The past couple of years have made it clear that organizing groups online using new digital tools has become easier than ever. Many people (paradigmatically Clay Shirky) have examined the way in which groups form and act when the cost of connecting with each other approaches zero. One thing which people have not focused on quite so much, however, is the way in which the lowered cost of group formation works against the creation of new groups.
How would making it easier to connect people make it harder for people to connect? When tools make the cost of connecting zero, the only thing that is required to get things done is to actually do them — when you can create a blog with a click, and a wiki with a double click, you suddenly realize that the only thing that is keeping you from producing a blog full of witty insights is that you must actually write them. When everything other than your time is provided, you realize just how little time you and everyone else has.
I mention this because of three recent projects in open access anthropology which have had only lackluster success: the ‘modulation’ of Chris Kelty’s book Two Bits, the Open Access Anthropology website and the recent group interview Anthropology In/Of Circulation which has got a fancy website in which we can all complexly engage in dialogue about (and read) a piece which recently appeared in Cultural Anthropology.
None of these projects has been particularly successful, and not — I insist — because they are particularly uninteresting. Rather, people’s lack of engagement with these project arise from the fact that all of us barely have time to read these pieces, much less ‘modulate’ them.
This fact in itself should not surprise us — anyone who has ever written anything has realized just how difficult it is to get people to read our work. Mostly we rely on people whose relationships with us are deeply caught up with their own sense of self (partners, spouses, advisors), or their self-interest (editors, etc. who will sell your work for money). If anything, the greatest power the Internet has is to reveal just how little people care about what we write. Of course, without the Internet, people would still not care about our work, but the Internet really makes this fact universally visible.
Now, of course these sites should stay up, and we never know what the future holds — it may be that in the future there may be a huge surge of interest in the Anthropology In/Of Circulation and it is right and proper that the site stay up. But if people do come to the site and see that no one has worked on it… isn’t that in itself a disincentive to participate?
I think that this speaks to wider issues in Open Access — the physicality of a book, I think, is a major reason that people downplay the value of online-only publications. Moreover, I think the fact that someone is willing to sell your work makes people treat their work seriously — not because they are out for filthy lucre, but because the very fact that someone takes their work seriously enough to try to make money off of it is a sort of existential endorsement of its worth.
And finally, I think that a movement often develops by slowly overcoming the costs of organizing and (in the case of open access) actually getting something done. That is to say, when people start small and get invested in something — a road they are building, a weblog they all read, a print-on-demand collection of their poetry — it makes them eager to take the next step and produce the next stage in their project. Just throwing a complete OA journal editing system online and telling people “get to it!” may actually working against the accumulating solidarity that overcoming barriers to group formation provides.
This isn’t meant to be a cynical or negative diagnosis of these projects (although it is designed to instill guilt in you if you haven’t read or commented on these works!). Its just a reflection of where we are and where we are going as we move towards AAAs and think about these and other projects moving forward, and just how much attention we can ask of ourselves and others.
Remember when email was a novelty instead of a time suck?
And finally, I think that a movement often develops by slowly overcoming the costs of organizing and (in the case of open access) actually getting something done. That is to say, when people start small and get invested in something[…] it makes them eager to take the next step and produce the next stage in their project. Just throwing a complete OA journal editing system online and telling people “get to it!” may actually working against the accumulating solidarity that overcoming barriers to group formation provides.
I think this point is key. I recall an article on the success/failure of various online political organizing campaigns, and the lack of a direct relationship between ease of fundraising and ultimate electoral/legislative success.
Attention/Value? Easy! Just pay a pile of coin to Paris Hilton to endorse Kelty’s book: (1) celebrity will attract attention; (2) spending money to hire Paris will reinforce the book’s value.
For what it’s worth, I downloaded the PDF version of Two Bits and have been highlighting like crazy. My focus, however, has been on ideas that I might be able to adopt/adapt for my own research. I expect to get back to Chris when I’ve had a chance to work with this stuff for a while, but given all of the other demands on my time this is in the “Real soon now” category.
What’s missing at the moment, it seems to me, is a reward for getting back to Chris more rapidly. The reward I’m looking for is genuine conversation that benefits me as well as the author. So, for example, I might say, “I’m wondering how the idea of a recursive public applies to creative teams in advertising. It’s not a perfect fit since creative team members are typically working for other people and don’t challenge the basic rules that govern the business in which they are involved. That said, they are very conscious, indeed, that a successful or prize-winning campaign changes the field for everyone who must then go looking for the next big thing.” If Chris had the time and inclination to pursue this thought, we could bat it back and forth and both wind up with a better sense of the strengths and limitations of the concept he has proposed.
So I basically agree with the thesis of this–that time is the bottleneck to the success of any new project. What I think you have wrong is that there are different scales of time at work in everyone’s life. Referrring to these projects as failures, or even as “lackluster successes” (thanks for the winning endorsement there, blogmate) implies that the only scale of success is immediate adoption with massive attention on a rapid period. I think this is silly, and to coin an analogy, the fastfood version of community to which I would prefer to play slow food movement.
Academics especially, are on time scales that range from the rapid and immediate (grant writing and getting timely papers out the door) to the middle range (a semester long class or six weeks of fieldwork) to the long range (years of fieldwork, 1-3 years to publish a book) to the very long range (five year plans and research agendas). We academics are privileged when we can move between these scales, and privileged to have colleagues who can *keep track* unlike the blogosphere and the mainstream media, which can no longer remember what it was discussing longer than 72 hours ago.
The main problem with the Shirky-eque approach then, I would suggest, is that it focuses only on the first of these scales, the 72-hr one. And the tools do as well. My RSS reader can make no distinction between things that are “new” at different scales… so the 200 postings from boingboing are as important as the 10 from savage minds and the 1 from a blog by a friend who has just published a book.
There is another issue here which I also think is frequently missed: web 2.0 works (when it works) because people get whuffie. they get a certain amount of good feeling from contributing to something collective and they feel obligated to do it again to make it work. Academics already do this ALL THE TIME. To ask them to do it just a bit more, with less payback, is insane. The incentive structure is arrayed in favor of immediate commitments (colleagues, grad students and so forth) and against everyone else, but the basic structure of contribution is the same. These two issues are related in that most of the longer time scales are taken up with the more immediate commitments, and the shorter time scales tend to be everyone else, which are lower cost and tend to mean less in terms of building real and lasting relationships. Sometimes people move between these scales and distances, but not often.
That all being said, I reserve judgment on whether Two Bits is a success until it has at least seen one semester of teaching, if not two, and at least one review in a scholarly journal. At that point I’d be willing to revisit the question of whether I’ve successfully built a community (and hint: I already have, it just isn’t actively visible on the site itself).
Thanks for those comments Chris — very interesting. I didn’t mean to imply your book and website weren’t successful.
I agree that there is a ‘pace layering’ in scholarship that is important — that we academics can and need to ‘be on the bottom of things’ rather than ‘on top of them’ (I’ve written of this myself before). So perhaps it will just take time to remix and modulate the book… and perhaps those projects are already underway and I just haven’t seen them yet because they aren’t done.
Still at whatever pace you work, I think there is a kernel of value to my original argument, which is that many of these online experiments in remixing, commenting, and otherwise rethinking the ‘future of the book’ ask for a level of engagement that is far greater than that demanded by reading a written text. And, second, that the level of engagement demanded for just reading a written text is itself just about all that most of us can handle.
I don’t doubt that you’ve build a community and yer brand around the book/website and I’m sure that it will yield a wide variety of fruit (even my contrarian postings will keep stirring the pot, hopefully). I’m just wondering what the nature of that community is, and whether they will spend the attention necessary to start using the new book 2.0 features you’ve rolled out.
And, incidentally, even if they don’t I think they won’t because the attention costs are high — not because the book isn’t good. Anyone who reads it can tell you’ve put a lot of your own attention into it, and this is reflected in the quality of the final product.
Yes yes. Strangely, I have lower expectations for the “experiment” than might seem evident from the above comments. One of the things about publishing the book as a book in the conventional way was that I got to see inside all the ways that system is supposed to build community and create a long-scale form of attention: through marketing and promotion initially, but more invisibly, through use in classrooms, through awards or mentions, through republication of chapters, through reviews and so on. It is a big inertial system that is already in place and it feels strangely safe to be inside it, even I know intimately all of the ways in which I think it misses massive opportunities for new experiments. So basically, anything that happens with the book at all will please me to no end, even if that means simply a re-print here or a translation of a chapter there.
But I also think there is a generational shift happening with the students–who are the people I most expect to modulate the book, and not so much my colleagues (because you are right, it’s work enough for them to simply read it). Students on the other hand are both more likely to be comfortable with the ideas of remix, and more likely to have the time to futz around with it. So, as I said, I’m waiting for the semesters to get rolling to see what people might do with it.
“Attention” may be currency in the new information economy, but it sounds suspiciously like the old mode of misrecognition to assume the organization of production in terms of currency flows contains the secret of value.
Or is the point that there something about the internet’s capacity for “free beer” production that actually changes the nature of our collective subordination to Capitalism?
(Apologies if you already covered this ground in your book, Chris, it’s just I’ve been so busy …)
Hmmm…. would you say that students are more “used” to the idea of remixing, or are they just not completely interpellated into The Old Attention System and hence have both 1) openness to newness 2) time/opportunity/attention to experiment w/the new system?
One thing I always miss is having a 20-30 page digest of a book (like Free Culture esp.) — a remixed and dehydrated version. So…. someone should do that….
I just want to echo Chris’ observations on different time scales in which “our” work will unfold and be responded to. Imagine, as I have been doing lately, a CommentPress version of a Boasian ethnography of a Native North American society. If such a thing could have been published in 1912, years might have passed between meaningful commenting but there would have been steady visiting to the site/book over the course of years viewed in a century+ frame. There would have been community-centered feedback over time (children of consultants, naysayers, great-grandchildren of consultants, great-grandchildren of naysayers). There also would have been scholarly dialogue over time (academic naysayers, advisees of the author, those who studied in the community later, those revisiting “theoretical issues” etc.). Over time, there would be commenting on comments. And, of course, scores of people would read and meaningfully engage with the “work” without leaving behind any digital footprints. This happens now in our actual world all the time. Any Savage Minds post is meaningfully read by many more folks than just those who comment. A CommentPress project is almost certainly, as a consequence, thereby an Open Access work. Thus it harvests all of the good that comes from this fact, even if a manic discussion does not erupt upon its release or ever. This does not deny the point that time is a bottleneck for all of us.
Hmm…. why do you assume that people will steadily over time comment on a CommentPress version of Boas’s ethnography? It seems to beg the question of how these texts become meaningful to people such that they choose to invest their time in them rather than some other activity. Or perhaps you are arguing that given geological units of time, even microscopically low levels of care will still result in talmudic like commentary?
I appreciate that academics work on a different time scale than fad-obsessed bloggers, at least some of the time. But saying that something will take more time doesn’t remove the need to provide some account of the relation between the affordances provided by a piece of semiotic technology, its placement in a field of care, and the decisions that individuals make to take it up or not.
I’m arguing — and thanks for the comments, because I’m only now being able to articulate this — that the field of care for academics is structured in such a way that many of our recent experiments (“OUR” in the sense that 2 out of the 3 examples I used prominently featured me — this is not (to reiterate) an anti-Kelty thing) will not get taken up.
The Americanist ethnography example was a thought experiment so I cannot prove anything with it. But I do think that some parts of our literature do powerful work in slow motion. I have studied the social life of Americanist ethnographies written 100 years ago in the particular communities about which they were written. In favor of open access, such members of such communities always complain that they (ethnographic documents) are too hard to get a hold of. Once interested folks do get their hands on them, they are almost always put to some present-day use and there are almost always discussions about the substantive issues presented therein. The desire to comment/correct/update the ethnographic record is often spoken of openly by Native American people and they have generally been at a loss as to how to accomplish this, short of co-opting the next ethnographer to come along or to go to graduate school themselves. I do think that, given my experiences and intuitions, some very productive, if sometimes very slow motion, conversations could be had across time and space. Ethically, I think that we have good reasons to facilitate such possibilities and not to be too discouraged if it does not a happen as quickly as we might like.
So yes, I am “arguing that given geological units of time, even microscopically low levels of care will still result in talmudic like commentary” and that that commentary could make significant differences. For some communities about whom we have historically written, just having the opportunity (even, if rarely exercised to the fullest in practice) to join the conversation without impossibly high participation costs seems to me to be one worthwhile aspect of such projects. I recognize some of the other benefits that are being sought and I too worry that they might not be fully realizable for the reasons the Rex described initially.
The last three comments confuse several different issues, I think. One is how academics work together amongst themselves (whether consciously or not) to make texts meaningful enough to deserve comment and be taken seriously for longer than 72 hours. Another is, given Jason’s example, how source communities or other interested publics start to engage with such texts, especially those texts that turn out to be documents of some power, the way 19th and 20th century ethnographies often were (not all, obviously, but certainly some).
In the case of two bits, I’ve already seen the latter, and I expected it: Geeks who want to add to, correct or otherwise engage with the history I tell, including one person whose written a supplemental history of TCP/IP in Korea (!) and several small corrections. I have not yet seen a lot of the former, but that, as I keep saying, is because I intend to revisit it on a longer scale, as the book is taught in classes, and as other scholars in my orbit do work that either engages with it, modulates it or just works on the same problems.
If I think in term of “the field of care” then I am more likely to think of the experiments we are trying as supplemental to the existing structure of care– in addition to reviews in journals (good enough), discussions on a website that anyone can read (better); in addition to merely being used in one or two classes somewhere (good enough), a possible set of discussions across those classes and across semesters (better!). In any case, I would say that my interest in doing this is in extending and enhancing the “structure of care”– which also means that the structure of care we live with is now rendered more visible, de-naturalized, by the new tools and possibilities. What would suck would be that we make that structure of care *less* effective by rushing too headlong into a Web 2.0 frenzy of scholarly bliss, and then abandon it all for web 3.0 when that arrives. So, yes, I agree… what’s at stake here is making that “structure of care” explicit… if that is the right term for it (I’ve used “infrastructure of scholarship” in some places… I think I mean something similar by that).
Kelty says we are confusing different issues when we examine how academics work together amongst themselves to make texts meaningful enough to deserve comment, on the one hand, and how source communities or other interested publics start to engage with such texts. But I think these are both particular instances of the more general topic we are dealing with now — the ‘field of care’ into which these OA activities are placed.
In the case of academics we have a whole field of professional advancement and intellectual curiosity which the commentpress blog is placed. In the case of ‘source communities’ the field is, according to JBJ, their concern with how they are represented and how that ties in to their continuing struggle for justice, autonomy, sense of self and so forth. Kelty has also nicely documented the recursive public of geeks that his own project is positioned in when they address it.
I think when we started a lot of these sites we — or maybe it was just me — worried about 1) making the sites useable and 2) ‘changing people’s minds’. We were not so concerned with what I’ve been awkwardly calling the wider ‘field of care’ as the context in which these projects were placed. Of course, we sweated the details of institutional politics of the AAA and financial issues, but somehow those seem like a limited subset of the more general features I’m calling a ‘field of care’.
This discussion is really helpful, I think. It makes clearer that multiple aspirations are laminated together in our experiments with new technologies/social organizational arrangements for doing/sharing our work. It also points to the time horizon issue in a productive way. These differences then generate various proposals for what success (or failure) would look like.
I am enthusiastic and concerned all at once. I think that figuring it all out will take time and that there will be disappointments. I am encouraged by the ways that matters seem to be changing in good ways more quickly than I had feared.
The broader OA anthropology advocacy effort which has found a collaborative, communicative home here on Savage Minds (thereby making the Open Access Anthropology site something of an annex), has begun having positive effects on official discussions inside the AAA (and elsewhere). Beyond the cautious engagement characterizing the latest issue of Anthropology News, there are more extensive OA proposals being discussed in the relevant AAA committees. Savage Minds as a digitally mediated collaborative community continues to have significant short and medium term effects and is the venue to which non-anthropologists look for the state of the debate on these issues within anthropology.
Similarly, I think that surprisingly rapid progress is now being made recalibrating such things as tenure and promotion guidelines to acknowledge work in “new” media.
At the same time, “Anthropology of/in Circulation” has reminded me of the power of established ways of working. Its recent paper appearance in snail mailboxes has begun prompting good old-fashioned water cooler talk in my circle.
In addition to thinking about the attention bottleneck, I would like to give more thought to the public-ness issue. I have heard from very well situated folks who could add much to the discussion of “Anthropology of/in Circulation” on the CommentPress site (and who like the idea of it) but who do not feel at liberty to do so given their individual circumstances. It seems that this dynamic relates to the longstanding paradoxes of blind/open peer-review.
Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to push these questions forward.
Wait! We’re not done yet!
One lesson to things I was trying to say in my post was not just that we have to look at the wider structures of care that form the context for new OA projects, but we must also think about how the development of these new OA sites alter those contexts and also begin working to create entirely new ones.
I don’t think we can be satisfied worrying only about ‘reception’ — we have to think also about the way these sites create new opportunities for people to get involved. At one time we (i.e. ‘I’) thought that is we wanted to get people involved in using OA, then all we had to do was explain to them why it was important, and then to give them usable tools to lower barriers to entry
Instead I think we need to think about making OA ‘hard’ to do — we need projects that people need to work at, such that as they work on them more they will start caring about them because they have invested in them. Of course, we need to make the first hit free, and we don’t want to create too many hurdles to participation. But one outcome of this discussion, I think, is that we need to think more about the ‘journey’ and less about the ‘destination’, as it were.
bq. we need to think more about the ‘journey’ and less about the ‘destination’,
We definitely need to think more about the journey. But I’m not sure I agree with less about the destination. In my own experience, the Internet and IT developers are constantly offering me new journeys to take, new pieces of software to learn and explore. I sit at a Mac loaded with stuff, of which I have only scratched the surface. Why, then, have I spent so much of the last couple of years learning more about Filemaker and Pajek and interacting with members of the Social Network Analysis (SNA) community that with iLife, Omnigrapple, Facebook or Flickr? It’s because I see an opportunity to do research that combines the tools of SNA with a unique personal and professional experience in an industry that has now been a big part of my life for going on three decades. Yes, understanding more about it and how it has developed during these years that I’ve been around it is a big part of understanding my personal story, me, myself and how I fit into this world that is still deeply mysterious to me.
From this perspective, I agree completely that simply creating a new mouse trap is no guarantee that anyone will buy into it. People need to know why they should bother and feel that it is worthwhile. Pulling in some other threads, what does OA do to forward the integration of the personal transformations wrought by ethnography into larger collective projects that seem exciting as well as worthwhile?
Rex,
Good point about making it “harder”–in some cases I think you are right.
Just a quick note though back to your original post–I don’t think that the discussion part of the Anthropology in/of Circulation was really properly launched here at SM to give people a heads up to even go over and start a conversation. I blogged about it and JBJ did, but SM is the main portal for this type of stuff (much bigger readership) and so I think perhaps your initial reaction was a bit premature in terms of the lack of commenting/discussion generated.
But this post has garnered some good thoughts so maybe we could re-direct to the piece and get something started there? (or here)
I have no idea why that shows up crossed out….
Yes. With the craziness of our summer schedules this blog post is actually the first mention of Anthropology in/of Circulation on SM – although it got some nice posts elseswhere on the Anthro-Blogsphere.
Regarding the original post, I think that Shirky’s book explains more than Rex gives him credit for. First of all, Shirky does give due emphasis to the shallowness of collective action in the Internet age (see my previous SM post on Shirky). But more to the point, I think Shirky’s use of power law graphs explains a lot. The way Wikipedia or other such collective sites work is that you have a few hundred power-users who make most of the edits, and thousands of other users who add the bulk of the content, but only contribute a small amount per person. The problem in the social sciences is that there are simply not yet enough “users” at either end of the spectrum. The anthro blogsphere is growing rapidly, as are those who participate by reading and commenting on anthro blogs, but I think a lot of what Kelty & Co are doing here (as well as what we are doing with SM, OAA and Remixing Anthropology) is really just showing the potential for what can be done once we reach critical mass.
Kim: The crossed out text is a byproduct of our Textile syntax markup engine. Sorry about that, but some people like it.
One thing which seems to be happening, kind of recently, is a new approach to processing information. We don’t have more time but we’ve been so concerned with making the best of it that we rely more on “distributed” anything. In this case, distributed reading. In a haphazard fashion, we each read the bits we want to read. Sometimes, we may put things on the backburner for a little while and, by the time we get to it, other people have done the reading and posted comments. We don’t distribute specific roles. We let things run their course. Many projects fail but some projects do succeed. And success rate isn’t much of an issue especially if even the failure can be useful to new projects.
Maybe I’m just saying this because I just responded to a blogpost (in French)which mentioned the U.S. Department of Defense’s Power to the Edge concept in the context of Twitter. The connection may seem tenuous from the outside (this post is about structured projects involving academics, that other post was about “putting things out there” based on a model created by the USDoD to deal with “command and control”). But it still seems to make sense: in the end, we’re talking about results, not about “stupids.”
One thing which seems to be happening, kind of recently, is a new approach to processing information. We don’t have more time but we’ve been so concerned with making the best of it that we rely more on “distributed” anything. In this case, distributed reading. In a haphazard fashion, we each read the bits we want to read. Sometimes, we may put things on the backburner for a little while and, by the time we get to it, other people have done the reading and posted comments. We don’t distribute specific roles. We let things run their course. Many projects fail but some projects do succeed. And success rate isn’t much of an issue especially if even the failure can be useful to new projects.
Maybe I’m just saying this because I just responded to a blogpost (in French)which mentioned the U.S. Department of Defense’s Power to the Edge concept in the context of Twitter. The connection may seem tenuous from the outside (this post is about structured projects involving academics, that other post was about “putting things out there” based on a model created by the USDoD to deal with “command and control”). But it still seems to make sense: in the end, we’re talking about results, not about “stupids.” 😉