Reality is Broken is the recent book about gamification by Jane McGonigal (New York, The Penguin Press, 2011) that has been getting a lot of attention. My copy finally came in the mail so now I guess I have to read it. I sound reluctant because everything I’ve read about the book disposes me to dislike it. The vapid “computers are going to save the world” (once more) hype by and for the author is enough to choke on. The idea that gamifying can solve all sorts of problems reminds me of when I thought I could get students to learn by making games out of completing assignments (yes, I too used scratch-and-sniff stickers to gamify learning.) I say all this to acknowledge that as I write one or more blog entries on this book as I read it, I am not reading the work with a fair mind, so readers of my comments beware.
Category: Philosophy of Computing
The Management Myth
Wandering through The Atlantic I came across an article I loved back when I first read it. The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart (June 2006) has a subtitle that says it all, “Most of Management Theory is Inane …” Stewart compares philosophy to business degrees and comes to the conclusion that philosophy should take over.
The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.
Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s
Jeffrey R. Young has an article in the Technology section of The Chronicle of Higher Education enjoining us to Beware Social Media’s Surprising Dark Side, Scholars Warn CEO’s (March 20, 2011). The article is about a South by Southwest Interactive conference that brought together researchers and industry.
One of the big trends is using crowdsourcing or micropayments to get work done for free or very little. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor warned that this could be exploitative.
Mr. Zittrain began his argument against crowdsourcing with the story of the Mechanical Turk, a machine in the 18th century that was said to play chess as well as a human. But the contraption was a showy fraud; a man hidden inside moved the arms of a turban-wearing mannequin. Amazon, the online shopping giant, now offers a crowdsourcing service it calls Mechanical Turk, which lets anyone, for a fee, commission unseen hands to work on tasks like proofreading documents or identifying artists in musical recordings.
The similarity of crowdsourcing to a man shoved inside a box means the practice isn’t exactly worker-friendly, the professor argued. “In fact, it’s an actual digital sweatshop,” he said of the many sites that use the approach.
Fees paid for crowdsourced tasks are usually so meager that they could not possibly earn participants a living wage, Mr. Zittrain argued. He is familiar with one group drawn to the services: poor graduate students seeking spending money.
I wonder if anyone has proposed a code of ethics for crowdsourcing? Thanks to Megan for sending this to me.
The File On H.: Ismail Kadare
I’ve been meaning for years to blog about Ismail Kadare’s The File On H.. This short book is, I believe, Kadare’s response to the naive views about orality and primitive societies of people like Lord and Parry. Kadare apparently met them at a conference and there is no doubt that the book is some sort of literary response to their study of oral storytelling in the Balkans. The authors of the Wikipedia entry on the book seem to feel that Kadare was trying to alert us to the Albanian oral traditions that Lord and Parry ignored for the Serbo-Croatian ones. I think he was making fun of American academics trying to recover some noble and original orality and also trying to show that there is a continuity between oral storytelling and the constant spying on people of a police state.
<Spoiler Alert>Technology, this time magnetic tape recording, plays an important part in the plot. The two academics bring this new type of machine to Albania to record the local rhapsodes. A jealous Serbian monk stirs up trouble and the recordings get shredded. Ironically, while the two academics have nothing to left when they leave Albania, one of them has caught the bug and been infected with orality. They may not have recordings, but they have learned to do it. Which is the more useful?
The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About
From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about The Battle for Control — What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick’s nice essay “The Information; How the Internet gets inside us” in the New Yorker that divides us into three groups,
. . . the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic. . . . The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that . . . books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others.
Kent then turns historical looking at both the infoglut trope over time and then, in an original move, he looks at what some of the originators of the Internet thought it would be. He ends by concluding that it is really about control,
We may argue again and again whether the Internet is changing our brains, elevating us, lowering us, making us smarter, or making us stupid. But at the end of the day, it seems the real argument is about control — who has it, who shares it, and who wants it.
The game of art: a profile of digital artist Cory Arcangel | Technology | guardian.co.uk
The Guardian has a story about the now familiar question fo whether games can be art, The game of art: a profile of digital artist Cory Arcangel. The story focuses on Corey Arcangel but links to an interesting article by Henry Jenkins on Games, the New Lively Art.
Does information wants to be free?
I’ve been thinking about the phrase “information wants to be free” by Steward Brand according to Chris Anderson in Free: the future of a radical price (see chapter 6). Brand originally saw this as a paradox between information want to be expensive and wanting to be free,
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. (Brand, 1984)
Anderson in Chapter 6 of Free goes back to Brand to find out why he anthropomorphized information instead of saying “information should be free.” (Brand felt it sounded better and that it focused attention on information, not people.)
While the phrase is memorable as it is (and because it ascribes intention to information) I suspect it would be more accurate to say that “information infrastructure is designed to promote free access.” The web was not designed to facilitate payment for information (as Ted Nelson imagined his Xanadu docuverse would be.) The design and economics of our infrastructure brought the cost of publishing and dissemination down to the cost of having an internet connection and an account on a server. That made it easy for all sorts of people who have non commercial reasons for sharing information to publish free information. It did not, however, mean that all information is available free. There are still people who resist sharing information for all sorts of reasons. In particular I am interested in indigenous communities that resist sharing their stories because that would turn them into information. Their stories are meant to be told in a context by someone who has rights to that story to others who are ready for the story. Posting it on the net decontextualizes the story and reduces it to mere information which in its freedom is neither really free or informative as the original telling.
For a useful web page on the phrase, its origin and uses of the aphorism see Roger Clarke’s ‘Information Wants to be Free’.
Informatica Umanistica: Interrupting Digitization
Informatica Umanistica has just published a paper of mine on digitization titled, “Interrupting Digitalizatin and Thinking about Text”. The article starts,
One of the memes of new media is that the form of communication determines the content. As McLuhan puts it the medium is the message, and therefore, as we digitize the evidence of human culture from the Roman forum to Hamlet we inaugurate not just a new edition of our knowledge, but a new knowing and with it a new way of thinking. This paper will not engage the question of technological determinism, instead it will assume that the enthusiasts are right and ask then what is digitization? or what is the message of the digital form? Asking such questions is an interruption in the rush to digitize everything; imagine the scanner has broken down for a moment letting us pause and ask if we really understand the digital, if we understand what is gained and lost, and if we understand the possibilities before us or how we are constrained.
Wapedia – Wiki: Stewart Butterfield
Apparently Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr was a philosophy major. He got his BA in philosophy from the University of Victoria and an MA from Cambridge. Did philosophy make a difference? Hard to tell, but he gives a talk on How to Make a Fortune with your Liberal Arts Degree according to the Lavin Agency that represents him. The site quotes him to the effect, “You can always pick up how to figure out profit and loss, but it’s harder to pick up the other stuff on the fly.”
His co-founder and partner Caterina Fake, now working on Hunch, studied English and has a thoughtful blog here.
Just goes to show how useful the humanities are.
Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thanks to Willard, I’m reading Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin’s Romance of the Machine, a defense of American materialism, science and engineering. He identifies 3 sets of technologies that have consolidated the Union – the telephone, the vacuum-tube oscillator (radio), and the gas-engine (auto and airplane.) He weaves a consciously idealistic story about engineering mirroring the machines of nature and weaving peace.
The machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature. (p. 29)
It looks like an act of providence that the telephone was born when the consolidation of our Union needed it most; the vacuum-tube oscillator arrived in time to lend its aid in the consolidation of this nation with the other nations of the world. Many an enthusiast believes that these two machines are messengers sent from heaven to aid in the guidance of the destiny of this nation, and of the whole world. This enthusiasm is not surprising. (p. 92)
There is a very interesting chapter (“Romance of the Telephone”, III) where Pupin argues that the telephone provided two important innovations – first the communications network and second a model democratic industry.
There is another epoch-making service which the telephone
rendered to this nation. This service was the creation of a great
American telephone industry, which in many respects serves to-day as a model to other big American industries. (p. 67)
His argument is that ATT is too big to be owned by wealthy families. Instead it is owned by the middle class – people like its employees. He further sees the management as coming from the same middle class and being professionals. He sees a shift from political democracy to economic democracy which benefits all. Whatever happened to that idealism?
Our telephone industry and the other large American industries encourage us in the belief that we are much nearer to the ideal of economic democracy than we are to Lincoln’s ideal of political democracy. The first is developed by scientists and engineers, the second is <pb> in the hands of politicians. (p. 77 – 78)
One thing that happened is a loss of faith in the technocracy. The second thing was a shift in business towards management who saw their mandate narrowly as being only to increase investor value.
Some more quotes:
There will be no place for barbarism, like war, in a world in
which the two American machines, the telephone and the vacuum-tube oscillator, are afforded every opportunity to develop their latent powers for the enlightenment of the world.Here are two.machines which the American machine civilization has produced, and thus laid the foundation of the radio art, the most subtle and refined of all the technical arts ever conceived by the human mind. No trace of materialism can be detected in their history. On the contrary, their achievements represent them as messengers from heaven sent to earth to rid the world of barbarous notions and raise it to a higher level of civilization.(p. 94)
The telephone, the telegraph, the vacuum-tube oscillator, the aeroplane, and the automobile, will certainly bring the peoples of the world closer to each other and establish between them bonds of friendship, just as they are establishing them between the peoples of our States. That is the highest mission of these machines. (p. 103)
The book ends by talking about “The Great American Experiment” and how this political experiment inspired engineers and scientists to develop technologies to consolidate the Union so that “The designers, the builders, and the machines employed by them are the inseparable parts of the American machine civilization.” (p. 111)
Bibliographic Reference: Michael Pupin, Romance of the Machine (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930).