursue knowledge without being constrained by Church dogma” (555).

Early Renaissance rhetoric attempted to “reunite broad learning, philosophical wisdom, and eloquence” (555).

B&H take a counter-traditional stand that rhetoric in the Renaissance “traced along the path of Renaissance cultural development from Italy to Northern Europe and on to England” (556), which to me is a good thing since this cultural fixed path of migrating thought seems to much like a teleological time linewith the end point having the highest level of rhetorical saavy (and surprise! It’s England!). That whole concept sounds suspiciously like Bernal’s “extreme Aryan model” of Mediterranean socities. B&H explain:

But the pace of change varied greatly from place to place, and the development of rhetoric was conditioned by the great political, social, and religious changes that also occurred in this period…it is misleading to speak of rhetoric as a unified subject of study. There were many rhetorics in the Renaissance. (556)

B&H claim that rhetoric lost its political importance on the European scene as as large-scale monarchies took power, and through this fall in the hierarchy of importance, rhetoric lost it epistemic function, too (556). This was different in the Italian city states as the government and territory were small, in fact, they were still very much like the societies of antiquity when it came to the suasivepowerof rhetoric. While there was no large democracy (which even in Rome and in Greece was limited to males who were landowners and not slaves), there was still the possibility of courtiers who could persuade ruling families. The environment was highly stable (in comparison to other parts of Europe where the populations were dealing with wars, religious wars, and the Plague) and also very wealthy. These city-states had been mercantile centers since the Roman Empire. This in turn led to training centeresfor”rhetoric-related professions such as lawyer or notary, and also as places with a rich tradition of public oratory for state occasions and family ceremonies” (557).

Scholasticism was the main pedagogy in the universities at this time. Scholasticism was “committed to a version of Aristotelian empiricism that stressed the knowledge of external reality rather than emphasizing the mind’s power to reimagine and shape reality” (557).

Humanist during this period try to return to the classical. Through their work in translation, they began to see the meaning as “historically established” (560), and this helped foster a concept of rhetoric as important since there was no God-given Truth, only practices and actions taken informed by convention and the ability of individuals able to persuade others to take courses of action within the defined episteme of the city-state. For humanists, if an individual wanted to be “actively useful, the responsible citizen must express philosophical insights in language that is convincing in contemporary circumstances” (560).

This emphasis on individual citizens was based on a belief that individuals make “history by attempting to develop personal talents amid the constraints of given historical circumstances; thus individuality is both historically constituted and an act of will. This notion of self as performance gave an aesthetic cast to humanist scholarship that attracted the interest of many aristocrats” (561).

As the city-states were consolidated, the humanist scholars focused less on public-political life and more on education (561). Humanist education (then as now in my opinion) “was something of a paradox…The humanist educators devised curricula to prepare children to embody the Ciceronianideal of the public man at a time when to actually enact this ideal was becoming increasingly difficult except for the sons of a few aristocratic families. This controdictioncould perhaps be glossed over with boy students, for the could adapttheir literary skills to the demands for accomplished writing that grew as gvernemnetramified. They could find places as public servants, even if those roles were covert ones of courtiers or bureaucrats…the contradiction emerges in full force with respect to the many girl students who were educated alongside the boys in most early humanist schools” (562).

When women scholars called for full parity with male scholars “they were rebuffed in a variety of ways: told to limit their secular studies or risk vulgarity, to turn to sacred studies or imperil their souls–or told to cease altogether or be proved unchaste” (563).

Excellent rebuff of an argument for full confrontation with male scholars and awesome articulation of what any pejoritized group faces when squaring up to the ruling hegemony by Cassandra Fedele on 563.

An evolved claim about Renaissance “rhetorics” not just “rhetoric” on 564; the rhetorics are based on time, place, and government in power.

In Northern Europe there appears to be more of an emphasis on finding a universal method of rhetoric, one that could be easily taught. “It seemed to promise an almost magical power that would align the knower and the known and confirm and extend the human mind’s domination over nature. What we now call the scientific method may have been the another outcome of these same efforts” (567).

Erasmus: “greatly expanded the scope of sacred rhetoric. He followed Augustine’s lead in claiming that the preacher must seek to move as well as teach and exploring stylistic means for doing so” (567). He does this through “recovering a full range of rhetorical resources” (567). Erasmus was Catholic monk, but through the Brothers of the Common Life, who took no vows but volunteered themselves to a simple life in a communal setting where local acts of charity where encouraged. Erasmus also taught that letters could encompass all forms of classical rhetoric (deliberative, forensic, epidiectic), and did much to move letter writing out of the more stylistically rigid forms and purposes developed in the middle ages. Erasmus was a critic of the Catholic Church and its excesses, but still remained a member and defended Catholicism against Protestant critics.

Rasmus: published works that attacked Scholasticism and major classical figures (Aristotle, Quintillian) while he was a professor at the University of Paris. He claimed to have found better methods of divining the truth and teaching other how to do so, too. B&H explain:

[W]hereas earlier humanists carefully separated medieval scholarship from the classial authors they claimed it had corrupted, Ramus wished to throw off all authorities, classical or medieval. Hence he lays out his theoretical program by attacking Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian in turn. He also downplays th eimportance of classical languages in his educational scheme. Ramus was one of the first academics to publish all of his works in the vernacular–French, in his case–as well as in Latin. His attack on classical thought and language is so vigorous that one might question whether he can be called a humanist…Ramus’s positve program calls for the union of philosophy and eloquence, but by this he most emphatically does not mean the Ciceronian ideal. Like Agricola, Ramus simply includes in dialectic various activities of invention and arrangement that had been the province of rhetoric…by rhetoric Ramus means only the study of stylistic ornamentation…for serious business plain style is best…Ramism dialectic greatly [simplified] material to fit into dichotomies…a useful pedagogical tool. (568-569)

He is, essentially, the anti-Italian humanist who is still considered a humanist due to his emphasis on the power of the individual.

Wilson–an Englishman whose rhetorical textbook (yes, textbook) “was the first textbook in English not only to acknowledge rhetoric’s five-part structure but to discuss all five parts in detail” (571). It was popular since it heavily dealt in the concept of performance, since “the popularity of these rhetorics [Wilson's textbook was often reprinted] derived partly from the ambitions of social climbers in volatile Elizabethan society…They were sources of information on how to behave, talk, and write like a member of the upper social classes. Social mobility reinforced the idea of identity as performance, since the courtier, possibly newly arrived at a high rank, had to show that he or she belonged there. Even if born into an aristocratic family, one was required to give a seemingly effortless imitation of an aristocrat to prove that one’s rank was justified” (572). In this type of rhetorical situation, the rhetor has to rely heavily on the audience’s reaction because they ratify the rhetor’s performance and deem his/her persona as successful. The performer/rhetor is never offstage in this situation and requires many abilities, rhetorically, to meet this demand (composing primarily as writing was huge in Tudor ruled England; the courtier could be expected to write or speak on demand political speeches, love letters, poetry, praise for a specific superior or scorn for the super-ordinate’s enemies [572]).

Rhetoric creates the ground for poetry, but divides from logic–due to Ramist influence–and looses its “epistemic power” (573). Rhetoric then, as now, was deplored. The “‘best’ language was seen as value neutral tool of inquiry, not a value-laden medium of communication” (573).

Early humanists felt that all people were shaped by their culture, but that humans had the capability to step back and take a critical distance from the received social and religiouswisdomthey had received (and here this mean Protestant reformers, too). However, withthe rise of Cartesian science, this was not enough. “The new science attempted to elevate reason to an even more exalted position, claiming that it could free itself from all learned cultural dispositions and replace received wisdom withnewly discovered universals or absolutes…In other words, with the rise of science, culture bound knowledge began to seem second rate, and withitrhetoric, both secular and sacred, that drew on cultural knowledge” (574).

“True knowledge is a knowledge of things, not words. Hence [Arnauld's] logic text recommends beginning from personal experience and pursuing induction to achieve knowledge” (576).

“Yet even this rejection of rhetorical style constitutes a style, one of directness and simplicity” (576).

“Desiderius Erasmus”
Erasmus was very interested in education. He envisioned peace through unity in one political state (like ancient Rome) and one common religion (Roman Catholicism) and one common language (Latin). “For this dream to be realized, education must play an important role, since fluency in Greek and Latin wold have to be encouraged from an early age. Classical and patristic texts would be the focus of instruction. Rhetoric would be a natural extension and aid of this work., because the only surviving classical textbooks treated rhetoric and because rhetoric’s methods would help to analyze Greek and Latin texts. Erasmus draws heavily from Quintilian in his thinking on education” (582). Utopia would be achieved through education and the return to one, unified identity. Sounds familiar.

On Copia is intended to help the student “attain copie, or abundance, in his Latin style, and ultimately to attain the flow of powerful words and ideas that mark the accomplished rhetor” (582). The text primarilydeals with amplification, and in doing so treats a wide variety of figures and tropes.

Erasmus advocated flexible style of Latin that wasn’t a copy of what the “masters” had written as forwarded by the rigid Ciceronianism of his time. In this way, “Erasmus hoped that a Latin language revivified and liberated by his stylistic principles could become, once again, the universal language of a united Christian civilization” (583). This gained some traction, but was ended by the rise of the plainer Senecan style favored by the likes of Francis Bacon in the 17th century.

On Copiaisntacatalogue. It’s a “superabundant verbal play…that is designed to increase fluency of both words and ideas–the two are mutually generative” (583).

“The humanist analysis of sacred texts that Erasmus modeled and taught could become a means not only to verbal fluency but also to spiritual insight and piety” (585).

Last paragraph is an interesting talk about folly and transcending folly, which makes the person transcending look mad; for Erasmus, according to some scholars, this was a move towards a spiritual transcendence.

From Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style
Erasmus names the dangers of copia in his first section and explains he will be pontificating about the two aspects of abundant style: “content and expression, and giving some examples and patterns” (597). By the end of the text he makes this clear by explaining how even in praising a man, a speaker can bring in contrary ideas that may seem to undercut the man, but through words serve to show how such ideas continue to praise the object of affection. It’s all in the turning of the phrase and bending the figures to the goal of a positive appraisal.

598 takes on Ciceronians by asserting Cicero participated in the type of exercises he (Erasmus) is about to describe. Ciceronians where all about slavish imitation of classical rhetoricians/rhetors according to B&H. Ciceronians would have been against Erasmus’s fluid style of Latin composition.

Abundant style has two aspects: 1)Richness of expression (synonyms, heterosis, enallge, metaphor, variation in word form, equivalence) and 2)Richness of subject matter (assembling, explaining, amplifying of arguments through examples, comparisons, dissimilarities, opposites) (598). This is all in the attempt to introduce variety into speaking and composing; Erasmus makes the claim that variety is found in nature, and therefore, is naturally pleasing to audiences. In the converse, if a speaker/writer can not speak/compose with variety he gives the appearance of being unnatural and consequently seen as “unintelligible, harsh, or even totally unable to express” (598-599) himself.

Vulgar words (richness of expression) are vulgar sometimes due to the words themselves (cursing, I suppose) and other time due to the fact the wrong word is applied to the wrong subject or are used at the most inopportune time. Erasmus makes uses the example of dung–good when talking to farmers, bad when giving a speech on the affairs of state in front of the sovereign or dignitaries (600).

Unusual words (richness of expression) should not be used for the sake of being clever. It comes off as artificial.

Poetic Words (richness of expression) should be used sparingly, especially in prose.

Archaic words make for good elaboration and add some charm. These words should be used sparingly.

Obsolete words are best used for humor or irony. The meanings have changed, and in a way I think this is a cloaked dagger thrown at the Ciceronians of Erasmus’s time.

Harsh words are often uncomfortable metaphors no one understands, or at least find odd but not clever.

Foreign words should be used sparingly.

Indecent words should be avoided, but can be used if they express certain acts that one is talking about (I assume this has something to do with the act of preaching; Erasmus mentions incest as a vile act but to talk about the act itself is not bad, so it would seem in warning about or describing for educational purposes is not indecent). A writer/speaker can learn how to use them by paying attention to those of good repute who are modest in their speech.

New words are good for spice but should be used moderately.

The rest of the text is the continual building on and elaboration of how to perform the abundant style. The headings are self-explanatory and the first paragraph after each heading describes the point of the section denoted by the heading. What I find more interesting are the terms that seem to match the “dreaded modes.” While I think it would be easy to see Erasmus as part of this long tradition of the modes in the composition classroom, I think that such critics need to understand the intent of Erasmus and the centuries between his work and that of current-traditional pedagogues. Erasmus fore-grounds the idea that language and thought are connected and one breeds the other; that the point of speaking/composing is to be flexible so as to create an abundant style when speaking or writing; and that this is an handbook intended for those working in Latin and Greek. Also, in his own time period, there would be no conflation between teaching language and its uses with the idea of a literary canon as now. Most primary and secondary schools, when teaching English, are actually teaching literary study either to promote the supremacy of Anglo-American traditions and to re-enforce those traditions as point of pride and the taken for granted superior literature within the entire world, or they use said class time to teach appreciation, to construct the text as art, as the repository of genius, and something that the reader should be edified by through reading and contemplating it.

This, I don’t think, was the milieu of Erasmus. If someone at this time was literate, said person was training for a position within the church or the government. Literacy wasn’t about passive consuming or edification–it was about producing text (oral, written) in a competitive, high stakes environment where a position in government could greatly affect the student’s material situation. How Erasmus’s students would capitalize on outlining or a manual giving examples would be much different than current-day students; due to the episteme of late capitalism students today are expected to consume or enjoy a text, not use it as a heuristic to question or interrogate their situation–and certainly not something they would produce to advance a specific claim about the world (or just a topic) after using another text to critically consider the events going on around them. While it may be said the stakes are the same for today’s students as it was for Erasmus’s (education equates to the license for a high-level profession) the difference is that it was stated upfront and made clear through the social practices of the Renaissance. Currently, in my opinion, everyone believes the U.S. is a classless society where everyone who is “worthy” makes it to the top of the social hierarchy through essential qualities, not through things like quality of education, socio-economic class, familial history, or ability to navigate social situations that please super-ordinates.

“Peter Ramus”

Ramus was anti-Scholasticism, and therefore, thought all classical–as well as most contemporary–styles of learning were useless.  His master’s thesis argued that the work of Aristotle was useless.  He believed the ability to reason was innate and that it could be cultivated through exercise, so there was no reason for a system like Aristotle’s or Quintillian’s to teach reasoning nor argumentation nor persuasion nor Latin nor Greek.  Rhetoric is only questions of style in his system (which he proposed to replace the useless styles, like Scholasticism or classical thinkers) and the real power to make meaning lies in the dialectical. 

Dialectical in Ramus’s system receives the invention and arrangement, too. There are ten topics of invention: causes, effects, subjects, adjuncts, opposites, comparisons, names, divisions, definitions, and witnesses (676).  Arragnement should only follow the structure of the syllogism and move from the most general principles and work down to the most minute practices; “the process typically involves the creation of dichotomies at each level” (676).  Ramus felt this was the most natural way to organize discussion on any subject.  It mirrors the natural order of the world and the human mind, making any argument easy to remember, and thus the canon of memory is no longer needed.

Many did see this as the universal method of inquiry so many of the intellectuals of the day chased after.  “Literary historian Frances Yates places Ramist dichotomours diagrams in the hermetic tradition, according to which certain spatial arrangments of symbols magically control, because they duplicate, the order of the world.  The link with this tradition helps to explain how Ramus could present his method of arrangement as the perfect memory system, alinging the mind and the material to be known as they match and bond” (677).

Ramus say his method applicable to any endeavor, not just statecraft nor poetry nor prose.

Ramus attacks Quintillian on many fronts.  First, he argues there is no need for moral philosophy nor moral character in a speaker.  Also, he attacks Quintillian for including anything that may lead to speculation; the text should only include the things that the Quintillian wanted to impart to his students, not topics that other rhetoricians may want  to discuss or consider.  There should only be one correct answer.  Moreover, there is nothing to be gained through continually reading and writing.  Students should imitate their instructor or other excellent speakers (678-679).

From Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintillian 

The intro is a derision of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian, and a judging of them by his own method of arrangement, that is, the “natural” syllogism.  Ramus closes in essentially the same way, and this seems odd.  Not that he shouldn’t forward his own method or even argue for an explicit claim (ie, classical thinkers are wrong), but that he doesn’t seem to acknowledge these thinkers had their own system; Rasmus doesn’t seem to even try to demonstrate how his system is superior through comparison.  He just runs classical thinkers down on the basis of their arguments not fitting his (literally his) method of analysis.

Ramus argues for efficiency (683 underlined).

For Ramus Reason and Speech are separate.  Speech does not influence Reason as Erasmus taught, and consequently, rhetoric and grammar are lesser arts than dialectic.  Grammar makes sure language is pure and understandable, rhetoric ensures a correct and appropriate delivery. (684)

Ramus, on 685, appears to be arguing for an essentialist view of the world.  Morality and virtue are products of nature, not something that is inculcated within an individual.

685-686 Ramus performs an ad hominem attack.  This whole piece, so far, appears to be one.  It would seem it is based in rhetoric even though it claims to be based in dialectic.  Ramus’s concept of syllogism as pure reason is nothing more than his own form of persuasion, or rhetoric.  It just has traction since it allows him to speak in absolutes to an audience hungry for absolutes.  Ramus just understands the kairotic moment. (687)

On 690 (section underlined) Ramus asserts we see the work of classical scholars as “splendid” because the rules of his times have been based on and forced to conform to the work of these thinkers since they are considered brillantby tradition alone.  This I can agree withto an extent, there is a socially constructed network of forces at work, and yet I still have problems with Ramus’s inability to compare his method to that of Quintillian.  This text is primarily an ad hominemattack that can only work with a like-minded audience.

“Thomas Wilson”

In the Arte of Rhetorique, Wilson of a way to find and and develop arguments, that is, rhetoric is more than embellishment.  This is different than his what he says in the Rules of Reason.

The emphasis on aptness and conciseness is a way to emphasis, covertly, ethos according to Lois Agnew (699).

Due to the milieu of England in the 16th century, Wilson emphasizes written rhetoric.  Letter writing and composition was all the rage it seems.

Book 1: Taxonomizing the subject via of definitions from classical times; places to search (invent) epidecictic or ceremonial speeches; gives app. places for deliberative speech (in this example