Uncovering Information Labor

Obsolete information labor occupations

2010-03-05T15:16:00.005-06:00

Cute bit on the NPR web site that a friend pointed me to: "The Jobs of Yesteryear"

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.

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 telegraph messenger boys, sadly.)

As a way of getting undergraduates to think about changes in labor and technology, I often find myself turning to the Prelinger Archives 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:

Digital Labor, Cold-War Roots

2010-02-03T00:32:00.010-06:00

Doing 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 complex1.

Fred Turner, 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.

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 country2. 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.

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 PTSD3. 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 Internet4?

Notes
1. 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.

2. 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.

3. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26078087/ , http://www.gearfuse.com/army-drone-pilots-suffer-from-combat-stress/ , and http://www.slate.com/id/2197238/ for recent discussion of this topic.

4. http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15063872

References
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.

Scolari, C. A. “Mapping conversations about new media: the theoretical field of digital communication.” New Media & Society 11, no. 6 (9, 2009): 943-964.

University-based reporting, or university-assisted reporting?

2009-11-21T08:22:00.001-06:00

(Reposted from my School's new weblog.)

In an article for the Chronicle for Higher Education this week entitled "University-Based Reporting Could Keep Journalism Alive" [http://chronicle.com/article/University-Based-Reporting/49113/] 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):

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.

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."

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.

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:

Madison Commons. [http://www.madisoncommons.org/] 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.

Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. [http://wisconsinwatch.org/] 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.

All Together Now Madison [http://atnmadison.org/] 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.

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?

Update: Blogging the Digital Labour Conference

2009-09-20T15:13:00.003-05:00

As mentioned previously on this blog, the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Information and Media Studies will be hosting a conference on Digital Labo(u)r, October 16-18, 2009.

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.

If you can't make it to Canada, stay tuned here for reports from the event.

Murdoch on Digital Journalism: The Ultimate Union-Buster

2009-09-16T09:36:00.005-05:00

One must at least admire Rupert Murdoch for his unabashed franchise. The Financial Times reports that Murdoch, in a seeming about-face, has come to herald the new era of Kindle and other similar electronic newsreading devices 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:

"'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.'"

Conference: Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens

2009-08-08T16:15:00.003-05:00

Readers 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.

Digital Labour: Workers, Authors, Citizens

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.

'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.

Adaptive Technologies, Labor and the Practice of Hindering Access

2009-08-08T15:42:00.007-05:00

[NB: This entry started out as a response to Greg's post below, 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.]

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 CapTel), 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 this diagram from CapTel for a simplified explanation of the process)- not to mention what goes into television closed captioning, but I would do well to leave a discussion of that to Greg. 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.

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 World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 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.

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?

[The U.S. Copyright Office published a Notice of Inquiry 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 can be read here. Other comments, filed by disability advocacy groups, private citizens, and content industry attorneys and others, can be accessed here.]

Uncovering speech-to-text labor

2009-07-23T07:07:00.004-05:00

My most recent book 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.

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.

An interesting posting over at the BBC technology blog "dot.life" 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 Spinvox, "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?

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.

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.

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 my first book) 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.)

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.

(UPDATE: The story over at dot.life continues for another post, with a response from the firm.)

Rethinking the labor of blogging "uncovering information labor"

2009-07-17T09:03:00.005-05:00

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 University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. 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 "The Information Society" — who will likely have much smarter (and much more timely) things to say about information labor than I have lately.

More soon, I promise.

Winter break

2008-12-21T07:05:00.002-06:00

The 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.

Better late than never: Joining the communication professors who have signed the "Statement Concerning Recent Discourse of the McCain/Palin Campaign"

2008-11-03T16:35:00.004-06:00

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 online statement has been circulating for a while and I just added my name to the mix:

Statement Concerning Recent Discourse

of the McCain/Palin Campaign

October 23, 2008

(Lastest Update: November 1st)

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.

We wish to express our great concern over unethical communication behavior that threatens to dominate the closing days of the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Both major campaigns have been criticized by fact-checking organizations for prevarications. We call on both campaigns to halt blatant misrepresentations of their opponent’s positions.

It would be misleading, however, to imply that since “both sides do it” there is no qualitative difference worth noting. In recent weeks, the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has engaged in such incendiary mendacity that we must speak out. The purposeful dissemination of messages that a communicator knows to be false and inflammatory is unethical. It is that simple.

Making decisions in a democracy requires an informed electorate. 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.
[...]

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.

Print culture and science/technology knowledge production

2008-09-12T13:43:00.002-05:00

I'm here at the UW-Madison Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America conference on "The culture of print in science, technology, engineering, and medicine" 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Summer vacation

2008-07-20T21:33:00.001-05:00

Time for me to get some information labors of my own completed before summer's up and the fall semester begins. See you in September.

Global warming and a tangle of information labors -- journalism, computer modeling, and Google searching

2008-07-17T08:27:00.003-05:00

An 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:

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.

Greg Downey
Madison, WI

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.

Here are the original articles in question, if anyone is interested:

Dismissing global warming (as first published in the Sun-Sentinel, later reprinted in the Wisconsin State Journal)
The tempest (Washington Post)
Long-range hurricane forecasts: Public service or worthless? (Sun-Sentinel)

As a postscript, today my department of Journalism & Mass Communication sent out a press release entitled "SCIENTISTS SEE BRIGHT SIDE OF WORKING WITH MEDIA." Food for thought.

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.

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.

Revealing information labor through Wordle

2008-06-17T07:18:00.010-05:00

A blog post over at Wisconsin Union Blend alerted me to this fun little Java program called Wordle:

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.

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 c.v. (traditionally produced in a paper, or at least paper-like, format) and, now, their web site. 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?

Here's the c.v.:

And here's the web site:

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.

The labor contradictions of steampunk

2008-05-08T08:30:00.003-05:00

I never thought I'd see a New York Times article on the literary, technological-tinkerer, and aesthetic movement loosely known as "steampunk," but there it is today, in the "Fashion" section:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The labor of closed captioning

2008-03-08T07:11:00.000-06:00

At 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 Johns Hopkins University Press:

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.

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.

The labor of reading -- wirelessly

2007-11-19T15:33:00.000-06:00

Big news in the world of reading today. First, as Tom Regan reported this morning on the National Public Radio News Blog, "A new National Endowment for the Arts report says Americans are reading less. And young people are reading a lot less."

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.

Lest you think this only applies to books, the full report (available as a PDF for your online reading convenience) 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 executive summary which the NEA so thoughtfully and rather ironically provided.)

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 the New York Times weblog Bits 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:

Amazon has 90,000 titles for sale at launch, including books from all major publishers.

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.

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.

A follow-up post by Brad Stone at the NYT 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 Kindle product page 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 Wikipedia article, 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.)

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).

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.

The divisions of Web 2.0 labor

2007-09-29T09:45:00.000-05:00

I'm attending a small conference this weekend at the University of Utah entitled "Frontiers of New Media: Historical and Cultural Explorations of Region, Identity, and Power in the Development of New Communications Technologies" 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?

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.

The value of your advertising-consumption labor

2007-08-06T08:59:00.000-05:00

A fascinating little piece in the New York Times today 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):

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

The neoliberal university and differential tuition for different majors

2007-07-30T08:43:00.000-05:00

A New York Times article this past weekend (Jonathan D. Glater, "Certain degrees now cost more at public universities") alerted me to something I'm ashamed to say I hadn't realized about my own University of Wisconsin — specifically, about the undergraduate degree in our School of Business:

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.

[...]

Officials at universities that have recently implemented higher tuition for specific majors say students have supported the move.

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.

With the tuition and fees for an in-state undergraduate at UW-Madison estimated to be $6,730 for the 2006-07 academic year, a $500 surcharge amounts to nearly 10% of a student's tuition bill.

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 brief history of neoliberalism.) 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.

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.

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 Spring 2007, 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.

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.

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!

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!

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?

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.

On its web site, our School of Business touts that it offers its undergraduates "The resources of a world-class public university with the personal contact of a comparatively small business school." 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.

The Wisconsin State Representative who wanted to kill the law school, and why it's more than just a silly news story

2007-07-13T12:08:00.000-05:00

This 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).

Today in the Capital Times 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.

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.

"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."

[...]

"When we have an overabundance of attorneys already, there's no point in subsidizing the education of more attorneys," Lasee said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Web 2.0 is more than just "you"

2007-06-20T15:02:00.000-05:00

Time magazine's "Person of the Year" in 2006 was "You," 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.

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.

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 set of weblog postings 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reconceptualizing "information labor" as "imaginative labor"

2007-06-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dispatch from the Wisconsin Idea Road Trip 2007

2007-05-25T06:59:00.000-05:00

Every 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.

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.

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%).

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).

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.

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.

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.

The labor of translation

2007-01-27T15:33:00.000-06:00

My latest book project -- being copyedited as we speak and hopefully on track for a Fall 2007 printing -- deals with issues of transcoding and translating information between the modes of text and speech, specifically in the case of television closed captioning. Along the way I learned a little bit about the information labor of print translation, a fascinating subject about which further information studies and print culture history volumes should be written. So it was with some appreciation that I read an article in the Guardian today about the labor necessary to translate Harry Potter to cultures and languages around the globe:

Of the 325 million Harry Potter books sold around the world, some 100 million copies don't contain a single line of JK Rowling's prose. They're mediated by the work of other writers who set the tone, create suspense and humour, and give the characters their distinctive voices and accents. The only thing these translators have no impact on whatsoever is the plot, which of course is Rowling's alone.

The moment Bloomsbury put out their next press release announcing that Rowling has delivered book seven and the publication date has been set, more than 60 translators across the world - from Europe to South America, Africa to Asia - will start sharpening their pencils. When that first published copy appears, their race will begin.

It's a race against publishers' deadlines, of course; in certain countries, where the quality of second-language English is very high, it's a race to get the book published in (say) Norwegian, or Danish, before your entire market decides not to bother waiting for the translation, and you find that you're trying to sell it to people who've already read the book in the original.

In some cases it's a race against unofficial translators, too; in China, where enforcement of international copyright law leaves something to be desired, IPR parasites churn out their quick and shoddy renegade versions more or less with impunity. These range from fan-produced translations published online, to brand-new books in the HP series sold on street corners, like the rather peculiar attempt at a book five that appeared while Rowling was in fact still hard at work in Edinburgh writing it (Rowling shares this distinction with Cervantes, who was understandably taken aback to find the second part of Don Quixote published unofficially before he'd had the chance to get round to writing it).

As this excerpt suggests, translation is not simply a straightforward word-substitution process, in danger of being replaced by simple software algorithms, but a very human pursuit somewhere between "art" and "science". Yet it is also a pursuit constrained by the technologies and economics of printing and distribution on a global scale. (Read the full article here.)

Information labor and cultural exchange - a former student of mine speaks out

2006-12-15T09:12:00.000-06:00

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to find an email from a former undergraduate honors thesis student of mine, John Pederson, who is currently working in Indonesia on a Fulbright English Teaching scholarship. That in itself reveals a form of information labor and cultural exchange that, although overshadowed in the popular imagination today by stories of military occupations and the hunt for "terrorists," at least some young people in the US (not to mention around the world) still find rewarding and important. But more than simply teaching English and learning Bahasa Indonesian, John is helping construct a local information infrastructure in other ways:

Luckily, I've had the help of an entire village to help me with this and lay the foundation, literally, for the first student radio station in Sekayu, Indonesia!

The tower looks more like student science fair project than the future of free speech for a young democracy. But once up and running, the tower will broadcast the opinions, interests and ideas of a generation to an audience of about 6 kilometers—more than enough to cover the entire village.

John also impresses me with his efforts to bring his work and the work of the people in his village to the global public through a rich web site he created at www.justsayin.info -- a nice example of the way personal publishing and the public interest can coincide, and in more than one cultural environment besides.

Producing, disseminating, and critiquing information in the Iraq War

2006-12-09T16:22:00.000-06:00

Haven't had the time or the itch to blog here for awhile, but this piece caught my attention. An article in the Washington Post cites the (bipartisan) Iraq Study Group report in noting that "U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals":

In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture.

The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. 'Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence,' it said."

I recall that when the war started in 2003, it was official military policy not to report civilian casualties and/or "collateral damage" as well. This may still be official policy, but certainly the debate over the number of Iraqi civilians killed, injured, and displaced as refugees has intensified over the last three years -- with public health experts in the Lancet citing numbers of deaths in the hundreds of thousands, and the US administration having to contest these estimates.

The situation reminds me of the "closed world" of self-perpetuating Cold War discourse which Paul Edwards discusses in his book of the same name. Not only the terms of the debate, but the institutional and technological structures of information-gathering and validation are tied from the very start to a particular worldview, ideology, or set of assumptions about political-economic power and the inevitability of military engagement. With the limited and slanted informational tools at hand, it becomes impossible to argue against power and its policies.

When the most basic of measures -- "acts of violence," civilian casualties, scale of the refugee problem -- are not only in dispute, but possibly under active cloak and at the very least removed from official responsibility, how are policymakers, watchdog journalists, members of NGOs, and interested citizens supposed to form opinions and push for action?

The 24/7 time and space of information labor

2006-06-15T10:04:00.000-05:00

Today a news item on Inside Higher Ed discusses the wisdom of keeping university library and computing sites open 24/7 to meet student demand for round-the-clock resource availability:

Each new year seems to be marked by a flourish of excited press releases and announcements regarding expanded hours of operation at libraries and technology centers at colleges and universities across the nation.

While many administrators boast that such developments are part of their efforts to be responsive to student desires, many health professionals, especially those focused on sleep research, say that the extra hours may actually be harming the well-being and health of students. At a recent meeting of the American College Health Association several professionals were abuzz about sleep issues in the college-age population that they feel aren’t getting enough ettention, but many see the problems only growing larger.

“We are living in a commercial world that goes 24/7,” says Michael McNeil, coordinator of the Health Empowerment Office at Temple University. “My colleagues in higher education may not like this, but we’re fostering procrastination and cramming — time management skills should be put first.”

Alison Beaver, director of health promotion at the University of Virginia’s Elson Student Health Center, says that she wouldn’t be surprised to one day learn that the prevalence of mental health issues reported by many of today’s students are correlated with a lack of sleep. Research is currently ongoing in this area.

The article does suggest that perhaps late-night noise in dorms and apartments leads students to seek out-of-home study and work sites, even if they have broadband internet connections in their bedrooms. But overall the piece neglects the question of what might be driving student patterns of 24/7 resource demand and use. Is it simply "procrastination and cramming," or might this demand be related to the difficulty of students finding open computer terminals and/or study spaces during peak hours of demand? Perhaps professors are demanding more and more online reading and research as components of classwork (I know I am). Or perhaps library and computing resources are actually being used more for leisure -- gaming, chat, web-surfing, and collegiality -- during the extended hours, thus contributing to mental and emotional health.

More research on this would be great. There's probably academic library "uses and users" research out there already on the topic. It would be nice to see this research about changes in undergraduate information labor time/space pattern correlated with research in the time/space patterns of information in the corporate, government, and non-profit worlds of post-college employment, too. Perhaps that's where the real speedup is happening ... and perhaps, like it or not, 24/7 information sites, resources and labor habits in college are preparing our students for their ultimate high-tech and high-stress careers.

RESOURCES

Rob Capriccioso, "Sleepy hollow," Inside Higher Ed (15 June 2006)

Cycles of knowledge production, consumption, and contestation

2006-05-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

I work in two academic departments at once, one which we might call a "journalism school" and the other a "library school". Part of my job entails finding connections between these two, which I conceptualize as two different (but related) "positionalities" for viewing the overall circuit of knowledge production, consumption, and reproduction in society at different (but related) "moments" in the overall dialectical process. (Whew.) So when I find an interesting and accessible example of all this -- a situation in which the moments of journalism and librarianship overtly connect -- I want to talk about it.

Milwaukee-based newspaper columnist Joel McNally wrote a recent column which provided me with just such an example. The column concerns the evolving debate over the production, consumption, marketing, economic profitability, and economic externalities of "fast food" in American society. Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser has most recently reenergized this debate with his 2001 book _Fast Food Nation: The dark side of the all-American meal_, a work of "muckraking" reporting which evolved out of an earlier two-part article of his in _Rolling Stone_. Since then, a popular film and DVD _Super Size Me_ has taken up the same theme (including an interview with Schlosser on the DVD edition) and former president Bill Clinton has negotiated a deal with major soft drink distributors to stop placing sugared soda in schools. Now Schlosser and a co-author, Charles Wilson, have taken their message to a youth media audience with their new children's book _Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food_ -- a clear candidate for widespread dissemination in public and school libraries.

Controversey has followed this iteration of knowledge from journalism to bookseller to cinema to library. As McNally writes,

Front groups with names that imply they are promoting "freedom" or "liberty" are, in fact, attempting to demonize Schlosser to prevent him from getting his message to the book's target audience of middle school students and young teenagers, who are in the process of developing lifelong, unhealthful eating habits.

The instantly manufactured controversy upon publication of the book was foreshadowed by a story in the Wall Street Journal about an internal memo circulated within McDonald's management preparing them to deal aggressively with the publication of "Chew on This" and the release of an upcoming film based on "Fast Food Nation."

[...]

Some of the tactics reach ever further back to the red-baiting days of Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy. A right-wing group that calls itself the Heartland Institute accuses Schlosser of "tricking young people into fearing the world's finest food supply in order to entice them into his web ... to lead them away from capitalism into his failed socialist ideology."

[...]

The most vicious attacks accuse Schlosser of being a racist who wants to deny choices to minorities. This is a reporter who has documented the industry's exploitation of minority communities and disregard for the lives of black and Latino workers. The motive behind the smear tactic is as transparent as the accusation he is subverting the young.

One of the efforts to refute Schlosser's arguments is the website "Best Food Nation", an industry umbrella group (sponsored by the American Meat Institute, the National Potato Council, the Snack Food Association, etc.) which claims to offer "the facts about the U.S. food supply, which is among the safest, most affordable and most abundant food supplies in the world":

Simply put, America is the Best Food Nation. From safe, abundant and affordable food choices to
jobs and economic growth for our communities, the people working in the U.S. food system provide innumerable benefits not only to Americans, but consumers across the globe. Unfortunately, critics
of our food system want consumers to think otherwise and are promoting their agendas using
information that is inaccurate, misleading and incomplete.

[...]

We have always invited public discussion on issues related to our food supply. But we feel those discussions should be based on facts, and invite you to explore the information contained within
this site and form your own opinion.

As one might expect in a debate like this which involves not simply personal life choices, but questions of science, medicine, and technology, both sides appeal to the "facts" and deride their opponents as "promoting their agendas." Of course, if Schlosser's "agenda" is to make a career as a reputable and influential journalist, and the food industry's "agenda" is to make the greatest profit producing and distributing food, we might very well factor this into the construction of "facts" on each side. As reported on the PR Watch website recently, tracking the "agendas" of the various interest groups (and front groups) mobilized in such a debate -- such as the "Heartland Institute," the "American Council on Science and Health," and the "Center for Individual Freedom" -- is in itself a full-time job for organizations like SourceWatch.

For example, McDonalds corporation is funding anti-Schlosser campaigns both on its own and together with other food industry partners. I say anti-Schlosser, and not pro-fast-food, because it seems that the tactics not only defend industry practices, but attempt to discredit Schlosser as a voice of authority. According to an article on the debate in the Wall Street Journal,

McDonald's Corp. has been trying to counter Mr. Schlosser's message with a public-relations campaign that plays up the chain's new healthy offerings and spotlights workers who have climbed through the Oak Brook, Ill., chain's corporate ranks.

The nation's largest fast-food chain is also funding TCS Daily, an arm of the Washington lobbying and public-relations firm DCI Group, that is making more pointed attacks against Mr. Schlosser and his work. Last week, TCS Daily launched a Web site called Fast Talk Nation that called his theories "rhetoric" and argued that he wants to decriminalize marijuana, based on excerpts from one of his other books, "Reefer Madness," about sex, drugs and cheap labor in the American black market.

Last Friday, TCS Daily abruptly closed the Fast Talk Nation site two days after its launch. James Glassman, who says he "hosts" the TCS Daily site, says he closed the Fast Talk Nation site because he wanted to pool his resources with the broader industry's Best Food Nation site.

But for me, this debate is interesting because it is being played out at so many different points along the circuit of social knowledge production -- in letters to the editor, in bookseller and film protests and boycotts, in corporate trade association and think tank press releases, and now, quite possibly, schools and libraries. McNally gets it right, I think, when he pinpoints the current focus of the campaign against Schlosser as schools and libraries which are both prone to local community pressure and dependent on local community support:

In a way, it doesn't even matter how patently absurd or easily discredited the attacks against Schlosser are. They will succeed if they somehow turn Schlosser, a talented journalist writing about important subjects, into a "controversial figure."

One of the goals, obviously, is to keep Schlosser (and his book) out of our schools. School administrators today are easily intimidated into censoring everything from books in the library to plays students are permitted to perform to the T-shirts kids wear.

Professionals from the positionalities of both journalism and librarianship need to be involved in debates like these -- indeed, they can hardly avoid them. Journalists can offer a perspective on the quality of Schlosser's reporting: Is it clear? Well-sourced? Is the evidence he uses credible? Are his methods transparent? And does he have a history of quality reporting for quality media outlets that can bolster his legitimacy? Similarly, librarians can offer a perspective on the quality of Schlosser's translation of this reporting for a youth audience: Is it unique? Have teachers and administrators been seeking such resources? Does it resonate with children? Is it transparent? Does it lead the classroom to open a debate, or to forclose it? Teaching our future journalism and library professionals to wade into such controversies bravely and competently is one of our greatest responsibilities at the university level, I think.

But when confronted by such a coordinated and, to my mind, non-transparent attack on the kind of knowledge claims that Schlosser is making across various media, across various institutions, and across the various moments of the knowledge production-consumption-reproduction cycle, it is not enough to view such controversies only from one's own vantage point. Journalists and librarians, teachers and professors, scientists and doctors, government officials and non-governmental activists alike -- in fact, anyone who makes their living (and draws their legitimacy) from the professional production of quality knowledge -- need to coordinate as well. We need to understand the points where power is applied in society in such debates over not only knowledge "facts," but methods of knowledge production themselves.

All this is not to say a teacher, a scientist, a politician should or will agree, in the end, with Schlosser -- or with any other sincere individual trying to push the boundaries of knowledge in society from his or her own professional position. But what it does say is that all knowledge professionals have a stake in how knowledge is produced, consumed, and contested across the whole cycle. In some parts of the cycle, corporate wealth carriers with it great power to influence debate (sometimes even shut down debate). In other parts of the cycle, grassroots experience, opinion and, yes, even ignorance can be mobilized in powerful ways. And sometimes sincere, transparent, peer-reviewed, non-profit knowledge production carries a powerful weight in and of itself. But if those involved at each different moment never take the time to consider the source and extent of their power in the cycle -- both as individual professionals and together as collaborative professions -- that cycle itself threatens to "short-circuit" through the path of least resistance.

Embodying information artifacts and information labor

2006-05-09T12:24:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting little essay over at Inside Higher Ed today by anthropologist Alex Golub on a topic that my class on US library history has been debating recently: the benefits and drawbacks of paper-based information artifacts (like books) versus digital information artifacts (like online journals). Golub nicely points out that one might reasonably appreciate both physical and virtual modes of information production, distribution, and consumption, for differing reasons:

I am a digitally-enabled, network-ready scholar. I check e-mail and browse the Web. I read RSS feeds. I leverage Web 2.0’s ambient findability to implement AJAX-based tagsonomy-focused long-tail wiki content alerting via preprint open-access e-archives with social networking services. I am so enthusiastic about digital scholarship that about a year ago I published a piece in my scholarly association’s newsletter advocating that we incorporate it into our publications program. The piece was pretty widely read. At annual meetings I had colleagues tell me that they really like it and are interested in digital scholarship but they still (and presumably unlike me) enjoy reading actually physical books. This always surprised me because I love books too, and it never occurred to me that an interest in digital scholarship meant turning your back on paper. So just to set the record straight, I would like to state in this (admittedly Web-only) public forum that I have a deep and abiding passion for paper: I love it. Love it.

But the thing that interests me about Golub's essay is that he speaks not only of information artifacts, but of information labor with and through those artifacts -- how labor itself has qualities both virtual and embodied, which we often take for granted:

Paper has a corporeality that digital texts do not. For instance, have you ever tried to find a quote in a book and been unable to remember whether it was on the left or right hand side of the page? This just a trivial example of way in which paper’s physicality is the origin of its utility.

And of course professors have bodies too. This is another way that scholarship is embodied — we often do it while in libraries. Here our bodies are literally in a vast assemblage of paper with its own unique form of usability. And as scholars achieve total communion with the stacks, they find books based not just on catalog number, but on all of their senses. The fourth floor of the library I wrote my Ph.D. in sounded and smelled differently than the second did. How many of us — even the lab scientists — with Ph.D.’s will ever be able to forget the physical layout of the libraries where we wrote our dissertations?

Golub goes on to point out that information artifacts -- especially physical, print artifacts -- help us structure and define the very space and time of our work and leisure environments, and become wrapped up with our identities as information consumers and information producers:

Our collections of physical, paper texts do not only help explain who we are to ourselves, they signal this to our visitors. When my guests first enter my apartment and make a beeline to my shelves they are actually learning more about me. When they admire my copy of Roscher and Knies I am learning something about them. When they spot my first edition of Ricky Jay’s Cards as Weapons or Scatological Rites Of All Nations I know that I have found a true soul mate. I am convinced that this is somehow more important than finding out that the professor in the office next to me reads the same cat blogs that I do.

It seems to me that considering issues like these of labor, space, and even identity constitute a much more productive way of thinking about the dialectic between print and virtual information than the "either-or" arguments that are so easy to engage in (and which, admittedly, sometimes I foster in my own classes on the subject).

For example, Nicholson Baker's popular and controversial (at least within library, information studies, and archival fields) book _Double Fold_ seems to be in a sense entirely about the same print-based versus screen-based personal identity construction that Neil Postman talked about in his book _Amusing ourselves to death_. Baker talks mainly about the battle for space and funding in libraries and the rationalization for microfilming and then destroying printed texts in order to secure that space and funding. And Postman is mostly interested in the effects of consuming screen-based information rather than print-based information, especially the effects on the public's ability to engage in rational debate. (Much of this debate could probably be traced back to McLuhan, in fact.)

But both of these texts raise questions about information production as well -- the way moving among printed materials itself becomes part of our conception of ourselves as knowledge producers, knowledge "miners," knowledge organizers. That's not to say one can't produce, "mine," or organize knowledge in a virtual environment as well. But we are bodies in space and time, like it or not, and I have to believe that over the long term the way we work, and the way we build individual and collective meaning from that work, must change in relation to the spatiality, temporality, and materiality of that work.

P.S. As I'm writing this I'm also proctoring a final exam in a basement classroom which has become a temporary holding pen for books being moved out of a small department library which is itself being transformed into more of a "wired workspace" than a set of print stacks. I am not at all against this transition, which is being performed carefully and professionally. But ironically, the colleagues who teach regularly in this classroom tell me they want the rejected books to stay here -- not only for their sound-deadening properties, but because they give the room a different "feel." I guess it takes a trained anthropologist to recognize that the "feel" of such spaces might really matter in substantive ways to the value that is produced in and through those spaces.

Spanish-speaking workers in the US and the technological training products which target them

2006-05-02T09:31:00.000-05:00

As the debate over undocumented Latino immigrant workers in the US has unfolded over the last month here in the US, I've been trying to think about the ways in which concepts of "information labor" are wrapped up in this issue. Marc Cooper, a journalist and "Senior Fellow for Border Justice at the USC Annenberg School’s Institute for Justice and Journalism," had two weeks ago written a nice summary at TruthDig of how immigration reform bubbled up to the top of the news agenda in the last few weeks -- along with some revealing statistical and historical context to the debate.

The root cause of the immigration surge, of course, has nothing to do with a broken U.S. border but everything to do with a ruined Mexican economy. The wage differential between the U.S. and Mexico is about 11 to 1. Some studies suggest that in the agricultural sector there’s a 20-to-1 differential. The passage of the 1994 NAFTA agreement further depressed Mexican rural wages and further accelerated the immigration wave. No one knows the exact figure, but something like 15 million Mexicans have emigrated to the U.S. in the last 20 years. An equal number are expected over the next two decades.

An estimated record 12 million undocumented —or illegal aliens if you prefer—now reside in the United States, more than double the number of a decade ago. Undocumented Mexican workers, once found primarily in the fields of the Southwest, now occupy the front lines of the service labor market in almost every state of the union.

So the time/space geography of undocumented Mexican labor in particular seems to have diversified from seasonal work in rural agricultural regions to year-round service work in urban and suburban regions -- particularly in the hotel and restaurant industry, if the sources I'm reading are any indication. Certainly those industries have taken "informatizing" measures over the last two decades in order to consolidate their business processes, from just-in-time ordering of food and supplies to fragmenting the time and space of handling take-out orders (such as the McDonald's experiments with having remote English-speaking drive-through workers speak to customers in restaurants with largely Spanish-speaking on-site labor). So certainly information tools and telecommunications links are now intimately tied up in the corporate environment which employs so many Spanish-speaking Americans and would-be Americans.

But there are other ways in which this labor force is being targeted by vendors of information products -- especially for high-tech English language training. I found a 2004 story from the Dallas Morning News which was reprinted on the site of the restaurant-industry-sponsored Multicultural Foodservice & Hospitality Alliance that talks about some of these new training efforts:

Dallas-based Brinker International Inc. is launching one of the largest initiatives combining technology and English lessons.

In February, the nation's second-largest casual dining company plans to launch an at-home program called Sed de Saber (roughly "thirst for knowledge" in Spanish).

Workers will use durable interactive touch-pads, similar to the popular LeapFrog toy.

They'll study a Mexican novella to learn restaurant terms and concepts in English, said Jose Gomez, director of diversity for Brinker. More than a third of Brinker's roughly 95,000 restaurant employees are Hispanic.

Interestingly (or ironically) Brinker International is the parent company of the very profitable Mexican-themed chain restaurants "Chili's" and "On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina".

The "Sed de Saber" system, which does in fact use licensed LeapPad technology (designed for infants to highschoolers), is produced by Newport Beach, CA-based Retention Education, LLC. Manuals for both employees and their "program managers" can be found on their web site. Although the system is promoted as an "English language learning program" which is "designed to help your Hispanic employees learn English language skills that can improve the quality of their lives," many of the topics listed in the manual concentrate on food service job tasks like "understanding schedules," "being a prep cook," "taking orders," "handling money," and "being a shift manager." Still, other more general topics are included like "shopping for groceries," "talking to the pharmacist," and "finding community resources."

At the beginning of the program manager guide is a warning of sorts that there are legal standards for how this four- to six-month training must be offered. If it is a mandatory training program, employees must be paid for their participation time; if it is voluntary, employees must not be penalized for choosing not to participate, and must not use the system during work hours. Retention Education even suggests that employers might want to offer Sed de Saber for employees to purchase themselves, perhaps "through a payroll deduction." The retail version of Sed de Saber costs $300 (plus shipping and handling), so a weekly payroll deduction over the suggested six-month training period would be at least $12.50/week if the employee paid all costs. I wonder how Brinker and other restaurant owners, large and small, are handling these legal nuances. (The MF&HA piece indicated that Brinker's use of the program was as an "at home" training, suggesting that it is voluntary/unpaid.)

I wonder what Latino/a, Hispanic and Chicano/a advocacy groups think about such training programs. My brief web search hasn't revealed anything, but I'm going to keep following this thread. Of course, the corporate rhetoric around such training programs, no matter what their merits or risks, never talks about using them to facilitate the hiring of undocumented labor. These are training programs for "Americans" to learn English. Amidst the current charges that undocumented Mexican immigrants in particular are some sort of "drain" on the economic resources of the US (charges which I think are ridiculous if one counts not only the economic value these workers add to the economy, but also the sales taxes, SSI taxes, and property taxes they pay), perhaps it could be useful to highlight these persons as not only eager to learn English -- and to pay in terms of their time and possibly their money for the opportunity -- but also as a huge consumer market targeted by the leaders of high-tech education ventures.

Informatics, information science, and information studies, oh my

2006-04-25T10:21:00.000-05:00

On a lark, I decided to search for "information studies" on Wikipedia today. Now, before people interpret this as some kind of blanket endorsement (or critique) of the quality, purpose or value of Wikipedia, let me say that the reason I was curious about the Wikipedia entry for "information studies" was that I presumed that the kind of people who claim to practice "information studies" might actually be showing up as authors on Wikipedia.

But, sadly, there was no Wikipedia entry for "information studies" as of today. This intrigued me even more. I figured that maybe the field of "information studies" would be cast instead as "information science" (for all the typical contradictory reasons relating to the valuing of scientific knowledge as supposedly value-free). But the Wikipedia entry for "information science" is merely a disambiguation page which points to either "informatics" or "library and information science". So I followed up these two categories and here is what I found:

informatics

Informatics is a sub-genre[1] of information science, which is the study of information. It is often, though not exclusively, studied as a branch of computer science and information technology and is related to ontology and software engineering. Someone who practices the profession of informatics is called an informaticist, an informatician, or simply an informatics scientist.

Informatics is primarily concerned with the structure, creation, management, storage, retrieval, dissemination and transfer of information. Informatics also includes studying the application of information in organizations, on its usage and the interaction between people, organizations and information systems. Within informatics, attention has been given in recent years to human computer interaction (HCI), value sensitive design, iterative design processes and to the ways people generate, use and find information.

Informatics focuses on understanding problems from the perspective of the stakeholders involved and then applying information (and other) technology as needed. In other words, it tackles the problem first rather than technology first.

library and information science

Library and information science (LIS) is the study of issues related to libraries and the information fields. This includes academic studies regarding how library resources are used and how people interact with library systems. These studies tend to be specific to certain libraries at certain times. The organization of knowledge for efficient retrieval of relevant information is also a major research goal of LIS. Basic topics in LIS include the acquisition, cataloging, classification, and preservation of library materials. In a more present-day view, a fervent outgrowth of LIS is information architecture. LIS should not be confused with information theory, the mathematical study of the concept of information, or information science a field related to computer science and cognitive science.

Programs in LIS are interdisciplinary, overlapping with the fields of computer science, various social sciences, statistics, and systems analysis.

Finally, I found this sparse but intriguing category separate from the rest: social study of information systems

Most simply The Social Study of Information Systems is interested in people developing and using technology and the "culture" of those people.

SSIS studies these phenomena by drawing on and using "lenses" provided by social sciences, including: Philosophy, Sociology, Social Psychology, Organisational Theory, Political Science.

Of the three categories, "informatics" was by far the most eclectic, listing various subfields such as "social informatics," "community informatics," "legal informatics," "discovery informatics," and more. By contrast, the "library and information science" entry was primarily concerned with distinguishing itself from "librarianship," or "the application of library science" which "comprises the practical services rendered by librarians in their day-to-day attempts to meet the needs of library patrons."

As a member of a School of Library and Information Studies, who himself studies labor and information/communication technology, you can imagine my frustration at this point. Perhaps I should endeavor to create a subfield of "labor informatics" by staking out some space in Wikipedia. Perhaps I should author a "library and Information Studies" page and challenge the division between "informatics" and "library and information science". But I don't think that waging these boundary battles through Wikipedia would be a very productive use of my time. Yet I was intrigued enough to delve into some of the comments which lurk behind each Wikipedia article, to see if the article authors (and readers) themselves had any insight into the difficulty of conceptualizing these related areas of interest.

In the "library and information science" discussion, one reader commented, "There is no treatment of the history of library science or librarianship, nor an adequate explanation of the evolution of the discipline and its programs into modern-day Library and Information Science." Another asked, "Is there a link I missed that takes one to a discussion of the theoretical foundations of the field? I mostly see a discussion of librarianship (which is fine on its own), but perhaps this could use a bit of discussion about the various "paradigms" (if I may use that loaded word) such as the focus on systems, the cognitive focus on the individual, and the more social constructionist and/or domain analytic views?" So it seems that the current Wikipedia entry for "library and information science" is under considerable criticism already and is ripe for some enterprising LIS graduate student to revise.

The "informatics" discussion is even more interesting -- and more contested. One reader argued, "I do not agree with the equivalence of Informatics and Information Science in general. They might be used syonymously in some contexts, but in my experience they are considered different but related fields. I'm not going to make any edits to the page until I can back up my statements here with some sources to cite, but I wanted to bring this up. I am an "informatics scientist" in a global pharmaceutical company, and the group that utilizes the 'information science' skill set is separate with distinct tools, methodologies, and responsibilities." Another pointed out the rather amusing contradiction that "Currently Computer Science is listed as a sub-category of Information Science and Information Science is listed as a sub-category of Computer Science." And a third reader pointed out that perhaps what the overall field needs is a more historical/geographical analysis of its origins and meanings: "Informatics (US) / Information science (EU) evolved out of computer science, just like software engineering. Therefore subjects studied by computer scientist a decade ago, like human-computer interaction, are now studied by information scientists." This kind of "archeology" of informatics would indeed be useful, since according to Wikipedia the field itself somehow split into half a dozen different subfields. Sadly, the subfield article on "social informatics" lacks discussion entirely.

I'm still not sure what to make of all this, if anything. But a cursory glance at the mission statements of various graduate programs in "information science," "information studies," and "informatics" (all flavors) reveals little consensus on this terminology -- even though, as I mentioned in the last post, the study of "information" in social life has been going on for at least half a century now. Right now I'm trying to spec out a historical/geographical study of my own that would consider the post-Memex, pre-WWW debates over technology, labor, and libraries in the US, a story that intimately involves this struggle over the defnition of "information science" and "library science" in academic settings. I enter this research with the assumption that discursive battles like these can carry real risks and rewards, especially in the competition for scarce research funds, scarce faculty positions, or even scarce technological infrastructures. If Wikipedia is any indication -- and frankly, maybe it isn't -- that competition is far from resolved today

Invisibility of information studies

2006-04-18T09:16:00.000-05:00

Not only is "information labor" often invisible in society these days, but the very scholars in academia who study it are also quite often invisible. This morning, for example, I was alerted to a National Research Council project meant to assess US doctoral programs:

The National Research Council has launched its latest project to assess U.S. research doctorate programs. Like previous efforts in 1983 and 1995, the new study is designed to help universities improve the quality of these programs through benchmarking; provide potential students and the public with accessible, readily available information on doctoral programs nationwide; and enhance the nation's overall research capacity. Data will be available in late 2007.

The problem lies with the research taxonomy that the NRC is apparently going to use -- an organized set of valid fields of doctoral study which quite completely ignores both new and old areas of social science study of information and society such as "social informatics," "library science," and "information studies." The NRC taxonomy leaves only the so-called "emerging field" of "information science" under the category of "physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering." Information science is certainly not an "emerging" field -- it's been around for more than half a century -- but more than that, information science doesn't capture the related but quite distinct work that I and my colleagues do to understand the dialectical relationship between information products, processes, and philosophies throughout society as a whole.

Divisions of information labor in the fast-food industry

2006-04-11T08:06:00.000-05:00

From today's New York Times comes an article on a new spatial, technological, wage, and task division of labor at McDonald's, which allows the fast-food giant to gain greater control over time by extending its operations across space:

Like many American teenagers, Julissa Vargas, 17, has a minimum-wage job in the fast-food industry — but hers has an unusual geographic reach.

"Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?" Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details —"You Must Ask for Condiments," a sign next to her computer terminal instructs — and wished the woman a wonderful day.

What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas's workplace here on California's central coast. She was at a McDonald's in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo.

Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald's outlets around the country. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few yards from where they were placed.

The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through.

The managerial efficiencies of such an arrangement don't only come from the time savings, however. There is both greater surveillance and control over empolyees and greater specialization of labor tasks:

Software tracks her productivity and speed, and every so often a red box pops up on her screen to test whether she is paying attention. She is expected to click on it within 1.75 seconds. In the break room, a computer screen lets employees know just how many minutes have elapsed since they left their workstations. [...]

Its workers are experts in the McDonald's menu; they are trained to be polite, to urge customers to add items to their order and, above all, to be fast. Each worker takes up to 95 orders an hour during peak times. Customers pulling up to the drive-through menu are connected to the computer of a call-center employee using Internet calling technology. The first thing the McDonald's customer hears is a prerecorded greeting in the voice of the employee. [...]

The call-center system allows employees to be monitored and tracked much more closely than would be possible if they were in restaurants. [The manager's] computer screen gives him constant updates as to which workers are not meeting standards.

Finally, this system also serves to reinforce and reproduce greater polarization between the language and job skills available in various local labor markets:

Often, in California in particular, he said, the employee may primarily speak Spanish, while the customer speaks only English — a problem that can be eliminated with a specialized call-center crew. "We believe we raise the customer-service bar by having people who are very articulate, have a good command of the English language, and some who are bilingual," he said.

Specialization at a centralized call center means there is no need to invest in language training -- either in English or in Spanish -- or customer-service training at local McDonald's sites. Is there also no need to worry about a literate work force at such sites? How much might the distancing of mental and manual labor through realtime information technology be pushed? What might the effects be on the already-limited employment experience that working in such a commercial organization confers on its workers?

No mention is made in the article of the other dangers of such a geographic displacement -- such as that local consumers will feel out of touch with the distant language coming out of the drive-through speakers as opposed to the face they see in the drive-up window, or that the corporation will use such technologies to move its labor force into areas of the globe with few labor protections and poverty-level wages.

I wonder, if McDonald's sets a precedent with such disembodied retail customer interaction services, which companies and industries will follow next? Telepresence at the checkout counter in the supermarket? Or at the Gap? How far is far-fetched here?

Interdisciplinarity, sub-disciplinarity, and inter-topicality

2006-03-31T06:55:00.000-06:00

I attended the kickoff event to a conference on interdisciplinarity at my Big State-Supported But Increasingly Privately-Funded university last night. This was an event of keen interest to me, as I consider myself "interdisciplinary" in several different senses and I wondered how the presenters would define and interpret and value interdisciplinarity themselves.

Why do I call myself "interdisciplinary"? First, I have earned degrees in several different "disciplines". I have a Bachelor's and Master's in "computer science," I have a second Master's in "liberal studies," and I have a hybrid Ph.D. in both "history of technology" and "human geography" (I was a member of both departments during my graduate study). Some might say this is a "multidisciplinary" background, not an "interdisciplinary" one. My response would be that if I wrote LISP code on Monday, engaged in discourse analysis on Tuesday, did some history work on Wednesday, and acted like a geographer on Thursday, you could accurately call me "multidisciplinary". But since I combine different aspects of the different disciplines I was trained in throughout my week and work, I call myself "interdisciplinary".

Really, though, each of these disciplines is sort of a subdiscipline itself of a larger set of what many might consider more "fundamental" disciplinary domains. Obviously, "history of technology" is a "history of ..." just like other history specialties which focus on a single era, a single region, a single population, or a single social issue. Similarly, "human geography" competes with the "geography of ..." cast in several different ways. The field of "liberal studies" might not even be considered by many to be a real discipline, though I think of it as a subfield of American Studies these days (I didn't when I was earning the degree). And even "computer science" may be a sort of subfield of "computer engineering" (from the point of view of the engineers) or a subfield of "information science" (from the point of view of the information scientists).

A trickier question might be trying to specify what makes these sub-disciplines -- or their parent domains -- "disciplines" in the first place. Many choose a topic-focused definition: computer science is the study of computer software; liberal studies is the study of ideas within liberal societies; history of technology the study of technological change; and human geography the study of human patterns of settlement. But I think the real key to conceptualizing a discipline is to consider not the topic under study, but the "ways of knowing" (methods, standards, and norms of value production) involved in that discipline. In computer science, the production of efficient, effective, even elegant "code" was proof of expertise. Liberal studies demanded quick facility with the texual analysis of works in history, literature, and policy. History relies upon the discovery, analysis, and organization of primary and archival source material. And geography demands conceptions of space, time, and scale, in both absolute and relative senses, and the ability to use these conceptions to demonstrably inform the core of one's work. Practitioners in different disciplines don't just investigate different things -- they see those things in entirely different ways.

This splitting apart claims about "ways of knowing" (methodologies, concepts, theories, epistemologies) from claims concerning "things worth knowing about" (topics of study) is important enough to warrant an additional set of terms beyond "interdisciplinarity," I think, for those of us who foolishly attempt to know about more than one thing at a time. Maybe academics who research several different topics independent of each other should be called "multi-topicial"? And maybe the research of two or more different topics in an integrated, intertwined way should be called "inter-topicality?" Myself, I claim to study both information/communication technologies and the human labors that emerge and adapt in concert with these technologies. The fact that I claim a special relationship between the two topics makes me "inter-topical" rather than "multi-topical," I think. And the fact that I study this inter-topical relationship from multiple ways of knowing -- crucially, trying to relate those ways of knowing together rather than applying them separately or in sequence -- makes me an "interdisciplinary inter-topical" researcher rather than a "multidisciplinary inter-topical" researcher.

If you're still with me, I appreciate it, because all this was actually leading up to something.

That interdisciplinarity conference I mentioned started off with a mini history of several longstanding interdisciplinary programs on our campus -- one dealt with environmental studies, another with poverty studies, a third with women's studies, and a fourth with international studies. All were described as organizational arrangements meant to focus on a single problem through the use of teams of scholars, each of whom came from a different discipline. This is a couple of steps away from the plight I find myself in, as a single scholar who studies multiple problems together from multiple disciplines at once.

But it gets worse (or better). I also happened to be employed in two departments at once (the two different "disciplines" of "information studies" and "communication studies"), each of which could itself be seen as an "interdisciplinary" program in its own right (single problem, many scholars each from different home disciplines).

You can see now why maybe I was hoping to find some answers from this two-hour session I attended. Alas, answers don't come that easily anywhere in academia. But the session helped me generate a new set of questions that I want to articulate here before I forget them. The questions deal with that relationship between the production of "interdisciplinary (and single-topic) centers" (like a science/technology studies department hiring many faculty each trained in a different discipline) and the production of "interdisciplinary (and multi-topic) scholars" (like me). Does the funding of one lead (through generations of research collaboration and graduate student training) to the production of the other? Are interdisciplinary or inter-topical academics more likely to be hired by interdisciplinary units on campus, or are they now coveted by (or targeted toward) "traditional" disciplinary departments which need to be "diversified"? What are the power relations at work when "disciplinary" and "interdisciplinary" scholars must fight for a zero-sum-game of decreasing funding as states pull resources from universities? Do these power relations play out differently within "interdisciplinary" units versus "disciplinary" departments? And finally -- what do we do about the real contradictions that emerge in this system, such as when departments such as mine (or scholars such as myself) find themselves sometimes claiming "disciplinary" tradition, and other times claiming "interdiscipilnary" innovation?

The myths of "merit" in information labor?

2006-03-23T07:23:00.000-06:00

A new book by Harvard University law professor Lani Guinier entitled "Meritocracy Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Class Became Race, and College Education Became a Gift from the Poor to the Rich," argues that "what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry." For Guinier, the notion of "merit" needs to be problematized because, paradoxically, we rely on it as the litmus test for entrance into the one institution which is designed to allow people of different cultural backgrounds, socio-economic power positions, and ideological beliefs to enhance and demonstrate their "merit" by acquiring professional skills, wrestling with complex ideas, and building a record of scholarly achievement: higher education in the form of prestigious public and private colleges and universities. Guinier explains:

I became interested in the 1990s as a result of looking at the performance of women in law school. A student and I became interested in the disparity between the grades that men and women at an Ivy League law school were receiving. Working with Michelle Fein and Jean Belan, we found that male and female students were coming in with basically the same credentials. The minor difference was that the women tended to have entered with slightly higher undergraduate grades and the men with higher LSATs.

The assumption at that time was that incoming credentials predicted how you would perform. Relying on things like the LSAT allowed law school officials to say they were determining admission based on merit. So several colleagues told me to look at the LSAT scores because they were confident that I might find something to explain the significant differences in performance. But we found that, surprisingly, the LSAT was actually a very poor predictor of performance for both men and women, that this "objective" marker which determined who could even gain access was actually not accomplishing its ostensible mandate.

I then became interested in studying meritocracy because of the attacks poor and working class whites were waging against affirmative action. People were arguing that they were rejected from positions because less qualified people of color were taking their spots. I began to question what determines who is qualified. Then, the more research I did, the more I discovered that these so-called markers of merit did not actually correlate with future performance in college but rather correlated more with an applicant's parents' and even grandparents' wealth. Schools were substituting markers of wealth for merit.

One of Guinier's goals in writing this book is to complicate arguments about affirmative action in higher education, showing that while much of the rhetoric is about race-based preference thwarting an idealized "meritocracy," in reality many admissions formulas premised on merit are actually discriminating on the basis of class even before questions of race and ethnicity enter the picture:

Sheryl Hopwood was a white working-class woman who applied to the University of Texas Law School and was denied admission. In 1996, she sued the university for racial discrimination, arguing that less-qualified blacks and Latinos had taken her spot. Thirty-nine years after Central, she sued in the district court and then in the Fifth Circuit and won, but the problem with the court's analysis was that they did not look behind the school's claim that all slots, except for those bestowed through affirmative action, were distributed based on merit.

It actually turns out that the school's own formula for determining merit disadvantaged Sheryl Hopwood. She went to a community college and the University of Texas Law weighted her LSAT scores with those of other applicants from her school and graduating year. Because her community college drew from a working-class population, Hopwood's own LSAT score was negatively weighted. So Hopwood's chance of attending the University of Texas was diminished because of class status not because of her race.

Such systems are reproduced in part because of another information indicator, according to Guinier, since "schools are so committed to the annual issue of U.S. News and World Report that ranks educational institutions according to the their students' standardized test scores." The "merit" of the institution (a problematic measure itself when reduced to a single-number ranking) is drawn not only from the "merit" of its faculty and staff, but from the "merit" of its incoming class. The result, Guinier argues, is that " Education is becoming about providing credentials to obtain high-paying jobs rather than training people for a thriving democracy."

More details of Guinier's book can be found in this interview with the author posted on AlterNet. This whole debate initially struck me as interesting because I'm wrestling with my own professional understanding of how "merit" calculations are devised, defended, and deconstructed at all levels of the university, from awarding student scholarships to recommending faculty raises. The democratic, egalitarian, and open nature of university decision-making paradoxically makes "merit" a more contentious issue than it might be in a more closed or hierarchical or autocratic corporate setting. Yet I, like many of my peers, I imagine, have benefitted from a system where "merit" has in recent history been defined with SAT, ACT, and GRE scores on standardized tests.

But more than this, I feel like this is an opening to ask what might seem to be an obvious question: how in an "information economy," the production and reproduction of "merit" may be -- should be? -- increasingly entwined with the consumption and production of knowledge. In trying to measure and quantify merit, we are processing and valuing information. In trying to define and demonstrate merit, we value the accumulating and manipulating of information. But if different ways of knowing are contradictory or incommensurable -- different epistemologies, worldviews, or definitions of "rationality" itself -- then aren't measures of merit similarly at odds? Can we analyze some of the debates over risk and reward in our society in these terms, alongside terms of (say) class, race, age, and gender?

Information organizations that profit from information ignorance?

2006-03-16T09:09:00.000-06:00

An article today in the New York Times about a state-backed lawsuit against a well-known consumer tax-preparation service firm has got me thinking:

H&R Block, the nation's largest tax-preparation service, was accused yesterday of selling inappropriate savings plans to hundreds of thousands of income tax filers, in the latest attack on the company's push to offer other financial services.

The New York attorney general said in a lawsuit filed yesterday that the company steered clients, many of them low income, into individual retirement accounts that were "virtually guaranteed to lose money" because of low interest rates and high fees. The suit also contended that H&R Block did not fully disclose its fees.

"The conduct described in today's complaint is particularly appalling because many of those hardest hit were working families who struggle to save," Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, said in a statement.

The company said it would defend itself against the allegations.

The firm has had similar legal troubles in other states, related to other "services" it offers to its clients:

[L]ast month, the company was accused by the California attorney general of illegally marketing and selling high-cost loans as "instant" tax refunds. The company agreed late last year to pay $62.5 million to settle four class-action lawsuits related to refund-anticipation loans.

Additionally, the law firm of Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins filed a class-action lawsuit in Kansas City, Mo., against H&R Block yesterday, citing similar accusations.

As I understand it, this firm's brand image is based around the idea of selling professional information labor -- knowledge of tax laws, expertise in bureaucratic government procedures, and facility with mathematics -- to two market segments: (1) household and small-business consumers who feel they lack such information knowledge and skill to the degree that they are either unable or unwilling to complete their government-mandated tax forms themselves; and (2) household and small-business consumers who feel they _could_ prepare their own taxes, but trust the expertise of the firm to bring them greater savings on their taxes than they themselves would be able to reap.

In light of the lawsuits, it seems to me that this firm is, in a way, exploiting the "information ignorance" of its clients (not the best term, but bear with me) in two ways: first, it relies on clients who don't feel competent or comfortable in preparing their tax forms on their own; and second, it relies on clients who won't question the fine print of "instant refund" and "long-term savings" plans which, according to the lawsuits, are little more than high-interest and high-fee loan-sharking schemes.

This line of analysis got me to thinking about some of the other organizations and institutions in our political-economy which rely on, profit from, and perhaps even work to reproduce, this "information ignorance" in its various forms -- not just lack of information about and familiarity with legal and bureaucratic knowledge and procedures, but various fundamental "illiteracies" such as mathematical illiteracy, print illiteracy, media illiteracy, computer illiteracy, scientific illiteracy, and the like. For example, for all their talk about being part of the "entertainment" industry, I believe that gambling/gaming firms (and state-backed lotteries as well) require a certain amount of mathematical illiteracy among their markets in order to entice consumers to give over their money to a "house" which nearly always wins. Ponzi schemes, "multi-level marketing" firms, and get-rich-quick "informational seminars" of all sorts rely upon mathematical illiteracy of a different sort.

More than the fringes of the economy such as loan-sharking, gambling, and pyramid schemes are implicated here, though. Sometimes profiting from "information ignorance" might mean engaging in the organized concealment of product and price information from consumers, such as in efforts of the real-estate industry to keep the "multiple listing service" operating as a closed system (perhaps akin to the failed defense of closed systems of travel agents and stock brokers a decade ago). Multinational corporations like Wal-Mart or McDonald's which rely on an advertising image of "home town connection" have no interest in revealing the true global nature of their commodity, labor, and profit flows; neither do they work reveal the conditions under which their products are produced, marketing instead the single-minded benefits of "low price" or "great taste" to their consumers. In other words, "commodity fetishism" is in itself a form of information ignorance -- ignorance of the space and time, material and labor, conditions of production of commodities.

Once we extend the definition of "information ignorance" in these ways, though, certainly such profit-seeking firms aren't the only ones to blame. Ignorance can perhaps be a willful state to exist in on the part of consumers, or a convenient condition to foster on the part of the state. I like to think that our institutions of education -- from mandatory public schools to competitive private unversities -- have as their core mission the elimination of such ignorance, not only among their immediate clients (students), but throughout the societies in which they operate. Other civic institutions, like public libraries and public media, seem to share such values. Private information agencies and media outlets depend on the existence of the particular market segments that they target, so may be in a more contradictory position. Some might reap increased revenues from an audience hungry for knowledge; others might depend for their revenues on an audience deprived of experience.

In all of this analysis, however, I'm not sure I'm really comfortable with the terms "ignorance" and "illiteracy". They seem too monovocal -- "you are ignorant if you don't know what I know, or believe what I believe, or make decisions in the way I make decisions" and all that. But if there's a new and useful way to connect disparate forms of "information prodution" and "information consumption" together through an analysis of the power position of both the producers and the consumers -- getting beyond "owning the means of production" vs. "willing to pay for products and services" and instead delving into the specific conditions for knowledge valuation, production, and reproduction in society -- then I'm willing to play with those ideas for a while to see where they lead.

Wired cities, livable cities, and "rooted cosmpolitans"

2006-02-07T20:04:00.000-06:00

I had the pleasant opportunity to speak on the topic of "livable cities and wired cities" as part of the UW-Madison Humanities Center "Rooted Cosmopolitans" speaker series tonight. The venue was appropriate: the Central Library in downtown Madison. I shared the stage with the smart and funny Mike Ivey from the Capital Times, and met a bunch of movers and shakers in both Madison and Milwaukee technology policy (unfortunately, Mayor Dave had to leave before I could shake his hand). Sounds like I'm gushing a bit but it was fun to serve as a public intellectual for an inquisitive audience. If you're finding this blog as a consequence of that talk, hope you enjoyed the event and if there are points you'd like to continue to discuss, feel free to comment on this post. If you missed the talk but want to see some of the charts I used and points I raised, my slides are posted on the web.

The telegram is dead; long live the messenger

2006-02-03T07:04:00.000-06:00

A graduate student in my program recently pointed me to the interesting news blurb that Western Union had ceased its telegram service effective January 27, 2006. He thought I might be interested in this fact of trivia because I myself have written a book on telegraph messenger boys, entitled, creatively enough, Telegraph messenger boys: Labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950 (Routledge, 2002). In that book, I argued that, over its century-long history of active use, the meaning of the telegram itself was dialectically tied to the meaning of the messenger boy who carried it. Perhaps that's one reason the telegram died a lonely and anonymous death last week ... if you ordered a "telegram" in the late 1990s, your text would be entered through a web page, your account charged through a credit card, your telegram pounded out by laser-printer, and your envelope finally delivered to its recipient by an Airborne Express carrier. No human "messenger" was involved in any kind of brand-related sense -- the Airborne Express fellow who came to my door certainly didn't care that he was carrying a "telegram" and didn't ask me for a "reply" as they do in old movies, for example. But more than that, the company taking your money was not even really "Western Union," although it did own that brand name. The original Western Union Telegraph Company changed its name to New Valley Corporation in the early 1990s and spun off its only profitable division, its money-transfer service, to First Data Corporation about a decade ago. All this trivia is simply to say that our information commodities can become intimately bound up with our information labors. Maybe we don't really notice, though, until they're gone.

The labor of updating a weblog regularly ...

2006-02-03T07:01:00.000-06:00

... increases in difficulty when one has to manage weblogs for one's university classes as well. But here are some other spaces you can visit where I and my students are discussing "information labor":

- LIS 569, History of American librarianship

- J 201, Introduction to mass communication

More soon, I hope.

The geography of "wiretapping" labor

2005-12-24T09:15:00.000-06:00

What do you know, less than twenty-four hours after I said I wouldn't be posting, a revelation in the New York Times this morning that I'd like to dissect a bit. The article, "Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report" [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html] discusses new background information about the Bush administration's executive-ordered practice of surveillance over international communications without customary court approval:

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

So right from the start, our old telegraph-era spatial and technological metaphor of "wiretapping" is a bit inadequate to analyze what's going on. The "wiretap" idea assumes a geography of sender, receiver, and intermediary "wire" which can be "tapped" either at the sender's end, at the receiver's end, or somewhere in between -- wherever is technologically convenient and/or legally allowable. The wires, sticking with this historical analogy, might be corporate-owned physical capital, but are erected on government-granted right-of-way. But the technological and political geography of "analyz[ing] large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States" at the "main arteries" of the US telecommunication system is quite different.

The way the Bush administration has described (and justified) its actions so far fits into the old "wire tapping" metaphor: "President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda." But the actual labor of identifying which virtual "wires" to "tap" is far more thorny and complicated: "What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation."

From "wire tapping" to "data mining" the scale and meaning of surveillance changes significantly. The NYT article reminds us that "The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties."

The cooperation of corporate owners, managers, and workers in "data mining" activity is much more crucial as well, according to anonymous sources in the article: "A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists. [...] Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined."

Further, when mining this data at the level of the "telecom switch," even within one particular corporation's control at a time, it is not always apparent whether the geography of the telephone call or Internet transaction is intended to involve the US, or whether it simply reaches US-based equipment as a consequence of decisions made about the topological efficiency and market cost of global corporate communication networks: "The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches."

Now, I'm not pointing out these moments of the article in order to make a claim about whether or not our government should or should not engage in such data mining. But I find it disturbing that the President refuses to actually engage in this debate openly, using a century-old "wire tapping" metaphor for a new-economy "data mining" activity. With the well-documented unwillingness of the Bush administration to make its decision-making processes transparent and open to public debate -- from its corporate-friendly energy policy, to its use of taxpayer-paid and placed opinion columns and video news releases in support of its policies, to its decision to link Iraq to 9/11 in a metaphorical "War on Terror" -- I don't think it is unreasonable to ask for explanation and justification of a major shift in surveillance policy.

The final point to consider comes out at the end of the NYT article, when it is revealed that not only might the Bush administration be exceeding its legal authority in its post-9/11 surveillance practices, but that it has actually used its coercive power to create a corporate and technological environment more amenable to such practices: "One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches." In other words, actions taken unilaterally by the US government in pursuit of its own definition of a "War on Terror" are helping to change the geography of information flow, information surveillance, and information profit on a global scale. From an administration -- and a party -- which claims to value the working of the "free market" and claims to eschew regulation of that market, such coercion over the "space of flows" of global communication for particular national security ends is a contradictory moment that might reveal a rift between the "fiscal," the "defense," and the "libertarian" pillars of the current US conservative/Republican movement.

Happy winter, everybody.

2005-12-22T15:44:00.000-06:00

Don't expect posts for awhile, as I decompress and retool for next semester. But thanks for reading and have a happy winter festival of whatever sort you prefer. (Or, if you're in the southern hemisphere and it ain't winter there, please accept my sympathies.) P.S. The winter image comes from the superb open-source sky simulation program Stellarium, which I recommend for inquisitive children everywhere this gift-giving season. Useful information labor indeed.

Ho ho ho,

GREG

Video games: Labor or recreation?

2005-12-09T08:56:00.000-06:00

OK, I just had to mention this article in the New York Times today (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/technology/09gaming.htm) about a new form of "outsourcing" (and, in this case, "offshoring") of information labor.

One of China's newest factories operates here in the basement of an old warehouse. Posters of World of Warcraft and Magic Land hang above a corps of young people glued to their computer screens, pounding away at their keyboards in the latest hustle for money.

The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash.

That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.

"For 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, my colleagues and I are killing monsters," said a 23-year-old gamer who works here in this makeshift factory and goes by the online code name Wandering. "I make about $250 a month, which is pretty good compared with the other jobs I've had. And I can play games all day."

What amazes me is not so much the idea that this labor is flowing to low-wage, minimal-regulatory areas of broadband connectivity, but that the market for this service is so tied to what is supposed to be a form of recreation. How do videogames and video game access subscriptions make such profit if they are seen as so much drudgery?

It is also interesting to note the ways in which these avatar-builders are portrayed in the article. The stand-in gamers, who "range from 18 to 25 years old," are allegedly "not willing to do hard labor" according to one gaming-labor company owner. "If they didn't work here they'd probably be working as waiters in hot pot restaurants," he said, "or go back to help their parents farm the land - or more likely, hang out on the streets with no job at all." I wonder how other gaming workers beyond the single example quoted in the article -- many of whom apparently sleep and eat at these "gold factories" in order to hold down 12- to 18-hour shifts -- see themselves. Playing videogames for half a day straight, in an officially illegal industry where abuses might go unnoticed, subject to quotas like in any other factory environment and earning only 25 cents an hour, doesn't sound "lazy" to me (as the sources quoted in the article would suggest).

Learning from graduate student labor

2005-12-02T13:52:00.000-06:00

Sandra Tam, a Ph.D. candidate in social work and women’s studies at the University of Toronto has written a nice essay over at Inside Higher Ed (http://insidehighered.com/workplace/2005/12/02/tam) on "Demystifying the Intellectual Work of Grad Students" that confronts some of the persistent contradictions wrapped up in information labor. For example, she points out that "people’s acceptance of scholarly endeavors and graduate studentship as a privileged type of work often occurs at the same time that they disparage the actual associated academic activities" and products which result from this work -- accusations of elitism coupled with anti-intellectualism. But instead of just laying out some of the polarizing misperceptions that emerge about information labor, Tam asks why such misunderstandings are produced and reproduced in the first place:

On another level, the comments suggest that the intellectual work of academics and graduate students does not fit with other types of work, such as physical, manual, skilled trades, professional, service, care, and/or domestic labor. Perhaps people are just not familiar with scholarly work of graduate students and academics. Perhaps I need to explain what is it that I do between the figurative hours of 9 to 5. Some aspects of my work are more obvious than others. People generally accept that graduate students take courses, research articles, or teach, which involves developing courses, preparing materials/lectures, grading assignments, and/or academic counseling of students.

However, most of my time is spent thinking, reading and writing. There is less vocabulary for describing what I actually do when I think, read and write. How do I target what to read, which databases to search, which email lists and professional associations to subscribe to? How do I decide which conferences or lectures to attend, whom to network with, and which journals to submit my articles to? In addition, there is academic grunt work, for example, coffee making for conferences, data processing, transcription and assorted clerical tasks, babysitting professor’s children, or attending academic and community events and meetings to build future research alliances.

The rest of Tam's article explores one aspect of the invisibility of graduate-student academic labor by invoking a concept from feminist studies known as "provisioning":

Feminist economists developed and defined provisioning as the work of securing resources and providing the necessities of life to those for whom one has relationships of responsibility. Provisioning is introduced to make observable a wide range of work and work-related activities that reflect how young marginalized women are creatively surviving by juggling pressures and responsibilities of school, work, and family, while planning careers in an uncertain labor market. In a similar way, provisioning reveals the tasks and details of what I do as a doctoral student.

Provisioning might indeed be useful to explore the grey area of "employment versus education" which doctoral candidates inhabit. (Witness the acrimonious debates right now, both at private institutions like New York University and public institutions like my own UW-Madison over the dual nature of Teaching Assistant working conditions -- "are they workers or are they students" -- with no room for any dialectical understanding that in the process of producing knowledge and becoming knowledge-producers, they might be both.) But I think Tam's essay should point us as well to the ways that even post-Ph.D., salaried or waged information labor -- and academic information labor in particular -- might be misunderstood and mischaracterized (or, perhaps I should say, differently understood and contentiously characterized).

The fragmented space and time of information labor (am I "working" at home, late at night, when I brainstorm ideas for my next class or my next book on my laptop computer?), the polarized "front stage" and "back stage" performances of academic responsibility (time in the classroom is valorized, but time sending emails, compiling bibliographies, and blogging weblogs is not), and the differential social and temporal scales of research even among faculty in the same department (contrasting folks expected to author a dozen articles a year in collaboration with a group of smart Ph.D. students with people like me who need three years or more to conceptualize, research, and write a sole-authored book) all stand in stark contrast to many other kinds of labor. It seems to me that building a new vocabulary to describe, analyze, and legitimize graduate student work -- the kind of vocabulary which Tam suggests is currently lacking -- would benefit those of us in academia who are former graduate students as well.

The many debates over standardized testing in public schools

2005-11-26T08:09:00.001-06:00

(Hi folks. Here's a holiday blog post as I take a breather from the last read-through of my new book manuscript, due at the publisher this week. Information labor indeed.)

Standardized testing in the public schools connects with the idea of "information labor" on multiple levels. It is a practice intended to accurately measure the level of knowledge acquisition and information-manipulation training of children who, presumably, will soon be active producers, citizens, and individuals in an increasinly information-intensive economy, polity, and society. In addition, it is a practice often used to measure the effectiveness of teachers, administrators, and school boards in producing such knowledge and skills in students -- with the threat of failure in these endeavors ranging from firing at the individual level to privatization at the institutional level. And, of course, standardized testing is "information labor" in and of itself for those students who must study, practice, and take the exams themselves.

So I read with great interest an article in the New York Times today (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/26/education/26tests.html) on the contradictory results coming out of the Bush Administration's public school testing practices at both the national and state levels, as mandated by the "No Child Left Behind" regulations:

A comparison of state test results against the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test mandated by the No Child Left Behind law, shows that wide discrepancies between the state and federal findings were commonplace.

In Mississippi, 89 percent of fourth graders performed at or above proficiency on state reading tests, while only 18 percent of fourth graders demonstrated proficiency on the federal test. Oklahoma, North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Alaska, Texas and more than a dozen other states all showed students doing far better on their own reading and math tests than on the federal one.

The chasm is significant because of the compromises behind the No Child Left Behind law. The law requires states to participate in the National Assessment - known to educators as NAEP (pronounced nape) - the most important federal measure of student proficiency.

But in a bow to states' rights, states are allowed to use their own tests in meeting the law's central mandate - that schools increase the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency each year. The law requires 100 percent of the nation's students to reach proficiency - as each state defines it - by 2014.

States set the stringency of their own tests as well as the number of questions students must answer correctly to be labeled proficient. And because states that fail to raise scores over time face serious sanctions, there is little incentive to make the exams difficult, some educators say.

What was even more fascinating (and disturbing) to me than these results, however, was the way the article portrayed their reception by various interest groups:

The battle lines have long been sharp in the testing debate. Most corporate leaders favor national testing, said Susan Traiman, a director at the Business Roundtable, a group that represents corporate executives.

Opponents include liberal groups that dislike all standardized testing; the testing industry itself, which has found lucrative profits in writing new exams for all 50 states; and political conservatives who fiercely resist any intrusion on states' rights to control curricula and tests.

To me the vast disparity in national versus state test results is disturbing because it undermines not only the very goals of "No Child Left Behind" (that all children reach a socially-agreed-upon level of proficiency in the socially-agreed-upon "basics" of education such as reading and math) but because it undermines the _process_ through which NCLB is supposed to reach these goals -- certifying "successful" versus "failing" teachers, schools, and school districts, as a prelude to diverse and as-yet-undefined set of penalties and remedies which might range from state takeover to federal voucher programs. The various interest groups described in the article all hold different positions, not only on the value of standardized testing as a diagnostic tool itself, but on the set of options, outcomes, and opinions tied into the whole philosophy of NCLB. By simplifying the views of so-called "liberals" into "disliking all standardized testing", or by splitting off "political conservatives" without considering the complementary fractions of conservatism in the public schooling debates such as social conservatives and economic conservatives, such complexities fall out of the debate.

I suppose the NYT would classify me as a "liberal against testing" in this regard. Personally, I consider myself more of a "progressive pragmatist" who is not against testing itself. In my own personal history I benefitted greatly from my own effort, ability, and luck in successfully scoring high on college-entrance and college-credit tests during high school, and it would be a bit dishonest for me to now disavow testing -- especially since my job as a university professor puts me in the position of trusting this testing process with regard to my students.

But that doesn't mean that I think our current form of standardized testing is either fully complete or fully coherent in measuring ability, accomplishment, or future potential; or that I agree with any possible use to which the results of standardized tests might be put, often to deny further participation in the educational process either to educators or to those that they attempt to educate. Again, my personal experience reminds me that, coming from a privileged cultural position, many tests made sense to me simply because of my long exposure to them or my shared cultural background with the test-writers; that my abilities with regard to artistic expression, creative thinking, political activism, or scientific wonder were never "tested" by the Educational Testing Service; and that if more class time had been taken to teach me and my peers to a test, we would have missed out on other important educational messages and lessons which can't be reduced to a filled-in circle on a Scantron sheet.

"Liberals" and "conservatives" alike may appreciate the rational ideal of testing, but may disagree both between these groups and within these groups, on the proper uses to which testing must be put. The current evidence that the philosophy and implementation, rewards and penalties, rhetoric and reality of NCLB are not matching up on the most basic level of standardized test scores should reopen debate on the rest of the regulations -- have the current administration and congress crafted a plan which serves the interests of social justice, or one which serves the interests of the status quo? Have they listened to the lobbying pressure of a profit-driven information industry, or of progress-minded information professionals?

Random observations on information labor at the 2005 SHOT conference, Minneapolis

2005-11-08T16:52:00.000-06:00

Just returned from my one annual academic conference, the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) meeting, which was held this year in Minneapolis, MN. Other folks blog choice sessions from conferences like this in realtime, but not me. However, I've been thinking that this year my interaction with the events of the conference was structured and bracketed by information technology in new ways, so I thought I'd ponder some of them.

- I registered for my hotel online, but was forced to send my conference registration in by physical mail. I wonder if this meant more early registrations or more late registrations.

- I paid $12 per day for parking, and $10 per day for wireless Internet access. Each of these represents about 1/10th the cost of the actual hotel room.

- The wireless Internet access which I purchased only worked in my hotel room (actually the whole floor, which coincidentally included the pool). If I wanted access in the lobby I had to purchase it again, from a different provider. This meant I was constantly running back to my room throughout the day (because I'm too cheap to pay for something twice.) I had a fun time imagining how in the future we'd have to pay for air, electricity, and water on a micro-locational-specific basis as well ...

- The actual conference rooms and exhibit halls were unable to receive any wireless Internet access, paid or not. People who relied on such connections for their presentations were out of luck. And a bunch of colleagues who had brought laptops found themselves huddled in the hotel lobby, checking email, finishing up grant applications, weblogging, or just checking the news. I suspect some of them were creating ad-hoc computer-to-computer networks for the purpose of trading files and messages ...

- For the first time I not only used my portable computer to craft my presentation comments at the conference site, but read my comments from the screen like a teleprompter and then emailed my comments to colleagues who had asked for them, a short hour after the presentation concluded. I felt strangely disconnected when I returned home, without any "conference clean up" emails to send.

OK, enough rambling. I'm finishing up my second book this month so posts to the weblog will be light. But wanted to let my vast cadre of readers (all three of them) know that I'm still here. Cheers,

GREG

Tools for college teaching aid in clearing copyright but abandon defense of fair use

2005-10-21T14:44:00.000-05:00

An opinion piece today in Inside Higher Ed by Cornell professor Tarleton Gillespie has some smart things to say about academic online courseware vendors (a market becoming more and more concentrated), tools to enable micropayments for intellectual property royalties in the university context, and the erosion of any sort of institutional or professional defense of "fair use" principles for nonprofit social goals (such as education). The genesis of his column was the press release that "Last week, the Copyright Clearance Center announced that it would integrate a 'Copyright Permissions Building Block' function directly into Blackboard’s course management tools. The service automates the process of clearing copyright for course materials by incorporating it directly into the Blackboard tool kit; instructors post materials into their course space, and then tell the application to send information about those materials to CCC for clearance." Gillespie goes on to explain the ramifications of this new technological environment:

Some have argued that fair use is a practical solution for the complex process of clearing permission. If I had to clear permission every single time I quoted someone else’s research or Xeroxed a newspaper article for my students — figuring out who owns the copyright and how to contact them, then gaining permission and (undoubtedly) negotiating a fee — I might be discouraged from doing so simply because it’s difficult and time-consuming. In the absence of an easy way to clear copyright, we have fair use as a way to “let it slide” when the economic impact is minimal and the social value is great.

Others argue that fair use is an affirmative protection designed to ensure that copyright owners don’t exploit their legal power to squelch the reuse of their work, especially when it might be critical of their ideas. If I want to include a quote in my classroom slides in order to demonstrate how derivative, how racist, or maybe just how incompetent the writer is, and copyright law compelled me to ask the writer’s permission to do it, he could simply say no, limiting my ability to powerfully critique the work. Since copyright veers dangerously close to a regulation of speech, fair use is a kind of First Amendment safety valve, such that speakers aren’t restricted by those they criticize by way of copyright.

This distinction was largely theoretical until organizations like CCC came along. With the help of new database technologies and the Internet, the CCC has made it much easier for people to clear copyright, solving some of the difficulty of locating owners and negotiating a fair price by doing it for us. The automatic mechanism being built into Blackboard goes one step further, making the process smooth, user-friendly, and automatic. So, if fair use is merely a way to account for how difficult clearing copyright can be, then the protection is growing less and less necessary. Fair use can finally be replaced by what Tom Bell called “fared use” — clear everything easily for a reasonable price.

If, on the other hand, fair use is a protection of free speech and academic freedom that deliberately allow certain uses without permission, then the CCC/Blackboard plan raises a significant problem.

Another set of questions emerges from a different direction, if in its zeal to lessen the risk of having to fight legal battles (or even answer legal questions) over fair use, universities compel faculty and staff to use particular courseware systems (or any other tools involving automatic rights-clearance modules -- web design tools next?) from particular vendors for their teaching and/or research. This restricts the pedagogical freedom of instructors but serves to homogenize and standardize course offerings into models which can more easily be sold to wider markets of students willing and able to pay higher prices for more technologically-mediated educational products. In short, the "politics" of courseware artifacts and systems that Gillespie points us to may have far-reaching effects.

Public libraries and Sunday labor (updated)

2005-10-18T12:22:00.000-05:00

From the Capital Times today:

Sunday at the library popular, expensive
Mayor's budget cuts those hours

By Lee Sensenbrenner
October 18, 2005

Madison could be nearly the only city in Dane County not to have any Sunday library hours under the 2006 operating budget proposed by Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.

Cieslewicz's plan to save money by keeping the Central Library closed on Sundays instead of being open Sundays from October through April has become an early chafing point as the city moves toward adopting a budget next year.

Madison Public Library Director Barb Dimick told the Board of Estimates Monday that 1-5 p.m. period that the Central Library is open on Sunday sees higher traffic and use than most other four-hour periods in the schedule and is "a peak period during winter."

It's a popular time for family excursions, she said. And it's a time when downtown streets near the library, 201 W. Mifflin St., do not charge for parking.

But it's also a time when the staff is paid overtime, or one-and-a-half times their hourly rate, because of their contract. The Sunday hours were added in the late 1990s, Dimick said, and at the time that meant accepting overtime payments.

She said that the union contract with library staff is up for negotiation next year. As it stands, eliminating Sunday hours would mean a $60,000 savings in the $202 million budget.

Sun Prairie, Verona and Middleton all keep Sunday library hours.

I wonder how such a move would affect the effort to gain funding and legitimacy for a renovation of the Central Library building -- an effort which has been underway for years.

I wonder if this is a moment when those who want government to prioritize access to information (especially for those whose work schedules limit the hours that they can patronize libraries) should make their voices heard.

I wonder if there is anything in the professional or academic literature on libraries and community about the costs and benefits -- not just in dollars and cents, but in community goodwill and social capital -- of keeping libraries open seven days a week.

UPDATE 18 Oct 2005: One of our smart SLIS students pointed me to an article which begins to answer these questions:

Greg,

Here's a good start:

Title: A Defense of Opening the Public Library on Sunday.
Subject(s): PUBLIC libraries; LIBRARY users
Author(s): Hennessy, Frank
Source: Library Journal, 05/01/85, Vol. 110 Issue 8, p25, 2p
Abstract: Proposes and defends the position that public libraries be
open on Sunday by discussing the concept of time allocation and its
implications for the cost of library service. Author's perception on
the value of time as a resource; Correlation between income, education
and time spent in library use; Implications of availability of time on
Sunday for library users; Recommendation of flexible week timings for
library staff.
AN: 7558839
ISSN: 0363-0277
Persistent link to this record: http://ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/login?
url=http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=afh&an=7558839
Database: Academic Search Elite

Hennessy is CORRECT, simply calculating the cost of time + overtime is
an incomplete calculation.

The article by Hennessy makes some interesting arguments, all of which have to do with the social construction of time -- the idea that any given hour at the library for one person is not the same as the same hour at the library for another person. Rather, for different groups of users with different resources and needs, library availability at different times and days of the week has differing value. For example, "Education has a direct effect on individual library productivity. The higher the education level, the more adept a person is at using the library, resulting in a decrease in time spent" but an increase in the value of that time. Thus keeping the library open on Sunday needs to be considered, especially for economically disadvantaged and/or less educated users whose time in the library is not as "productive" as that of affluent or highly-educated users, as an "efficient allocation of resources which results in the lowering of time cost to the library user." Doesn't roll off the tounge for a soundbite in the local media, but these are the kind of careful and nuanced arguments that information managers need to make in order to advocate on behalf of their current and prospective patrons.

Information labor behind the new video iPod

2005-10-17T13:15:00.000-05:00

A couple of articles today note the objections of several creative production labor unions -- including the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guilds of America (East and West) -- over the arrangements that ABC/Disney has made with Steve Jobs and Apple Computer to provide downloadable video content to iPods. When you purchase an episode of "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives" for $1.99, does a fair percentage of that fee flow back to the creative information labor that produced the content?

A Reuters/Hollywood Reporter story posted on Yahoo news [http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051017/media_nm/writers_ipod_dc] considers whether the "cable model" or the "DVD model" is the appropriate royalty example:

WGAW continues to believe that the proper formula is the existing one covering pay television. That entitles writers to 1.2% of the entire producers' gross. DGA has an identical formula, while SAG gets 3.6% and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) gets 5.4%.

The DVD formula, by contrast, is much less lucrative for all of these guilds because it pays a slightly higher percentage based on only 20% of the wholesale receipts. The remaining 80% is withheld by the studios to cover manufacturing, distribution and marketing costs.

Interestingly, a key point in the debate seems to be the commodity status of a download -- is it a transmission, like a cable TV signal, or a product, like a physical DVD? A further article in Variety [http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117931052?categoryid=1066&cs=1&s=h&p=0] sheds some more light on this distinction:

All the guilds operate under a DVD residuals formula that has been in place for two decades. The rate -- which allows studios to exclude 80% of gross revenues prior to calculating residuals -- was tilted toward studios to help the fledgling videocassette technology at the time.

As a result, the credited writers of a moderately successful film selling 1 million DVDs and generating $15 million in wholesale revenues would split a payout of around $50,000, compared with an estimated $10 million profit for the studios.

At negotiations last year, all the guilds failed to budge studios from their resistance to changing the formula. The studios contended that DVDs were not ancillary income; they essentially kept studios afloat with only one in 10 features recouping costs from domestic box office and only four in 10 recouping after all revenues come in via foreign box office, TV and DVD.

With the battle over royalty rights in for-profit broadcast content heating up, we should not forget that much of the activity behind "video podcasts" actually comes from the free labor of activists, enthusiasts, and artists who currently provide their product/service for free. Ironically, Apple computer may be contributing to this side of the question as well, as it announced that its new consumer iMac models would now come preequipped with onboard video cameras -- ready out of the box for grassroots first-person podcasts of all sorts. Whether people consider such activities as labor or entertainment, at least such experimentation might remind audiences that crafting video productions takes time, effort, skill, and ... work.

Debating telework at a state university (long)

2005-10-10T10:06:00.000-05:00

Here at my workplace, a big midwestern state research university, there's been a draft policy circulating dealing with "telecommuting" that I find quite interesting -- as does the local labor union (which I happen to belong to), United Faculty and Academic Staff:

Telecommuting Policy - University of Wisconsin - Madison

UW-Madison recognizes the value of telecommuting for both employee and
employer. Telecommuting is a cooperative arrangement* based on the needs
of the job, the department or unit, and the university. The following is
the telecommuting policy for academic staff, classified and limited
employees of the University of Wisconsin – Madison campus.

Definitions

• Telecommuting – Telecommuting is a voluntary* workplace alternative
where supervisors agree to allow an employee to regularly perform some
or all assigned duties at home or another location. This may involve the
use of telecommunications (cellular phones, faxes, calling cards,
pagers, etc.) or computer technologies. A telecommuting agreement
document detailing mutually agreed* upon work schedules, accessibility
levels, equipment purchases/loans-service purchases and any other
pertinent issues must be completed and signed before beginning
telecommuting. A telecommuting agreement is not required for occasional
situations in which the employee works at home.

• Telecommuting Agreement - a document that describes a specifically
approved telecommuting work arrangement, and any necessary
equipment/services needed.

Employee Selection Criteria and Conditions

The Supervisor, Department Chair, and Dean/Director will review the
telecommuting request taking into account the factors listed below.

• Needs of the department or unit
• Needs of the employee
• Employee's work duties and the ability to measure or assess work performed
• Availability and costs of needed equipment
• Employee's current and past job performance, as documented in
performance evaluations, including time management, organizational
skills, self motivation, and the ability to work independently
• Assessment of other employees (e.g., interest, skills, unit longevity,
etc.) in the immediate work unit performing similar responsibilities.
• Effect on service
• Effect on the rest of the work group, unit or department
• Measurable objectives and results mutually agreed to by the employee
and the supervisor
• Other items deemed necessary and appropriate

Telecommuting is a prerogative of the University, not an entitlement of
employees. It is approved on a case-by-case basis consistent with the
mission of the University and the respective department or unit.

Telecommuting is not a substitute for dependent or day care.

*If the employee accepts the telecommuting arrangement as a condition of
employment when hired into the position, the employee will not be able
to unilaterally terminate the agreement; it can only be terminated by
the employer.
Page 2 – Telecommuting Policy Cont.

Compensation and Benefits

Telecommuting is a management tool allowing for flexibility in work
options. It does not change the basic terms and conditions of
employment. Compensation and benefits will be set forth in University
policy or union contract, whichever applies. The telecommuter's salary,
job responsibilities, and University benefits do not change as a result
of telecommuting.

Telecommuting Agreement and Form

A completed Telecommuting Agreement Form (attached) is required and must
be signed by the Supervisor, Department Chair, Dean/Director’s Office
and the telecommuter. Copies of these documents should be kept in the
employee’s personnel file; and be forwarded to Risk Management if
University equipment is loaned to the employee. This agreement will be
reviewed and updated at least annually, and as the specifics or
equipment/services are modified.

Work Schedule and Overtime

The work schedule of the telecommuting employee will be determined by
the Supervisor and will be documented in the telecommuting agreement.

The working of overtime, accrual of compensatory time, accrual and
charging of leave time will be subject to the same rules and regulations
as are in place at the designated University work location.

With advance notice, an authorized University representative may make
on-site visits to the telecommuter's work location.

Equipment and Information Security

• University-provided equipment at home is not an entitlement of
telecommuting employees. Depending on the job, equipment needs for
telecommuters will vary and are determined by the supervisor.

• Telecommuting employees must abide by the University's policies
covering information security, software licensing and data privacy.

• Telecommuting employees must abide by University Purchasing and
Accounting policies for all purchases and expenditures incurred for
telecommuting equipment or services. The telecommuting agreement will be
required as documentation for purchases and expenditures related to
telecommuting and must be attached to all transactions.

• Maintenance on University-owned equipment will be performed only by a
University authorized technician. The employee will be responsible for
bringing the equipment to the employer-designated repair location.
Necessary maintenance and repairs on University-owned equipment will be
performed at the University's expense.

• Maintenance and repair of employee-owned equipment is the
responsibility of the employee. The University is not liable for such
equipment even if the employee is engaged in University work at the time
of malfunction.

• Upon termination of the telecommuting agreement or employment, the
employee must return all University-owned equipment to the University.

Although my own salaried, exempt position means that I wouldn't be covered by the telecommuting agreement in question, I'd like to offer some thoughts on this very timely discussion of telecommuting policy for two reasons:

(a) as a faculty member split between two departments, I'm privileged to have a university-provided laptop computer and cell phone, along with the freedom to work remotely from home, from coffeeshops, etc. when performing various work-related tasks, and i would like to see the very real benefits of technology-enabled alternative work times and spaces brought out to more UW-Madison employees if possible; and

(b) I actually do research on the way new information technologies transform the time, space, and social relations of the workplace, so this discussion might be something I can contribute to. But please take my (rather long, sorry) comments as just a first-pass reaction to what I see as a constructive but flawed first-draft at a telecommuting policy ...

(1) “UW-Madison recognizes the value of telecommuting for both employee and employer.”

First of all, I would suggest that the agreement outline some of the possible benefits to employees and to the employer, to make clear both the purposes that telecommuting is intended to serve and the limits of telecommuting’s usefulness. For example, from the point of view of the employer, telecommuting can reduce the need for office space, parking space, and lighting/heating/electricity energy costs. But, telecommuting should not be thought of as an alternative to providing adequate equipment, workspace, transportation, childcare, work hours, supervisiory feedback, and opportunities for advancement to employees.

From the point of view of the employee, telecommuting can reduce the need for or time of travel from home to office, and subsequently reduce gasoline costs or other travel costs. But, telecommuting should not be an alternative to: (1) providing adequate work quality and/or work hours to an employee; (2) providing adequate office space and/or office equipment to an employee; (3) providing adequate parking or mass-transit options to an employee; and (4) as the document already states, “Telecommuting is not a substitute for dependent or day care.” (While this might seem obvious to some, a quick look through the management-oriented literature on telecommuting shows photo after photo of young mothers at home with small children on one hand and a computer/telephone on the other. Ridiculous, gender-biased assumptions are still pretty common.)

We should also recognize the potential (but not inevitable) urban-wide benefits of telework, such as possible overall reduction in travel, pollution, congestion, and energy use. (This is tricky, though, because home-based work has its own energy, pollution, and travel costs as well.)

(2) “Telecommuting is a cooperative arrangement* based on the needs of the job, the department or unit, and the university”; “Telecommuting is a voluntary* workplace alternative where supervisors agree to allow an employee to regularly perform some or all assigned duties at home or another location.”

It seems clear from the rest of the text that the proposed UW-Madison telecommuting policy makes telecommuting neither cooperative nor voluntary. As the document goes on to specify, “Telecommuting is a prerogative of the University, not an entitlement of employees.” Further, a footnote in the document states that “*If the employee accepts the telecommuting arrangement as a condition of employment when hired into the position, the employee will not be able to unilaterally terminate the agreement; it can only be terminated by the employer.” Thus telecommuting as defined by UW-Madison is an arrangement which may only be chosen by the employer, not the employee, and may even be mandated by the employer as a condition of continued employment. This is not cooperation, but coercion.

I would suggest that the policy make clear that upon entering into a “telecommuting agreement,” either the employee and/or the employer may terminate the agreement with adequate prior notice, and that such termination by either side should, by itself, in no way affect the continuation or definition of the employee’s job.

(3) “A telecommuting agreement is not required for occasional situations in which the employee works at home.”

I think this is a reasonable loophole. I would add “or at an alternate work location,” because not all telecommuting takes place at home.

(4) “The Supervisor, Department Chair, and Dean/Director will review the telecommuting request taking into account the factors listed below. [...]”

In addition to the factors listed, I would add “safety, security, and ergonomics of the proposed alternate work site,” both for the protection of the employer and for the protection of the employee.

(5) “With advance notice, an authorized University representative may make on-site visits to the telecommuter's work location.”

This is a tough one. When the alternate work location is the employee’s home, I think the employee should hold a right of privacy and be able to prohibit visits from the employer or the employer’s representatives. However, in order to ensure workplace safety, security, and ergonomics, or to install, maintain, and upgrade equipment, or even perhaps to drop off and pick up work in physical printed form, some contact with representatives from the workplace seems not only desirable, but inevitable.

I would suggest specifying some specific reasons that such visits might be required and/or requested, and specifiying some specific rules about what should happen if employees refuse such visits. For example, if an employee is not willing to have workplace representatives visit the site to perform equipment installation, maintenance, or upgrade, then perhaps that employee would not be able to have university equipment on site.

In any case, the ultimate right of refusal of any visit must rest with the employee if the alternate work site is the home. But at the same time, if the employer deems such visits crucial to the telecommuting arrangement, then it would seem that this would be grounds for terminating the telecommuting arrangement.

(6) “University-provided equipment at home is not an entitlement of telecommuting employees. Depending on the job, equipment needs for telecommuters will vary and are determined by the supervisor”; “I understand that costs related to remodeling and/or furnishing the work space shall be non-reimbursable/non-payable by the UW.”

The risk with these provisions as currently stated is that only those employees who supply their own telecommuting equipment (whether that is a computer, a printer, or a high-speed internet connection) will be allowed to enter into telecommuting agreements.

I would suggest that the language change to indicate that if the university decides a telecommuting arragement is warranted, and if the employee does not possess or does not wish to use personal equipment in support of the arrangement, then the university should pay to install all necessary equipment for the arrangement at the employee’s site (including any site modifications which might be necessary).

(7) “The employee will be responsible for bringing the equipment to the employer-designated repair location. Necessary maintenance and repairs on University-owned equipment will be performed at the University's expense.”

I think the transport of equipment to and from the alternate work site should be the responsibility of the employer, but at the very least, this should be something that is negotiated and specified within each individual telecommuting contract, and not assumed to be the employee’s responsibility.

(8) Finally, I would suggest some added language to protect the telecommuting employee:

Make sure that telecommuting employees receive adequate information about what is going on in the “physical” office, adequate information about job opportunities which might otherwise be relayed through physical bulletin board postings, casual conversation, and the like, and reasonable accomodations to be present in the decision-making processes of the unit in which they are employed. This might mean making sure that information gets communicated by email as well as by an announcement in a physical meeting, or by email as well as by printed memo. But from what I’ve seen in the research on telecommuting, the social and occupational disconnect from office life and further career opportunities is a great risk to telecommuters themselves.

Make sure that performance reviews of telecommuting employees take into account the difficult nature of working under conditions of self-supervision and “out of sight, out of mind” of fellow employees, which may be a negative effect on, say, employee peer reviews of performance.

Talk about telecommuting -- or, as I prefer, “teleworking” -- as part of a general strategy to not only provide flexibilty in the location of work, but in the time of work. In other words, combine with programs for time-shifting work, starting early or leaving late to avoid commuting bottlenecks, flexible work hours and work schedules for both employer and employee efficiency, and job sharing.

For people interested in some background reading on research pertaining to home-based-work, telecommuting, and the more general category of “telework,” I’d suggest the following references:

Sheila Allen and Carol Wolkowitz, Homeworking: Myths and Realities (London: Macmillan, 1987).

Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds., Homework: historical and contemporary perspectives on paid labor at home (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

Andrew Gillespie and Ronald Richardson, “Teleworking and the city: Myths of workplace transcendence and travel reduction,” in James O. Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama and Barney Warf, eds., Cities in the telecommunications age: The fracturing of geographies (New York: Routledge, 2000), 228-248.

Ursula Huws, Werner B. Korte and Simon Robinson, Telework: Towards the elusive office (Chichester ; New York: Wiley, 1990).

Patricia L Mokhtarian, Gustavo O Collantes, and Carsten Gertz, “Telecommuting, residential location, and commute-distance traveled: Evidence from State of California employees,” Environment and Planning A 36:10 (2004), 1877 - 1897.

Book review: Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor (2004)

2005-10-06T16:48:00.000-05:00

I wrote a review of Frank Levy and Richard Murnane's new book _The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market_ (2004) for the _International Review of Social History_ and thought I'd post an excerpt below, since I haven't had time to blog on much else this week.

Economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane have written an engaging and accessible introduction to the political economy of a very specific but very important type of ‘‘information labor’’: that subset of work which is amenable to ‘‘computerization,’’ which in some cases means outright substitution of computer algorithms for human labor (a classic ‘‘deskilling’’ argument), and in other cases means careful augmentation of human labor through interactive software (a classic ‘‘upskilling’’ argument). The main point that the authors make is that these two simultaneous paths to what might be called the ‘‘digitalization of labor’’ are quite distinct, in both the kinds of tasks they encompass and the kinds of workers they affect. As computers colonize more and more industries and occupations, Levy and Murnane present a detailed analysis of what these electronic tools can and can’t do to predict that certain workers will continue to benefit while others will increasingly suffer in a ‘‘hollowing-out of the occupational structure’’ (p. 4) – a nuanced ‘‘digital-divide’’ scenario which can only be addressed, the authors conclude, through state intervention and educational reform.

Levy and Murnane begin by noting that, although ‘‘all human work involves the cognitive processing of information’’ (p. 5) there are many different kinds of information processing, only some of which are easily and affordably coded as computer algorithms. For example, the pattern-recognition (and consequent tactile dexterity) performed by even the most low-wage service workers remains uncomputable – don’t expect to see robot janitors any time soon. Similarly, complex communication tasks, such as those used by middle-income salespersons and educators, remain out of the computer’s reach. And finally, tasks that require novel and open-ended problem-solving, often called ‘‘symbolic analysis,’’ are restricted to human creativity (though computers are often used as productive tools by such high-wage workers). But any task which may be broken down into a discrete and finite set of steps and ‘‘rules’’ is potentially computable, and thus jobs which consist in whole or in part of such tasks will be increasingly endangered as the capital cost of computing power continues to fall. And crucially, ‘‘A task, once computerized, is potentially easy to replicate and so invites intense competition’’ (p. 54) with such information technology penetrating quickly through whole industries and occupations.

Levy and Murnane then move from a consideration of what kind of tasks favor computer substitution vs computer complementarity to what kind of workers will see their jobs eliminated by computers vs enhanced by computers. Not surprisingly, education is the key intervening variable. ‘‘Rapid job change raises the value of verbal and quantitative literacy’’ (p. 101), the authors argue, because reading and mathematics skills are ‘‘enabling skills’’: skills that are ‘‘necessary but not sufficient for economic success’’ (p. 103), especially in an increasingly information-based economy. Thus labor-market entrants who have had the opportunity to hone these enabling skills (e.g. college graduates) should fare much better than labor-market entrants without such skills (secondary-school dropouts or, sadly, even many secondary-school graduates, according to the authors).

Levy and Murnane back up these claims using historical labor market data from the United States. ‘‘In 1979, the average thirty-year-old man with a bachelor’s degree earned just 17 per cent more than a thirty-year-old man with a high school diploma. Today, the equivalent college–high-school wage gap exceeds 50 per cent, and the gap for women is larger’’ (p. 6). Similarly, they point out, while only 24 per cent of US workers used a computer on the job in 1984, now over 50 per cent of US workers do so (p. 105). These parallels represent a causal link, argue the authors – though they leave many of the details out of this book, instead referring readers to a 2003 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, written with David Autor, which details the quantitative data and formulae that ground these assertions.

Given this increasing divide in ‘‘enabling skills,’’ wages, and occupational choices, what is to be done? Limiting their prescriptions to the US context, Levy and Murnane do not shy away from the obvious policy questions here, but instead assert that ‘‘the nation cannot rely on for-profit firms as the primary institutions responsible for teaching the enabling skills needed to excel at complex communications and expert thinking tasks’’. Instead, ‘‘America’s schools will continue to be the critical institutions responsible for teaching American children the enabling skills’’ (p. 130). While Levy and Murnane in general recommend a social policy where ‘‘the better-off pay compensation through taxes or charity’’ (‘‘[c]ompensation will not come through the market since the market is creating the winners and losers in the first place’’ (p. 155)), their most specific proposal revolves around a vision of ‘‘standards-based education’’ – setting clear goals for student progress, standardizing instruction to meet these goals, and measuring student progress toward these goals ‘‘frequently’’ enough to make sure they are attained (pp. 134–135).

The rest of the review critiques their final recommendations a bit, but I'll save that for folks who want to search out the original. It's a good book.

Paying for Katrina by attacking knowledge and culture

2005-09-23T15:34:00.000-05:00

The website Inside Higher Ed reported briefly today on "a document, released Wednesday by Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives, that lays out potential cuts Congress might make in the federal budget to free up funds to pay for the huge job of rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars."

The House Republicans gave their plan the military-sounding name "Operation Offset" and described "$929 billion in possible cuts over 10 years". Amazingly, some of their proposals are not only attacks on the essential public support of knowledge production and cultural production which otherwise slip through the cracks of "market failure," but also seem to fly in the face of the whole point of rebuilding the Gulf Coast -- and New Orleans especially -- in a responsible, functional, sustainable manner. Some examples:

$840 million a year, or $8.6 billion over 10 years, in subsidized Stafford Loans for graduate students. The document says that most financially needy graduate students are likely to have had government help as undergraduates, and that they "make an informed decision to invest in their own futures and should bare [sic] the costs of schooling."

$722 million over 10 years for the Leveraging Educational Assistance Program, which provides federal matching funds to state need-based aid programs. LEAP is no longer necessary, the Republican panel argues, because "almost all states operate programs far larger than the federal contributions."

$2 billion over 10 years for the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Program, which the committee argues duplicates Education Department efforts to prepare teachers and develop instructional materials.

So, presented with a stark depiction of structural and racially-linked poverty in New Orleans, the ignorance and apathy toward which help turned a manageable and forseeable disaster into a human tragedy, these lawmakers would like to pull money from graduate, need-based, and mathematics education. Because of course education does not at all help people lift themselves out of poverty, right?

About $3.8 billion over 10 years by ending federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. The panel argues that "the general public benefits very little" from the two agencies, and that they could be "easily be funded by private donations."

So, after lamenting the loss of New Orleans because of its cultural importance to the nation and the globe, we end all federal funding of cultural production, because such production has so little benefit for the general public?

$6.5 billion over 10 years from withdrawing federal aid to the AmeriCorps and other national service programs.

Given the clear service needs in New Orleans -- and opportunities for providing poor youth with job skills and education funding by bringing them into service programs -- this one makes my head swim.

And finally,

$1 billion over 10 years for the Environmental Protection Agency's Science to Achieve Results Program, which provides graduate fellowships and grants for environmental researchers. The program is "duplicative" of other federal research efforts, the panel says.

Yes, we certainly wouldn't want an oversupply of envionmental researchers to tell us about the toxic flooding, loss of wetlands, climate change, and human-environment interactions of urban growth that clearly, absolutely, had nothing to do with the plight of the Gulf Coast under Katrina in the first place.

Alright, apologies for the snide tone of some of these responses, but seriously, how about if we pay for putting the devastated areas and lives of Hurricane Katrina back together by asking American individuals and corporations to pay for it through progressive taxation tied to wealth, seeing as we all as American citizens and firms have a clear economic and social interest in keeping this part of the country productive, vibrant, and safe?

Or maybe we should simply reign in the spending on certain military operations and no-bid defense contracts with "little benefit to the general public". But that's another story.

The commodification of knowledge (and knowledge work) via Google

2005-09-23T07:15:00.000-05:00

A short article in the New York Times this week discusses the "Google Answers" service where users ask a question, propose a fee for the answering of that question, and await an answer from self-styled experts who (presumably) use Google to find the answer. Google of course gets a cut of the e-bay-like transaction:

When David Sarokin finishes his day job as an environmental scientist in Washington, he heads home to a second batch of questions. He is one of several hundred humans who work for Google, answering questions from users who aren't satisfied with their results from the automated engine that made Google famous.

The queries that users bring to Google Answers (answers.google.com) touch on all parts of life, but they usually cannot be reduced to a few keywords. One incoming freshman at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., for instance, asked for help finding a parking spot near campus. A stargazer asked the name of the two planets rising early in the northwest sky, and a homeowner wanted a "romantic and literary" name for a new house.

Google Answers is one of several services creating an online commons for impromptu research. Ingenio.com, for example, markets the services of traditional professionals like tax lawyers and computer technicians. And some sites, like Wondir.com, maintain a no-fee exchange of questions and answers - though tipping is permitted.

On Google Answers, Mr. Sarokin scans the list of new questions frequently and chooses those he feels he can answer. In some cases he uses his scientific background, but in others he just relies on a well-honed talent as a general researcher.

"We get questions both merely odd, and others pretty incomprehensible, and I tend to steer clear of both," he said. "But now and then, I can't resist."

The oddest of all, he says, had him trying to determine what female vampires wear and "how to defend oneself, as the questioner felt the need to do so would soon arise."

For this answer, Mr. Sarokin received 75 percent of the $4 that the questioner paid Google. The questioner sets the price, and the researchers must decide whether the fee merits the time they are likely to invest in providing an answer.

The questions stay active for 30 days, and the user can increase the fee if no one seems interested. If the answer is excellent, a questioner can add a tip not shared with Google - a practice that about three-quarters seem to follow, according to one survey by the researchers.

Mr. Sarokin once earned $120 for researching the need for a scientific expedition floating in the pack ice in the Arctic. Another effort brought $25 for turning up data on the number of computer crimes committed in 2004. Google imposes a cap of $200 on the fee, and it is not uncommon for people to offer the maximum if they need the answer quickly and want to grab the attention of the researchers.

Colin Colby, the Bates freshman who needed a parking space near campus, said he was happy to pay $200 for an answer that came within 72 hours with the name of a woman who had parking spaces to rent.

The interesting thing to me is how such a service, if it became popular (which, in all honesty, I kind of doubt), would affect the other specialized services that Google is engaged in -- such as "Google Scholar" which attempts to return web resources that have only been produced through the peer-reviewed, corporate-academic research process. Or the new Google attempt to digitize all of the print materials in the University of Michigan library (among others) and provide an indexable search to their contents (but not their copyrighted contents themselves) to web-seekers. Might these bits of Google-mediated information be assigned a dollar value through the Google engine as well?

We have a long tradition of subsidizing expert information-seekers for the benefit of all, without regard to ability to pay, in our society -- the library reference desk is a prime example. We also have a long tradition of relying on trained experts -- like, say, an engaged and inquisitive press -- to seek out socially-useful answers. Have these committments and expectations evaporated? What about the expectation that public education and university education will train individuals to use tools -- like libraries, and newspapers, and, yes, Google itself, for crying out loud -- to ask and answer important questions for themselves? Would broad popularity of, and endemic reliance upon, "Google Answers" undermine such efforts?

Dystopian or utopian scenario, depending on your positionality: Will the next generation of Google-groomed university students begin to calculate the cost/benefit ratio of classes they attend, based on the Google-market value of the facts that they learn there? Will chastened university research review committees find that they have to evaluate a faculty member's market-based output in facts and trivia, as calculated through the Google filter, in making a case for tenure? Or will state legislatures abandon even more of their funding role for public education and research, claiming that teachers at all levels should act as entrepreneurs, selling piecewage facts, figures, and parables over Google-affiliated school web sites in order to supplement sub-minimum-wage salaries?

OK, maybe I'm having a science-fiction moment here. But the question I'm trying to illustrate (if not "answer") is -- how do information valuing and commodification practices in one area of social/political/economic life affect the commodification and valuing of information labors in other areas of social/political/economic life? Answer me that, Google.

Universities are not businesses (updated)

2005-09-20T07:18:00.000-05:00

A blurb in Inside Higher Ed today mentions a new report by the Institute for Higher Education Policy entitled "Is Outsourcing Part of the Solution to the Higher Education Cost Dilemma: A Preliminary Examination". Apparently the report finds that privatizing some of the "business" functions of college and university institutions is common, but that on the other hand, privatizing "core" knowledge-production and -dissemination functions is rare, citing "the significant barriers that exist to outsourcing any areas at the core of what higher education does: teaching, research and public service."

In addition to the concerns that exist about outsourcing in any setting lack of control, possible declines in quality and customer satisfaction, and blows to employee morale college and university officials are particularly wary of perceived damage to the sense of institutional culture and community, the report says.

"Colleges and universities simply have different ways of getting things done than businesses," it says. "In addition to encouraging, indeed mandating, a consensus approach to decision making, the protection of shared governance and academic freedom is paramount. In short, a major barrier to outsourcing in higher education is the very essence of the organization."

As one place where "shared governance" (direct-democratic decision making) and "academic freedom" (freedom of thought, speech, belief, research, and activism, especially when any of these represent a minority concern as compared to mainstream society) are still valued, instead of asking "why doesn't the university run more like a business?" I wonder what the university as an institution of democracy and freedom can teach other knowledge-production and knowledge-dissemination professions, from software development to journalism, librarianship to law.

Update 21 Sep 2005: Today the same Inside Higher Ed site has an interview with the authors of a new book entitled Remaking the American University (Rutgers University Press), in which the authors mentioned what they thought the "most worrisome" current trend in higher education was:

What worries us most is that universities and colleges have become so preoccupied with succeeding in a world of markets that they too often forget the need to be places of public purpose as well. We are serious in arguing that universities and colleges must be both market smart and mission centered. Not surprisingly, then, we are troubled by how often today institutions allow their pursuit of market success to undermine core elements of their missions: becoming preoccupied with collegiate rankings, surrendering to an admissions arms race, chasing imagined fortunes through impulsive investments e-learning, or conferring so much importance on athletics as to alter the character of the academic community on campus.

By far the most troublesome consequence of markets displacing mission, though, is the reduced commitment of universities and colleges to the fulfillment of public purposes. More than ever before, these institutions are content to advance graduates merely in their private, individual capacities as workers and professionals. In the rush to achieve market success, what has fallen to the wayside for too many institutions is the concept of educating students as citizens — graduates who understand their obligations to contribute to the collective well-being as active participants in a free and deliberative society. In the race for private advantage, market success too often becomes a proxy for mission attainment.

I couldn't agree more.

Lawmaker explores curtailing democracy in the information workplace

2005-09-15T11:38:00.000-05:00

Here in Wisconsin, our flagship state research university is a public relations mess. Various "scandals" involving a handful of academic professionals who are being investigated for behavior which might lead to their demotion or dismissal have apparently been used as a way to legitimize cutting university funding, increasing student tuition, and refusing to deal with organized teaching assistants fairly at the bargaining table, from my point of view. Nevermind that any organization as large as the University of Wisconsin university system is bound to have some regular personnel problems, and nevermind that as a publicly-accountable and (somewhat) publicly-funded organization, the University's systems for dealing with these problems tend to be more just and transparent than you would ever find at a private, for-profit, capitalist corporation. Somehow at least one state legislator is questioning whether the University's deliberative, democratic decision-making structure might be the core problem here, according to a Capital Times article:

The state might want to consider stripping the University of Wisconsin faculty's statutory right to share in the governance of the university, a top lawmaker said.

Faculty and academic staff have long had the right to participate in the policymaking process at the university. That right is more than just an administrative rule; it is enshrined in state law.

But Rep. Suzanne Jeskewitz, R-Menomonee Falls, said the faculty's right to shape university policy could be an obstacle to making important changes to the university's employment practices. Lawmakers and university officials are conducting a wide-ranging discussion about such controversial practices as offering backup positions and keeping felons on the payroll. Faculty will need to be consulted if changes to such practices are to be made.

Shared governance rules also allow faculty the right to be represented on search committees for deans and top administrators, and committees examining important university issues, like the production of UW logo clothing with sweatshop labor.

I'm constantly amazed at how those very people charged -- and entrusted -- by the public to uphold democracy are so quick to try to squelch democratic representation and decision-making processess in any institution besides their own -- whether that's the neighborhood councils of Baghdad or the union halls of Milwaukee. Those who favor "running government like a business" seem to forget that business is inherently non-democratic: decisions are made by a select few, based either on hierarchical bureaucratic position or on ownership rights, not on proportional representation or on contribution to the value and profit produced by the firm. I certainly hope our university administration stands up against accusations that faculty participation in policymaking is somehow an "obstacle" to improving the university. Faculty -- along with academic and support staff and graduate students -- ARE the university. The fact that we produce knowledge and knowledge-workers, and not retail commodities, puts us in the rare and privileged position of having some measure of control over the conditions of that production. We need to stand up for that control and advocate that more institutions, not fewer, follow the model we set.

Libraries and risk management and vulnerable populations

2005-09-02T12:22:00.000-05:00

I'm angry at the apparent incompetence and indifference from officials at all levels of power which has resulted in the most vulnerable social segment of the population of the city of New Orleans being treated like animals, or criminals, or worse. I didn't think this weblog would be the proper place to vent my own tears on this issue, until I was forwaraded a note about how the American Library Association has a web page devoted to its Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Many of these notices list efforts to find out if library personnel, library buildings, and library holdings have survived flood, wind, and fire damage. But some are of a different nature. For example:

Here in Calcasieu Parish we have had many hurricane evacuees coming to our libraries throughout the parish to use our internet computers. Yesterday we collected and dropped off donated books and magazines at the civic center Red Cross shelter and opened up a computer lab in our downtown meeting room for the exclusive use of evacuees (it is within walking distance of the civic center). Every branch is reporting waiting lines for using the public computers. Staff have created a web page with links for the evacuees and are constantly updating it. Reference staff at the various libraries are gathering and distributing information to evacuees in their communities. Children’s librarians are setting up story programs with the Red Cross.

Such efforts from the non-profit information professions -- as with efforts announced by midwestern state universities that they would provide spaces for students and faculty displaced from their Gulf Coast homes, jobs, and schools -- are heartening in the face of so much state mismanagement and chaos, especially with regard to the largely poor and largely African-American citizens still -- days later! -- fending for themselves in the former city of New Orleans. I can't help but wonder, though, what might have happened differently if local information agencies like public libraries -- or public schools, community centers, and the like -- had been involved beforehand in emergency planning and preparedness processes. For example

(1) These are agencies which are best positioned to "get the word out" to local residents about evacuation routes, contingency plans, weather warnings, basic survival tools, and the like;

(2) These are agencies which know best the literacy and education and mobility level of their local publics and can help emergency management officials craft messages and outreach strategies that actually reach and affect their target audiences; and

(3) These are agencies with longstanding storage, transport, and information-communication networks of their own which may be quickly mobilized in the event of emergency.

What would happen if public library managers around the country, in both large urban and small rural library systems, took on a "homeland security" role as well? What would happen if some of the programming in public libraries included disaster education, risk awareness, and community asset inventories? What would happen if libraries took seriously the notion that not just printed and magnetic media, but community experience as embodied in local institutions, organizations, households, and leaders represented the "informational capital" which they were held responsible to preserve and distribute?

Maybe if someone had asked a day-to-day working librarian in New Orleans for input on the city, state, and federal emergency "plans" which have evidently failed so miserably, that librarian would have been able to answer: "There are lots of people in this city who don't have cars, who don't follow storm predictions on the Internet, who don't have the literacy skills to read FEMA forms, who don't have the economic resources to afford flood insurance, or who for any number of reasons simply won't be able leave their homes, their families, and their lives in this city during an emergency unless you are able to come and get them and treat them with the respect they deserve, right now."

P.S. On a related note, here's the Craigslist for Katrina aid, a novel example of Web-based emergency response (hope it turns out to be useful to some). I'm assuming you know how to get to the sites for Red Cross, America's Second Harvest and the like if you have money to donate.

Scientific illiteracy in the information-rich US

2005-08-30T07:39:00.000-05:00

With rational policy on everything from the benefits of genetic research to the risks of terrorism in modern urban society dependent on the public's (and the government's) understanding of basic scientific principles, a recent story in the New York Times on scientific illiteracy is alarming indeed. According to political science professor Jon D. Miller of Northwestern University only about a quarter of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert":

American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

Interestingly, Miller himself locates the failure as starting all the way back with our public school systems, which he says are underfunded: "This country cannot finance good school systems on property taxes". I personally would push this argument further and wonder what the "uneven geography" of scientific literacy in the US looks like. Which school systems produce the most scientifically illiterate students (either in numbers of students falling below a threshold of understanding, or lowest overall misunderstanding for a comparable population of students). But I too suspect that with more resources devoted to teaching students about the natural, material, physical, and human-built world and the science, natural history, mathematics, and engineering which underlie it, scientific literacy could be greatly improved.

It seems like there are more dots to be connected, however. We may be living in an "information economy" as measured by our production, consmption, and productive use of information-processing devices and information-rich media, but if we are to claim that we live in a "knowledge society" then we need a different set of measures. A society with twenty-first century technology should be appalled to find out that any significant percentage of its children live comfortably with "common sense" ideas that were discredited in the seventeenth century.

Ostensibly saving paper, but really making labor, at a state university

2005-08-22T09:44:00.000-05:00

I've written before on this blog using the example of my state's recent years of university budget-cutting to illustrate how public and legislative support for both the quality and quantity of information labor -- and education for future information laborers -- can so easily evaporate or become sidetracked into sensationalist trivia. Here's another good example from a fellow university in our state system. As reported in Inside Higher Ed, at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh this year, professors in the College of Letters and Sciences are now prohibited from handing out paper syllabi in an effort to save pennies:

In making cuts, Zimmerman says, the college tries to protect its academic mission and the syllabus policy would never have been adopted if anyone thought it would hurt students. He adds that many professors elsewhere have already stopped handing out syllabuses. “A good number of people we’ve spoken to have never even seen a hard copy of a syllabus,” he says.

From an educational perspective, the policy could help students if they go to professors’ Web sites before classes start, and either read or print out a copy. “If they think about class before they show up the first day, it might enhance student learning,” he says.

The bait and switch here is typical of much writing on the "effects" of cyberspace on material labor practices -- an assumption that one can unproblematically replace the other. "Telecommuting" replaces travel using automobiles, "telemedecine" replaces rural health care clinics, "distance education" replaces the construction of pesky brick-and-mortar classrooms, and of course Google replaces the public library. Right? But such facile comparison hides the complexities of virtual and material practices.

With regard to syllabi, we need to think of them not simply as equivalent material artifacts where one has physical costs and one is virtually free, but artifacts that are produced and used in particular ways for particular purposes. For example, I'm a professor at a big state university who prints out paper syllabi for all of his students on the first day of class -- whether that class has 500 students or 5 students. I believe students will be able to follow along with my explanation of the class purpose, method, and details better with a physical piece of paper before them. I believe they will be able to better decide whether to take my class if they have that piece of paper to regard over dinner that night. And I believe that if they take my class, that piece of paper will serve as a valuable reminder of what they learned later. I've kept paper syllabi from classes I took two decades ago in college.

Yet at the same time the printout of my class syllabus comes directly from the website I create for my class. The printout has the URL of the website prominently displayed. I advise and expect my students to visit the "live" class web site weekly in case something changes or in case I have good information to add. Both informational artifacts serve a different purpose in education, and have different space/time roles. Together they enhance each other.

They both have different production and labor dynamics as well. The paper syllabus, presented on the first day, forces me, the instructor, to have my course worked out in detail weeks beforehand. The web syllabus allows me to be dynamic in my educational practices -- to a degree. I know the students have the original printout and I restrain myself from deviating too much from my original plan. Plus, the paper syllabus can be printed out "in batch" at very low capital and labor and spatial/temporal costs, in a centralized, specialized copy center (reaping economies of scale and expertise). If I had all my own students print their own syllabi, it would take a myriad of decentralized printers, all of which need service, toner, electricity, and attention. I would be trading off my own brief labor and the paid labor of professional printing staff for the much more time-consuming, unpaid labor of my students, plus the largely invisible but costly labor of network printer support staff.

Even when one actually counts the dollars and cents, the policy doesn't add up:

The college never figured out the exact cost of printing syllabuses, he says. But copies cost the college about 2 cents a page, nearly all of the university’s 11,000 students take at least some classes in the college, and syllabuses run from a page to 15 pages.

My back-of-the-envelope estimate shows that if each of these students took 2 L&S classes with a syllabus of 10 pages each, the total cost per semester would be $4,400. That's about the cost of ten distributed printers -- which will likely break down frequently -- or perhaps one-tenth the annual salary of one service person to keep those printers in working order. I'd take the copying if I were truly interested in cost-cutting.

This whole issue -- and so far my whole response to it -- has been over a triviality which distracts the public, the legislature, the university staff, and the students from the real issue:

Zimmerman says that the Wisconsin system’s budget “has been cut relentlessly” and that deans have no choice but to try to save every penny. Zimmerman has been dean for 14 years, and his college’s budget (about $18.5 million) is down from where it was when he started. Not a single unit in his college is receiving more money now than when he started, despite inflation generally and huge increases in costs such as scientific equipment.

Education is being sacrificed here to other state priorities -- and private profits -- over a decades-long term, and we're arguing over two-cent copies, blaming professors who want to educate their students in the most effective way they know how. Incredible.

Is Disney abusing Chinese workers to make books to sell to US kids?

2005-08-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

I need to start this post by reminding readers that Disney is a transnational media firm, courting an international consumer market with largely Western European- and US-inspired media products of all sorts, which owns, among other properties, ABC. I also need to mention that I could find nothing about this story on the ABC News web site.

A report in the UK Guardian today was headlined "Disney accused of labour abuses in Chinese factories." I don't usually reprint whole articles verbatim on my weblog, but in this case I think I should:

Walt Disney said yesterday it had hired an auditor to investigate claims of widespread labour abuses in Chinese factories that make children's books for the company.

A report from the National Labor Committee, a human rights group, alleges that workers are forced to be at factories for up to 15 hours a day, are paid below the minimum wage and denied holiday, overtime and maternity pay. It was based on interviews with 120 workers at five factories in Shenzhen province.

The report says one company, Hung Hing Printing, has one of the worst records in the province for industrial accidents. One 24-year-old woman was crushed to death in 2002 by a hole-punching machine and a man killed when he accidentally touched an exposed mechanism. Crushed hands and fingers from unsafe machinery are common occurrences, it alleges.

Interviews and video footage from the plants were supplied by a Hong Kong-based human rights organisation, Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehaviour.

"At one printing factory producing Disney books, there are four to five accidents a week. People lost their fingers and palms," said Billy Hung, coordinator of the group. "But ... the factory just hires new workers and the accidents simply continue."

Workers said they had to meet targets or lose pay, which meant they usually worked longer than the official 12-hour day. The group claimed workers were paid just 35 cents (20 pence) an hour, below the region's minimum wage of 42 cents an hour.

Supervisors are also said to scream insults at workers such as: "You are a stupid pig." According to testimony, workers often faint due to the intense heat and fast-paced work. One said: "In meetings management would say, 'if you faint, you deserve it and I won't sympathise with you'. "

Disney said it took the allegations "very seriously" and had asked the non-profit social auditing firm Verité to investigate. The firm said it would "take the appropriate actions to remediate violations found".

The report also claims that Disney audits are a sham and that workers are coached on what to say or face being fired.

At another firm, Nord Race in the city of Dongguan, staff are paid just 33 cents an hour. The report claims the firm demands 13- to 15-hour shifts, seven days a week, in stifling heat. Workers have no health insurance and if late, they lose half an hour's wages for every minute they miss, it claims.

Nord Race denied the claims in a statement to the Associated Press and said it complied with Chinese labour laws.

The report has been published at a sensitive time for Disney, just a month before Hong Kong's Disneyland theme park is officially opened.

This story should remind us that, far from "virtual" and "weightless," the global information economy -- both in its hardware products like CD players and computers, and in its software or content products like books, CDs, and DVDs -- is still a material, messy, and often dangerous production economy. Formed in 1981, the National Labor Committee is one of the many global activist organizations which, in its own words, believes:

Transnational corporations now roam the world to find the cheapest and most vulnerable workers. The people who stitch together our jeans and assemble our CD-players are mostly young women in Central America, Mexico, Bangladesh, China and other poor nations, many working 12 to 14-hour days for pennies an hour. The lack of accountability on the part of our U.S. corporations--now operating all over the world, and the resulting dehumanization of this new global workforce is emerging as the overwhelming moral crisis of the 21st century. The struggle for rule of law in the global economy--to ensure respect for the fundamental rights of the millions of workers producing goods for the U.S. market--has become the great new civil rights movement of our time.

You might remember the NLC as one of the organizations involved in the 1996 Kathy Lee Gifford / WalMart sweatshop debate. More information on their Disney report, and their other projects, can be found on their web site.

More information on Disney is available from independent sources, including a list of their media holdings (compiled by the Columbia Journalism Review) and an investor's fact sheet by Hoover's.

You may of course want to get Disney's side of this story as well. Visit their corporate website at http://corporate.disney.go.com/ -- especially their public relations statement on international labor standards.

The company has not yet issued a press release on its web site responding to the NLC accusations.

Only half of those taking ACT college entrance test have adequate reading skills (updated)

2005-08-18T09:35:00.000-05:00

No pretense at rigorous analysis today, only a lament.

I remain convinced that "reading skills" are key to individual, corporate, regional, and national success in the ever-changing information economy and culture we find ourselves in. So you can imagine my dismay at this New York Times report:

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.

I would argue that this indicates that, despite Republican-led "education reform" legislation over the last five years, children are being "left behind." Perhaps "taxpayer revolt" movements which argue that quality schools shouldn't be so expensive have had something to do with this too. Maybe the general and repeated anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitude of the Bush administration is coming through loud and clear to our young people. I just don't know. But as a state university educator who teaches a core writing course to hundreds of undergraduates a year, I know that I and my rather low-paid teaching assistants will be next in line to face the challenge of educating this cohort. It's a position from which I think I can quite clearly see the connections between investing in public schools and investing in productive economies. Why can't enough taxpaying private property owners and/or enough taxpaying private corporations see that connection too?

P.S. A related article today, from the Associated Press, on public schools:

Forty percent of public school teachers plan to exit the profession within five years, the highest rate since at least 1990, according to a study being released Thursday.

The rate is expected to be even greater among high school teachers, half of whom plan to be out of teaching by 2010, according to the National Center for Education Information.

Retirements will open up entry-level slots for younger, and cheaper, teachers, which may help ease school budgets a bit. Then again pensions will still need to be paid out to retirees, probably for a long time. Hopefully this demographic shift in teaching won't be used as yet another excuse for defunding education at this critical time in our nation's history. Otherwise, the students of tomorrow will be just as ill-prepared as those of today as they face the expanding universe of cacophonous but detail-rich media, the global panopoly of interests and beliefs which are far more complex than the simplistic struggle of "freedom versus terror," and the end of a century of petoleum dependence which will have devastatingly differential effects in rich, militarily-secure countries versus poor, conflict-ridden ones.

Academics "branding" themselves, their books, and their research topics on the web

2005-08-10T07:16:00.000-05:00

A student of mine sent me a link to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Master (or Mistress) of Your Domain," by Michael J. Bugeja (I'd link to it, but viewing requires either a subscription or an emailed invitation). Anyway, the article details advice from the director of a journalism school at Iowa State University on how faculty can use the web to "brand" themselves, their research output (books), and even their research topics. Why engage in such marketing? To gain notice of peers that can translate into letters of recommendation for tenure and promotion committees.

Faculty web sites are common, but range widely in the amount of information provided and the level of effort invested (my own web site takes up way too much of my time -- but I feel it does get noticed, especially by my students). Sites for faculty books -- stand-alone sites with their own catchy domain names, not simply listings on publisher catalogs -- are less common. The third category, branding a research topic, is most interesting to me:

This year I set up a research site with an assistant professor [...] who shares my concern about the Internet's dynamic but unstable features. In such an environment, footnotes often disappear in online documents and databases, threatening scholarship as we know it.

Our research has been featured in The Chronicle and other publications and journals, and all of that is accessible via our site, whose domain name -- halfnotes.org -- suggests our contribution to the discipline: "the half-life of Internet footnotes," or the time it takes for one half of footnotes to decay in an online document.

Whereas the objective of a book site is to sell the text, the goal of a research site is to provide access to scholarly work, establishing that narrow niche necessary to document "the potential for national distinction" and "contributions to the discipline."

Such a site should explain why your work makes that contribution. We do so with links explaining how our research began, where it has taken us, and where we intend to take it. The site also contains downloadable pictures and vitas along with book recommendations and reprints. Other links go to my book site and [my colleague's] Web site.

So when editors or colleagues query us about our research, we answer briefly via e-mail and then send them to halfnotes.org, which we update whenever we publish new data.

True, maintaining such a research site is one more chore in our digital day, but that simple upkeep also serves to accumulate the history of our scholarship and our contribution to the discipline.

It's interesting to me how such efforts seem to fit in with recent moves by universities to "brand" the research coming from their professors -- for private universities, a way of demonstrating value and prestige, and for public universities, a necessary strategic response to hostile legislatures who don't understand the kind of research produced by their state employees. But both sets of practices -- individual branding and institutional branding based on research topic -- carry a risk, I think. With the practice of "branding" comes an implicit assertion of "ownership." And research at the academic level isn't about taking personal, private, and protected control over a particular resarch topic, method, or twist -- it's about engaging a global community of scholars on a particular set of research questions.

I think the three types of "branding" discussed here -- having your own site as a faculty member, creating a site for a book you are trying to sell, and creating a site based on the research you claim to do (or to own?) -- differ significantly in degree and in the interests they serve. Personally, I'm extremely comfortable with having a personal website, and I readily acknowledge that it serves a personal career-building function for me. Not only do I list all my publications on my site, making it a virtual "cv," but I automatically repost my latest blog rambling there and even reveal my salary and employment history to interested readers. I think all of those things, while serving my personal interests, serve the academic interests of information openness and contextualization of scholarship and teaching as well (which is why I feel justified in placing them on university-sponsored resources).

Although I provide information on my own books (which are for sale in the marketplace and which, for one, I earn nearly a 50-cent royalty per copy), I feel less comfortable with creating a book website with its own domain, disconnected from the rest of my research, teaching, and biography. My publisher should promote my book in this way if they desire; they're reaping the bulk of the profits, if any, from my books, not me (or my university).

Finally, I'm of mixed opion about claiming jurisdiction over a whole area of research with a web site. I have my own weblog -- the one you're reading now -- to illustrate and work through my own research interests, but consider it a conversation rather than a manifesto ... engaging with a terrain of scholarship rather than staking out that terrain and claiming that I alone serve it best. I intentionally host this weblog outside of my university, to allow for the inevitable crossover of political-economic and academic conversation which is increasingly prohibited in state university settings (while, I might add, the advocates of so-called "Academic Bill of Rights" claim that "conservative" speech by students in the classroom is somehow trampled by "liberal" professors on a regular basis). But it's still less than I want it to be.

I'm frustrated that I haven't figured out how to turn this weblog into a more collaborative experience. There are other researchers at my own university who do work on topics similar to my own, from very different points of view or research methods or sets of expectations, and we've found that engaging with each other on the web is difficult. I think part of this -- on my end at least -- does come from the fact that, as cooperative as we'd like to think we are in academia (and we are EXTREMELY cooperative compared to just about any knowledge-producing process in the private sector) we nevertheless find ourselves in a artificially competitive labor market -- not only within single departments, but within single universities and across different universities -- where the culture we learn from Day One is "distinguish yourself!"

Perhaps the moral here is that, as in so many other aspects of modern life, the traces we leave on the web serve to highlight and magnify both the best and the worst of the social processes we engage in. I guess I just hope that new social practices of "branding" researchers, research universities, and that research itself, leads in the end to wider public understanding and appreciation of all three, rather than the narrow interests of individual or group privatization, accumulation, and hoarding of knowledge and the benefits which accrue from it.

Boston Globe reveals sham "think tanks" and "research journals"

2005-08-09T08:45:00.000-05:00

Saw this Boston Globe article floating around the blogs today and initially I was dismayed -- not just because there are well-funded people out there who are trying to "spoof" actual academic associations and journals with sound-alike scam versions in order to peddle their personal (and, to me, hateful) beliefs as honest, peer-reviewed research, but because the president of the dominant economic and military force across the globe apparently believes this stuff (or, worse, doesn't believe it personally but wants voters to think he does):

President Bush had a ready answer when asked in January for his view of adoption by same-sex couples: ''Studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman,' the president said.

Bush's assertion raised eyebrows among specialists. The American Academy of Pediatrics, composed of leaders in the field, had found no meaningful difference between children raised by same-sex and heterosexual couples, based on a 2002 report written largely by a Boston pediatrician, Dr. Ellen C. Perrin.

But Bush's statement was celebrated at a tiny think tank called the Family Research Institute, where the founder, Dr. Paul Cameron, believes Bush was referring to studies he has published in academic journals that are critical of gays and lesbians as parents. Cameron has published numerous studies with titles such as ''Gay Foster Parents More Apt to Molest' -- a conclusion disputed by many other researchers.

The president's statement was also welcomed at a small organization with an august-sounding name, the American College of Pediatricians. The college, which has a small membership, says on its website that it would be ''dangerously irresponsible' to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The college was formed just three years ago, after the 75-year-old American Academy of Pediatrics issued its paper.

That pediatric study asserted a ''considerable body of professional evidence' that there is no difference between children of same-sex and heterosexual parents.

The Family Research Institute and the American College of Pediatrics are part of a rapidly growing trend in which small think tanks, researchers, and publicists who are open about their personal beliefs are providing what they portray as medical information on some of the most controversial issues of the day.

Created as counterpoints to large, well-established medical organizations whose work is subject to rigorous review and who assert no political agenda, the tiny think tanks with names often mimicking those of established medical authorities have sought to dispute the notion of a medical consensus on social issues such as gay rights, the right to die, abortion, and birth control.

For example, Cameron's Family Research Institute, with an annual budget of less than $200,000, tries to counter the views of the 150,000-member American Psychological Association, which has an annual budget of $98 million. The tiny American College of Pediatricians has a single employee, yet it has been quoted as a counterpoint to the 60,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics.

Senior Bush aides, asked for the basis of the comment about adoption, now say they are unaware of any studies comparing heterosexual and same-sex adoptions -- by Cameron or by any pediatric association. The president, they say, was probably referring to studies that show children are better off living with both biological parents -- though those studies have nothing to do with adoption by same-sex couples.

But Cameron said that he feels confident that Bush was referring to his work, and that he once briefed two White House aides on his research, which is widely distributed through the Christian Communication Network, a public relations firm run by an antiabortion activist, Gary L. McCullough, who also was the press agent for the parents of Terri Schiavo.
Indeed, a web search found that Cameron's findings had been repeated on a variety of conservative websites and blogs.

The first point to understanding this story, though, is that an interlocking set of mutually-validating information interests are at work in producing and reproducing this "research". An individual creates an "institute" with a funding source and an authoritative name; that helps to legitimize the "research" in the eyes of the media, especially a media so underfunded and, apparently, lazy that it asserts "balance" in a news story by citing this institute in the same breath as large, longstanding, and open-to-scrutiny scientific and acacemic organizations representing the bulk of a profession. Then this institute finds further legitimacy by "publishing" (really, paying for publication of) its findings in supposedly peer-reviewed journals:

Cameron's adoption study, and at least 10 more of his works, appeared in Psychological Reports, a small journal based in Montana, which says its studies are peer-reviewed, although editor Doug Ammons said: ''No reviewer has a veto right." The journal, which typically charges $27.50 per page to print an article, is portrayed by Ammons as a ''scientific manifestation of free speech."

By contrast, the largest professional journals, which are often cited as sources of medical information -- such as Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine -- say they will reject an article if any peer reviewer raises serious objections about its methodology. Those journals do not charge for publication.

Anyway, as I said, this story really depressed me until I realized the silver lining: The Boston Globe was publishing a piece bringing these practices to light, and the blogosphere was picking up the story and perhaps giving it legs. Where those legs will take it, I'm not sure. I doubt the story will break on the network evening news tonight. But it may stick in the mind of a documentary film producer, or it may get into the hands of an instructor like myself who can use it as an instructive example and generator of debate in a university course. Journalism is serving its purpose as a check and balance on the truth statements and political manipulations of persons with divisive social agendas -- and in doing so, it will perhaps allow entertainment and education to serve those purposes as well. That gives me hope.

WI state assembly introduces "student bill of rights" to regulate University information labor

2005-08-03T07:36:00.000-05:00

Here's a state legislative proposal which, if enacted, would affect the information labor of an entire state university system -- and which, in its details, reveals both the gross misunderstanding of, and perhaps some disdain for, those who make their careers performing research and teaching service to the state.

Wisconsin State Rep. Marlin Schneider, D-Wisconsin Rapids has introduced a "Student Bill of Rights" to the Wisconsin State Assembly, co-sponsored by Rep. Rob Kreibich, R-Eau Claire (chair of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities), according to an article in the LaCrosse Tribune. I'd think this was merely a frivolous publicity stunt if it didn't have the chairperson's cosponsorship. Here are the details of the bill:

- Require an instructor to approve or deny a request to add a course within five days of the request.

- Require the suspension of all parking rules for the week preceding and following each semester.

- Require grades to be submitted no later than 10 days after the final examination for the course.

- Prohibit an instructor from requiring students to purchase or use a textbook the instructor has authored unless student government approves.

- Require the chancellor to revoke tenure of a faculty member or deduct six months' pay for an untenured instructor whose academic advising causes a student to be enrolled at least one semester more than he or she otherwise would have been enrolled.

- Prohibit an instructor from requiring students to complete a course evaluation until after the final examination is given.

- Requires by 2012 that audio or video recordings of all lectures and course sections be made available for downloading on the Internet.

- Require an instructor who adopts the policy of reducing the grades of a student due to illness resulting in absenteeism to state that policy in writing, and permit a student to appeal any decision based on that policy to the appropriate academic dean.

- Require an instructor to excuse the absence of a student whose family member, fiance, or fiancee dies or becomes extremely ill, and to allow a student to take any examination missed because of a funeral of a family member, fiance or fiancee.

- Require an instructor to meet with a parent or guardian who wants to discuss academic performance within a week, as long as the student approves in writing.

- Limit the work day of a medical intern to 16 hours.

- Prohibit the Board of Regents from entering into a contract that grants naming rights to a university arena, playing field or stadium.

- Direct the state Department of Public Instruction, the UW Board of Regents and the Technical College Board to adopt maximum weight standards for textbooks.

Some of these wildly unrelated proposals might sound like "common sense" at first blush. But the idea that the state assembly needs to micromanage such rules and regulations for the whole university system (including the flagship research school UW-Madison, consistently ranked in the top tier of public universities across the nation) is something of an insult. Unlike, say, regulation over privately-owned, non-democratic, secretive, individually-competing capitalist business firms, the state university system is a coordinated, cooperating, open to public scrutiny, and democratically-operating institution. Faculty serve both within departments and within the university as a whole to make policy and evaluate that policy. Paid administrators, lawyers, and human resources specialists balance those faculty decisions with professional, legal, and bureaucratic expertise. If there is anything that legislators Schneider and Kreibich -- or any of their constituents -- would like to object to with regard to the way the university works, they already have a well-functioning mechanism to make those recommendations or air those issues. Why would they choose to ignore all of these sincere information laborers and the self-regulatory structure they have taken such time and effort, over such a long history, to construct? I hope it is not in order to set a legislative precedent, using the Trojan Horse of "common sense" issues like parking, allowing the state assembly to later restrict academic freedom, speech, and research in further "common sense" bills (as is now being attempted in other state legislatures around the nation).

In particular, I must respond to one of the bill's provisions which I have some personal experience with, and which I think represents a gross misunderstanding of the practices and economics of academia. The proposed bill would "Prohibit an instructor from requiring students to purchase or use a textbook the instructor has authored unless student government approves." The assumption here seems to be that faculty who author books (a) make large royalties from these books, and (b) assign these books to their classes only to make a personal profit. Both assumptions are faulty. I have authored one book so far, for which I receive less than a 50 cent royalty per copy. I have never forced my students to purchase this book in one of my classes, but if I did require a seminar of 20 students to purchase the book, I'd make a grand total of ten bucks. I have also co-edited a collected volume of articles, which I did require my students to purchase in one semester. I did this because there was no other appropriate text on the topic available. Indeed, we want to have faculty in our universities who are publishing at the cutting edge of their field, and our students should have the benefit of this work. I receive no royalties for my editorial work on this volume, but the bill would have considered me an "author" of the book and assumed that I was up to no good in assigning it to my students. Writing such misguided and, frankly, insulting provisions into law is wrong. It sends a signal to both current and potential faculty members in Wisconsin that their state does not value their information labor -- that it considers them little better than charlatans, perhaps even criminal.

We should reject this law, and at the same time, we should not be afraid to address the issues it raises within our own internal regulatory structure. Bad policies can easily be changed by good people following proven, democratic procedures. We at the University of Wisconsin System may indeed have a few of the former, but I know we have an abundance of the latter.

The labors of "democratic, citizen journalism"

2005-07-31T09:34:00.000-05:00

An essay by Rory O'Connor over at Global Journalist lauds the blossoming of online "citizen-journalists" (such as bloggers but also individuals contributing to new cooperative and "open source" web ventures like GetLocalNews.com and Open Media Network) and links this revolution not only to the increasing household penetration of the broadband Internet, but to the consumption of personal digital appliances for media manipulation like digital cameras:

The rise in high-speed Internet connections is fueling an evolution of the Web from a medium heavy on text and graphics into a source of audio and moving pictures, and the proliferation of low-priced digital cameras, camcorders, recording gear and a host of personal electronic devices has created millions of potential journalists. With these tools of production now cheaper, faster and more accessible than ever, the tools of dissemination are becoming more ubiquitous and democratic than ever.

This tendency to equate the expansion of consumer technology to "democratization" is not new (see for example the 2nd volume of the Americans trilogy by historian Daniel Boorstin in the late 1970s) but claiming that a particular class of technology-consuming consumers can not only ehance, but replace professional journalism seems pretty risky to me. I think we need to ask some critical questions before we come to any conclusions: Which persons have the media literacy, the disposable income, the previous work- or education-related knowledge of the professional media industries, and the considerable "disposable time" to become effective citizen journalists? What kind of journalism, from what positionality and directed to what audiences and social ends, are these persons likely to produce (or even able to produce)? In many cases the answers to these questions might be inspiring and optimistic: say, educated individuals in societies which repress their political-economic participation or dismiss the value of their life experience finally able to find a collective voice through low-cost publishing of text to collective weblogs. At the other extreme, the answers to these questions might point to the snowballing production of an "echo chamber" where idle consumers of one narrow media slice parrot and quote tidbits back into the mediasphere for like-minded (and like-positioned fans). Many weblogs, in fact, might be judged to display both of these polarized sides simultaneously (this one included).

I think the key in making such judgements -- as we as critical consumers of any media must inevitably do, like it or not -- is to evaluate such activities neither on the basis of the "democratizing" consumer technology they use -- text blogs or photo blogs or video blogs or (mark my words) virtual-reality gaming-engine full-immersion experience blogs -- nor on the consumer popularity they elicit, but on the basis of the labor practices they promote, demand and sustain. And in that sense i think the divide between groups of "citizen-journalists" and groups of "fan communities" and groups of "online diarists" and any other subset of bloggers that we might try to bound is going to be their adoption of, and contribution back to, notions of careful, critical, and conscionable rhetoric, analysis, research, and documentation. These are skills one learns at, say, the university, rather than purchasing them at Best Buy.

Biased information labor at PBS?

2005-07-29T08:13:00.000-05:00

Just can't let this one go by without a short comment, for the benefit of any students out there who might be reading this.

An editorial this week over at Fox News from David Boaz, executive vice president of the avowedly libertarian Cato Institute, purported to list the "Top Ten Reasons to Privatize Public Broadcasting". I don't have the time or interest to try to refute all of his allegations -- some are grounded in important debates over the direction of public broadcasting and don't deserve to be dismissed out of hand, and not all of the allegations are of equal value or import to the debate -- but I wanted to point out two in particular, which strike me as comically contradictory:

7. Public broadcasting has a liberal bias. The reason the Republicans are poking around in PBS’s business is that they’re tired of taxpayer-funded radio and television networks being used to campaign against Republican administrations and their policies. Does public broadcasting have a liberal bias? Is the Pope Catholic? I have the luxury of choosing from two NPR stations. On Wednesday evening, June 29, a Robert Reich (search) commentary came on. I switched to the other station, which was broadcasting a Daniel Schorr (search) commentary. That's not just liberal bias, it's a liberal roadblock.

[...]

1. The separation of news and state. We wouldn’t want the federal government to publish a national newspaper. Why should we have a government television network and a government radio network? If anything should be kept separate from government and politics, it’s the news and public affairs programming that Americans watch. When government brings us the news—with all the inevitable bias and spin—the government is putting its thumb on the scales of democracy. It’s time for that to stop.

So for the head of the Cato think tank, a group which is funded by partisan interests and provides research and rhetoric to those partisan interests, the problem with PBS is "liberal bias." OK, I understand they don't want taxpayer dollars promoting bias one way or another. I'll forget for a moment the fact that it was the FCC under the Reagan Administration in the 1980s which let the former "Fairness Doctrine," a regulatory principle over the privatized airwaves that demanded a sense of "balance" in news reporting, die a lonely death (allowing the meteoric rise of "right-wing talk radio," among other things). And I will forgive the "Is the Pope Catholic?" line of "common sense" reasoning, even though the Cato institute, as a supposedly research-based think tank, should be able to supply actual research to back up its claims -- I understand this is an editorial on Fox, meant to be snappy, not authoritative. But if PBS is so liberal, then how can it possibly be an outlet for government propaganda, as Boaz indicates in his number one reason to privatize PBS? (Hasn't Boaz been paying attention to the recent revelations that in fact it has been the Bush Administration who has been using taxpayer dollars to pay media consultants to support its policies on the air, and to produce "Video News Releases" sent to local television news programs who pass this propaganda off as independent reporting?) In fact, if two out of the three branches of federal government are now controlled by the economic and social conservative side of the political spectrum (with a new Supreme Court justice likely tipping the balance of the third branch as well), might we not want a watchdog voice to represent a more moderate (which they see as "liberal") set of views?

I would like to encourage media and information students of mine to check out the Fox editorial, and then to follow up some other sources as well, such as Salon reporter Eric Boehlert's nice article on the current attack on PBS (posted at truthout.com) and a 1999 Vassar College study of actual persons appearing on PBS news and public interest programs (posted at FAIR.org) which showed that the dominant voice is not "liberal," but corporate. Not only is PBS not as "liberal" as the Cato institute -- representing the epitome of economic conservatism and, as libertarians, often social liberalism! -- would have Fox viewers believe, but PBS is, in a very real sense, already privatized: both dependent for corporate funding to produce and screen much of its programming, and providing a showcase for corporate America pundits in its nightly news just as every other professional national news service tends to do.

Yet I still think we need PBS, and instead of pointing to PBSkids.org as the canonical argument for why we do (although I still think this is a very good example and argument) I'll point to another informational resource that is unique in America -- and around the world -- to PBS alone, an unparalleled source of investigative, documentary filmmaking AND a great example of how, as a publicly-based endeavor, that information is able to be enhanced and preserved over the new media of the global Internet. I'm talking about Frontline, and if you've never seen this program or visited this web site, please do it now and discover just what journalism COULD become in an environment free of corporate pressures for avoiding any and all least-common-demoninator objections of affluent and/or targeted consumers.

Talking points on the value of public univeristy information labor to a state

2005-07-22T07:51:00.000-05:00

Here in Wisconsin, university faculty and staff have been fighting to keep their benefits, gain cost-of-living raises, and avoid the need to raise tuition on students, arguing against a Republican-controlled state legislature which doesn't seem to agree that public research universities are a wise investment of tax dollars. Here are a few quick talking points presented in open testimony by the group PROFS, which lobbies the state on behalf of faculty interests -- talking points no doubt applicable to other state university systems besides Wisconsin's as well.

Other universities and states are taking note of the fact that UW-Madison salaries are slipping further behind our peers. They are pursuing our faculty at an increasing rate.

The numbers tell the story. A couple years ago, we had 52 faculty members receive outside offers, and we were able to retain 75% of them. Last year, we had nearly twice as many - 98 - receive outside offers, and we were only able to retain 52% of them.

Make no mistake about it. We are losing some very good people.

Why should you and the rest of the state care about retaining and recruiting UW-Madison faculty? There are many reasons. UW-Madison faculty members bring in, on average, more than $250,000 in federal research funding annually, which has a huge multiplier effect on the state. The university's 2004-05 budget includes a great deal more federal funding ($526 million) than state tax dollars ($370 million).

UW-Madison's economic impact on the state is estimated to be at least $4.7 billion annually. At least 218 Wisconsin companies have been started as a result of ties to UW research done by faculty. These companies employ more than 7,000 people and have gross revenues of well over $1 billion.

And momentum for business growth is building, as an average of 13 companies have been formed from the research at UW-Madison in each of the last five years. Forbes magazine recently rated Madison the best place in the nation to launch a business or career, due in large measure to the presence of the university.

While calculating the direct economic benefits of university research is an effective strategy, I hope we (and the Republican lawmakers) don't lose sight of the fact that university faculty and staff also spend significant time and effort teaching and mentoring the state's young adults, so that they too might find jobs where they can apply critical thinking skills in service of the greater public interest -- and get paid a fair wage to do so. (And many of these jobs, in todays increasingly globalized, increasingly informatized society, will necessarily involve "information labor.") That's all we ask for ourselves, and personally, that's my greatest wish for our students.

How higher education is viewed by some in Congress

2005-07-21T09:18:00.000-05:00

The online magazine Inside Higher Ed reported on the House Education and Workforce Committee as "it was considering hugely important
legislation that determines how the government spends tens of billions of dollars a year on students and colleges" in a "session to amend the Higher Education Act". Two contradictory bits stand out in particular. First, the debate over the "watered-down version of David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights" that was to be attached to the act, to protect conservative students from alleged abuse by "liberal" professors who supposedly run rampant in grading them poorly simply on the basis of their political views:

One issue emerged Wednesday that college groups had thought was largely settled. Last month, a group of higher education associations issued a statement aimed at altering a resolution included in the Republican leaders’ Higher Education Act legislation that mirrored the Academic Bill of Rights that is rattling around several state legislatures. The House committee’s leaders applauded the colleges’ statement and largely incorporated it into the latest drafts of their bill. The language makes the point that academe is not monolithic ideologically and that colleges can — without the government — deal with professors (a distinct few, according to most academic leaders) who punish students for their views.

But at the urging of faculty unions and other groups that had not approved the statement, Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.) introduced an amendment Wednesday that aimed to drop the compromise language, which he said “interferes with the longstanding principles of academic autonomy.” “There is no place for this kind of ideology in the Higher Education Act,” Tierney said.

Added Rep. Timothy H. Bishop (D-N.Y.), a longtime administrator at Southampton College: “The fact that we are including this suggests that we are accepting the fiction that this is a problem.”

As the Democrats spoke, Rep. Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican, looked like his head might explode. “It’s embarrassing that people are going on record against this,” he sputtered, characterizing the mistreatment of conservative students by liberal professors as a “sweeping and pervasive problem.”
Students, he said, “should know that the United States Congress stands behind them.”

The tide turned a bit when Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisc.) said he thought a bigger problem were the “thought police” — small groups of students at various campuses who are creating blacklists of professors whose views they don’t agree with and trying to get the instructors fired. Souder said he “supposed that professors ought to have this right, too,” and so Tierney withdrew his amendment “temporarily” with the understanding that Democrats and Republicans might work together to alter the bill’s language to ensure that professors’ free speech rights are protected, too.

The second debate, ironically and frighteningly, was a proposal by a conservative legislator to, yes, punish professors on the basis of their political views (and to legislate just what appropriate political views are):

[The committee] Gave reasonably serious consideration to an amendment by Rep. Charles Norwood (R-Ga.) that would have withdrawn funds from international education programs that engaged in “anti-American activities.” Disbelieving Democrats repeatedly evoked the House Un-American Activities Committee and many Republican members looked embarrassed and shook their heads as Norwood, occasionally drawing titters from the audience, stuck to his guns in urging a crackdown against programs and professors who “teach distrust of America.” The measure failed, but 10 of the panel’s nearly 40 members voted for it.

[...]

Norwood’s proposal to cut back on anti-American activity, which would give a new international education advisory board that the legislation would create the power to define and identify such activity. He said that many international studies programs in the United States “teach distrust of America” and “teach young Americans to be against their own country.”

Asked repeatedly for examples, he demurred, drawing criticism from skeptical Democrats. “I am opposed to letting any committee of Americans define what is un-American for another group of Americans,” said Rep. Robert E. Andrews (D-N.J.).

Again, I fear, this is just one more example of a broader trend in which politicians supported by certain constituencies and monied interests seem intent on pushing anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist (if rationality means "open to critique"), and anti-critical restraints on education, research, and media production. Individually, such efforts might sometimes seem absurd, but they should be analyzed and mobilized against as a coordinated whole.

On the jailing of journalists for protecting sources (updated)

2005-07-20T12:35:00.000-05:00

(Originally posted 08 July 2005 ... updates follow)

Journalism is information labor, and the ability of journalists to find and secure trusted sources is crucial to that labor -- crucial to useful, truthful journalism. In the current US media climate where "journalism" is too often redefined in the public mind to mean punditry, product placement, or puff pieces, we must remember that real journalism requires real labor, and often real risks on the part of both journalists and their sources. The best and most succinct statement of this with regard to the recent jailing of a New York Times reporter for adhering to her professional principles comes not from the "objective" US media, but from the avowedly left-of-center UK Guardian:

The American constitution no longer protects the unfettered freedom of the press. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the remarkable case of the New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who has just begun what is likely to be a four-month prison term for refusing to reveal her sources for a story that was never published. Protecting the confidentiality of a source, the US courts have ruled, does not outweigh all other considerations.

Rarely has the term Kafka-esque been used with greater justification than to describe the events leading to Ms Miller's imprisonment on Wednesday. Ms Miller had investigated - but not reported on - the naming of an undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame, whose husband, a former diplomat, had written a New York Times article questioning the validity of key intelligence on the eve of the Iraq war. Mrs Plame was identified soon afterwards, in a column written by the rightwing polemicist Robert Novak. That naming was a criminal offence and an inquiry was launched into who had provided the information. Strangely, nothing is known of Mr Novak's contribution to the investigation, but Ms Miller was subpoenaed. In a further twist, Ms Miller has been highlighted as one of the New York Times reporters who had relied too heavily on Iraqi exiles for overstated reports of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Uncharitable commentators claim she is now trying to redeem herself by her uncompromising stand in the current case.

Throughout, the US courts have accepted that precedence must be given to the task of bringing to justice the person who committed the crime of naming a CIA agent rather than the principle of protecting the confidentiality of a journalist's source. The British courts would, under the Human Rights Act, also have to balance the right to privacy with the right to freedom of expression.

Confidentiality of sources is an indispensible, if not an entirely untrammelled, weapon in the pursuit of truth, on which the Guardian writes with the humility of past experience. To reiterate one of those principles that Tony Blair promised to uphold after yesterday's London bombings: the more accessible truth is, the better informed the electorate, and the better protected democracy. It is not clear who Ms Miller spoke to or what she was told. But she should not be in prison and if the constitution does not protect her, then surely it is time for a federal law that will. And we should guard against this change in the legal climate crossing the Atlantic.

The tricky things about this story, of course, are that (1) the source being protected by the reporter is actually the person targeted for wrongdoing, not a whistleblower reporting the wrondoing of others; (2) the nature of the wrondoing was itself the source's "speech act" of revealing government security information to the reporter; and (3) the social and political context of the "war on terror" privileges the government's role in managing secrecy (remember too that the grand jury investigation itself is secret and may even be subject to "gag orders" restricting those who have participated so far). Keeping a reporter out of jail might have been easier if any one of these conditions had been different. And it would be easy to label this a "special case" where general press freedoms must be challenged. It's not an easy decision. But I have to believe that upholding the freedom of the press to use sources without revealing them to the state will, in the long run, increase the security of the US, and reproduce an environment where the truth will more readily be uncoverered -- even apart from secret grand jury investigations. Hopefully there are still smart and brave journalists out there willing to investigate the original story of the Republican Administration security leak, which after all was the real problem here, not the "liberal media".

Update 20 July 2005 ... as this story has unfolded and I've listened to and read more discussion on both the specific case at hand and the general principle at stake, I've come to agree that I should take into account a few other considerations in addition to the three I ended with above: (4) the reporter actually in jail didn't even write an article based on communication with the source, so it is unclear what public truth would come from protecting the individual (or whether that individual could even be regarded as a "source" for an article that was never written); (5) the reporters who did print information leaked by the source(s) were perhaps being used by the source(s) in a dishonest manner to smear a critic of the Bush Administration, in which case any truth-for-confidentiality claim might have already been broken; and (6) the profession of journalism should very well be held to a similar standard to other professions which regularly deal with personal confidences as a means to a greater good, such as medicine and law -- and in these professions precedents certainly do exist for deciding when confidentiality between a professional and an individual client (or source) must be abandoned in favor of the public good (or even the risk of direct harm to other indiviuals). Whew.

Some have sugested that the correct professional course of action, regardless of a personal reporter's desire to act on the basis of civil disobedience, would be to push for blanket shield laws, accept legal challenge to those laws on a case-by-case basis, and abide by the legal precedent set for interpeting these laws vis a vis the public interest or the absence of harm to other individuals. In other words, protect journalists, but trust in the rule of law, and abide by the law in the case of exceptions. After all, the legal system, like good journalism, also has a responsibilty to uncover the truth and protect the public interest (ideally). I'm coming around to this position, although I hope the fact that one of the sources "outed" under this logic is the architect of the two-time victory of an individual president, an administration, and a party whose policies I do not support has not unjustly influenced my position ... I want whatever standard the journalistic profession agrees upon, and whatever standard is written into federal law (and there SHOULD be such a standard), to apply equally well when the source being protected is distasteful to me as when the source is a hero to me -- but only if that protection serves the futher uncovering of the truth, and therefore the public interest.

But this is a more complicated issue than a blog post or two can do justice to (as are they all, really) so I'll sit on my hands now and watch the drama unfold before weighing in again. P.S. Thanks to a sly posting of Aaron Veenstra's over at Civility in Public Discourse for prodding me to rethink all this.

Fox pundit calls all science (and science-based policy) into question

2005-07-20T08:29:00.000-05:00

Somehow I knew that Fox News would have a field day with this one -- especially in light of recent legisltative attacks on the science behind consensus theories on global warming via calls for the entire research and data records of three particular scientists to be handed over to some angry congressman with ties to the energy lobby -- and I just feel compelled to respond.

A Fox pundit led off her column today with the deceptive statement that "A review of medical studies published from 1990 to 2003 in three prestigious journals -- the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Lancet -- has called the validity of approximately one-third of them into severe question." She then opined, "If a relatively 'hard' science (like medicine) has such difficulty with accuracy, then the results offered by the so-called 'soft' sciences (like sociology) should be approached with a high degree of skepticism," and that "Inaccurate studies become entrenched in laws that govern our daily lives. [...] In the best of circumstances, research is unreliable outside strictly defined limitations; even within those limits, research generally provides only an indication rather than a proof.

First of all, the original AP story she cites spins the review entirely differently: "Subsequent research contradicted results of seven studies -- 16 percent -- and reported weaker results for seven others, an additional 16 percent." The distinction is important: Fox leaves the impression that a single "review" found flaws in one-third of the the studies published in the three journals. But the reality is that it was a series of other studies subsequently published in those and other medical journals which, over time, modified the results of the original reports, and sometimes contradicted them outright.

Far from an indictment of academic research as "unreliable," this is, in fact, an example that the peer-review and research-duplication process for academic research works. The original studies in question were published because they met the standards for solid initial research results on novel ideas and questions. The subsequent studies built on these original reports, also worked their way through the peer review process, and were able to make claims of more general validity. It is likely that not only were these "scaled-up" studies, but that they were also studies with increased amounts of funding.

This is why it is unfathomable to me that the Fox pundit would use this moment to incite her readers to "Bring skepticism and common sense to all data you hear; withhold your tax dollars." She argues,

Consider the 'feminist' issues of rape or domestic violence. Studies that address these areas are often released in combination with policy recommendations. Indeed, they sometimes appear to be little more than a springboard from which advocates can launch a campaign for more law.

In turn, the laws that result often provide for more research. The Violence Against Women Act or VAWA -- now up for re-authorization before Congress -- is an example. VAWA includes provisions for more tax-funded research, for precisely the sort of research that created it in the first place.

And, so, a re-enforcing cycle is established: studies lead to laws that lead to similar tax-funded studies, which call for more law.

Leaving aside for the moment the unanswered question of why this pundit is attacking the Violence Against Women Act (and "feminists"), she seems to be arguing that (a) research by "advocates" is by definition tainted; (b) law should not in any way be based on research because research may be called into question; and (c) the federal government should not fund research with tax dollars because research may be used to formulate policy or law.

In answer to (a), the idea that research by persons with political interests is always tainted, I would argue that all persons have political interests (by definition) and that it is the set of structures and processes through which research flows which allows us to judge its truth value and/or utility. I expect and want researchers to be interested in the topics they are researching. I hope that people interested in curbing violence are the ones researching causes and patterns of violence, for example. But I want that research to be undertaken by someone trained in academic methods and ethics; I want the work funded by sources without political interests in reproducing their own position of power; I want that research to flow through a process of professional peer review and publication; and I want that research to then be called into question over and over again if necessary, by other persons from the same kind of training, with the same kind of interests in finding the truth, and working through the same funding-neutral, peer-review process.

This also answers (b), in that of course research should be called into question. That's the definition of rational argument, as opposed to, say, "faith" or "common sense" (which by definition cannot be called into question). I would rather have my government basing its laws and policies on rational argument which can, if conditions change or of new information is revealed, be called into question, rather than on someone's singular and unwavering idea of faith-based law and policy.

And finally, in terms of (c), I want my democratic, transparent, politically-accountable federal government funding research with tax dollars, because that is precisely how we may produce the kind of unbiased research results the Fox pundit claims to desire. If by contrast research is only funded by undemocratic, private, secretive, corporate sources, how likely is it that research which threatens to undermine the power position of these sources might be funded, distributed, and used?

A computer programmer labor shortage at Microsoft and in the US?

2005-07-19T08:30:00.000-05:00

A recent article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Microsoft is feeling a shortage of qualified information labor, and blames declining enrollments in US university computer science programs:

Microsoft isn't able to hire enough computer scientists in the United States to fill its available positions, Bill Gates said yesterday, citing decreasing interest in the field and fierce competition for qualified talent.

Gates, speaking to an international audience of computer science faculty members on the company's Redmond campus, said Microsoft's inability to meet its employment needs is affecting 'the speed at which we do things.'

The Microsoft chairman said he was perplexed by the declining enrollment in computer science programs at the nation's universities. [...]

Gates made the comments yesterday to more than 350 university faculty members from 20 countries at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit.

Does Microsoft's hiring difficulty mean economic ruin for the "new economy" in the US? The report cites a UCLA study which "found a 60 percent decline between 2000 and 2004 in the number of college freshmen who planned to major in computer science," and cites a consulting study which found "Enrollment in computer science programs at North American universities has dropped by 7 percent in each of the past two years." But at the same time, "The U.S. unemployment rate for computer occupations was 4.3 percent in 2004, noticeably worse than the 2.8 percent unemployment for all professional occupations in the same year, according to an analysis of federal employment data by the U.S. division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers." Might this not mean that we actually have a glut of programming labor available in the US as a whole, and that students are making a rational choice to avoid a crowded field?

There's another angle to this question which the Seattle Post-Intelligencer story neglects to report. As succintly described by the management-friendly National Public Employer Labor Relations Association in this summary, Microsoft has been involved in litigation over its use and classification of part-time, contingent information labor all through the 1990s:

The seminal case examining whether contingent workers are "employees" for certain benefits purposes is Vizcaino v. Microsoft. Vizcaino involved a group of independent contractors who were hired to work on special projects and who signed agreements acknowledging they would not receive benefits. Microsoft did not withhold the workers' federal income tax or allow them to participate in the company pension and welfare plans, which included a 401(k) plan and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan. The independent contractors were paid from accounts receivable and not payroll.

However, the workers were treated similarly to company employees in most other manners. They worked with company employees on projects, had the same supervisors as those employees, worked the same hours as company employees, and were provided with supplies by Microsoft. In 1990, the IRS examined Microsoft's records and determined that based on a "right to control" test, the workers were "employees" for tax purposes.

This and related cases dragged on at least until 2000, when the Surpreme Court denied to review a previous ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on the matter, resulting in an ambiguous case where "employers are [...] left without guidance from the Supreme Court regarding the classification of contingent workers who are employees of third party staffing agencies" while "the Microsoft litigation has opened the door for such employees to bring costly litigation if they are denied certain benefits."

If Microsoft is truly concerned about growing IT laborers in the US through university education, versus simply trying to secure the cheapest and most pliable IT labor force it can -- through tapping saturated labor markets, using third-party contingent workers, or importing and offshoring of IT labor -- then maybe besides leading the IT industry in lobbying for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in order to find cheaper labor markets, or requesting the single greatest number of H-1B visas and permanent guest status for workers it wants to bring to the US, Microsoft should lobby the federal government to increase aid to states, where public higher education has faced serious budget cuts for years.

Critique of US television news media from "Baghdad Burning"

2005-07-15T08:42:00.000-05:00

A recent visit to Baghdad Burning reminded me why I think universal accessibility to weblog tools is now such an important aspect of any definition of the global "digital divide". The author talks about her surprise at finding US-media news programming broadcast throughout Iraq in recent months, and provides a lively deconstruction of what she sees:

I've been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so ... clean. It's like hospital food. It's all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions- 2 minutes on women's rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once.

About a month ago, we were treated to an interview on 20/20 with Sabrina Harman- the witch in some of the Abu Ghraib pictures. You know- the one smiling over faceless, naked Iraqis piled up to make a human pyramid. Elizabeth Vargus was doing the interview and the whole show was revolting. They were trying to portray Sabrina as an innocent who was caught up in military orders and fear of higher ranking officers. The show went on and on about how American troops never really got seminars on Geneva Conventions (like one needs to be taught humanity) and how poor Sabrina was being made a scapegoat. They showed the restaurant where she worked before the war and how everyone thought she was "such a nice person" who couldn't hurt a fly!

We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I've always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality- I just didn't know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere.

The key here, in my opinion, is the dialectical connection between media consumption and production that her weblog posting makes possible: I can sit in the US and read the weblog of a woman in Iraq, who is watching media designed to be distributed in the US that instead is now being redistributed in that society, and see her reacting from her perspective and challenging the images of US media she had previously heard secondhand from other Internet resources which she had long had access to. The dissemination of such personal interpretations of "dislocated" media to wider audiences, which themselves are reading those interpretations from their own "dislocated" positionality in a sense, is just wonderful.

Now if only we could fix our own broadcast news media here at home ...

Global information labor and global information education

2005-07-15T08:27:00.000-05:00

From a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor comes an ironic example of the dialectical relationship between information-labor education and the wider information-labor economy -- in India:

In a sign of growing pains within India's high-tech economy, the government last week slashed the intake capacity of engineering schools by more than 25,000 seats across the country's private university system.

A dramatic shortage of engineering teachers with doctoral degrees prompted the cuts. Various experts estimate that India has only 10 to 30 percent of the qualified instructors it needs.

The shortfall is a product of India' s economic success story - as well as a peril to its future expansion. High salaries and abundant jobs are attracting more students to engineering, and at the same time wooing teachers away from classrooms and into the office parks that now dot many of India' s southern cities.

In an interesting twist, these cutbacks come after years of increasing privatization of India's higher-education system:

Private engineering institutions have spawned all over India because the government has not had the funds to increase significantly the number of engineering schools it runs. In 1970, India had a total of 139 engineering institutions, and only four of these were private.

Today, India has nearly 1,400 engineering institutions; only about 200 belong to the government. This explosion in higher education has allowed many more Indians to pursue an engineering degree [...] seats were so few 20 years ago that only 1 percent of aspiring students got in; today, nearly 70 percent manage to find places.

But with cutbacks in enrollment allowances (mandated by qualified teacher-to-student ratios in the private schools of 1:15), the private schools may face financial ruin from lack of paying students, just as successful graduates face financial windfalls for choosing private-sector employment over academic employment:

Today, a fresh engineering graduate can get paid twice as much as an assistant professor who has spent a minimum of six extra years and a hefty Rs. 300,000 to 400,000 ($6,896 to $9,195) more to earn his master's degree and PhD.

The story doesn't address the globalization side of this issue, however: not only are high industry salaries in India fueled by offshoring of IT labor from transnational North American, European, and Asian firms, but transnational Indian students still find educational opportunities in these regions as well. What might the relations between high-tech training and high-tech labor become in, say, the United States if US-based transnational firms increasingly seek workers around the globe, but would-be global workers increasingly turn to the US for education and training?

My own preference would be for just and equitable education and employment chances for all potential information laborers around the globe. But I wonder if the declining value placed on academic labor in the US, coupled with the declining committment to make academic education universally available to US students -- products of tight state and federal budgets linked to both endemic government privatization efforts and disingenuous conservative charges of "liberal bias" in academia -- might eventually make the US both a poor choice for recruiting information labor, and a poor choice for training and educating that labor.

Hidden information labor behind "reality TV"

2005-07-11T08:43:00.000-05:00

The supposed draw of "reality TV" for viewers is that such entertainment presents an unscripted, unfiltered view of human behavior and human drama; the supposed draw of "reality TV" for networks is that such entertainment removes the need to hire peksy and expensive creative talent such as writers and actors. Both assumptions are wrong, as a recent New York Times article on labor disputes behind reality TV illustrates. For example, on the reality TV show "The Bachelor," the producer recently found that in a cost-cutting measure "the production had eliminated the low-level clerks, called loggers, who catalogue the contents of hundreds of hours of video taken of the contestants." These high-level workers acknowledged to be necessary to reality TV, like the producers, not only end up covering more diverse information labor tasks, but work under harsher wage conditions:

Salaries for producers and editors on reality shows vary widely, and often depend on the production company, though network shows tend to pay more than cable. One show may offer $2,500 a week for a field producer, while another may offer $1,600 a week. By comparison, the minimum guild rate for a writer on a prime-time, 13-week scripted show is $3,477 per week.

Part of the problem is related to the different temporal rhythm of reality TV. Unlike scripted drama or comedy, some reality shows take "only weeks, rather than months, to be bought, produced and appear on the air." Production companies which offer the quickest turnaround and the lowest bid win the contract -- often by cutting out traditional steps in the labor process. One producer called it "the Wal-Mart model".

Such labor cuts are helping to create a backlash of pro-union sentiment. "nearly 1,000 writers, editors and producers [...] have signed with the Writers Guild of America, West, to try to force reality production companies and the networks that present the shows to negotiate a union contract." Similarly, "the Directors Guild of America has struck agreement with about 35 reality shows".

The head of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers dismisses such efforts: "A lot of people in this country would love to have the work these people are doing, and the rates of pay that they receive, millions of people," he said. "Sports people work long hours. News people work long hours. It's a business that basically adjusts to the needs of production, and hopefully people get time off later." But the NYT report says "that's exactly what editors and producers in the reality genre say that they do not get. On scripted shows, they said, writers work abnormally long hours during the year, but have long hiatuses between seasons. And their compensation is commonly twice what reality show producers - the people who devise the story lines, but who are rarely called 'writers' in the credits - earn."

The NYT article points out that underlying all of these questions is a key definition wrapped up in the idea of creative information laobr: "Is the work done by producers and editors on reality shows really the same as writing?" For example, I'm studying the work of broadcast closed captioners which bears striking similarities to the plight of reality TV workers: their work is under severe time pressure, they are often targeted for elimination by cost-cutting production companies, and they are not considered "authors" even though they must creatively interpret information in one modality (audio) and turn it into information in a totally different modality (text) while taking into consideration audience needs such as reading speed, education level, and cultural background.

Whether it's reality TV, a closed-captioned movie-of-the-week, or your local network news, the analytical points of relation -- and potential opportunities for collective political action -- seem to hinge on the ability of information workers hired on different broadcast products to be able to recognize the labor processes, employment conditions, and social roles they share as skilled and creative mediators of media messages. Only then can they make claims of legitimacy, solidarity, and value back to both their employers (producers) and their customers (audiences).

Update: An article today in the New York Times reports that "A lawsuit filed last week against producers and broadcasters of reality television shows accused those companies - including ABC, CBS and the WB - of planning to falsify payroll records of employees to avoid paying wages for overtime. The lawsuit, filed on July 7 in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeks class-action status and is part of a broader effort by the Writers Guild of America, West, to organize nearly 1,000 workers who edit and produce the reality programs. The union says the workers toil lengthy schedules for dismal wages with no health or pension benefits, unlike counterparts on scripted television shows."

War as information labor

2005-07-06T08:17:00.000-05:00

A story in the UK Guardian today mentions a potential shift in the way the Pentagon assesses military readiness, away from the current "two major wars" criteria:

The Iraq counter-insurgency is forcing the Pentagon to question its military doctrine that requires forces to be able to fight two major wars at the same time, it was claimed yesterday. A four-yearly review of US military power is not due until early next year, but it is already clear that the strategy is under great strain from the Iraq war. The length and ferocity of the insurgency has surprised the Pentagon. Two years after 'major combat operations' were declared over by George Bush, there are still 138,000 US troops in Iraq, costing $5bn a month. Yet under US military doctrine it is not even defined as a war. In theory, US forces should be able to fight two major wars and contain the insurgents, but the credibility of that claim is being stretched thin.

The current criteria for military levels is actually more complicated than simply "two wars," and apparently goes by the shorthand "1-4-2-1":

The September 11 attacks showed the US was facing an entirely new foe, so the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, adapted the goals. From then on, the military would have to defend the homeland from terrorism, keep a presence capable of deterring conflict in four critical regions, fight and quickly win two major wars and win so decisively in one of them as to remove the enemy regime. The formula was called 1-4-2-1. But with so many troops pinned down in Iraq, the conflict is draining US forces of the capacity to fight elsewhere.

The new approach being discussed might be called "1-1-1-1" by contrast, since the goal would be "to fight four entirely different kinds of war at the same time: traditional large-scale combat; counter-insurgency; defending the US against attack (involving weapons of mass destruction); and 'disruptive' warfare" such as information-infrastructure attacks. Interestingly, this new definition of readiness privileges information labor in warfare like never before, according to Loren Thompson, "a strategic analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington thinktank":

'The debate is moving away from hi-tech weapons and futuristic technology and in the direction of counter-insurgency and country expertise,' Mr Thompson said. The change would raise the importance of special forces, but would transform training for infantrymen, to emphasise language skills, military intelligence and familiarity with foreign cultures.'One of reason we rely so much on reserves now is because those kind of skills had been relegated to the reserves in the cold war,' he said.

If our armed forces indeed need to be trained more as information workers, with emphasis on language, problem-solving, and cultural skills, I wonder what this means for all-volunteer recruiting efforts which are not only currently under stress (with enlistments down and recruiting quotas going unfilled) but have historically targeted precisely those areas of the nation which have lacked investment in basic education, information technology infrastructure, and vibrant knowledge economies?

Wisconsin's dilemma: Short-term budget fix vs. long-term investment in the production of information workers

2005-07-04T17:21:00.000-05:00

Here in my current home state of Wisconsin, the two houses of the Republican-controlled State Legislature are wrangling with their budget proposal for 2005-2007 (the state budgets in two-year blocks) and it appears that once again, the University of Wisconsin System -- including the flagship research university UW-Madison which employs me -- will take a hit. From a recent report in the Wisconsin State Journal:

As passed by the Assembly, the budget would give the UW System about $1 billion in each of the next two years, or about $9 million more than the state currently provides.

But System officials say they really face a budget hole of about $90 million after factoring in new items requested by lawmakers and projected increased costs for things such as debt payments, utilities and health insurance.

The Senate amendment would increase that gap to $130 million. The Senate's budget would provide about $30 million less to the UW System in 2005-07 than it received in the current two-year budget.

Compare these priorities to the ones set by the Wisconsin Technology Council (a public/private partnership which advises state government on growing the high-tech economy in Wisconsin) in its May 2005 report entitled "Human Capital and Brain Power in the Wisconsin Economy: Shaping the New Wisconsin Economy"

Wisconsin continues to trail the U.S in terms of college-educated in the workforce. In 2004, 25.6 percent, or about 906,240 Wisconsin residents had earned at least a bachelor's degree as compared to 27.7 percent of the U.S. population. Wisconsin has increased its college-educated percentage of the workforce in every year since 2000 but the rate of growth is not enough to close the gap with the national averages.

[...]

Below average numbers of college graduates is an area of concern. One only has to look to neighboring Minnesota to find a state that has 20 percent more colleges graduates in its workforce and per capita income that is nearly $4,000 higher. That economic equation is compelling and should provide a clear path for Wisconsin’s future actions.

I am surprised that this statistic putting Wisconsin's college graduate population below that of the general US population isn't the first talking point off of every state politician's lips. Instead, vague accustions about how Wisconsin is the "highest taxed state in the nation" serve as the sound bite of political currency. Yet policy organizations that actually analyze the tax system on the basis of social justice, such as the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, report that the problem is not one of overtaxation, but of regressive taxation:

COWS recently released a national report explaining exactly “Who Pays?” taxes in Wisconsin. Going beyond rhetoric and simplistic state-by-state tax comparisons, the report details the “incidence” of taxation in each state – in other words, how much of a person’s income is paid in taxes, broken down by different income groups. The report was produced by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a national leader on fiscal issues and frequent collaborator with COWS. The results of the report, which revealed how Wisconsin’s poor pay more in taxes as a percent of their income than the wealthiest in the state, generated significant media attention and public concern.

Education, on the other hand, is a progressive action -- a proven vehicle for class mobility. Wisconsin is doing an adequate job, measured against the rest of the nation, of producing high-school graduates. But in the 21st century I believe the currency of the good life in the global information economy is now a college education -- one focused not just on technology, but on multicultural diversity, social equity, and critical thinking. Defund the state university system and you abandon these important social goals -- and the citizens who wish to reach them.

Appalling information labor factoid of the day

2005-07-03T08:44:00.000-05:00

From a NYT book review of Clyde Prestowitz's Three billion new capitalists, reviewer Henry Blodget offered up this sad example of the future of the US information-labor workforce (and our society's committment to that future):

Globally, our 12th-graders rank only in the 10th percentile in math (that's 10th percentile, not 10th). Our students also rank first in their assessment of their own performance: we're not only poorly prepared, we have delusions of grandeur.

Something to think about the next time your local government cuts funding to public education (Madison, I'm talking to you), or your state government cuts funding to university education (Wisconsin, I'm talking to you).

The so-called "jobless recovery" even in Silicon Valley

2005-07-02T16:59:00.000-05:00

Today an article in the NYT entitled Profit, Not Jobs in Silicon Valley points to the frustrating phenomenon for information professionals at all levels of status and wages in Silicon Valley (and perhaps, to a lesser degree, around the US): "demand, sales and profits are rising quickly while job growth continues to stagnate"

In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.

Changes in technology and business strategy are raising fundamental questions about the future of the valley, the nation's high technology heartland. In part, the change is driven by the very automation that Silicon Valley has largely made possible, allowing companies to create more value with fewer workers.

This question of labor productivity in the high-tech industry complicates the typical narrative for "old economy" industry, where the usual suspects of outsourcing and offshoring are assumed whenever employment stagnation (or wage stagnation) in a local economy is seen along with stable or rising revenues and profits. The article points out that

One key measure, known as value added per employee, rose 3.7 percent in 2004, to $222,000 in economic value per worker. That compares with $85,000 per worker in the rest of the country, according to data reported by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a regional economic research group.

By a number of other measures, companies are watching profits and sales rise. An analysis published in April by The San Jose Mercury News found that the top 100 public companies in the region had revenues of $336 billion in 2004, an increase of 14 percent from the previous year.

Of course, this is what information technology in the hands of educated labor is supposed to do, right? Raise productivity and profits for those who invest in it, and raise the wages and working conditions of those who use it. But it's interesting to imagine that something like the "deindustrialization" of, say, Detroit -- due simultaneously to such things as increased US worker costs and productivity, foreign firm competition, shifting consumer demand, and reluctance of US employers to invest in places where they've historically supported whole communities when presented with opportunities to instead divest of assets and take higher profits elsewhere -- might be happening to some degree now in Silicon Valley. Post-deindustrialization, anyone?

More on the "labor" that consumers perform on behalf of advertisers

2005-07-01T11:22:00.000-05:00

An article today in the New York Times entitled Consumers, Long the Targets, Become the Shapers of Campaigns describes that one reaction to consumers shirking their "labor" responsibilities in watching broadcast television commercials has been to shift this labor to Web activity -- not just forcing consumers to click-to-dismiss pop-over and pop-under advertising windows, but enlisting consumers as marketing consultants and product designers "interactively":

WHEN Crest introduced a toothpaste line two years ago, it used focus groups to help pick three flavors: cinnamon, herbal and citrus. This time around, the new Crest flavors will be chosen by customers.

Crest, a division of Procter & Gamble, is asking people to go to the Web to vote for their favorite from a short list of contenders: lemon ice, sweet berry punch or tropica exotica. Samples of the flavors are attached to some Crest products.Marketing executives say the campaign reflects an increasing interest by companies in involving consumers in their advertising. The trend is another way to break from traditional advertising that viewers increasingly can tune out with TiVo and other digital video recorders. Marketers say the Internet has also made interactive campaigns easier to conduct.

'This comes with the inherent declining power of traditional media advertising,' said Clive Chajet, chairman of Chajet Consultancy, a brand consulting firm in New York. 'All marketers today are seeking different ways to market their products.' Crest is running television and magazine advertisements about the promotion, which were created by Saatchi & Saatchi, part of Publicis Groupe. It also is sending e-mail to four million consumers on the company's e-mail list. Voters must go to Crest.com to register and vote. Then, they receive an e-mail message from Crest urging them to vote every day.

Every day!? Will the end result of such "interactive" campaigns be perhaps a reversal from the target-marketing of products to consumers based on their ability and willingness to pay (eg. affluent and status-conscious consumers) and instead to the default-marketing to consumers based on their ability and willingness to spend hours each week participating in online interactive surveys? (Please cast your vote now.)

Metaphors for the "participatory Internet"

2005-06-29T07:44:00.000-05:00

In the wake of several court decisions on liability and Internet file-trading (sharing? stealing?) systems, a NYT article entitled Web Content by and for the Masses does a nice job of illustrating all of the different ways that people previously conceptualized as Web "audiences," "surfers," or "users" are today engaged in actually producing content:

From photo- and calendar-sharing services to "citizen journalist" sites and annotated satellite images, the Internet is morphing yet again. A remarkable array of software systems makes it simple to share anything instantly, and sometimes enhance it along the way. [...]

Indeed, the abundance of user-generated content - which includes online games, desktop video and citizen journalism sites - is reshaping the debate over file sharing. Many Internet industry executives think it poses a new kind of threat to Hollywood, the recording industry and other purveyors of proprietary content: not piracy of their work, but a compelling alternative.

The new services offer a bottom-up creative process that is shifting the flow of information away from a one-way broadcast or publishing model, giving rise to a wave of new business ventures and touching off a scramble by media and technology companies to respond. [...]

"The giant brain is us," said Peter Hirshberg, a former Apple Computer executive who recently joined Technorati, a service based in San Francisco that indexes more than 11 million Web logs. His reference is to the 1960's fear that computers would emerge as omniscient artificial intelligences that would control society. Instead, he said, the Internet is now making it possible to exploit collective intellectual power of Internet users efficiently and instantly.

I find all of this fascinating too, but I'm also surprised at the many descriptions and metaphors used in this article for user actions which, for me, essentially come down to sheer "labor". We apparently find it easy to talk about "ehancing," "annotating," and "sharing" information as if that were an easy, unproblematic process that we're all equally adept at. We talk about "user-generated content" but not about the sheer time and effort and training it takes to allow users -- certain users, privileged users -- to actually generate this content. We talk about the collectivity of active, producing Internet users as a "giant brain" with "collective intellectual power" (knowledge) but we don't think in terms of the collective time expenditure or value generated through this knowledge. And we talk about the "two way flow" or "interactive flow" of information without conceptualizing the differential risks borne, and rewards received, by each endpoint of this flow (eg. corporate media firms on one side, who are increasingly released from the obligation of producing, verifying, and remaining accountable for content quality, and media consumers on the other side, who are increasingly expected to have the knowledge and time and good will to freely create content for the rest of us).

Don't misunderstand me: I'm glad to have the power to labor through, and upon, the Web. I'm doing so right now, largely for free (though in some calculation of value, perhaps my in-between academic and popular writing here on this weblog works to shore up my salaried position as a university professor). And I'm doing so in recognition that labor is not merely an activity which produces value for use and exchange in a society, but which "produces" personal engagement with the world, personal identity as a valuable individual. But I'm also acutely aware that i'm doing so at the expense of other productive activities (like writing my next book) and other reproductive activities (like eating my breakfast). I'm doing so using tools and skills and knowledge gleaned from a long history of privilege in both the educational system and the corporate workforce. I'm doing so within a geographic and political-economic infrastructure of regularly-supplied electricity and broadband household communications. This "shared" labor that I'm performing through and for the Web -- labor that admittedly increasing numbers of similiarly-situated Net users are also willing and able to perform -- must still be contextualized and analyzed before it is naturalized and romanticized.

Faculty salary divides between different disciplines and between different universities

2005-06-28T10:16:00.000-05:00

An article today at Inside Higher Ed discusses a soon-to-be-published study from the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute on faculty salary divides both across different disciplines (especially engineering and humanities) and across different universities:

Why do aerospace engineering professors make a little more money than classics professors at some public universities, and a whole lot more at others? [...]

The researchers looked at 1992-3 salary data from 88 institutions, 85 of which are public, many of them flagships or other research insitutions. The researchers already knew that computer science teachers at a given institution make more than philosophy instructors, but what they found was that the relative spreads between any two particular disciplines were widely variable at different universities. The study found a correlation between department quality as determined by National Research Council ratings, and the relative pay of faculty members in different disciplines.

For example, if a college%u2019s economics department was rated well and its English department only average, the salary gap between economics and English faculty members at that institution was likely to be larger than the gap at an institution where both were rated equally.

The article also cites the research director of the American Association of University Professors who is worried by this trend:

Higher education really is something for the common good that provides a benefit for society as whole. When you see some of these large differences, it’s easy to slip into a system that emphasizes individual payback instead of payback for society. [...]

As public support declines, institutions become more driven by the outside market. [...] If we move to a more corporate structure, then there’s an idea of ownership of data or information, and of limited exchange, and that, in the long run, will damage the whole enterprise.

But there's another potential that the article doesn't report, but which the original Cornell study suggests: the divide between faculty at the same university, in the same discipline, but of different genders. From the original working paper:

One hypothesis that we did not address in the paper is whether differences in field differentials in full professor average salaries across universities also may reflect differences in the gender composition of faculty in different departments at different universities. To see why this might occur, consider the following example: Suppose there are only two universities and two departments, economics and English at each. Suppose the economics department at each university hires only males and economists receive the same average salaries at both universities. Suppose further that the English department at the first university hires only males and that the English department at the second university hires both males and females and that the male faculty at both English departments receive the same average salaries, which are lower than the average salaries paid to economics faculty. Finally, suppose the English department at the second university pays its female faculty members a lower average salary than it pays its male faculty members because of gender discrimination or other factors.14 If this situation prevailed, the ratio of the average salary of economists to the average salary of English professors would be higher at the second university.

Put simply, if, as a long literature suggests, female faculty members on average get paid less than male faculty members, other factors held constant, differences in the gender composition of faculty members within a field across universities may influence the average salary of faculty members in the field vis-à-vis their colleagues in other fields at an university.

(Cite: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp60.pdf)

What I think this report should remind us of is that there's a discussion that needs to happen about the value of information labor in higher education, connecting all of these disparate divides (and other potential divides according to prestige of the university, money available for research expenses, ability to hire high-quality graduate students, cost-of-living differences of the local university community, and the like) in order to allow academics to speak with a greater collective voice, not only about their own bread-and-butter worklife issues, but about the place of academia in society as a whole.