tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-119692552024-03-13T10:24:42.336-05:00Uncovering Information LaborCoordinated by Greg Downey, a former computer programmer turned arts and sciences professor at a big midwestern university, comes a tentative, fragementary, and probably sometimes contradictory ongoing exploration of the relations between information / communication technology, knowledge production and consumption, global political-economy, and the lived world of human labor. We only blog part-time, so don't expect new posts more often than once a week.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.comBlogger103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-68033398814183868342010-03-05T15:16:00.005-06:002010-03-05T15:27:17.552-06:00Obsolete information labor occupationsCute bit on the NPR web site that a friend pointed me to: "<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060&sc=fb&cc=fp">The Jobs of Yesteryear</a>"<br /><blockquote>As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct. Click through the gallery below to see examples of endangered professions, from milkman to telegrapher, and hear from people who once filled those oft-forgotten jobs.</blockquote><br />Interestingly, half of the jobs profiled dealt with information labor: lector, copy boy, switchboard operator, typist in a typist pool, typesetter, and telegraph operator. (No <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Telegraph-Messenger-Boys-Technology-Geography/dp/0415931096/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267824044&sr=8-1">telegraph messenger boys</a>, sadly.)<br /><br />As a way of getting undergraduates to think about changes in labor and technology, I often find myself turning to the <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger">Prelinger Archives</a> collection of corporate and educational training films. Here are two of my favorites, one for each of the two deparments I'm involved with at UW-Madison:<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="252" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf" w3c="true" flashvars='config={"key":"#$b6eb72a0f2f1e29f3d4","playlist":[{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/Journali1940/format=Thumbnail?.jpg","autoPlay":true,"scaling":"fit"},{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/Journali1940/Journali1940_512kb.mp4","autoPlay":false,"accelerated":true,"scaling":"fit","provider":"h264streaming"}],"clip":{"autoPlay":false,"accelerated":true,"scaling":"fit","provider":"h264streaming"},"canvas":{"backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"none"},"plugins":{"audio":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.audio-3.0.3-dev.swf"},"controls":{"playlist":false,"fullscreen":true,"gloss":"high","backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"medium","sliderColor":"0x777777","progressColor":"0x777777","timeColor":"0xeeeeee","durationColor":"0x01DAFF","buttonColor":"0x333333","buttonOverColor":"0x505050"},"h264streaming":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.h264streaming-3.0.5.swf"}},"contextMenu":[{"View+Journali1940+at+archive.org":"function()"},"-","Flowplayer 3.0.5"]}'> </embed><br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="252" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" src="http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf" w3c="true" flashvars='config={"key":"#$b6eb72a0f2f1e29f3d4","playlist":[{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/Libraria1947/format=Thumbnail?.jpg","autoPlay":true,"scaling":"fit"},{"url":"http://www.archive.org/download/Libraria1947/Libraria1947_512kb.mp4","autoPlay":false,"accelerated":true,"scaling":"fit","provider":"h264streaming"}],"clip":{"autoPlay":false,"accelerated":true,"scaling":"fit","provider":"h264streaming"},"canvas":{"backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"none"},"plugins":{"audio":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.audio-3.0.3-dev.swf"},"controls":{"playlist":false,"fullscreen":true,"gloss":"high","backgroundColor":"0x000000","backgroundGradient":"medium","sliderColor":"0x777777","progressColor":"0x777777","timeColor":"0xeeeeee","durationColor":"0x01DAFF","buttonColor":"0x333333","buttonOverColor":"0x505050"},"h264streaming":{"url":"http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.h264streaming-3.0.5.swf"}},"contextMenu":[{"View+Libraria1947+at+archive.org":"function()"},"-","Flowplayer 3.0.5"]}'> </embed>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-41522399202416355922010-02-03T00:32:00.010-06:002010-02-09T10:45:39.422-06:00Digital Labor, Cold-War RootsDoing some reading over the past week, I was prompted to think about, then comment on,a chapter by Friedrich Kittler on Cold War computing technology. and the implicit (and explicit) ways in which an examination of so-called "defense technology" comes into direct contact with, and within the purview of, media studies, information studies and labor studies. Specifically, I am interested in uncovering the history of these technologies and their development, particularly when the when many defense technologies have been considered value-neutral or even as beneficial (and perhaps were, particularly when they moved from the province of military applications to consumer or mass-market ones). Additionally, the process of uncovering the hidden labor embedded in digital and computing technologies and processes, is inextricalbly tied to the critically important task of uncovering their hidden agendas, applications and roots within the military-academic-industrial complex<span style="font-size:78%;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=11969255&postID=4152239920241635592#1.">1</a></span>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/fredturner/cgi-bin/drupal/">Fred Turner</a>, in a talk last week at the University of Illinois, referenced SAGE, for example, one of the first interlinked computer systems, and part of the U.S military’s DEW (distant early warning) system. Kittler notes, in the same writing, that “the Semiautomatic Ground Environment Air Defense System, was conceived as an answer to the Soviet atomic fleet, and it brought us everything today’s computer users have come to love: from the monitor to networking to mass storage” (182). Many of these military innovations have found direct applications and homes in the civilian sector, a “spin-off called information society [that] began with the building of a network that connected sensors (radar), effectors (jet planes), and nodes (computers)” (182). Not only, therefore, has the technology developed by the military, in conjunction with partners in academe and industrial R&D, made its way into daily life, but so, too, have basic concepts of organization, processes and structures. Any study endeavoring to undertake an examination of these organisms must therefore absolutely examine ties to other systems, projects and goals, particularly during the technological boom of (and promulgated by) the Cold War.<br /><br />I recently undertook a preliminary (to me) study of a state information system in late 20th century France that was developed for civilians and laypeople in the country<span style="font-size:78%;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=11969255&postID=4152239920241635592#2.">2</a></span>. While this system, popularly known as the Minitel, was fundamentally implemented for the populace at large, by tracing the policy development and goals at the root of the creation of the system, I quickly discovered that military and national sovereignty concerns were, in fact, at the core of this massive national technology project. In fact, a desire to be able to calculate nuclear strikes and impacts in simulation on IBM mainframe computers drove then-president and erstwhile war hero Charles de Gaulle to institute a state information policy where previously there had been none. To this end, Kittler’s comment that “since 1941, wars no longer needed men, whether as heroes or as spies, but were victories of machines over other machines” (182) does not seem like much of a reach at all.<br /><br />And just as Cold War soldiers unleashed A-bombs on Pacific atolls, physically divorced from their literal and figurative impact, today’s drone pilots unleashing shock and awe in Afghanistan (raised on Xbox 360 information-processing and joystick skills) are removed from their targets. Yet, media reports are flooding in suggesting that these virtual bombardiers are experiencing very real PTSD<span style="font-size:78%;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=11969255&postID=4152239920241635592#3.">3</a></span>. How do virtuality and reality blend with technology and morality in this new brand of warfare? And what does it mean when our warfare resembles our gaming, and in our games we play soldiers for fun, on networked hardware running simulations on the one-time DoD project known ARPAnet and now known as the Internet<span style="font-size:78%;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=11969255&postID=4152239920241635592#4.">4</a></span>?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eSkY9KgN-VE/S2keUNPSfOI/AAAAAAAAAFA/DOhzYz-fhf8/s1600-h/dronepilot.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 283px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eSkY9KgN-VE/S2keUNPSfOI/AAAAAAAAAFA/DOhzYz-fhf8/s400/dronepilot.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5433907757899218146" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><br /><u>Notes</u><br /><a name="1.">1.</a> To this end, Carlos Alberto Scolari provided a great deal of context and support, suggesting that new generations of Internet and digital media scholars can provide the framework for examinations of technology in these complex areas of inquiry.<br /><br /><a name="2.">2. </a>The Minitel system was developed and implemented in the 1970s-1990s and comprised of the nationalized telephone network, hardware access points and suite of services and information tailored to its French userbase. It was conceived as and constituted a digital Maginot Line against capital extraction, economic dominance and cultural hegemony from transnational corporations based in the United States, Japan and elsewhere.<br /><br /><a name="3.">3</a>. See <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26078087/">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26078087/</a> , <a href="http://www.gearfuse.com/army-drone-pilots-suffer-from-combat-stress/">http://www.gearfuse.com/army-drone-pilots-suffer-from-combat-stress/</a> , and <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2197238/">http://www.slate.com/id/2197238/</a> for recent discussion of this topic.<br /><br /><a name="4.">4</a>. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/4.%20http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15063872">http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15063872</a><br /><br /><u>References</u><br />Kittler, Friedrich. “Cold War Networks or Kaiserstr. 2, Neubabelsberg.” In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 181-186. New edition. Routledge, 2005.<br /><br />Scolari, C. A. “Mapping conversations about new media: the theoretical field of digital communication.” New Media & Society 11, no. 6 (9, 2009): 943-964.</span>Sarah. R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13495338005089494192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-69455688492568413532009-11-21T08:22:00.001-06:002009-11-21T08:25:38.598-06:00University-based reporting, or university-assisted reporting?<p>(Reposted from <a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/blog">my School's new weblog</a>.)<br /></p><p>In an article for the Chronicle for Higher Education this week entitled "University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive" [<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/University-Based-Reporting/49113/">http://chronicle.com/article/University-Based-Reporting/49113/</a>] media scholars Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie Jr. discuss the fact that "in recent years, more journalism schools have plunged into producing news for the public" (including ours):</p><blockquote><p> Florida International University now has an arrangement in which the Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post, and South Florida Sun-Sentinel use the work of student journalists. Columbia's Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism has in its few years of existence had students produce work that has appeared in The New York Times, the Albany Times Union, Salon, and on PBS and NPR. Students at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism have produced work for the public posted on the school's news Web sites. It is beginning another news Web site in cooperation with San Francisco's KQED public radio and television stations. The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University runs the Cronkite News Service, which provides student-reported work to 30 Arizona client news outlets, while other ASU journalism students have worked as paid reporters in the Phoenix suburbs for the Web site of the major metro daily in the city, The Arizona Republic. Similar work is taking place at Boston University, Northwestern University, the Universities of Maryland and Wisconsin, and elsewhere.<br /></p></blockquote>While department-run student newspapers, special seminars on investigative reporting, and exclusive internship relationships with professional journalism projects are not new in journalism education, Schudson and Downie argue that the Web has enabled such reporting to reach a much wider audience, in a much more timely manner, than ever before: "Publishing for the general public can now be done at minimal cost—no need to contract out to a printing company, no need to distribute to newsstands—just construct a Web site. Distribution has moved from major barrier to trivial expense."<br /><p>Here at UW-Madison, of course, our situation is different than those of the stand-alone schools of journalism at Columbia and Arizona State where Schudson and Downie Jr. work. We're a School of Journalism & Mass Communication (SJMC) whose teaching, research, and service span a range of media industries and knowledge-production practices, from the analytical, investigative practices of careful journalism (whether online, on air, or in print), to the targeted, persuasive practices of ethical strategic communication (whether by businesses, non-profits, or governments). Our classes incorporate not only the skills and concepts necessary to succeed in these industries, but the context and understanding necessary to understand how these industries work together (and sometimes work against each other) in a global media ecology. <br /></p><p>So for our School, the connection between our undergraduate and graduate educational mission and our larger knowledge-production research and service mission is what motivates our participation in community journalism projects where our students "produce news for the public." And rather than going it alone, we prefer collaborating with local, professional media firms and non-profit organizations. Here are just a few examples:</p><ul><br /><li>Madison Commons. [<a href="http://www.madisoncommons.org/">http://www.madisoncommons.org/</a>] This innovative online partnership between both local/neighborhood organizations (the East Isthmus Neighborhood Planning Council, the South Metropolitan Planning Council, and the Northside Planning Council) and local for-profit media (The Capital Times, Wisconsin State Journal, Isthmus, and Channel 3000) was created by SJMC Professor Lewis Friedland and the UW-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy. It's a great example of graduate student researchers and community citizen journalists working together with both democratic civic groups and local mainstream media.</li><br /><li>Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. [<a href="http://wisconsinwatch.org/">http://wisconsinwatch.org/</a>] Started by longtime SJMC lecturer Andy Hall, WCIJ is "a first-of-its-kind alliance with public broadcasting journalists in six cities around the state, plus students and faculty of the journalism school at Wisconsin’s flagship university" which "combines innovative technology with time-tested journalistic techniques to increase the transparency of official actions, intensify the search for solutions to governmental and societal problems, strengthen democracy and raise the quality of investigative journalism." SJMC Professor Jack Mitchell sits on the board, and three current SJMC students plus one recent SJMC graduate work as reporters in the project.</li></ul><ul><li>All Together Now Madison [<a href="http://atnmadison.org/">http://atnmadison.org/</a>] This project, spearheaded by Brennan Nardi (editor, Madison Magazine), Bill Lueders (news editor, Isthmus), Andy Hall (executive director, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism), and our own SJMC Professor Deborah Blum, ATN is "a collaborative journalism endeavor by news media in Madison, Wisconsin, to produce print, broadcast and online reports on a common theme." The project has connected to several SJMC reporting classes already. Their first set of reports, on "Our Ailing Health Care System," are available now.</li></ul><p>Schudson and Downie ended their article by reminding us that, "Thinking through what universities can do for journalism requires some serious conceptual work about how best to integrate the legitimate educational and research missions of the university with service to society." I've only thrown out a few of the concrete connections to live, investigative, community journalism that our School has helped to create and nurture, but I think that each one of them fills that double role that Schudson and Downie suggest. Anybody want to chime in with more examples, or propose further ideas? <br /><br /> </p>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-18229064511393057112009-09-20T15:13:00.003-05:002009-09-20T15:17:38.024-05:00Update: Blogging the Digital Labour Conference<a href="http://uncoveringinformationlabor.blogspot.com/2009/08/conference-digital-labour-workers.html">As mentioned previously on this blog</a>, the University of Western Ontario's <a href="http://www.fims.uwo.ca/">Faculty of Information and Media Studies</a> will be hosting <a href="http://conferences.fims.uwo.ca/digitallabour/">a conference on Digital Labo(u)r</a>, October 16-18, 2009.<br /><br />I will be in attendance at the conference and will blog coverage of it here, including notes on sessions and other happenings of potential interest to the readership. <br /><br />If you can't make it to Canada, stay tuned here for reports from the event.Sarah. R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13495338005089494192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-37160306378032573852009-09-16T09:36:00.005-05:002009-09-20T15:19:16.333-05:00Murdoch on Digital Journalism: The Ultimate Union-BusterOne must at least admire Rupert Murdoch for his unabashed <span style="font-style:italic;">franchise</span>. The <a href="http://www.ft.com/">Financial Times</a> reports that Murdoch, in a seeming about-face, <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e508e888-a219-11de-81a6-00144feabdc0.html">has come to herald the new era of Kindle and other similar electronic newsreading devices</a> from a truly pragmatic standpoint. Although he predicts up to 20 years for the devices to surmount the current paper and ink industry, Murdoch waxes rhapsodic on the future portended by such a shift:<br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">"'Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions,' said Mr Murdoch, who battled printing unions at his Wapping plant in London more than 20 years ago. 'It’s going to be great.'"</span></blockquote>Sarah. R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13495338005089494192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-42247351705355298642009-08-08T16:15:00.003-05:002009-08-08T16:19:37.472-05:00Conference: Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, CitizensReaders of this blog may be interested in attending or following this upcoming conference at the University of Western Ontario, October 16-18, 2009. It looks to be fascinating. <br /><br /><blockquote>Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens<br /><br />A conference hosted by the Digital Labour Group, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario, October 16-18, 2009, London, Ontario, Canada.<br /><br />'Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens' addresses the implications of digital labour as they are emerging in practice, politics, policy, culture, and theoretical enquiry. As workers, as authors, and as citizens, we are increasingly summoned and disciplined by new digital technologies that define the workplace and produce ever more complex regimes of surveillance and control. At the same time, new possibilities for agency and new spaces for collectivity are born from these multiplying digital innovations. This conference aims to explore this social dialectic, with a specific focus on new forms of labour.</blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://conferences.fims.uwo.ca/digitallabour/">Read more at the conference website</a>.Sarah. R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13495338005089494192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-38832735901299677552009-08-08T15:42:00.007-05:002009-08-08T16:12:43.878-05:00Adaptive Technologies, Labor and the Practice of Hindering Access[NB: This entry started out as a response to <a href="http://uncoveringinformationlabor.blogspot.com/2009/07/uncovering-speech-to-text-labor.html">Greg's post below</a>, but grew verbose enough to mandate its own space. This also marks my first official entry on this blog; thanks, Greg, for this opportunity to participate in the dialog.]<br /><br />An interesting post, and one that prompts me to reflect upon my own past working with "adaptive" or "assistive" technologies for people with a wide range of different abilities, such as blindness and hearing impairment or deafness. For many of these populations, such capabilities, such as text-to-speech functionality or the ability to use a "captioned" telephone (c.f. the product created by local-to-Madison company <a href="http://www.captel.com/">CapTel</a>), actually enable and facilitate individuals' own labor. In some cases, people who may have been late-deafened left the workforce, only to return once these adaptive technologies became available to them (allowing for business-related phone use, for example). Interestingly, in the case of relay services, whether traditional(TTY) or more modernized telephone "captioning" services, an immense amount of human labor is required to make these services function (see <a href="http://www.captel.com/how-it-works.php">this diagram</a> from CapTel for a simplified explanation of the process)- not to mention what goes into television closed captioning, but I would do well to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Closed-Captioning-Subtitling-Stenography-Convergence/dp/0801887100">leave a discussion of that to Greg</a>. Natural language translation is one of the last great computing frontiers and a programming/processing conundrum. Automating it with any kind of success ratio involves a great deal of human intervention - often at low-paying wages and shift-work, outside of these companies' engineering departments. It is just one example of how a highly technical product/service is entirely intertwined with its unskilled labor that is at the core of its functionality. Taking the human interface out of this loop, while undoubtedly the ultimate goal for company management, is simply not feasible technologically at this point. Yet, to the end-user, this human intervention is entirely invisible, by design. Captions appear like magic and almost instantaneously on the phone unit, giving the appearance and the illusion of an entirely automated process.<br /><br />Meanwhile, and only slightly tangentially, true text-to-speech functionality that does not require human labor at its delivery point is being challenged by a hodge-podge of industry players who would like to eliminate it from the Amazon Kindle. In this case, a technology that holds immense promise for legions of potential users - including people who are blind or visually impaired, people who have dyslexia or other types of text- or language-based impairments - is being threatened by the content industry (e.g. the Authors Guild of America, the MPAA), who perceive this facilitating and potentially life-altering technology - one which requires no human intervention beyond user and device - as a potential impediment to its seemingly unfettered earning potential. This issue is further complicated by its introduction at the <a href="http://www.wipo.int/">World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)</a>, where it has been contextualized primarily as an issue of industry retention of DRM/TPM over its content, rather than one of access and fairness, as many affected by the disabling of text-to-speech might be more likely to characterize it.<br /><br />It would be intriguing to see a cost-benefit analysis that accurately reported the amount of money and hours the industry coalitions are expending (not to mention the loss of PR capital, translated into real dollars) to make sure that blind people and those with dyslexia are eliminated from benefiting from an adaptive technology - one that could have profound positive outcomes for engaging people in the digital labor economy. What happens when these industry representatives turn their targets on screen readers and other assistive technologies that allow many people to do their jobs, provide access to computers and allow for people live and work in a digital context when their different abilities might otherwise make that impossible?<br /><br />[The U.S. Copyright Office published a <a href="http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2009/74fr13268.pdf">Notice of Inquiry</a> on this topic in March of 2009 and receive 33 comments during the comment period, one of which was filed jointly on behalf of the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and <a href="http://www.copyright.gov/docs/sccr/comments/2009/russell.pdf">can be read here</a>. Other comments, filed by disability advocacy groups, private citizens, and content industry attorneys and others, <a href="http://www.copyright.gov/docs/sccr/comments/2009/index.html">can be accessed here</a>.]Sarah. R.http://www.blogger.com/profile/13495338005089494192noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-57957861229490234602009-07-23T07:07:00.004-05:002009-07-24T06:48:42.655-05:00Uncovering speech-to-text labor<p>My <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Closed-Captioning-Subtitling-Stenography-Convergence/dp/0801887100/ref=sr_1_2/104-4333073-1363961?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182431235&sr=1-2">most recent book</a> concerns a form of information labor I refer to as "speech-to-text" labor — the work of transcribing and translating, whether after-the-fact or in realtime, a person's spoken words to printed text. For over a century, the use of special stenographic systems of listening, memorization, and notation has represented one means to accomplish this labor, aided by an ever-changing mix of technologies, from Stenotype keyboards to laptop computers. Another means, dating back not quite as long, has employed speech recording and playback devices, from the wax cylinders of early dictation machines to the embedded digitial audio recording chips of today. But either way, a human transcriber/translator was always involved at some point in the process.</p><p>For many decades, however, a third means to accomplish speech-to-text labor has been in the works: one which attempts to substitute computational algorithms for human listening and judgment, these days often quite succesfully. Whether for producing records of courtroom testimony, displaying captions for late-night television, or developing transcripts of global wiretapping efforts, the act of interpreting, understanding (to a degree), and transcoding human speech seems to be a task which, given a smart enough program and a fast enough machine, computers ought to be able to do.<br /></p><p>An <a tooltip="linkalert-tip" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/the_spinning_of_spinvox.html">interesting posting over at the BBC technology blog "dot.life"</a> caught my eye recently because I think it exemplifies the fact that even with the latest versions of these kinds of technologies, human labor is nearly always still present in the speech-to-text loop — sometimes because humans provide more accuracy in the final product, and sometimes because humans represent a more lower-cost, scalable, flexible way of accomplishing these tasks. The case in question is a venture called <a href="http://www.spinvox.com/">Spinvox</a>, "a great British technology success story, using brilliant voice-recognition software to decode your voicemail messages and turn them into text." The blogger's question was, do machines really decode these voicemails, or do humans?</p><blockquote>Still wishing to be convinced that it was people not machines listening to my messages, I tried another tactic. It was suggested to me that if I recorded a message and then sent it five times in a row to my mobile, then a computer would provide the same result every time. Well my message was deliberately stumbling and full of quite difficult words - including my rather tricky name. But every version that came back to me in text form was radically different - and pretty inaccurate. So unless Spinvox is employing a whole lot of rather confused computers to listen and transcribe messages, it sounds like the job was being done by a variety of agents.<br /><br />Why does this matter? After all Spinvox has always been clear that there is a human element in the work - though when it says it can call on "human experts for assistance", you might imagine Cambridge boffins rather than overseas call centre staff. But the fact that so much of its work still appears to rely on people simply listening and typing could have implications for its finances and its data security.</blockquote><p>I don't find it surprising that Spinvox would rely on such a spatial, temporal, skill and wage division of labor — farming snippets of complicated translations out, 24 hours a day, to a dispersed network of highly-structured and inexpensive spots around the globe for nearly-instant human decoding. I do find it interesting that "security" is the main concern here. The idea that a snippet of a voice mail, decoded by a low-wage call-center worker, could represent a security risk to the caller or the receiver reminds me of the late 19th century concerns (which I explored in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Telegraph-Messenger-Boys-Communication-Technology/dp/0415931096/ref=sr_1_4/104-4333073-1363961?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182431235&sr=1-4">my first book</a>) that telegraph messenger boys would find insider investment knowledge by peeking into the printed versions of telegrams that they hand-carried into and out of the electrical wired networks. (Who knows, if this worry over the security of transcribed and translated voicemail takes hold, it might motivate the same kind of solution for some as the problem did a century ago — writing and speaking in code.)</p><p>For my part, I think the most interesting aspect of this case is that the boundary between what we think of as a problem amenable to a technolgical fix (speech-recognition software) versus a spatial/social fix (situating countless individuals in time and space who can provide piecemeal labor on demand) is still very blurry. Voicemail itself — especially when accessible through a personal, mobile device — is a technology meant to enable its privileged user to arrange the time and space of his or her own working day for maximum convenience, flexibility, and productivity. We need to remember that the freedom of one group's mobility and flexibility — even in such a small case as this — may very well come at the cost of another group's fixity and constraint.</p><p>(UPDATE: <a tooltip="linkalert-tip" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/07/spinvox_sends_a_message.html">The story over at dot.life continues for another post, with a response from the firm</a>.)<br /></p>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-13935401067004032062009-07-17T09:03:00.005-05:002009-08-17T07:32:53.814-05:00Rethinking the labor of blogging "uncovering information labor"Hello readers (all three of you). I find my blogging production has evaporated as I've been strugging with my new academic role as the Director of the <a tooltip="linkalert-tip" href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/">University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication</a>. I'm hoping to catch up on some backlogged ideas here soon, but in the meantime, I'm going to open up this blog to some trusted collaborators — like one of the graduate teaching assistants from my UW-Madison course on "<a href="http://lis201.blogspot.com/">The Information Society</a>" — who will likely have much smarter (and much more timely) things to say about information labor than I have lately.<br /><br />More soon, I promise.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-57581893243687648762008-12-21T07:05:00.002-06:002008-12-21T07:06:45.538-06:00Winter breakThe election is over, the semester is over, the year is over. Winter break is a time for university faculty to catch up on their own information labors, so I'll see you in spring 2009.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-1529462352902585232008-11-03T16:35:00.004-06:002008-11-03T19:34:41.765-06:00Better late than never: Joining the communication professors who have signed the "Statement Concerning Recent Discourse of the McCain/Palin Campaign"<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I know, I know, it's only one day before the election, but I wanted to add my little bit of campaign discourse to the blogosphere — not necessarily for or against either party's positions and proposals (I know who I'm voting for and I'm proud of it, but I don't think my endorsement will be big news) but in regard to the communication strategies that one party has used against the other. This <a href="http://politicalcommunication.info/">online statement</a> has been circulating for a while and I just added my name to the mix:<br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left; line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;font-family:arial;" ></span><br /></strong></p><blockquote><p style="text-align: center; line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal" align="center"><strong><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span><span style="font-size:x-large;">Statement Concerning Recent Discourse </span></span></span></strong></p> <p style="text-align: center; line-height: 150%;" class="MsoNormal" align="center"><strong><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span><span style="font-size:x-large;">of the McCain/Palin Campaign</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNormal" align="center"><strong><span>October 23, 2008</span></strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNormal" align="center"><strong><span>(Lastest Update: November 1st)<br /></span></strong></p> <p style="text-align: center;" class="MsoNormal" align="center"><strong><span>This statement is signed by research faculty of communication programs from across the nation. We speak as concerned educators and scholars of communication but do not claim to speak for our home institutions.<o:p></o:p></span></strong></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="border-style: none; padding: 0in;" class="MsoNormal"><span><span style="font-size:medium;">We wish to express our great concern over unethical communication behavior that threatens to dominate the closing days of the 2008 Presidential campaign. </span><span style="font-size:medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p style="border-style: none; padding: 0in;" class="MsoNormal"><span><o:p><span style="font-size:medium;">Both major campaigns have been criticized by fact-checking organizations for prevarications.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-size:medium;">We call on </span><em><span style="font-size:medium;">both</span></em><span style="font-size:medium;"> campaigns to halt blatant misrepresentations of their opponent’s positions.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p style="border-style: none; padding: 0in;" class="MsoNormal"><span><o:p><span style="font-size:medium;">It would be misleading, however, to imply that since “both sides do it” there is no qualitative difference worth noting.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-size:medium;">In recent weeks, the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has engaged in such incendiary mendacity that we must speak out.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-size:medium;">The purposeful dissemination of messages that a communicator knows to be false and inflammatory is unethical.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-size:medium;">It is that simple.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></span></p> <p style="border-style: none; padding: 0in;" class="MsoNormal"><span><o:p><span style="font-size:medium;">Making decisions in a democracy requires an informed electorate.</span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span style="font-size:medium;">The health of our democracy and our ability to make a good decision about who should lead our nation require the very best in communication practices, not the worst.</span></o:p></span></p><p style="border-style: none; padding: 0in;" class="MsoNormal"><span><o:p><span style="font-size:medium;">[...]<br /></span><span><span style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></span></p></blockquote><br /><p style="border-style: none; padding: 0in;" class="MsoNormal">The petition goes on to list (and document) specific instances of apparently intentional disinformation on the part of the McCain/Palin campaign. I'm happy to let the political, economic, and social philosophers among the faculty debate which party will actually bring the good life (if any), but as a member of the communication faculty the least I can do is add my name to a chorus of academics who want to use this campaign as a teachable moment, and to remind our students that both what we say and how we say it matters. If we hold out any hope for a civil political discourse in our globalized, polarized, technologically-mediated, and largely-commercialized media system, we have a responsibility to speak out when that civil discourse is threatened, mocked, or ignored.<br /></p>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-7607815466289381712008-09-12T13:43:00.002-05:002008-09-12T13:56:06.313-05:00Print culture and science/technology knowledge productionI'm here at the UW-Madison <a href="http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/">Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America</a> conference on "<a href="http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/STEMConferencePage.html">The culture of print in science, technology, engineering, and medicine</a>" today. As one of the co-organizers, I made some opening remarks on the study of print, science, and technology which fit with my weblog theme quite well, and I thought I'd reprint them (extended version) here:<br /><br /><blockquote>I was trained in a program in the history of science, medicine, and technology — after having earned an engineering degree — long before I knew there was a field called "print culture studies" — and long before I found myself dealing with print culture on a daily basis as a faculty member in both a library school and a journalism school. But even from my graduate training it was clear to me that both the artifacts of print culture studies — books and periodicals, advertising and ephemera, newsletters and correspondence — and the social processes of print culture studies — making meaning and building community through the collective production, circulation, consumption, and interpretation of knowledge made physical through text and image — were central to the study of science, medicine, technology, and engineering practice in America.<br /><br />Take the artifacts of print culture studies first. It is difficult to imagine how scientific or medical practice of any sort can take place without a social process of textual production, peer review of those texts, scholary publication of those texts, and professional librarianship to find those texts again when needed. In the middle of the 20th century the military demands of the Cold War and the information technologies of the computer suggested to some that the academic monograph, the academic journal, and even the academic article were all hopelessly out of date as efficient modes of scientific communication. But every technology that has been proposed to replace these print products — from the microfilmed technical report to the online weblog — still draws on the metaphors and practices of print culture. And behind the scenes, well before publication of scientific findings, a vast print culture of laboratory notebooks, emailed correspondence, and powerpoint presentations lurks under all of our scientific work. <br /><br />This brings us to the second connection, the social processes of print cuture. After all, if there is one thing that broad science and technology studies share, whether they focus on nanotechnology or evolutionary theory, information technology or the germ theory of medicine, is that at their core they are about constructing, reproducing, and legitimizing certain ways of knowing — practices of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. <br /><br />A good friend of mine who was also trained as a historian of science and technology, Josh Greenberg (who coincidentally is now heading up digital print projects at the New York Public Library), uses an unusual word to describe this connection: "epistemography." What does this mean? To find out you can consult the online print archive known as Josh's weblog, in which he writes, "the name epistemographer comes from one of my graduate school professors (a fine historian of science named Peter Dear), who wrote an article in which he argues that Science Studies is really about charting knowledge; where it comes from, how it’s made, and who’s doing the making. Thus we studied epistemography, which makes me an epistemographer." I don't bring this up to suggest we all run off and form yet another new discipline, but to suggest that the work we're already doing probably points more in the same direction than we might normally think.<br /><br />There's one final way in which print culture studies and science/technology/engineering/medicine studies inform each other, in my view. This one is a little more tricky, though, because it assumes a particular kind of print culture and science studies. Here at the Center we've built a long tradition of focusing not just on the products of print, or on the ways they've been put into social practice, but the relationship that print culture products and practices have to power — political and economic, social and cultural.<br /> <br />What this means is that the Madison Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, following in the research traditions of its founders Jim Danky and Wayne Wiegand, and building on those traditions with so many of its participants over the years (wholeheartedly including the research of current director Christine Pawley), places special focus on how those lacking power in American history — sometimes literally lacking a voice in the mainstream historical record — have used the tools and techniques of print to call attention to their claims and build a shared identity under circumstances of marginalization. We see it as our special responsibility to collect, catalog, and understand "the print culture collections of groups whose gender, race, occupation, ethnicity and sexual preference (among other factors) have historically placed them on the periphery of power but who used print sources as one of the few means of expression available to them."<br /><br />We in science and technology studies are in a similarly exciting moment with research that has, especially in the last few decades, finally begun to seriously and systematically foreground the role of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and language in the production of scientific knowledge, in the construction of technological infrastructure, in the decisions about engineering values and the application of medical advances. I'm proud to be a participant in both the print culture and science studies disciplines, because I think much like the professional cultures they nurture — librarianship and publishing on the one hand, and science/engineering/medicine on the other — our academic efforts hold within them a real mission to make sure that the benefits of human knowledge are made accessible with equity and justice across the globe.<br /></blockquote>Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-92186968271921116092008-07-20T21:33:00.001-05:002008-07-20T21:34:41.640-05:00Summer vacationTime for me to get some information labors of my own completed before summer's up and the fall semester begins. See you in September.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-36537504581175929922008-07-17T08:27:00.003-05:002008-07-17T13:12:34.230-05:00Global warming and a tangle of information labors -- journalism, computer modeling, and Google searchingAn article in my local newspaper got me angry today and set me to writing a response. I think the episode actually represents an interesting set of issues dealing with information seeking and evaluation of evidence -- on several levels -- so I'm reprinting my letter to the editor here:<br /><blockquote>While I take no issue with my local newspaper presenting a news analysis on those engaged in "dismissing global warming," the supposed "In Depth" article on this topic in the July 17 2008 Wisconsin State Journal was actually rather shallow. The article, reprinted from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, only briefly described the belief of "Colorado State University storm prognosticator" William Gray that, in his words, "global warming has been grossly exaggerated." It offered no explanation, context or counter-claims for Gray's opinion. If the State Journal is going to simply reprint mediocre news reports on this issue, rather than doing its own reporting and consulting with the many University of Wisconsin climate experts who work here in our own state, perhaps instead of purchasing the 500-word Sun-Sentinel article it should have purchased (or at least consulted) the 7,500-word May 28 2006 Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach entitled "The tempest" which detailed that Gray believes computer climate modeling to be useless, stating, in his words, "They sit in this ivory tower, playing around, and they don't tell us if this is going to be a hot summer coming up. Why not? Because the models are no damn good!" Or perhaps the State Journal might have followed up on other articles by Ken Kaye on Gray's own track record of predictions, such as Kaye's April 09 2008 article in the Sun-Sentinel entitled "Long-range hurricane forecasts: Public service or worthless?" which reports that Gray himself actually "overestimated the 2006 and 2007 [hurricane] seasons and severely underestimated the chaotic 2005 season; in April of that year, they called for seven hurricanes to emerge — and 15 eventually formed." No matter what you think about the risk and reality of global warming, clearly there is much more "depth" to this issue than the flimsy half-page article in Thursday's Wisconsin State Journal would lead one to believe. I expect better from my city's last remaining daily print newspaper.<br /><br />Greg Downey<br />Madison, WI</blockquote><br />Now, I don't see myself as any sort of serious media watchdog by any means. But given a bit of background knowledge about the global warming debate, access to Google, the online presence of previously-published newspaper articles from around the nation, and an email account, I was able to quickly make an assertion of journalistic quality and communicate this opinion to my local newspaper editor. That's kind of cool. It's also kind of depressing that it was necessary, given that those same tools are available to my local newspaper editor as well.<br /><br />Here are the original articles in question, if anyone is interested:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/jul/15/hurrican-forecaster-william-gray-says-global-warmi/?partner=yahoo_headlines">Dismissing global warming</a> (as first published in the Sun-Sentinel, later reprinted in the Wisconsin State Journal)<br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305_pf.html">The tempest</a> (Washington Post)<br /><a href="http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-flbgray0410sbapr10,0,3614008.story">Long-range hurricane forecasts: Public service or worthless?</a> (Sun-Sentinel)<br /><br />As a postscript, today my department of Journalism & Mass Communication sent out a press release entitled "<a href="http://www.news.wisc.edu/releases/14605">SCIENTISTS SEE BRIGHT SIDE OF WORKING WITH MEDIA</a>." Food for thought.<br /><br />Further postscript: A few hours after I emailed my letter, a WSJ managing editor got back to me with a polite acknowledgement, which was much appreciated. <br /><br />And yet another postscript: Coincidentally, on Tuesday, July 29, 2008, UW-Madison Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Jonathan Martin will be speaking in a series on "emerging technologies at the intersection of science, policy, and media" sponsored by the Department of Life Science Communications. Martin's topic: "Talking about the weather: Shaping public perception of science." The talk will be from 7-8pm, in 1100 Grainger Hall.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-91382976768754112982008-06-17T07:18:00.010-05:002008-06-17T07:40:07.448-05:00Revealing information labor through WordleA blog post over at <a href="http://unionblend.uniblogs.org/2008/06/16/wordle-wub/">Wisconsin Union Blend</a> alerted me to this fun little Java program called <a href="http://wordle.net/">Wordle</a>:<blockquote>Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.</blockquote>Desperately trying to imagine how to link Wordle to the topic of "information labor" so I could talk about it in my blog, I realized that academics these days generally produce two major texts which are meant to represent their information labors to the world: their <a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/cv.pdf">c.v.</a> (traditionally produced in a paper, or at least paper-like, format) and, now, their <a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/index.php">web site</a>. So I wondered: would the word cloud of Wordle reveal two different concentrations of information labor if fed my more "official" c.v. and my more "public" web site? <br /><br />Here's the <a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/PDF/cv.pdf">c.v.</a>:<br /><br /><img style="width: 450px;" src="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/images/pictures/wordle-cv.gif" border="0" alt="a" /><br /><br />And here's the <a href="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/index.php">web site</a>:<br /><br /><img style="width: 450px;" src="http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~gdowney/images/pictures/wordle-website.gif" border="0" alt="b" /><br /><br />I was surprised at how my institutional affiliation with UW-Madison leaps out of the c.v. text, whereas my topical focus on information, technology, and labor is more prominent on the web site text. It's something I'll be thinking about and, I'll admit, something I wouldn't have considered had there not been a free little web applet for visualizing my representation of my own labors in this way.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-60192777226886683932008-05-08T08:30:00.003-05:002008-06-02T13:11:15.105-05:00The labor contradictions of steampunkI never thought I'd see a New York Times article on the literary, technological-tinkerer, and aesthetic movement loosely known as "steampunk," but <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/fashion/08PUNK.html">there it is today</a>, in the "Fashion" section: <br /><blockquote>The lead singer of a neovaudevillian performance troupe called the James Gang, Mr. James has assembled his universe from oddly assorted props and castoffs: a gramophone with a crank and velvet turntable, an old wooden icebox and a wardrobe rack made from brass pipes that were ballet bars in a previous incarnation.<br /><br />Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing -- an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman's waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery -- is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.<br /><br />It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early '90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.</blockquote><br />I must admit, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I'm something of a steampunk fan myself. But this affiliation manifests itself in different ways. In my consumption of popular culture, I'm indeed drawn to the airship-filled worlds of young adult science fiction paperbacks and Hayao Miyazaki anime DVDs. In my own technology aesthetic, I guess I'm less "steampunk" than "electropunk," as my campus offices are filled with cast-off media technology from the last fifty years ... analog record players and analog microfilm readers, vintage Atari games (antiques after 30 years) and vintage iPods (antiques after less than 10). And while I don't clothe my digital appliances in burlap, I do wrap my bicycle in wooden baskets and plastic flowers; I don't electroplate my computer in copper, but I complement my wireless-laptop-based blogging with wooden pencil sketches in a Moleskine notebook. In a sense I feel that the students I see who plaster their notebook computers with political bumper stickers and encase their industrially-designed iPhones in handmade, recycled-material pouches ("hippiepunk"?) are doing the same thing. Of course, the original meaning of "cyberpunk" itself was filled with similar anachronisms, nostalgias, and contradictions. <br /><br />What I find interesting about all these "technopunk" aesthetics and longings are the way they reveal our simultaneous desire and discomfort for both the future and the past. We long for the latest technology -- recognizing that "latest" is perpetually reinvented and continually just out of our reach, by definition -- but we cradle and contextualize that latest technology within an idealized representation of past technology, seemingly undermining our desire for the new with a sense of loss for the old. <br /><br />How does "information labor" -- and ideas of social class and social power connected to information technology -- relate to any of this? At one level, being a technopunk of any sort means expending labor to recast, recontextualize, or reimagine your present-day technology in the context of another (usually idealized) age. It's a valuing of craft labor, amateur labor, fandom labor of a very particular sort. It's a repudiation of both mass production and flexible production, a challenge to notions of planned obsolescence and incremental upgrades. And it's a social practice that takes significant time, expense, and education (literary, historical, or technological) to carry out. When affluent consumers use old technology, it's "retro chic." When poor consumers use old technology, it's a digital divide.<br /><br />But there's another sense in which labor and class lurk, specifically in the "steampunk" world. Combining formal Victorian clothing with digital consumer technology seems to connect both the noble utopian visions and the harsh political-economic realities of the modern and the postmodern age. Steampunk suggests a nostalgic world of possibility, where the visions of peace and prosperity through technology articulated by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne might yet be realized. But steampunk might demand a world of imperialist resource extraction, rigid class boundaries, widespread economic unrest and perpetual technological warfare as well. The late nineteenth century was no picnic.<br /><br />Yet I remain a steampunk fan. I think at its best, the literary, artistic, and playful processes of casting our technological dreams back 25, 50 or 100 years can be an incredibly creative exercise, illuminating the ways in which technology is constantly mobilized for the most beautiful of imagined futures even as it is put to use in the most terrible of present-day projects. Calling an alternate technological history into being forces the dreamer to engage with the same issues as those academic practitioners of the history of technology: not just the question of what difference technology can make, but the question of how we make sure that technology makes the difference we want.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-32814698894877324212008-03-08T07:11:00.000-06:002008-03-08T07:13:05.720-06:00The labor of closed captioningAt long last, my second book, Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television, is officially out. (I received my box of ten complementary copies from the publisher in the mail yesterday. This time I won't be reckless enough to donate five copies to various UW-Madison libraries.) Here's the blurb from <a href="http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8583.html">Johns Hopkins University Press</a>:<br /><blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_B_k-w1FW7aY/R6m25s2PBUI/AAAAAAAAAEE/f3PDKJZWlCM/s1600-h/Downey+G+2008+cover.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_B_k-w1FW7aY/R6m25s2PBUI/AAAAAAAAAEE/f3PDKJZWlCM/s200/Downey+G+2008+cover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5163859550164419906" /></a>This engaging study traces the development of closed captioning -- a field that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from decades-long developments in cinematic subtitling, courtroom stenography, and education for the deaf. Gregory J. Downey discusses how digital computers, coupled with human mental and physical skills, made live television captioning possible. Downey's survey includess the hidden information workers who mediate between live audiovisual action and the production of visual track and written records. His work examines communication technology, human geography, and the place of labor in a technologically complex and spatially fragmented world. Illustrating the ways in which technological development grows out of government regulation, education innovation, professional profit-seeking, and social activism, this interdisciplinary study combines insights from several fields, among them the history of technology, human geography, mass communication, and information studies.</blockquote><br />My "book tour" consisted of a talk in my own UW-Madison Department of Geography Yi-Fu Tuan lecture series. My "Introduction to mass communication" class and I were just discussing book publishing recently, and since I showed them in lecture that my previous book, Telegraph Messenger Boys, sits comfortably around the 1 million mark in terms of sales rank at Amazon.com (that means "millionth best selling," not "sold a million copies"), here's hoping this one breaks the 900,000 mark.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-29694559549231241222007-11-19T15:33:00.000-06:002007-11-19T16:01:11.203-06:00The labor of reading -- wirelesslyBig news in the world of reading today. First, <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/">as Tom Regan reported this morning on the National Public Radio News Blog</a>, "A new National Endowment for the Arts report says Americans are reading less. And young people are reading a lot less."<br /><blockquote>The report, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, found that the average person between 15 and 24 spends 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and seven minutes reading. Between 1992 and 2002, the number of young adults (18-24) who voluntarily read a book each year (we're talking about one book here) dropped from 59 percent to 52 percent. </blockquote><br />Lest you think this only applies to books, the full report (<a href="http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf">available as a PDF for your online reading convenience</a>) points out that the research team looked at "all varieties of reading, including fiction and nonfiction genres in various formats such as books, magazines, newspapers, and online reading". (If you don't have time to read the whole report, you can always consult the <a href="http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead_ExecSum.pdf">executive summary</a> which the NEA so thoughtfully and rather ironically provided.)<br /><br />The second reading-related news item of the day is notable precisely because it blurs those very categories of "reading books" and "reading online". As <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/amazon-pitches-a-wireless-ipod-for-books/index.html?hp">the New York Times weblog Bits</a> reported today, Amazon.com has entered the portable digital book market with a combination $400 handheld reading device and a iPod-touch-like mobile shopping experience (using nearly-ubiquitous cell phone networks rather than locally contingent WiFi hotspots). Saul Hansell describes the content pricing model:<br /><blockquote>Amazon has 90,000 titles for sale at launch, including books from all major publishers.<br /><br />Best sellers and new releases will cost $9.99. That represents a substantial savings off of Amazon’s already discounted prices. Amazon is currently selling hardcover bestsellers for roughly $13 to $20 and trade paperbacks for $8 to $11.<br /><br />The Kindle will also download and display newspapers, magazines and blogs. But in an era when most Internet content is offered free with advertising, Amazon has decided to charge monthly fees for these publications.</blockquote> <br />A <a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/enough-about-kindle-10-what-about-kindle-20/">follow-up post by Brad Stone at the NYT</a> already speculates about what a future release of the Kindle might incorporate -- suggesting the current version might have some significant problems to overcome with consumers. A visit to Amazon.com's own <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=amb_link_5873612_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-center-column&pf_rd_r=1YBMEVGGSN1JES477N60&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=329252801&pf_rd_i=507846">Kindle product page</a> reveals some of the initial public reaction to this product -- at least from those who themselves choose to spend time reading and posting to Amazon.com review threads. Comments seem to range from "I have been using it for about 2 months and it has changed the way I read," to "$400 is not a price point that interests me at all. I would pay half that perhaps, but only if I could also read things in different formats". And there's plenty more text for online reading about this device already -- even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle">a Wikipedia article</a>, with over four dozen edits since about 7am this morning. (Maybe this makes some sense, since free online access to Wikipedia is one of the touted features of the Kindle -- granting a serious sort of legitimacy to the open-source encyclopedia that shouldn't be minimized.)<br /><br />What's my take? The technological form factor (battery, size, screen) together with the wireless ability to purchase an additional book anytime, anywhere comprise the real innovation of the Kindle, I think, but only for omnivorous readers of current popular fiction and non-fiction whose work and leisure lives are so fragmented through time and space (think taxicabs, airports, hotels, cars) that both carrying around a load of books and stopping to seek out a place to dispose of and purchase a new book are burdensome. If I were a manager at Apple I'd seriously think about the ramifications of adding e-text reading power to a next large-screen, trade-book-size generation of the iPod, as well as wrapping ebooks more tightly than they already are into the iTunes Music and Video Store (which you'd have to rename again). In fact, I'm surprised Amazon has put together their own hardware solution and not partnered with Apple or Sony (one of the other early e-book entrants). <br /><br />But the real killer application for an academic information laborer like me, already affiliated with an institution which pays license fees for ubiquitous wired access to physical and digital text? The ability to tap into the PDF resources of my academic library and the databases it subscribes to (ProQuest, JStore, ProjectMuse, etc.) as well as the copyright-free resources of the Google Books Project from a similarly-styled, low-power, cell-phone-network, tablet-form-factor, e-book reader priced at $100. For free.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-53123095800186929112007-09-29T09:45:00.000-05:002007-09-29T09:57:48.482-05:00The divisions of Web 2.0 laborI'm attending a small conference this weekend at the University of Utah entitled "<a href="http://www.hum.utah.edu/display.php?&pageId=1752">Frontiers of New Media: Historical and Cultural Explorations of Region, Identity, and Power in the Development of New Communications Technologies</a>" and having a great time. The keynote was by Henry Jenkins of MIT on various issues dealing with the so-called "Web 2.0" phenomenon which often gets reduced to the soundbite of "user generated content". Henry did a great job of problematizing the terms used not only for "Web 2.0" but for its active participants -- are they users, producers, consumers, "prosumers," "produsers," etc.? But beyond these complimentary and contradictory roles, or even the actually-existing and culturally-imagined social groups which they attach to (and fail to attach to) across the globe, the thing that really started me thinking was the question of what kind of "content" they (we) were producing. What do we even mean when we say "Web content"? What is the work being done? What is the knowledge or artifice being produced?<br /><br />This concerns me because I see the same blanket statements about "content" (or "knowledge" or "information") being made all through the long history of contact between libraries and computers that I'm currently exploring for my next book project. Today on the Web, when we say "content" we're often referring to amateur, non-profit, or grassroots textual, image, sound, or video products which parallel those of professional, for-profit, or mainstream cultural producers -- insightful blog entries, artistic photographs, entertaining podcasts, or engaging videos. But we produce much more than this. We tag and organize and sort and collate and arrange in chronology in a pattern of "metadata production" (or "metacontent production") just as much, if not more, as we engage in content production. We produce instructions and guides and tutorials for acting in the real world or on physical artifacts, calling ourselves "Make" or "DIY" participants. We arrange activist or expressive or simply exhausting cultural moments, from political protests to zombie performance art, carried out ephemerally and then perhaps recaptured and redigitized as "content" in a second pass later. And we even build algorithms -- tools and caculators and sorters and all those things that all those scientists and engineers and mathematicians thought all those computers would be naturally used for all those years ago. I feel like exploring, mapping, and questioning this vast division of labor is perhaps one of the next challenges for those of us who ponder the meaning of Web 2.0 ... or even of Library 1.0.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-22468802860298991692007-08-06T08:59:00.000-05:002007-08-06T09:18:30.211-05:00The value of your advertising-consumption laborA <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/business/media/06digitas.html">fascinating little piece in the New York Times today</a> discusses the value that the company Digitas, one of the newest acquisitions of the global strategic communications giant Publicis Groupe, is supposed to add to their existing suite of advertising firms (including brand names like Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett):<br /><blockquote><br />The plan is to build a global digital ad network that uses offshore labor to create thousands of versions of ads. Then, using data about consumers and computer algorithms, the network will decide which advertising message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or — eventually — a television.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Greater production capacity is needed, Mr. Kenny says, to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads. He estimates that in the United States, some companies are already running about 4,000 versions of an ad for a single brand, whereas 10 years ago they might have run three to five versions.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Digitas uses data from companies like Google and Yahoo and customer data from each advertiser to develop proprietary models about which ads should be shown the first time someone sees an ad, the second time, after a purchase is made, and so on. The ads vary, depending on a customer’s age, location and past exposure to the ads.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Mr. Kenny said that Digitas constantly struggles to find enough employees with the technical expertise to use complex data to slice and dice ads for companies like General Motors and Procter & Gamble. As Digitas invests in countries like China and India, he said, the Publicis Groupe will benefit from the global talent pool — and perhaps create more demand for advertising in those countries.</blockquote><br />Two very different conceptions of labor are at work in these short descriptions of the Digitas strategy. On one hand, vast legions of low-wage but talented communications workers from across the globe are necessary to generate thousands of different advertising permutations for each campaign and code them with the metadata required for smart computer algorithms to invoke them effectively. These workers would seem to fall somewhere between the "clerical" and the "creative" in the pecking order of advertising agencies. But in either case, the commodities that they produce -- bite-sized, hyper-targeted advertising messages -- are imbued with a huge investment of information labor. <br /><br />On the other hand sit the targets of these advertisements, the presumably affluent and information-saturated consumers who view these ads not only on old-style mass-marketed and relatively impersonal television screens, magazine pages, and billboards, but on the hyper-customized margins of the web pages they visit throughout the day on their laptop computers, cell phones, and portable gaming devices. What we might think of as their attentional labor time -- the work that these coveted consumers do in the moment that their eyes and brains flit to the advertising message that pops up on their digital screen -- is so valuable as to be analyzed and specified by complicated computer algorithms working on both the back end and the front end of their web interaction, algorithms which use as their raw material both the real and assumed demographic information about these coveted consumers and the matching advertising metadata so carefully produced and entered by those low-paid marketing information laborers around the globe. <br /><br />What results for me is a vision of immense disparity in global communicative labor: the communication skills of so many being used to transmit messages of such unimaginable granularity into the communicative lives of so few -- all for the purposes of profit maximization. It's an uneven pattern that we can probably see in other realms of message-making as well, from political speech to non-profit fundraising to, yes, academic knowledge production. I wonder if there's value in analyzing such disparities in the labor and value of communication patterns more closely.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-27418923283372830852007-07-30T08:43:00.000-05:002007-07-30T09:00:22.160-05:00The neoliberal university and differential tuition for different majorsA New York Times article this past weekend (Jonathan D. Glater, "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/education/29tuition.html?ref=education">Certain degrees now cost more at public universities</a>") alerted me to something I'm ashamed to say I hadn't realized about my own <a href="http://www.wisc.edu/">University of Wisconsin</a> — specifically, about the undergraduate degree in our <a href="http://www.bus.wisc.edu/undergrad/">School of Business</a>:<br /><blockquote><br />Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates.<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />Officials at universities that have recently implemented higher tuition for specific majors say students have supported the move.<br /><br />Students in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, for example, got behind the program because they believed that it would support things like a top-notch faculty.<br /></blockquote><br />With the tuition and fees for an in-state undergraduate at UW-Madison estimated to be <a href="http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php">$6,730 for the 2006-07 academic year</a>, a $500 surcharge amounts to nearly 10% of a student's tuition bill.<br /><br />The political-economic conditions that have inspired this new funding structure include two decades of growing neoliberal governance strategies at both the state and national level. By "neoliberal governance" I mean the philosophy that the workings of capitalist markets can effectively substitute for democratic decisions of cultural value and social justice in every aspect of human life. (For more on this concept, see David Harvey's 2006 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273/">A brief history of neoliberalism</a>.) In the case of Wisconsin, this policy is evident in the fact that the state has reduced its level of taxpayer-funded support to less than 20% of the total budget of the university. We are to be run "more like a business" according to the refrain at conservative political rallies. Any notion that the public research university is an investment in economic growth, cultural understanding, and basic knowledge production as a resource commons for all is swept aside; the university must become "entrepreneurial," not in the broad sense of fostering learning and innovation in scientific, artistic, and intellectual pursuits, but in the narrow sense of attracting private capital for its operating expenses. The underlying assumption in all this is stark: any operating expenses unable to attract such private capital are by definition not of value in the university, and deserving of cuts rather than subsidy.<br /><br />The rationale behind our business school adopting this neoliberal model of differential tuition seems to rely on two core beliefs: (1) that business school faculty both require and are deserving of higher salaries than faculty in other units in order to maintain the value of the business school (based on what the market is willing to pay to hire away these faculty both inside and outside of academia); and (2) that business school students are both able and eager to pay a higher tuition in order to maintain the value of their degree (based on what the market is willing to pay to initially hire these graduates). In both of these arguments, "value" is understood narrowly as market value — the price of a salary. Any other definitions of value — say, how to "value" a multidisciplinary and eclectic department of scholars who don't all do the same kind of research on the same kind of topics and who, inevitably, don't all command the same salary in the idealized open market of corporate consulting; or, perhaps, how to "value" a broad and diverse undergraduate education which includes courses taken outside of a single school or department or specialty — are silenced from discussion.<br /><br />Postgraduate students working toward a Master's Degree or Doctorate, of course, already pay differential tuition in many cases, depending on the professions that they are engaged in. In <a href="http://registrar.wisc.edu/students/fees_tuition/1074tuition.pdf">Spring 2007</a>, for example, a generic full-time resident graduate student paid $4,592 per semester, but a full-time resident law student paid $6,326 and a full-time resident medical student paid $11,132. By comparison, a full-time business masters student paid $5,320. In the business school, there was even a slightly discounted rate for evening MBA students, who only paid $5,103 per semester.<br /><br />But this new structure in the business school differentiates students not on the basis of their professional specializations after achieving an undergraduate degree; instead, it redefines the meaning of the undergraduate degree itself as a professional degree worth paying a legitimate premium for. I can't offer any insight into whether that $500 undergraduate business school premium is worth the money; however, I would like to question whether it is a legitimate charge, in considering the meaning of the university itself.<br /><br />But first, a thought experiment. If charging differential tuition based on an undergraduate department is a smart, "entrepreneurial" idea, then why stop at the departmental scale of action? Why not extend the practice to the scale of the individual professor? After all, clearly some professors are valued more highly in the market than others (as seen by the outside offers they get from other universities or firms in private industry). And aren't these the very faculty members (and the ideas they produce and promote) which really make the business school competitive? Instead of charging an extra $500 to all business school majors, the school could simply charge an extra $100 each time an undergraduate takes a class with one of these premium professors — investing the money back into their salaries alone, of course. Such a scheme would be a real incentive to the rest of the business school faculty to innovate!<br /><br />But then again, why stop at the scale of the individual? I mean, even the most valuable professors sometimes teach courses which aren't as useful to the bottom line of getting a good job once a student graduates (I'm thinking of pesky "history" and "ethics" courses here, but undoubtedly there are others). And within those courses, certainly not all of the material covered in the syllabus ends up on the final exam. Hmmm ... how about having students pay by the day instead of by the course? Faculty could determine which days of lecture are the most valuable — based on the instrumental goals of resume padding and test preparation — and students could pay a $10 premium each time they attended one of those days. (This would have the happy effect of allowing some of those "less valued" professors to at least teach a few days of useful material in their otherwise valueless courses, too.) Students who decided not to attend those days of class wouldn't have to pay the extra premium. Power to allocate the original $500 premium designated to the department would instead go in "micropayments" to those exact portions of valuable courses, taught by those exact professors of value, which make the business school (and the undergraduate degree it confers) competitive. Market logic triumphant!<br /><br />If those proposals sounded misguided and extreme, then consider this. Instead of demanding that particular groups of undergraduates pay a $500 premium to particular groups of professors in particular departments under the assumption that the knowledge gains produced by one field — or the career outcomes of one student constituency — are more valuable than another, what if all undergraduates were asked to pay an extra $100 and that money was allocated democratically through faculty debate over a combination of factors — which departments serve more undergraduate majors, which departments have the potential to earn revenue from (still-higher-paying) professional graduate students, which deparments represent "market failures" (private industry declining to support the Havens Center for Social Justice, for example) nevertheless deserving of university subsidy, and, most crucially, rational deliberation about what kind of university experience our students (and our society) deserve as a whole?<br /><br />I'm worried about the new structure that our business school — and our univeristy — have instituted. I work in two similar departments which see themselves as "Schools" (both within the College of Arts and Sciences) to which the lures of differential undergraduate tuition would also be attractive. One is a School of Journalism and Mass Communication; the other is a School of Library and Information Studies. Both could make similar arguments for charging differential tuition to undergraduates. But I also do the kind of intellectual work that puts me on the fringes of the mainstream in both of those Schools. When one department decides it can charge more for its services than another department, it is using the "natural" logic of the market, whether it admits to this or not, to make a value claim about its own knowledge production — and in a university, this amounts to a value claim about the benefit of its work not only to an undergraduate job seeker, but to the culture as a whole. I am not prepared to endorse such a claim, even for my own fields.<br /><br />On its web site, our School of Business touts that it offers its undergraduates "<a href="http://www.bus.wisc.edu/undergrad/overview/">The resources of a world-class public university with the personal contact of a comparatively small business school</a>." But if that school — or any other — is willing to value its faculty and its knowledge above and beyond that of the rest of the university through differential tuition, then it is cooperating in the same neoliberal agenda that uses stark and simple market logic to decide which "resources of a world-class public univeristy" deserve funding in the first place. In effect, the very definition of the public university is changing before our eyes. Let's not simply look the other way.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-88053621057936768562007-07-13T12:08:00.000-05:002007-07-13T12:37:48.942-05:00The Wisconsin State Representative who wanted to kill the law school, and why it's more than just a silly news storyThis summer the Wisconsin Senate and Assembly -- the former controlled by Democrats, the latter by Republicans -- are trying to come to a compromise two-year budget for our state. In recent years, the University of Wisconsin has suffered under state budgets. This season, the Senate seems ready to invest in the university while the Assembly would like to defund it further. At stake is a familiar story of two competing conceptions of the university: for progressives, it is a site of serious knowledge production, a form of cost-effective collective corporate training, and a source of economic innovation to the local, state, and national economy; but to conservatives, it represents a site of public subsidy that should be privatized (economic conservatives) and a site of dangerous indoctrination that should be censored (social conservatives). <br /><br /><a href="http://www.madison.com/tct/news//index.php?ntid=201243">Today in the Capital Times</a> comes a revelation that would bring some humor to the entire exercise if it wasn't true: one of the conservative Assembly representatives actually managed to insert language into the official Assembly version of the budget which zeroed out funding of the UW-Madison law school.<br /><br /><blockquote>A lawmaker who persuaded the Assembly to eliminate all state funding for the University of Wisconsin Law School says his reasoning is simple: There are too many lawyers in Wisconsin.<br /><br />"We don't need more ambulance chasers. We don't need frivolous lawsuits. And we don't need attorneys making people's lives miserable when they go to family court for divorces," said Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Green Bay. "And I think that having too many attorneys leads to all those bad results."<br /><br />[...]<br /><br />"When we have an overabundance of attorneys already, there's no point in subsidizing the education of more attorneys," Lasee said.<br /></blockquote><br />Let me first go on record as saying that I disagree with Lasee's proposal, that I think his proposal represents the worst sort of anti-intellectual "legislation by personal prejudice," and that I am appalled that the Assembly leadership let such language slip into their budget proposal unchallenged.<br /><br />But my bigger problem with this incident is the way it is being treated in the press as some sort of ridiculous and ironic individual aberration ("this legislator wants to get rid of lawyers, ha ha; he must have a personal axe to grind against the law school, what a joke"). Instead I think it represents a real and growing change in the way that the difficult labor of knowledge production is understood and valued in society. <br /><br />Neither Lassee nor his critics seem to consider the UW-Madison law school a site of knowledge production. Instead, they see it as a site of lawyer production; a site where individual entrepreneurs are trained, credentialed, and then certified for (take your pick) predatory release on the consumer public, or distinguished public service to the citizenry. But lost in all this debate over whether the state should subsidize the increase in numbers of any given occupation, trade, or profession, is the thought that any department of the university does more than job training. <br /><br />Faculty, staff, and students all over our university are involved in research and exploration, teaching and public service, producing and translating and critically questioning knowledge itself. This function is essential not only to a healthy economy (whether under a conservative or a progressive definition of economic health), but to a healthy citizenry and a healthy culture. To me the irony is that the very institution through which the processes and products of our legal system come under critical, historical, and cultural scrutiny -- the law school -- is itself seen narrowly by supporters and critics alike as a diploma mill, not to mention subject to the personal legislative whim of one zealot or another.<br /><br />This is a pattern that we've seen -- and continue to see -- again and again, from the calls to privatize public television to the demands that libraries be run "more like businesses." Those of us involved in knowledge production, organization, dissemination, and critique have to challenge these narrow constructions, these stereotypes, these misunderstandings -- and not dismiss them as jokes for the late night talk shows.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-3049281129786685542007-06-20T15:02:00.000-05:002007-06-20T16:29:54.135-05:00Web 2.0 is more than just "you"Time magazine's "Person of the Year" in 2006 was "<a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html">You</a>," and that person lived in a place called "Web 2.0". This was the "you" of new social-networking and content-sharing web sites like YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia, and -- yes -- Blogger. It was the "you" who labored with the latest personal and portable text, audio, and video production tools to produce free and original content for the World Wide Web -- especially for those Web 1.0 corporations like Amazon and Google who now owned so much of the new Web 2.0 landscape and benefited from so much of that free Web 2.0 labor. But the growth of Web 2.0 wasn't seen as the result of these corporate giants and their projects for commercialization, commodification, brand-building and revenue-growing. Somehow, the success of Web 2.0 was due to you.<br /><br />The "you" of Web 2.0 was not without contradictions, however. While progressive, both in your technological acumen and in your willingness to open your life to the Internet, "you" were also an amateur, a loudmouth, a zealot, a short-attention-span child pretending to be a grown-up -- alternately posing as a journalist, a politico, an activist, an author, a professor, an expert of one kind or another. If Web 2.0 was ruled by "you," it was the land where "they" the experts were unwelcome, untrusted, underprivileged and even deported. Again, nevermind that most of the ideas, claims, and revelations which were discussed, debated, and derided by "you" in Web 2.0 were actually produced behind the scenes by "them" -- those representatives of powerful Web 1.0 institutions such as corporations, NGOs, governments and universities, still doing most of their knowledge production in Real World 1.0. Somehow, the failure of Web 2.0 rested with you.<br /><br />And so here I sit, one of "you," typing away at my little corner of Web 2.0 (care of the corporate infrastructure owned by Google and the discretionary time granted by the university which employs me). Folks in my broad field of communication and information studies are still debating whether Web 2.0 is repressive, liberatory, or both (a <a href="http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/category/web-20-forum/">set of weblog postings</a> by former ALA head Michael Gorman and others over at Britannica.com is the most recent). Yet the more I read about, think about, and experience Web 2.0, the more dissatisfied with both the positive and negative characterizations of it I become. Web 2.0 is an uneven geography, not so much pitting expert against amateur knowledge production, but blurring the spaces between the two, and revealing for all of us the problems of playing both expert and amateur roles -- in both knowledge-production and knowledge-consumption activities -- more intensively and interchangeably throughout our daily times and travels than ever before.<br /><br />Let me try to lay out this argument for "you." First of all, engaging in the production of Web 2.0 knowledge as amateurs does not necessarily mean that you cease to participate in more traditional forms of knowledge-production as experts. After all, a quick look at the history of "digital divide" statistics at almost any scale shows that it has been the most intensively-educated, most professionally-employed, most economically-privileged members of society who have had the most opportunity and power in building Web 2.0 over the last decade or so (much to the detriment of the utopian potential of Web 2.0, I would add). Most of you creators of Web 2.0 knowledge online continue to wrestle with knowledge offline, whether as managers or teachers, journalists or artists. With any luck, you're bringing your offline expertise online; but even if you're not, that offline expertise is still available to others to bring online themselves. Undoubtedly, though, given the different time-space demands of producing Web 2.0 knowledge (blogs go "stale" after just a few hours of inactivity) versus real-world knowledge (produced according to working weeks, semester schedules and quarterly investors deadlines) you fragment your knowledge production activities in each realm differently. <br /><br />Similarly, consuming Web 2.0 knowledge resources is more likely a selective activity than a substitution effect (even with that subset of you most likely to produce, and most feared to rely exclusively upon, Web 2.0 knowledge: college students). In times and places where you happen have access to physical information -- or when you place yourself in such settings through social and cultural conventions -- you can still read a complicated book, take lecture notes with pen and paper, deconstruct the painting hanging in front of you. But in times and places with Web 2.0 connections, questions asked can now become questions answered (at least tentatively) through online collaborative encyclopedias, film guides, or photo travelogues. Rather than substitution, fragmentation and reorganization are the activities you experiment with. The online availability of print metadata means that the time you spend browsing for books in the library is vastly reduced. But that doesn't mean you stop going in the first place.<br /><br />Finally, it is through those connections between Web 2.0 and Real World 1.0 that you bring to bear your new personal, wireless, mobile, and perpetually-active technologies -- from wi-fi laptops to Internet-capable mobile phones. These devices -- like online access and experience itself, still subject to a digital divide along the expected lines -- complicate your current time-space patterns of knowledge production in both Web 2.0 and Real World 1.0. In terms of production, ubiquitous connectivity outside the office means that you can be working on your professional industry analysis or your graduate thesis at home, in transit, or on vacation. But high-speed Web access within the office means that your coffee breaks are no longer spent around the water cooler, but typing on Blogger or uploading camera photos to Flickr. You can consult collaboratively-provided consumer information online while roaming the aisles of the grocery store. But you can also do some instant online fact-checking or footnote-following when you're reading that history book under the covers before bedtime. The physical infrastructure now available to you, allowing you to alter the spaces and times in which you draw from and contribute to Web 2.0 knowledge during your busy day, becomes nearly as important as the original virtual infrastructure that enabled you to produce and consume Web 2.0 knowledge in the first place.<br /><br />Where does all this leave "you"? Perhaps you are not as important as "they" think. After all, they still build and own those virtual and physical infrastructures -- they being the corporations, organizations, and governments which employ, engage, and serve you. You will continue to restructure your production and consumption of Web 2.0 knowledge, but always within a tightly-coupled dialectic to the production and consumption of Real World 1.0 knowledge. The potential exists for a positive feedback relationship here -- producing more knowledge, in more ways, with more checks and balances, and more points of entry, made accessible and understandable to more people than ever before. But it's a decision that is, perhaps, both up to "you" and out of "your" control.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-90162594702030094322007-06-04T09:24:00.000-05:002007-06-04T09:56:18.412-05:00Reconceptualizing "information labor" as "imaginative labor"I'm uncomfortable with the term "information labor" -- just as I'm uncomfortable with the terms "information society," "information technology," "information studies," and the like -- but I'm unsure about what to propose as a substitute. In some sense every labor process can be seen to depend on information, every physical artifact can be represented by information, every cultural communication can be reduced to information. But if information is everything then it explains nothing. <br /><br />There's the term "knowledge work" of course, which implies some sort of greater value than "information labor." "Information" suggests potentially useful but unprocessed data, while "knowledge" suggests a certain intrinsic or predetermined value to that information. The troublesome concept of "truth" also seems bound up in the idea of knowledge more than in the idea of information. Perhaps "information labor" transforms the raw materials of information into knowledge? Perhaps engaging in knowledge work is a precondition to making, defending, and reconsidering truth claims in the world? But then are information workers necessarily less skilled, valued, or compensated than knowledge workers? Still unsatisfactory.<br /><br />The term "creative labor" carries with it similar problems. We are told that it is to a new "creative class" of workers that we must look in order to rescue our culture, our economy, and our urban environment in an age of political-economic globalization. Can "creativity" be taught or is it an intrinsic gift? Are the products of creative work necessarily meant to contain or produce knowledge? Can't one be creative without having much access to most storehouses of information? And certainly a century of mass communication advertising has shown us that creativity and truth don't necessarily accompany one another. Shouldn't knowledge and information be expected to have a closer claim on such concepts?<br /><br />Some have focused on the mental mechanics of information, knowledge, or creative work and coined terms like "symbolic analysis." Such work is assumed to be more difficult and thus more valuable than the physical labors of extractive, manufacturing, or service work. At the core of such efforts, it would seem, is the ability to understand, manipulate, and generate utterances in various languages -- spoken or written, numerical or theoretical, visual or musical. Here I'm uncomfortable with the easy split between the head and the hand -- any language seems to me to be biologically and materially rooted in the bodily and environmental history of the individual trying to communicate. But I'm also uncomfortable with the dry reduction of all aesthetic and truth claims to the movement of sign and signifier. Surely we are more than Turing machines. <br /><br />So lately I've been mulling over the idea of "imaginative labor" as a useful bridge between these different concepts. Imagination requires memory, language, and mental manipulation -- each of which might be augmented by imaginative technologies of all sorts -- but it is something beyond the hundred monkeys hammering out a Shakespeare sonnet at random. Imagination requires a sense of time and space, a sense of change and play, a motivation for moving beyond the status quo (whether to a nostalgic past or a progressive future). And imagination can scale up out of our isolated dreams and diatribes, either in the communication between imaginative individuals or as the shared imaginary enacted daily and transformed over time within a cultural group. <br /><br />There's something about the various demands which imagination makes upon us that attracts me here. Being willing and able to imagine the world as it is not -- as it once was, as it might be, or as it currently appears from a different point of view -- takes education and empathy and effort. Thus imaginative work seems to be a particular form of labor which is enhanced by quality information, required for productive innovation, and perhaps even essential for daily reproduction. <br /><br />I think I'm going to try to imagine for a while what such a reconceptualization of "information technologies" as "imaginative technologies" might add to our understanding of our world.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11969255.post-86421654732461844592007-05-25T06:59:00.000-05:002007-05-25T07:00:28.563-05:00Dispatch from the Wisconsin Idea Road Trip 2007Every year in the spring, a diverse and engaged group of four dozen or so UW-Madison faculty and staff sign on to a five-day bus trip across the state known as the "Wisconsin Idea Seminar." The purposes are many. The event is certainly a fun and (hopefully) positive public relations event, as evidenced by the participation of scholarship-raising alumni and local newspaper reporters. In an economic environment where direct government appropriations only account for 19% of the university's operating budget, portraying UW-Madison to citizens and legislators all across the state in a positive light is an important goal. But in the end I think we as participants learn more about the state of Wisconsin than the state of Wisconsin learns about us. We've seen a thriving global plastic packaging firm in Oshkosh, an energy-producing dairy farm in the Fox Valley, an agricultural and gaming economy on the Oneida reservation, a mechanized cherry orchard in Door County, a maximum security prison in Green Bay, and several examples of the rich natural environment (and environmental ethics) that are preserved and reproduced by both the university's College of Agriculture and the state Department of Natural Resources. And the trip isn't even over.<br /><br />One evening during all of this, several of us gathered over drinks on the cool moonlit lawn of our Ephraim bed and breakfast to discuss the themes that had emerged so far. Amidst the good-natured joking and unwinding, some very serious issues quickly emerged. Wisconsin was a state rich in resources, labor, and ideas, but apprehensive about its place in a vast and interlocking set of competitive battles -- for tourist dollars, for state dollars, for corporate investment, for federal notice, for agricultural export, or for global status and prestige. The stark logic of economic competitiveness seemed to structure every conversation, affect every citizen, invade every institution. We consoled ourselves in public proclamations of our "innovativeness," our "adaptability," our "progressivism." But troubling realities of industrial and agricultural restructuring, racially disproportionate incarceration, and declining funding for public education made such claims ring hollow. <br /><br />Into this contradictory mix of comfort and crisis comes the University. According to the Wisconsin Idea, "the boundaries of the University classroom are the boundaries of the state itself." In other words, the teaching, research, and service which originate in Madison should have as their focus the many peoples, communities, industries, and interests of Wisconsin at large. Citizens deserve to see a direct effect — more particularly, a direct economic effect (in terms of competitive advantage) — for their sustained investment in our University (even as that investment continues to drop below 19%). <br /><br />I have a particular lens through which I view this idea. As a UW faculty member who studies information and communication processes — not just the technologies which enable those processes, but the laborers and consumers who enact them — I am beginning to think that the Wisconsin Idea is less an idealization of an economic production process (if the community subsidizes the academics, then the academics will increase the wealth of the community) as an idealization of a knowledge production process (if the community subsidizes the production of knowledge through research, then the unversity enacts the dissemination of knowledge through teaching, publication, and conferencing). <br /><br />Understanding the Wisconsin Idea in this way, however, one must move beyond the overly-simplified communication dynamic between "academy" and "community." If there's one thing that this seminar road trip has illuminated for me, it's that in this state, neither the academy nor the community is homogenous in its origins, its approaches, its interests, or its power. Just as there are both affluent and struggling towns within our political geography, there are both well-resourced and struggling departments within our disciplinary geography. Just as the swaths of "red" counties and "blue" counties vie for power in our presidential elections, both political critique and corporate partnership can vie for prominence in each faculty member's research. And just as a wide variety of ethnic, language, and cultural groups have migrated (and continue to migrate) through the Wisconsin landscape over the last thousand years, so does our University draw students, staff, and faculty from all corners of the globe, suffused with all manner of personal philosophies and subject to all manner of public prejudices. It is not enough to simply brand both the state and the state university "diverse." The point is to wrestle with the ways in which diversities of all sorts, and at all scales, affect the processes of knowledge production. <br /><br />For this reason I believe that reducing the state's plight (and the university's purpose) to one of "competitiveness" undermines the power of this diversity in knowledge production from the very start. Issues of environmental understanding, stewardship, and sustainability may not be reducible (or translatable) to market logic. Issues of cultural collision, conflict, and cooperation, while having profound links to economic power, nevertheless involve more than one's position in the labor market. And the same "high technology" that we might hope to deploy in order to attract and retain high-paying jobs cannot substitute for an informed, engaged, and media-literate political public. The life of our state is reducible to none of these single narratives. Neither is the life of the University. <br /><br />Thus for me, the "Wisconsin Idea" stands for more than just extending the boundaries of the classroom to the boundaries of the state. It means extending the meaning of teaching to include publication and engagement at both local and global levels. It means extending the meaning of disciplinary research to incorporate multidisciplinary team research involving diverse groups, as well as interdisciplinary translation of research on the part of diverse individuals. And it means seeing service not only as a way of demonstrating an economic return on investment, but as a way of reminding ourselves and our many publics that investments in knowledge of all sorts — both science and art, both critique and creativity, both practical and theoretical — yield returns of their own.Greg Downeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09154543464555817869noreply@blogger.com0