Saturday, October 27, 2007

Network Typology

T here are other typologies. There will be more. I may have glanced a few of them casually (i.e., lightly & forgetfully), but I have not gathered them together as part of any concentrated, focused effort or project. What I am trying to work through here is hit and miss. I think hit more than miss; if you think miss more than hit, tell me why, will you?

"Network" gets to be a God term. Invoked at every turn, it lugs around a fleet of connotations, some of them especially burdensome for the sluggishness they assign to the term. Consider my least favorite: network as a verb for professional hobnobbing (business attire preferred). Here is network in its commonplace form. Networking is schmoozing, clinking glasses, play-acting, pretending to pay attention, death-by-boredom conversation, etc. This mythology of network is bad for network studies and bad for the complex-ion of networks. Unfortunately we begin with this term, but it is a loose, pre-emptive reference (an I like the sound of networks, but who knows what's been said about them). I don't have any misgivings about the phenomenon of professional and organizational networks, complex systems, making one's way, etc. (see Burt, right?, also Weick). My itch is with the verb network for the way it implies the gaming of advantageous associations (this plays with Modern rules and roles, not subjectivities). It reminds me of the mass media references to "rhetoric" as only the most deliberately misleading and propagandistic political discourses, where "mere," "dirty-rotten," and "icky" are implied.

I said there would be a typology. I'm getting to it. There are five terms, but I think there need to be more. And like the dramatisms and the stases, there are two- and three-term ratios among them, depending on the network in consideration, the methodology, and so on. I will try to give explanations or examples, but I don't know yet whether I have them lined up for each one--the network -eses.

Mathesis/Mathetic: Schematic/mechanistic. Quantification and metrology. We find this in Social Network Analysis (SNA) and mathematical sociology. Mathesis as learning produces a rupture that causes confusion (or some other sort of fusion) between this and noesis.

Aethesis/Aesthetic: Evaluative/artistic. Distributed artistic production, collaborative design, and collectively curated and circulated works. We find this in distributed aesthetics and Saper's Networked Art. Saper keys on Barthes' receivables for networked art; it is also a useful alternative to readerly/writerly for aesthetic networks and their "enigmatic" experimentation.

Poiesis/Poetic: Rhetorical/productive*. I am tempted to align this with new media, but these more generally organize around rhetorical practices (invention, circulation). Poetic networks are more self-consciously rhetorical than the other types (but I can't think of any reason why this should always be so). In network studies, poetic networks are behind in the horse race. I mean that these other four network -eses seem to me more common. This will change because of the growing convergence of network studies with rhetoric and composition.

Noesis/Noetic: Rhetorical/epistemic*. Contemporary network studies has emerged with these last two types, primarily. Knowledge as networked (slime molds and emergence, semantic networks, etc.). I am tempted to call this the broadest category. How what is known/knowable can be traced; knowing as connective. This type (though not exclusively) guides many of the networkists: Barabasi, Watts, Ball, Buchanan.

Graphesis/Graphetic: Presentational/visual. Also rhetorical, this one is introduced by Johanna Drucker, even if she doesn't write explicitly of networks. It is the wedge (or bridge?) between aesthesis and mathesis where visual presentation motivates the approach. Many approaches to networks involve graphesis; those that do not instead rely on narrative and databasic modes of presentation (of course these have a visual quality, but they are more discursive than presentational).

*I have started to think of these as identifiably rhetorical, but this does not mean that the others are arhetorical. I was thinking here of primary characterizations, not exclusive, inflexible ones.

I also want to say something about how network substitutes for community. Community is easily falsified (named but not identified beyond the act of naming). We have a community here in our graduate program, let's say (this has been said before, it's just one example that comes to mind). But what is the network? To know this, we must granularize the community. Flatten it out (Latourian-style, an actor-network) so that we can put a finger on the ties. Who is working with whom? Who has had courses with whom? Who has regular conversations with whom? A community turned network answers a different set of questions (even if you never ask them) because the paths are lighted (or otherwise shone) and, consequently, patterned. This might sound like a wild runaround. It's not. I only mean that I prefer "network" to "community." Community is more elusive, more capacious. I don't find the concept all that helpful (no, it conceals more than it reveals). Too often when it is muttered I am surprised to learn that I belong to anything promoted as so grandiose, well-understood, and inclusive (such a thin gravy as to never have realized it was there). On the other hand, I can sense a network, put a finger on it, tie it for oneself (a community, I ca-knot).

I put this together because I want something with more explanatory power than what I have found in work I would describe as network studies. What happens when we attempt a quantitative project (bean-counting) but attempt it in service of other network aspects--not mathesis alone. This is tremendously important to my work. I need to be able to explain these ratios because, even while distant reading toward disciplinary "network sense" is, on the first floor, mathematically invested, it is not ultimately mechanical, structural, or schematic. It is, instead (and by my modest insistence) contorted (Latour would say "acrobatically") into poiesis--into the making and doing, into a heuristic that ought to mobilize.

What? That's all? No. I said I thought there should be more categories in this tentative, provisional typology based on network -eses. I don't know what to do with Benkler because I haven't been careful about reading Wealth, yet. I don't know where infrastructural networks fit in (the wires, routers, and such). Material and geospatial networks? Latour helps me (with 'hybrids' and 'all points local') think of these two as either noetic or poetic. But this can be another cause for the wheels to fall off at anything above Earth Wide Miles per hour.

Posted by at 9:50 PM | to Networkacy

Monday, October 22, 2007

Writers House

I may have mentioned before that I subscribe to the RSS feed for my del.icio.us network. For me this means big things. I use Google Reader to aggregate all of the links bookmarked in del.icio.us by users I have identified as belonging to my network. Twenty-two more or less active gatherers of the net's goods, the whole team working in service of, well, themselves (I almost wrote me). They don't necessarily post links for me (although del.icio.us makes this possible, and others have shared links with me directly a time or two). But because they post them for themselves, the bookmarks carry something like credibility, a small portion of this sort of matters to somebody. How much time do I spend sifting through the feed bubbling with all of these links from my del.icio.us network? Rarely more than a minute. Sometimes I herd the links into my own collection. Other times I open a link in a new tab and see what it's all about (this is the most time-consuming practice; also, sometimes, the most rewarding). Most of the time I move along, having merely glanced the bookmarks. Even when I pass them by, they give me a vague sense of what someone else is collecting (or researching or doing or even buying for holiday gifts...I won't say whose gift ideas I borrow every December). These practices, like many others (not all of them digital), promote what I think of as network sense (this, a key idea I am developing in the diss).

I learned about the Rutgers Writers House this way. The program has posted a YouTube video documenting the "house" (a lavish basement, really). I would have embedded the video for you, but embedding has been disabled (!). The video itself seems like the sort of thing that would have been mentioned on a listserv. Perhaps it was. But I didn't find it that way. When I subscribe, I subscribe by digest, and those listservs are either dead, dying, or--surprisingly--overflowing with such torrential interchanges as to be unreadable. I learned about the Writing House in this other way--from my del.icio.us network. Alex and Spencer recently posted it to their del.icio.us accounts. I followed. A small, distal circuit, one barely noticeable to anyone involved. Is there any value in this?

I think there is, and I'm more and more inclined to think of it as a nuanced form of apprenticeship or something like a mentorship model. It's not the typical hierarchical mentor-mentee dyad, but it functions in a similar way, fostering patterns of local, interested circulation among people who more or less know each other and whose participation is both self-interested (a link for one's self) and transparent (a link you too can have if you care to). It's not the typical gift-economy, right? Instead it is driven by a strange blend of beneficent self-indulgence (if collecting links is, indeed, indulgent...maybe not). It doesn't require thanks, (so the guides to netiquette tell me...okay, I made that up; really I wanted to use "netiquette" for the first time at E.W.M.to see whether anyone's still reading). In fact, thanking someone for posting to del.icio.us would be, uh, unusual, let's say.

I mention the Writing House link because it is a tangible example of these in-network practices--practices that because they manifest behind the scenes are especially difficult to identify. We cannot easily tell if they are happening for other people (even by asking, the decision to add a bookmark is not always memorable). While I don't want to make too much of this, I want to note it because it seems important to me to be able to articulate that nexus of exchange, particularly as an apprenticeship model. It's one of the more basic rationale when I encourage others to use del.icio.us, and it's a variation of connection that runs counter to the problems of isolation, insularity, and dispersion bound up with distance, disciplinary geographies, and specialization. I would like to see more people doing it, but to get to that point, I think we need still more examples of these effects if they are, as I think they are, a substantive form of something like apprenticeship (maybe holarchic apprenticeship).

Posted by at 9:55 PM | Comments (4) | to Networkacy

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Chreod: Alignment of Set-ups

R eading more than writing today, I planned to get down notes on another run through Porter, Sullivan, et. al.'s "Institutional Critique," (re: my own little life raft in postmodern geography) the same for Richards' short piece on "The Resourcefulness of Words," from Speculative Instruments (re: wandering resourcefulness, another spatial, and I would say networked, consideration) , and the same, yet again, for Miller's latest (Spring 2007) RSQ essay on automation, agency, and assessment, "What Can Automation Tell Us about Agency?"--not for the diss., this last one, but because I need to know more about it before responding to an email marked urgent. Only, rather than note-making, the day turned to night, and my efforts grew more digressive when I sought out one of Miller's references to Latour, an article I hadn't heard of called, "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer" (Social Problems 35.3). Here is Latour, er, "Jim Johnson," at his most playful. Terrific. Coincidentally, I also have an special place in my heart for compression door-closers.

A selection:

A scene, a text, an automatism can do a lot of things to their prescribed users at close range, but most of the effect finally ascribed to them depends on a range of other set-ups being aligned. For instance, the groom closes the door only if there are people reaching the Sociology Department of Walla Walla. These people arrive in front of the door only if they have found maps and only if there are roads leading to it; and, of course, people will start bothering about reading the maps, getting to Washington state and pushing the door open only if they are convinced that the department is worth visiting. I will call this gradient of aligned set-ups that endow actors with the pre-inscribed competences to find its users a chreod (a "necessary path" in the biologist Waddington's Greek): people effortlessly flow through the door, and the groom, hundreds of times a day, recloses the door-when it is not stuck. The result of such an alignment of set-ups is to decrease the number of occasions in which words are used; most of the actions become silent, familiar, incorporated (in human or in nonhuman bodies)-making the analyst's job so much harder. (308)

Before reading this, I'd never heard of chre-od ("we need" and "path"...a variation of met-hod, no? needful path or necessary path). For me, Latour, as usual, triggers a number of clicks and instigations. Something in the effortless flow and series of set-ups reminds me of disciplinarity and institution (Porter and Sullivan's concerns), but in a way that lightens the load on discursive structuring of these entities. Chreod incorporates actions in such a way that demands a rhetoric suited to the extra- (or is it non-?)discursive (institutions and disciplines are rhetorical constructs, but that's not all...Porter and Sullivan make this point, more or less directly, I would say, in their emphasis on the micro).

For reasons that are hard for me to pinpoint, I appreciate that chreod--this alignment of set-ups--turns away from words. Or it doesn't rely exclusively on inscription. It's not all textuality that determines the chreod. Texts are influential, yes, but actions, (redundant) performances, and things are, arguably, as forceful in the "holding together" of this alignment. Would Richards, in suggesting the resourcefulness of words as adequate for holding together a dialectic course of study, be receptive to this expansion that saves room for non-human actors and their speechless persuasion?

Posted by at 9:00 PM | to Networkacy

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Stroking a Pumpkin

I was just leafing through Latour's Reassembling again.  I can't quit this damn book.  I keep picking it up, leafing around, mulling over the marginalia, adding underlines, junking up the edges of the pages with more check marks and asterisks.

This morning I was also looking back again at "Visualization and Cognition," the 1986 article that begins to outline immutable mobiles, a concept further defined in Science in Action. It led me back around to Reassmebling; I was looking for the spot where he lists the properties of the face-to-face interaction as non-isotopic (a-ha! p. 200). A few weeks' Latour binge, so what? (L.'s mention of "the ethnography of abstraction" has me thinking maybe I can subtitle the diss. "an ethnography of disciplinary abstraction" or, at the very very least, write it as if).

While digging around for that other part, though, I saw a rare exclamation point in the margin. A spot where Latour writes of extreme shifts in scale:

Have you ever noticed, at sociological conferences, political meetings, and bar palavers, the hand gestures people make when they invoke the 'Big Picture' into which they offer to replace what you have just said so that it 'fits' into such easy-to-grasp entities as 'Late Capitalism', 'the ascent of civilization', 'the West', 'modernity', 'human history', 'Potcolonialism', or 'globalization'? Their hand gesture is never bigger than if they were stroking a pumpkin! I am at last going to show you the real size of the 'social' in all its grandeur: well, it is not that big.  It is only made so by the grand gesture and by the professional tone in which the 'Big Picture' is alluded to. If there is one thing that is not common sense, it would be to take even a reasonably sized pumpkin for the 'whole of society'. Midnight has struck for that sort of social theory and the beautiful carriage has been transformed back into what it should always have remained: a member of the family Cucurbitaceceae. (186)

Touché: Use caution with the pumpkin-sized gestures.

Posted by at 10:45 PM | Comments (1) | to Networkacy

Thursday, January 4, 2007

Net Morticians

I t wouldn't surprise me much at all if, in the year ahead, we hear more about network blight or the dissolution, abandonment, and decay of once-thriving clusters of interconnected activity. Danah Boyd's entry from Wednesday started me thinking again about the nascent network cycles that have yet to show significant, extended desultory patterns and down-trends. Boyd responds to Steve O'Hear's notion of social network fatigue (via) or, basically, the idea that actors in a given system will tire, grow weary, and as such, the system on a broader scale will slow to a creep or halt altogether. Boyd at first expresses skepticism--"Users aren't going to tire of their friends but they will tire of problematic social spaces that make hanging out with friends difficult"--before working through other considerations related to the fading of social networks and speculation about YouTube, MySpace, and teens.

For now, I'm most interested in the idea of network decay or fatigue brought up in the entries by Boyd and O'Hear. I suppose I'd be guilty of painting with broad brushstrokes to suggest that interest in network vitalism has, for the most part, favored genesis rather than dissolution, abandonment, and the cadaverous husks of exhausted (adequated?) links and nodes. Heck, we've seen much more of it, much more of the early waves of enthusiasm and euphoria, I mean. And still, we have digital monuments (relics to networks, not people, in this case), but the web's clouds of data-dust cover them rapidly enough that encomia are usually brief. The web, despite the ether, deletion, and ephemera, needn't be a funereal domain.

To the degree that social networks are living, they are also dying, right? Or prone to vacillations and arrhythmias. I only want to make a couple of notes about this, and keep them here for later. The first is that this resonates with something I was skirting around two weeks ago in my take-home qualifying exam. I won't go into great detail (oughta wait until they're assessed as passing, eh?), but I was working extensively with Munster and Lovink's "Theses," in which they call for a "distributed aesthetics" that will "account for these experiences of stagnation within network formations and for coupling these networked experiences with a network�s potential to transform and mutate into something not yet fully codified." Dying, living, ongoing, mutable, more or less cyclical. But because these social networks fuse together organisms and constructs (a primal puddle of entangled code), strictly organic metaphors falter, failing to account for the multiple life cycles of flocculent data and metadata, variously inscribed. Maybe Thacker's "Living Dead Networks" would help us toward a better theorized understanding of the contrails and exhaust left by networks or the network junkyards piled high with cast-asides and waste. This is what I mean about the web not being a funereal domain: there's no burial ritual for zombies, no panegyric for walking-deadworks (this/that wiki or listserv or forum or blog lived long ago!), no lasting sense of loss in abandoned heaps of information and mummified memes.

The second thing--and this is a point made both by Munster and Lovink in their discussion of mapping and by Thacker in his discussion of diagramming--is that the iconic representation of networks is, much like its counterpart in human anatomy and physiology, the anatomical chart, a momentary and (potentially) idealized slice of complexity (could the same be said for symbolic representation? for enactive?). That is, representing networks (mapping them, diagramming them; much of which I continue find intriguing and suggestive) really must constantly reassert the inherent dynamism of the thing depicted and the vitality downplayed by its static presentation. Otherwise, there comes the risk of something like dogfish in the dissection pan--the network trapped long enough to rest between two slides for magnified inspection is not quite the same as its raw form, still open to transformation and mutation. I'd locate my reservations about SNA or mathematical sociology here. How, then, can mapping and diagramming network formations proceed without merely dealing with dead things--the post-mortem networks, steel-gray in their baths of formaldehyde, describable only in their stillness?

Posted by at 9:45 AM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy
del.icio.us:

Friday, November 3, 2006

Gliffy and Facebook

T he week's quasi-experiment in WRT302 blended Facebook and Gliffy. In the session dedicated to Facebook (what of it?), I wanted to prime our upcoming discussion of networks when we read a few chapters from Critical Mass. But reading about Facebook didn't seem to me to be enough. I was mildly bored with the idea of reading about Facebook. Next, pose as if critical. Next, rehearse the cautions about visibility and decorum. Thorny! It's a fairly reliable pattern that when I'm bored, my students are doubly bored. And so.

By involving Gliffy (Draw and share diagrams on the web), we prefaced the conversation about Facebook by mapping ourselves as a network, first assembling into small clusters of three or four and then by researching ties that would connect each person within a cluster and then each cluster to another. Gliffy did the trick. I could easily start a file (one for each group) and then invite collaborators. Each collaborator received an email with a temporary password. Once logged in, each collaborator was able to draw and rearrange elements on the canvas. Saving the file swiftly captures that iteration of the glyph and adds it to running list of versions for all to see (enabling restorations of earlier versions as well). It's especially suited to collaborative diagramming, activities like composing a network map or chart.

At first this meant that students had to spend time (re)learning names of peers and looking over their Facebook profiles for link-worthy criteria. This stage was only loosely defined; the one caveat was that students should try to avoid obvious ties (direct friends; live in N.Y.; taking WRT302). Dig around, prefer the non-obvious, and make use of degrees of separation as needed. In twenty-five minutes, each of the clusters of students was finished with the first phase. Gliffy includes one-click publishing to the web, so the groups were able to publish, then drop the links to their network diagrams into the class's del.icio.us account for simplified sharing. Everyone could then see the work performed by other groups.

I'm blogging this mainly to record (for an eventual return) that this might serve well as an ice breaker (if, that is, the ice must be broken) provided everyone has a Facebook account. For those who don't, however, it's still possible for them to suggest a basis for links to others, and establishing those links generates a lot of other conversation. More importantly, when we finally turned to our discussion of Facebook, it made far more sense to approach it as a network phenomenon, and as such, we could deal with the strength of ties (what warrants a thick line? a thin line?), centrality (who was easiest to connect to?), dynamic relations, and structural holes as concepts applicable to a broad assortment of domains and beyond the most facile uses.

Posted by at 11:45 PM | Comments (6) | to Networkacy

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Amuellierated

T oday I was invited to join the Facebook group "Muellers of the World Unite." After excitedly accepting, I read "the wall" (Facebook's discussion board feature) and learned that I am not alone in being mocked by the clever many who have launched into full-blown impromptu renditions of the gone absent scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "Bueller, Bueller?" Yeah, I know. Horrifying or hillarious, it remains a don't-choke-on-your-tongue laugh riot after twenty friggin' years.

That's right, "Muellers of the World Unite" is an invitation-only group (still in its infancy, mind you, with merely 140 more than 200 members) largely concerned with mispronunciation: as often mill-er or mull-er as the preferred mew-ler. The seventh cousins and other kin-folk are outraged by such egregious treatments of the surname.

I kept on reading the fourteen wall-posts, and than, feeling good about being surrounded by like-named people, I found this treasure in the "Recent News": "This just in: Muellers are better then you."

No, I haven't been invited to take a leadership role in the group. I only ask that next time you are tempted to let fly with your impersonation of a nasally teacher uncomprehending of delinquency from school--"Mueller? Mueller"--tune the pronunciation.

Posted by at 1:40 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Lloyd-Jones on Centrality

I n "A View from the Center," his 1977 CCCC keynote address, here's what Richard Lloyd-Jones said about Mrs. Peterson, "the emblem" of those in his audience:

Some will share a memory with me--the recollection of picking up the phone, cranking one long ring, and getting "central." You could ring various combinations of shorts and longs and get specific subscribers directly, but if you really wanted to know what was going on in the village you rang "central."

The folks in bigger towns, which had numbers, had to call central in order to be hooked up to anybody else on the system, but their central didn't know much except numbers, and out central had a name--Mrs. Peterson--and she knew all sorts of things. Somehow, in the village, she knew who was at the bank, who had gone down to the ice house, who hadn't been feeling well. I don't know that she listened in on all the conversations, but we supposed so. She just made herself central in the life of the community. In our more urban and perhaps urbane way, we would think of her as a communication nexus, but we'd to better to remember Mrs. Peterson as Central. (49)

Compositionist as pastoral telephone operator. A communication nexus. This isn't the only metaphor Lloyd-Jones invokes in the talk, but it is the piece that resonates most with network studies. Whatever her methods (eavesdropping? Mrs. Peterson!), she is knowing because of a high degree of centrality, her niche in a reasonably sized network. When network become too large, the connector's knowledge diminishes. Thresholds: Central knows only numbers in densely populated areas.

Nothing to add beyond that. Just reading for exams, posting notes, and thinking Lloyd-Jones was talking about network centrality in his address out in Kansas City some years ago.

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

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

The Networked Image

I first picked up on Google's Image Labeler two days ago (via). In a nutshell, Image Labeler addresses a semiotic problem: the indexing of hundreds of thousands of images based on semantic assignments in the visual field of each image. Indexing an image depends upon the assignment of keywords that correspond to the objects represented. Google Image Labeler makes this process into a game of peer review: in this two person game, a player win points by registering a descriptor that also appears on the other person's list.

Tracing a few links (succumbing, that is, to the beckoning of a surprising curiosity), I briefly started to follow the life of this conversation in computer science and art. Most intriguing in this regard was the talk embedded below, a talk called "Human Computation" given by Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon.

I find von Ahn's talk fascinating on several levels. He explains gaming (i.e., "Games with a Purpose") as a solution to the labor-production dilemma of developing a gargantuan repository of indexed images, of reconciling the gap, using the most basic set of terms, between image and word. Implicitly, he sets up a way of thinking about "writing the image" as collaboration, as writing that connects (in the allure of consensus, agreeing, that is, on the equivalence of Bush's photo and "yuck" (around 21:00 in the video)) and produces. In keeping with the title of his talk, he explains human computation--"Running a computation in people's brains instead of silicon processors."--premised upon "anonymous intimacy," the pleasure of coming to terms with strangers about the verbal evoked in the encounter with the visual. He also refers to his impressive research projects The ESP Game and PeekaBoom, predecessors, it would seem, to Google's Image Labeler.

Is it going too far to invoke Barthes here? If not the studium, exactly, there is something studium-like in Google's Image Labeler. The image-index undertaking is a project akin to establishing studium as a database. The collaboration between a labeler and a validator (partners in the game) devalues the intense singularity and instead reduces the image to human-generated language agreements, its lexical mutuality. There is a networked quality to the image in the way it is treatment here. Enigmatic thinking won't win in this game. The image is domesticated by the process and submitted into the most generic realm of culture, which, as Barthes puts it, "is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers" (28). It's useful for image searching, but is also has implications for habituated seeing and collaborative image work.

Posted by at 12:50 PM | to Networkacy

Friday, June 16, 2006

Digital Onomastics, Frenetic Place-Names

W hat happens to onomastics or proper place-names with infusions of the digital? How do the logics of the web, networked writing and folksonymy let loose (a plentitude of named small-pieces, loosely joined) the propriety of an onomastics founded on scarcity, where place-names refer formally to physical locations and also depend upon authorization, a kind of official license? We will have one name and one name only! Erm, okay, two...two names. No more. Granted, place-names or toponyms are not altogether unraveled or let loose. Kansas is still "Kansas," or "KS," even in Google Maps (at a certain scale, though, the name vanishes because it's too specific, too local; KS fades into anyplace). But while these stabilized place-names remain on highway signs and also showing at certain scales of the cybercartographic mash-ups, the digital introduces a capacity for differently circulating and contending name systems. Toponyms are further compounded. For now I don't care whether we're online or on I-90. New (by which I mean not pre-fixed), folksonomic names and tags don't automatically replace the official names, although they might one day contend with them and even displace them or unsettle them a bit.

Maybe the questions are all wrong. What is the tie between tagging and place-names, whether space is prefixed with geo- or cyber-? No, no, that's not quite it either. Or else it is, and I'm not able to come up with a satisfying answer. But the digital seems to awaken something between protocols (IP addresses and URLs) as place-names and cartographic toponyms (physical place-names on maps) as tags. In other words, online mapping apps make me think that something shifts (or is brought nearer together, maybe) between official geographic place-names and Weinberger's idea of the web as "places without space." The web's geography of place-names mixes the proper, the common with the improper and uncommon, with the uncanny and anachronistic (even if the a href requires syntactic precision).

Here you could have just read Weinberger's "Space" chapter. Credit to Jeff's stuff for getting me to think about this, too.

Posted by at 2:00 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy

Thursday, June 1, 2006

Keep 'Em All Coming Back

W hat exactly constitutes loyalty among readers of weblogs? What is loyalty, anyway? Habituated interest? Supersocial attachment? Attentional symbiosis? Casual subscription? And are future returns, tracked through IP addresses, adequate or reliable indications of loyalty, of interest, or of a sort of persistence, of ongoing reawdrite entanglement? Could be.

Seven days ago or thereabouts, I signed up for a trial run of Google Analytics. I was invited, which means that I must've filled out a form some time ago expressing interest in the measures and data presentations, being the graph-geek I am. G.A. runs on a few lines of code; I slipped into the templates for this weblog, just before the </body> tag, as instructed. Within a few days, the reports accumulated enough data to begin suggesting trends and patterns: yet another matrix of activity at this weblog, tracked, I should note, during what's been yet another dull stretch of writing. Rather like a hitless streak: a flat and yawning series of blas�-blogging. Still, as if to mock me and my dis-ambition, the numbers twinkle, evoking in me some down-deep fascination with statistics, with counting and with related reports, displays of information.

Google Analytics offers up a number of graphs and charts, ranging from visits and page views to geographic locations and search terms/phrases, and all of the displays are easily re-sorted and layered for different periods of time and for easy-to-see comparisons. I won't be commenting on all of the features here. By no means is this a comprehensive review of G.A. I only want to point, for now, to one of the graphs, "visitor loyalty," because I find it off somehow. I mean that it makes some odd suggestions.

First, notice that the graph cover a one week period, from May 25 to May 31. According to Google, I had a few visits during that stretch. Okay, 1,476. Some differentiation is due. All visits and visitors, as you might expect, are not equal. My best guess is that there are three distinctive groups here: searchers, readers and spammers. Searchers largely make up the left-most counts. That is, they visit once and never return, whether because they're satisfied with what the search summoned (notes on Barthes' photographic image, for example) or because they are not satisfied (recipes for moth poison, let's say). The point is this: searchers are not yet loyal. Their presence is casual, often accidental, ordinarily forgettable, passing and nonchalant.

The third bunch, those 74 visitors who, in one week's time, came by between the frequencies of 9-14 times and 51-100 times are, well, too loyal to be trusted. Rather than be naive and celebrate them as die-hards, I take them to be spa&mers, mostly, although it's conceivable that a few of the 9-14ers could be legitimate readers, I suppose, or folks coming from a lumped-together network ID (e.g., sub-nets on the syr.edu network). Even when the finest, most compelling entries are rolling through EWM on a daily basis, it's unthinkable that this site would draw 51 visits from any reasonable person in a single week. I could start selling hats and t-shirts with that kind of following.

I take the 32 mid-range visitors to be the regulars, those whose loyalty is most in sync with the steadiest currents in this blogstream--a mix of family, colleagues and outliers, some of whom, perhaps, subscribe to one of the RSS feeds. The graph, then, displays this paradox about blogs, audiences and loyalty (even if I'm still reserved about the term as it applies to reading and writing activity): I'm aiming for the belly, for the lowest point in the U-shape between searchers and sp&mmers. I'm not quite sure, but I think that's the point I was writing toward.

Posted by at 5:30 PM | to Networkacy

Friday, May 26, 2006

Shenanigans

S ome prankster from one of my alma maters just invited me to a group called "Facebook Over 30!"

Um, no thanks.

To my mind, the only activity apropos for an "over 30" tag is basketball.  At everything else, I'm better now than I was at 29 (unless you consider my time in the mile, which is likely remains nine and a half minutes, just like always, even if there is no evidence that I'm slower than I once was). Hmph.

No need to remind me that "shenanigans" is so rarely uttered by anyone under 30.

Posted by at 11:15 AM | to Networkacy

Friday, April 28, 2006

Next: Disciplinary Facebook

I 'm intrigued by the Facebook's expansion beyond colleges, as reported here (via). Like any social networking app, the euphoria surrounding it is offset (too often in extremes) by abuses, missteps, skepticism, and lags in the adaptation of institutional policies to respond to the activity at the site. Yet recent shift--ten corporations signing on--gets at the spreading recognition of the value of social networking apps beyond mere friend-making, beyond "poking" strangers as a casual gesture of interest. Prepared to engage social networking as something more than trivial?

I'll watch with interest as more reactions to the latest expansion crop up. And those reactions will vary, of course, from jeering to the more serious. The announcement brings me all the way back to the earliest announcements of the Facebook in 2004. If they're expanding to workplaces, maybe it won't be long before leadership in the discipline starts weighing the possibilities of the Facebook for an entire field, such as composition and rhetoric. Granted, it wouldn't be perfect, but the way I see it, it'd be a marked improvement on the existing means for building and locating profiles, tracing interests through those who've written on such things, and so on. Imagine a use of Facebook with a professional orientation whereby disciplinary bibliographies, institutional affiliations (and histories), and linked tags for research and interests. I know it's a wild, data-based fantasy, and it would require us to see Facebook as more than forum for delinquency, but here's hoping. What, maybe five or ten years from now?

Posted by at 12:45 PM | to Networkacy

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Wondering Now

I just turned in my final project for the fall semester--a look at Social Network Analysis adapted as methodology for rhet/comp.  Hard-line SNA researchers often turn to mathematical sociology (half-seriously, I liken it to discourse analysis, peopled), heavy with formulas as probabilities for activity/system/org-phenomena, structural equivalence, and so on.  Basically, I wanted to sort the more general areas of network studies from SNA, tie in a few definitional pieces and key concepts, stake out the methodological layers of a few SNA-oriented future projects, get grounded.  Been a good project for that.  And yes, some relief in its completion.  Before the weekend, I have some grading to pace through; alongside that, leisure reading, a light read-ahead for the spring, and maybe a few days in Michigan at the end of the month if Ph. doesn't have hoops practice.

I didn't realize this would turn into another update (updates heaped upon updates lately).  But it does bring me to something I noticed on a science workbook laying open on D.'s workspace earlier.  She's plotting out the finer points of a science lesson for tomorrow.  The book, it has sets of questions to go with each of the labs.  Usual stuff.  Except the final question for every unit: What are you wondering now?

What are you wondering now?  Ought to end all semesters (projects, blog entries, etc.) that way.

Posted by at 9:45 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy

Friday, October 7, 2005

Into the Long Tail

C onsidering that this entry ends my longest blogging drought since early July, you might have wondered what's been happening lately.  I've gone and followed up a personal-best thirty-one entries in the month of September with a three-day lull in blogging.  To be completely honest, I devoted a lot of time and energy this week to developing and fine-tuning a paper I shared late this morning at the Contesting Public Memories Conference here in Syracuse.  The cross-disciplinary conference continues tomorrow, bringing together folks from a variety of specializations, a variety of places.  In the paper, "Networked Writing as Micro-Monument: The Long Tail's Nested Memoria," I was going for a three-part argument about the persistence of social/shared memories in the niches of blogspace.  To attempt the triple leap, I discussed John Lovas's weblog, micro-monument in relation to Chris Anderson's articulation of the long tail, and ways in which memorable personal intensities punctuate the long tail by applying Barthes's studium/punctum.  That's where my mind has been--stuck in the long tail for three days or so.

On a related note, I'm thinking through a few of the lessons I've learned related to this project and this week:

• Mid-semester conferences are difficult when they include writing significant pieces of the paper and the paper doesn't match with other coursework and teaching demands.
• The power law and long tail are immensely useful concepts for network studies, but they're difficult to introduce with any crispness to people who haven't heard of Anderson's project.  I suspect that this problem isn't unique to the long tail.  A similar bind comes up when we try to generalize a complex idea in application to a subject people are hearing about or thinking about for the first time.  I should be clear that this isn't a direct response to anything that came up today.  It's more like a sense I have that I didn't do enough to develop the long tail's relevance as a model for social memory.
• I have a new self-improvement project: write more small pieces that, with some revision and tuning, can gel into usable material for future conferences.  I haven't decided that everything should be published to the weblog, but it's clear enough that I need to work on two things:  (-1-) periodically aerate the ultra-condensed grad-student style and (-2-) start thinking about blog entries as mini-series or concatenations of developable projects.

That's probably enough for now, although it doesn't exhaust the dim sense of ought-to's.  For the remainder of the weekend, I'm on with reading I've neglected--the rest of Tufte on data visualizations and Dunnier's Sidewalk.  Also, in 307 on Monday we're starting The ClueTrain Manifesto and attempting our own collaborative Writer's Cluetrain. Going to shine some attention on that as well.

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Expected-value Navigation

R esearchers at UMass-Amherst announced this week that they've derived an algorithm useful for explaining the "six degrees" phenomenon in social networks (and related activity systems) (via). 

The social network exploited by Travers and Milgram isn't a straightforward, evenly patterned web. For one thing, network topology is only known locally—individuals starting with the letter did not know the target individual—and the network is decentralized—it didn't use a formal hub such as the post office. If navigating such a network is to succeed—and tasks such as searching peer-to-peer file sharing systems or the navigating the Web by jumping from link to link do just that—there must be parts of the underlying structure that successfully guide the search, argue Jensen and Şimşek.

What guides the search?  The press release briefly touches on issues of homophily and "degree disparity." Previous research has tended to treat these qualities discretely, Jensen and Şimşek's algorithm merges or blends them. Perhaps most noteworthy from the release is the question of how network topologies are known. This hooks into a few of the talks from CCR Community Day '05 and also at least a couple of the motivations behind CCC Online: how is disciplinarity known?

Posted by at 8:00 AM | to Networkacy

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Facile

I 'd noticed faces before, but the sudden spike in wallborn figures around here was beginning to concern D. and Ph. Of course, I was taking pictures of the few might-be shapes emerging in the cracked paint on the door frames in this old flat, even posting the images to Flickr. Changing humidity levels, expansion and shrinkage, next appear the cracks and with them, patterns: even people.  Nonsense, you say.  I had my doubts too. 

But, today when I picked up D. from work, I went upstairs to pitch in on a shelf-altering project--make a crooked shelf flat (earlier came the phone call: "Bring a hack saw.  We have a shelf with two inextricable nails in need of sawing.").  We had to adjust the shelf from angled--display-like--to flat.  Easy.  Yet the best part was that there, on the cluttered table nearby, this was staring back at me:

 

Face to Face, an issue of Pentagram Papers 4 from the late 70's, filled with found faces or face-like patterns.  From the jacket note:

The collection of accidentally created faces shown here was assembled over a period of two years by the Swiss designer Jean Edouard Robert.  During that time each new addition would be presented for the approval of his friends and colleagues, and it became a regular source of diversion for them.

Judging from this, it's near to Saper's notion of the intimate bureaucracy in Networked Art except that in this set (maybe not an assembling, hard to say) the fantastical dimension provokes another question: how do the art objects/receivables themselves act in the network? How do they impart the network structure, dynamics and flow? It is somewhat far afield from my initial compulsion to grab images of the paint-crack formations--best viewed in the half-light of daybreak when I should be asleep.  Just the thing I was looking for to help me think about something more than the peopling of the paint cracks (not just some lead-dust hallucination, turns out!): extra-human networked interaction.  Photographer Irwin Dermer adds this in the introduction to the collection of thirty or so photos:

Once a group of "faces" has been found, it can be seen that a unique society has been discovered.  A society existing in isolation until the moment they are seen in relation to each other.  But unlike other societies, there is no interaction between members.  They serve silently until the time when they no longer function or simply become worn out.

No interaction? Doesn't quite seem right for some reason. And so I'll leave this question open for now, and take away a different understanding of the persistent figures in the paint cracks.

Posted by at 10:30 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy

Tuesday, April 5, 2005

ω

B riefly, I just want to post a few thoughts on Greg Urban's chapter from Metaculture, "The Once and Future Thing (PDF)."  As Urban tells us, the ways culture moves, flows and circulates "is the central mystery of our time" (39).  Urban frames the paradox of cultural flow by characterizing its latent tension: the pull between sameness and difference. According to Urban, these two forces combine in a conglutination of alpha (α) (which he derives into beta (β) or "new" culture) and their inventive counterpart, omega (ω).  Where beta is inertial (replication and mundane derivation in New! culture), omega is accelerative (inventive).  Urban tells us that "The force behind such accelerative culture is the interest it generates, which stems in part from its novelty" (16).  As I read it, this has bearing on our other considerations of the ways memes achieve thriving conductivity (Aaron Lynch in Thought Contagion) and restrictive factors in diffusion theory (Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations). And although I don't want to be hasty in extending this to questions about the ways ideas and innovations spread/cycle through a discipline or field (like ours truly...um?), I will return in a brief second to one connection.

Here's the thing:  Urban's work invokes familiar sources, from Bakhtin--"Our speech is filled to overflowing with other people's words" (17)--to Benedict Anderson (imagined communities, text privileged, print capitalism), Bourdieu (habitus as "filter created by inertial culture for new expressions" (23)), and Gramsci (hegemony), he draws on an impressive list of thinkers/writers often invoked in rhet/comp.  Yes?  Without being explicit about what he regards as the most formidable cultural objects involved in the replication of culture, Urban does, in places, give us cause for supposing that we might be capable of making--perhaps composing--the ω object.

"The process [of hegemonic struggle] must depend upon the production of new expressions, and hence, on ω culture" (26).

and

"However, accelerative culture opens the possibility that a new object--an ω object--can cut new pathways, can reshape social space by harnessing different strands of extant inertial culture" (19).

I'm not making my point as succinctly as I'd hoped to, and it's a rather simple point: "Shared and circulating documents, it seems, have long provided interesting social glue" (190). See there, it's not even my point.  Here I'm drawing on a chapter I used with WRT205 students for this evening's session from Brown and Duguid's The Social Life of Information (PDF). Basically, the connection for me is that the busy vehicles shuttling memes, enabling diffusion and so on are oftentimes documents--produced texts; written, designed and rhetorical.  Brown and Duguid tell us, "documents do not merely carry information, they help make it, structure it, and validate it. More intriguing, perhaps, documents also help structure society, enabling social groups to form, develop, and maintain a sense of shared identity" (189).  I'm not trying to make a case that documents are the only thing; they're merely one thing.  But that they're the thing of interest to many rhet/comp folks reminds me that we should come to terms with the relationship of writing to Urban's ω cultural object.  It's not a tidy match with Urban's cultural object-types, but Brown and Duguid differentiate documents into two groupings: fixed and fluid.  Particularly as we conceive of the bearing of texts on network/cultural formation and organization, the distinction is incredibly useful, I think. I'm trying to say that consideration of memes, diffusion and variously same-different cultural vectors (from Urban) presents us with productive correspondences to document production (text making...writing) and the (dis)comforts manifest in our biases toward/against fixed or fluid texts. 

Cross-posted to 711.

Posted by at 11:19 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Homophily Bias

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

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

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

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Posted by at 8:53 PM | to Networkacy

Tuesday, March 1, 2005

Tulip Economy and Fitness

L ast week, when I ran across Henry Farrell's Crooked Timber entry on flogrolling, I was also reading from Watts' Six Degrees and Barab�si's Linked.  Flogrolling, as I understand it from the few places I could find it in recent circulation, names the aggressive efforts to publicize or promote links, thereby elevating the rate of emergence of newer bloggers.  From Farrell's entry and the comments following it, the discussion seems to center on the problem of spamming entries to Technorati and the resulting skew altering an entry's popularity or "interestingness" (a term which Farrell acknowledges as "ugly").  Flogrolling potentially circumvents more authentic geneses of interest in small-world networks, such as those networks constituting the blogosphere. It assumes, with links as a basic unit of exchange, rank is sharable; it can be passed from one high-ranking blog to another through simple linking, even if such linking is profit-motivated.  Consequently, the new weblog stands on the shoulders and enjoys a fleeting, deceptive mobility.  Yes?

Although Barab�si doesn't write directly about weblogs, a few principles from his research seem to apply.  Foremost, Barab�si suggests that scale-free networks (as distinguished from random networks) should be understood in terms of growth and preferential attachment.  Their busy edges and volatile topologies present us with just a few defining premises--premises which, as I understand them, may or may not apply neatly to the blogosphere or, more specifically, the network(s) of politically-interested blogs and bloggers.  In a scale-free network (which is a theoretical abstraction, Watts tells us...no network can be both an object of study and purely scale-free), we might guess that the earliest-established nodes (some turned hubs) occupy a privileged position, near the tall margin of the power law graph (in fairness, Farrell and Drezner speculate that the politically-interested blogosphere follows a lognormal distribution, rather than a power law).  But when we factor in competitiveness--the ongoing "up-for-grabs" nature of links--network fitness intervenes, bucking the assumption that the first-comers hold a protected position of privilege in the network.  Fitness addresses the consequence of newly adjoining nodes, latecomers who inject new energy to the network, often with the potential of cascading beyond the proximal nodes and, thereby, imparting other effects.  Barab�si discusses this phenomenon in terms of Einstein-Bose condensations and Bose gases, and although my few notes here are mostly just a summary of Barab�si's middle chapters, some of his physics references are more scientific than I can write through with confidence just yet.

I'd like to return to the idea of "authentic geneses of interest."  How do we find weblogs we're interested in or, more specifically, entries we're interested in?  If we accept that ordinary links (rather than trackbacks) are the dominant currency unit in the blogosphere, then I suppose it follows reasonably that futzing with the genuine link as a gesture of interest and replacing it, instead, with the flogrolled link--a paid-for gesture meant to by-pass the economic order, results in economic disturbance. And although this quasi-counterfeiting might initially appear in the form of robust new accelerations in traffic for newcomers exploiting such a system, I tend to think that the net effect will be negligible. Maybe that's too strong a way to put it.  But as I read it alongside Watts' discussion of tulip economies (196)--the high-hopes bubbles bursting over The Netherlands following the spark-fizzle of bulb sales, I had the impression that flogrolling will settle out as one of the lesser disturbances in the blogosphere. Just how great is the disturbance?  How long will it elevate low-interest (or artificially trafficked) sites into lofty standing before those sites must self-sustain or before the network's fitness coefficient stabilizes again?  It's just a hypothesis, really, but the selective paths of specific readers who follow links according to interest or reputation will restore the regular patterns.  Granted, much of this does little to account for the different ways we trace paths of interest across the various small-world networks of the blogosphere.  Whether by RSS, Technorati searches, trackbacks, chains of blogrolls, conventional links and so on--distinctions in how our interestedness is enacted when reading across the blogosphere most definitely bears on these tentative few ideas.

Posted by at 10:31 PM | to Networkacy

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Rusesabagina and Network Externality

W e walked two blocks over to the Westcott Movie House last evening to catch an 8 p.m. showing of Hotel Rwanda.  The Westcott is a single-show, old-style theater with only mildly graded seating so part of the view includes half-head silhouettes from the people one row up. Westcott picks up a few arts-cinema runs, shows them once each weekday and twice on weekends. 

Hotel Rwanda is full of events and scenarios suited to our developing vocabulary of networkacy, especially related to crisis and adaptation.  I'll keep it brief, considering that some folks probably haven't seen the film.  Because it's based on the Hutu-Tutsi clashes in Rwanda during the early '90s, the tragic premise of mass genocide is, perhaps, familiar enough for these connections to seem plausible.

Very much a connector, Paul Rusesabagina--the lead character played by Don Cheadle--navigates a series of variously constituted networks--from failed communications channels to unconvinced or indifferent international political structures and their agents.  So while I don't want to reduce network theory to a simple device for analysis and critique, I was struck--throughout the film--by the application of many of the notions Watts works through in Six Degrees. In one scene, for example, Rusesabagina urges the refugees to exercise their connections, shame their ties (weak or strong) into action. What of it? Enough visas to help some of the families. I wonder if we could call this some sort of rhetorical externality, a slight variation on information externalities (211).  I guess this could be read as a grand leap, so I only want to suggest one other connection. Watts says, "From a scientific point of view, therefore, if we want to understand what might happen in the future, it is critical to consider not only what happened but also what could have happened" (245, emphasis in original). In terms of Hotel Rwanda and the complexity of networked roles moderated by Rusesabagina, we might agree that just one of the compelling dimensions of network studies involves sorting through the "could have happened" questions.  And it reminds me, too, of Milgram's research on agency in "dispensing brutality" (131), which, through his Obedience to Authority research, sought to come to terms with Adolph Eichmann's part in genocidal crimes.

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Posted by at 11:58 AM | to Networkacy

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Renormalization

I 'm still grogging through a hyper-invasive head cold.  'Snot easy to read and write through the sinus pressure, drainage and trips to the kettle for another hot tea.  I've gotten on with reading Robert Connors, Hayden White and a couple of chapters from Barabasi's Linked for tomorrow in addition to a project overview for comp history and a trip to the tax prep office to sign the proper filing forms.  This was only the second time I've sought an accountant's assistance with taxes; with the move, bi-state filing, and limited opportunities for sorting through tax forms, we turned over to the pros.  And today when we were at their office nodding our heads to the double-check of name-spellings and socials, the friendly accountant showed us an itemization asking nearly twice what they'd initially quoted.  I'm too ashamed to share the number; I'll just say that I'm ordering the software next year and doing it myself again.  The $70 worksheet pushed me off the edge (of chair, cliff, reason).  In the late age of computer-spun accounting, no single worksheet prep should cost seventy bucks.

So we signed all the forms and came back home. I was too head-coldy to give the guy hell for puffing up the tax prep bill. 

Once home, about hot tea, I learned this: Peppermint will re-steep for a second good cup.  Raspberry zinger will not.

Renormalization is a term credited to physics (perhaps other fields, too).  According to Barabasi, it comes from the work of Cornell professor and 1982 Nobel prize winner Kenneth Wilson who assigned the term to the event following a physical phase transition.  Renormalization (granted, read second hand) accounts for the paradoxical flux and structural stiffening of real networks--the shift from chaos to complexity, from disorder to system:

By giving a rigorous mathematical foundation to scale invariance, [Wilson's] theory spat out power laws each time he approached the critical point, the place where disorder makes room for order.  Wilson's renormalization group not only called for power laws but for the first time could predict the values of two missing critical exponents as well. (77)

And...

We had finally learned that when giving birth to order, complex systems divest themselves of their unique features and display a universal behavior that has similar characteristics in a wide range of systems. (78)

It's quite possible, even likely, that I'm misunderstanding or misapplying this concept.  Even so, I find something catchy--sticky--in renormalization, and I wanted to put it on the table, set it out there for other possible connections (even if only my own, later on).  Barabasi goes on to explain two basic features of scale-free networks that complicate earlier theories that treat such structures as static and random.  To detail the importance of hubs, he names the characteristics of growth and preferential attachment.  And although his notion of growth seems teleologically biased, allowing for decay or detritus only briefly in a discussion of aging, I continue to be struck by the application of concepts from physics to social patterns.  At least for tonight (no telling how much credit to my head cold or tax fiasco), renormalization seems an especially interesting idea.

[Added: Renormalization is the same as order-disorder-order in story structures?]

Posted by at 10:21 PM | Comments (3) | to Networkacy

Friday, February 18, 2005

Meme-fluence, Elaboration, Chains

W hen I read Chuck's entry this morning, I turned to the 123rd page of four different books, three of which I had slated to read from throughout the day today (yah, bring on the meme police bc I didn't follow the rules).  Well, that's one way to get to the 123rd page: start there.  Fifth sentences of each went like this:

No. 1: "In other words, over the course of ages or over the course of an individual's biography, the 'life' of the work resides in the history of individual reading-events, lived-through experiences, which may have a continuity, but which may also be discontinuous with only a varying 'family' resemblance" (123).
No. 2: "He generously agreed" (123).
No. 3: "So we analyzed the discourse itself, finding the revealing words, the signature expressions, the tell-tale grammatical forms" (123).
No. 4: "Lately, however, he had been avoiding the popular discos and the hottest nightclubs" (123).

The books, differently ordered: Bruner's Acts of Meaning, Barabasi's Linked, Watts' Six Degrees, and Louise Rosenblatt's The Reader, The Text, the Poem.

And nicely enough, the juxtapositions got me thinking about a few things. Now that I've read all day long, I'll leave notes here about two of them.

Watts and Barabasi open their books on network theory with anecdotes about vulnerability.  Watts starts with the "cascading failure" of the power grid in the Pacific Northwest during the summer of 1996; Barabasi begins with the upheaval of Mafiaboy's efforts to incapacitate Yahoo with a hack-load of "ghost" queries.  Watts shifts into a narrative on the formative days of his research project at Cornell; Barabasi gives us an example of network robustness in the dissemination of early Christianity a la the apostle Paul.  Watts: emergence and "How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior?" (24); Barabasi: The Konigsberg Bridges.  And then, together, Erdos and Euler, Milgram, graphs, as if surfing tandem on scroll waves.  Almost.

Notably absent from Watts' accounting for the premise of six degrees is Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy's short story from 1929, "Chains" or "Lancszemek." Last night, after my first class session involving Linked with 205ers, I was rooting around the web for way to get my hands on a copy of "Chains."  Didn't find much.  I mean there are plenty of references to it, but I didn't find much of anything beyond references, mentions. Barabasi's notes tell us that he doesn't think it's ever been translated from Hungarian into English.  I'm just curious whether, as Barabasi speculates, the degrees of separation idea stemmed from the fiction of Karinthy.  He evens supposes that Erdos and Renyi might have read the story and found, in it, a sufficiently sticky premise to stimulate their later mathematical work.  I wouldn't say it diminishes Watts' project or points to a gap in his research, but it does leave me wondering about "Chains."

Posted by at 8:58 PM | to Networkacy

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Affordance and Manipulanda

W hat does a network afford?

I'm setting out with hopes that I can wrap together a few thought-strands running through other coursework this week. It tracks through Weinberger, as well, so the application here isn't out of the blue.  In his chapter on Space in Small Pieces Loosely Joined Weinberger says, "Our space is full of opportunities, obstacles and dangers, or what the psychologist James Gibson called affordances (e.g., the chair affords us the possibility of sitting) and the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the ready-to-hand" (32).  I can't remember if I'd learned about affordances before this semester; seems like a basketball coach once hollered something about the affordances of the game:  playing through potentials and opportunism constantly responsive to in-game context, or something.  But maybe not.

Whatever the case, affordances came up in other reading this week. This succinct bit comes from a 1974 essay from Bransford and McCarrell called "A Sketch of a Cognitive Approach to Comprehension," and it matched up nicely, I think, with another term--manipulanda--and, as well, some of our conversation last week about characterizing network literacy (whatever you call it):

The notion of a nonarbitrary relation between what something looks like and what it means is related to J.J. Gibson's (1966) notion of affordances.  Certain objects and their properties provide visual information for the activities and interactions they afford.  So, for example, sharp objects afford piercing, certain extensions (e.g., handles) afford grasping, hardness affords pounding, and roundness affords rolling.  Even surfaces afford activities since they are 'walk-onable,' 'climbable,' and the like.  Tolman (1958) presented similar notions in his essay on 'sign-gestalts.' These are not simply information about 'the larger wholes in which the perceived configuration will itself be embedded as one term in a larger means-end proposition [p. 79]." Tolman further introduced the term "manipulanda" which he defines as:

properties of objects which support (or make possible) motor manipulations of the species...One and the same environmental object will afford quite different manipulanda to an animal which possesses hands from what it can and will to an animal which possesses only a mouth, or only a bill, on only claws...grasp-ableness, pick-up-ableness, throw-ableness, heaviness (heave-ableness) and the like--these are manipulanda [p. 82].

Basically, I'd like to propose the inclusion of these terms in the network(ed) rhetorics glossary (wanna second it?).  I'm finding these terms/concepts helpful for understanding many of the paradoxes Weinberger works through and many of the tensions surrounding the assignment of genres to weblogs (or weblogs to genres).  It's as if we have available to us an abundance of digital manipulanda--affordance-ness with the network and with our related involvements. 

What does a web(log) afford?  A link?  A network?

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Posted by at 3:18 PM | Comments (3) | to Networkacy

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Hyperthreaded

I 'm reading Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined for 711, and hyperthreadedness lingers among a few of the sticky ideas I've run across.  Describing the multithreadedness of ordinary conversation, Weinberger tells us that "threading is practically a law when it comes to conversations: if you're talking about the ending of the movie Deliverance, you can't suddenly say, 'How about those Red Sox?' (67).  Of course, much of this presupposes coherence--the turn-taking assembling of packets (textual units) into more or less intelligible arrangement (focal, listening, attentive).  I suppose I'm leaving something off of this.  I've thought about threading or "threads" in some of the online teaching I've done, and I always thought it was odd that the simplest notion of threading suggests that conversational interchanges are best represented by local (spatial, therefore temporal, gathering together) in the interface.  Sure, it's easier that way.  What happens when you mention Red Sox after Deliverance in that sudden conversational switch?

Web conversations are also like this, but they aren't just multithreaded; they're hyperthreaded.  Although they usually start with a topic that's more formally defined than real-world conversations, because Web discussion may spread out across weeks or months the threads can become entangled.  And because Web time is so fragmented, we can pose new topics that are only tenuously related to the declared theme. (67)

The entangled quality of webbed discourse seems to me to be a more robust (confused) variety of the intertextuality commonly mentioned when we talk about referential, allusive language/text matrices.  But just when I think I have a handle on the subtle distinctions, Weinberger introduces another factor: "Web conversations can be hyperthreaded because the Web, free of the drag of space and free of a permission-based social structure, unsticks our interests.  The threads of our attention come unglued and are rejoined with a much thinner paste" (68).  As much as I think I understand Weinberger's effort to distinguish web conversations from "real world" lunchtime conversations, I wonder if this is more a matter of communication models than it is about substantial differences in the threadedness of internet conversation versus other kinds of conversation.  The notion of "unstick[ing] our interests" seems especially useful; for me, it partially accounts for what accompanies the habitude of reading and writing the web. Stick, unstick.  But I've still got more work to do in this fast-passing weekend, so this'll have to do for now.

Posted by at 10:56 PM | Comments (3) | to Networkacy

Saturday, February 5, 2005

Post-Post

P redictive first-thoughts on post-literacy (my-ning def'ns for 711):

Edited to add: network literacy is happen-stance image conversation.

Posted by at 8:31 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy
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Monday, January 31, 2005

Retromediation and Novelty

C ross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Frankly, as I read "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs," by Brooks, Nichols and Priebe, all of NDSU, I wondered about the consequences of framing weblogs as remediations of older forms--the journal, the notebook and the filter.  What results from a setup of weblogs that calibrates their potential in terms of paper-based corollaries?  It's difficult to know exactly how this was framed beyond the evidence we find in the article (the framework, the research narrative, the questionnaire, the data-sets, the conclusion) and in the related links (the weblogs themselves, a syllabus, a reading list, adjacent assignments) so I'm reluctant to respond to the essay with firmly resolved skepticism, especially considering that it reflects some of the earliest uses of blogs to teach writing. Yet through this limited lens, I have doubts about why we need to liken blogs to paper counterparts.  What's gained?  Is it a way to legitimate composition pedagogy adventurously (inventively, imaginatively!) straying from long-recognized forms, forms often occupying the lion's share of weight in the event-oriented syllabus or program-wide curricular design?  Is it a way to call up, for students, a sense of the familiar?  Although it is, perhaps to a lesser degree than resonates in this article, necessary at times to present students with a grounding in the familiar, when Brooks et. al. tell us, "we wanted to balance the novelty of the activity with a grounding in familiar literate practices," my initial thought is that a high stakes flattening/deadening/adequation is inevitably brought about.  And this, I think, must bear on motivation, if only subtly, tacitly.

What do I suggest instead?  Well, it depends on the broader aims of the course. For collective course blogs, I'm less and less inclined to model exemplary entries for the whole class, and rather than talking about what blogs enable by connecting them to the written forms they (more or less) resemble, I prefer to introduce blogs to students in terms of their impact on how we think (sure, paper variations impact thought, too), develop and write with/about ideas and so on (more to this, but I'll let it rest here).

Posted by at 10:29 PM | Comments (9) | to Networkacy, On Weblogs

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Li-li-logging

V an Dijck suggests that we might think of a weblog as a journal or diary nouveau--the result of digital media and the internet blending to enable linked writing spaces.  I like the genealogy she traces: the long (papery) tradition of daily record-keeping from the confessional, lock-n-keyed entries of a teenager to the "communal means of expressing and remembering"  we find in the nautical records of S. Pole explorers.  And yet I'm uneasy with the correlation between blogs and diaries, perhaps because "that's just journaling, right?" often comes with a sneer meant to infantilize/trivialize the medium of weblogs (or perhaps that's just my own sensitivity to such suggestions, which I have, at times, thought to be pejorative, aimed at demeaning that which bloggers claim to find so meaningful).

I don't want to go blog-wild with this entry, but I do want to register one half-formed idea: the label genre, while it might be appropriate for the "varied and heterogeneous" category of diaries, seems to work less well when applied to blogs.  Half formed...perhaps less...that idea. Genre, as I think of it, imposes a kind of hard edge to the scope of what's being defined.  And, because blog, as Mortensen and Walker point out, can be understood as an action (verb), I like to think of blogs as considerably more varied and blog as infused with doing/performance more than any genre (genera/kind) designation affords.  So that's all: differentiating blogs by genre always makes me pause, as it did in Van Dijck's article.  As well, on the correlations of weblog types to "link-logging" and "life-logging," I find the clusters to overlap, rather than to function discretely.  (I'd have to review again whether Van Dijck is explicit about this point, too).  I only mean to say that weblogs consisting primarily of entries reporting on links and weblogs consisting primarily of entries reporting on life rarely deny the encroachment or interference of the other.  As guiding definitions, they quickly deteriorate or blur, I think. For such rules (and rule-minded blogs), there are as many exceptions, and exceptionality is--for me--one of the more fascinating dimensions of the blogosphere.

I want to put this entry to rest, but before I do so, here are two more gems from Mortensen and Walker's article (which is, I think, full of simple, glowing bits).  First, they say, "I think better when I write" (269).  I really like what this says, mostly for what it does to remind me about my own habits of reading, writing and thinking.  I think I think better when I write, too, and it's been especially engaging to write in a blogspace where various folks can read into my writing to whatever extent their own interests compel them.  Second, they note that blogs have a discrete topoi: memory and meta-reflection (270)--another interesting piece I'd like to return to, explore, etc.

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Posted by at 4:19 PM | to Networkacy, On Weblogs

Friday, July 9, 2004

Network Captives

I admire Jeff R. and Will R., read their blogs like clockwork; their exchange(s) over the last 24 hours have been worth following, if you haven't been keeping up.  I'm here giving nods to the naming contentions as we slide between the print paradigm and electracy's futures.  In that slide, some folks pack heavy, others pack light.  I suppose there's a way of taking up the rift that contends, as Jeff often reminds me, the new media/digital turn doesn't need the lingo of literacy (or even the name).  As necessary and tricky as it is to re-vocabularize rhetorical agilities in a digital age, I wonder what--if anything substantial--is at stake.  It is, of course, about more than the terminology; it's about what we do and what what we do does.  Jeff's assessment of the high stakes are fair, clear:

In composition, I don't think we are anywhere near tackling this issue because it will undermine and reconfigure many of the truths we have accepted and hold so dearly. If we are to recognize that literacy no longer exists, what will become of composition studies which bases its identity on the ways writing empowers individuals to be productive members of society (see Brandt, Rose)? What will happen to topic sentences and Writing Centers, professional writing, or the first year textbook? Serious damage.

I can imagine this angle--in retrospect--shedding light on the grand transformation from orality to literacy.  Switch in and out a few indications of oral traditions giving way to Guttenberg's giant, and, perhaps from some perspectives, you have "serious damage" or at least wreckage, abandoned traditions, even widespread human cognitive re-patterning.  Forgive me for jabbing in the dark here (since I'm not well studied on Ong, for one), but one must preclude the other.  True?  Why must electracy unravel literacy as literacy unraveled orality?  Is it because electracy is meanwhile enfolding a textualism of all, braiding realities and programs and tunes..."I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll...."  Maybe I haven't read closely enough; maybe effacement is inherent in these revolutions.

[Long hesitation...reading list has grown by twenty or so titles (Ulmer, Graff)...having Friday fun...blog decorum...where's that coming from?]

I set out to make notes on Will's mention of collaboration.  My first thought is, Yes!, we are on collaborative ground with weblogs and wikis.  Open texts, and so on, just as Jeff sets them up as places where "writers and readers tap into, alter, appropriate, confiscate, download, share, etc."  But then I keep thinking these few thoughts about what I haven't seen blogs do:  1. Blog entries are rarely revised.  2.  Blog entries are rarely written collaboratively, perhaps because most blogware doesn't configure easily for partnering or group authorship.

The tapping and commenting and fisking--linked, interested, etc.--seem more prevalent than the sort of sharing and appropriating, which is to suggest that blogging as spontaneous media doesn't prefer to wait.  Entries are often buried in a matter of days, comments with them, and the temporality machine rolls, calendars overturn.  I get the feeling that blogs play the moment, invite the rush; whereas collaborative efforts can be slow and laborious, blogs thrive on freshness, vigor, never expiring. 

This is a jumble of (unfair, perhaps) assumptions.  I've been thinking lately about the expenses of collaboration, the problem of over-collaboration, of turning always to meetings about meetings, of everyone (including the ambivalent and disenchanted) having a say and of feeling like that just takes toooo loooong for some matters.  In part, I'm feeling jaded by the call for collaboration because I'm seeing it done in a way that turns to wheel-spinning, indecisiveness, and gross, endless shifts of leadership and agency to the (idle, vacationing, phone-message ignoring) network.

Posted by at 4:14 PM | Comments (2) | to Networkacy, On Weblogs
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"In the Western tradition of method, mathematics has been the favorite authorizing theory for invention in other areas" (9). Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics.