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.

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)

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?

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.

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.

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’.

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).

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.

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.

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….