Another Facebook Reality Check

I have a friend (whom I would prefer not to identify) who once asked me (I'm still not quite sure why) if Second Life was where middle-aged men went to get laid. Given the ongoing interest in whether or not Facebook (or something like it) should be considered part of an enterprise software suite, this question, however sarcastic it may sound, should not be ignored; and it appears, at least according to a recent post on The Blotter, that the New York Office of the Attorney General is of a similar opinion:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said his office is launching a full investigation into the social networking site Facebook and its safeguards against sexual predators.

"My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe Web site is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints," Cuomo said of the investigation.

In recent weeks, AG investigators posing as underage Facebook users were "repeatedly solicited by adult sexual predators" and granted unrestricted access to "a wide range of pornographic images and videos," including such groups as "*For girls that love to share naked pics*" and "Porn Star Trials," according to Cuomo's letter to Facebook.

The review also found that Facebook failed to respond or was slow to respond to complaints filed by investigators posing as the parents of the solicited underage users.

This investigation may end up killing two birds (that are not particularly close to each other) with one stone. From the enterprise software point of view, it reopens the question of whether or not time on Facebook is "wasted," while, at the same time, it also addresses the hypothesis that I claim HBO is investigating in Tell Me You Love Me, which is that sex is all we talk about and that we do so in extremely impoverished ways. The one way in which these "birds" may be closer than we think is in how they reveal our communication practices, whether for business or pleasure, and the danger they expose that all of those conversations are depressingly hollow!

The Hollow Conversation

Putting aside my penchant for trying to take on the Cluetrain Manifesto with either polemic or brash tomfoolery, let me now try to address the issue by framing it in a historical context. The basis for the frame is the concept of "conversation;" and, while I have already tried to frame conversation without the broader concept of the "interaction ritual," in this case I would like to take a more business-oriented approach and frame it in terms of "organizational communication." In order to do this, however, I must first recognize that those "terms" of organizational communication have evolved considerable over the roughly fifty years that both the practical world of business and the academic world of the professional literature have recognized it as a valid and significant topic. Therefore, I would like to offer a quick historical sketch of how the semantics of the phrase "organizational communication" has changed, based on the subjects of publications in that professional literature. These are the "phases of evolution" I would like to propose:

1. Propaganda: This had both an external side (public relations) and an internal one (if anyone remembers the "home organ").
2. Effective electronic mail usage: This initially concentrated on internal communication but gradually branched out to the external, starting with suppliers and distributors and eventually extending to customers (always getting the short end of the stick).
3. Decision support through groupware: These tended to be studies of how Lotus was being used and how much impact (positive or negative) that usage had.
4. Communication network theory: This had to do with how social networks formed, developed, and dissolved, with particularly attention to the role played by technologies, whether electronic mail or more sophisticated groupware. These studies were to first to take a more integrated view of the internal and the external. However, they were mostly descriptive (meaning that managers are still not sure what to do with the results).

This brings us to the present day, when Marx and Engels have been vindicated for their observation that the conduct of business is, above all else, a matter of "internal and external intercourse." (No, this is not from The Communist Manifesto; it is from The German Ideology!) On the surface that Marx-Engels phrase would appear to be just Cluetrain-speak. However, aside from my contention that the Cluetrain folks have only the most superficial conception of what a "conversation" really is, what is most important is that the "intercourse" itself is about more than just markets. What is missing from the picture, whether it is painted by the Cluetrain theses or by the evangelists for social software, is that, while technology keeps throwing out more and more ways to enable all that intercourse, the people empowered by the technology are still very much at sea when it comes to the content of the intercourse.

One of the popular protest mottos during the Vietnam War was, "What if they gave a war, and nobody came?" Today we seem to be addressing an analogous question, "What if we all gathered in conversation, and nobody had anything to say?" We all know this kind of situation. We have encountered it at countless parties. Our usual reaction is, to return to Goffman's terminology, to let ritual trump interaction and babble away on a sort of "automatic pilot." In many ways this would be the worst-case scenario behind that old Xerox marketing injunction to "keep the conversation going" (at the same time, giving the raspberry to Richard Rorty who coined the phrase in the context that "keeping the conversation going" was fundamental to the practice of philosophy).

There is an old joke about behaviorism that goes back to the days of Skinner. One behaviorist says to his colleague, "Boy, I am really impressed with operant conditioning. I have now trained my five-year-old to do anything I want!" He then pauses a bit and says, "So what do I want him to do?" So it is with the current state of that "internal and external intercourse." We have more "power of conversation" than we have ever had before. What we lack is the power to figure out what to talk about; so our conversations, if we hold them at all, turn out to be as hollow as that "automatic pilot babble" that takes place at so many social gatherings!

The Obsolete Rhetoric of "Human Potential"

I think I have finally hit on why JP Rangaswami is so infatuated with social software. What appeals to him more than anything else is the "leveling of the playing field" in cyberspace, which basically means that everyone is equally enfranchised. This would explain his most recent expression of a "mission statement:"

I want to find out more about the people who see these tools as opportunities to develop and enhance their potential, as opportunities to deliver to that increased level of potential. And I want to find ways of helping people do this.

Now there are a variety of ways in which I have tried to confront this world-view. The most theoretical probably came up when I tried to develop the principles behind the concepts of interaction rituals and interaction ritual chains. In that discussion I emphasized the axiom that the bonds that enable the formation of social networks are, by their very nature, stratified, which means that the playing field is never going to be level, nor should it be if networks are to form and function effectively.

However, beyond theoretical principles, there is also a matter of what might be called the rhetoric of idealism. The above quotation is an invocation of all that rhetoric about "human potential," which keeps trying to install itself as a meme in both social and management theory. I am sure that there are a lot of people out there who are sincere in embracing such rhetoric; and, in the grand scheme of things, it may even be desirable to do so. On the other hand, to distort a famous remark by John Maynard Keynes, in the grand scheme of things, we're all dead. Idealism has its place, but not as an opiate (now I seem to be distorting Marx) that deadens our awareness of the here-and-now. In that here-and-now the major problem that faces any business, regardless of scale, is the volatility of the context in which all operations (internal and external) are embedded. As a result every CEO has basically the same goal: survival in the face of volatility. This is why, for example, making decisions in the face of overwhelming volumes of data is so intimidating, since you have to implement your decision before it has gone obsolete.

Thus, to turn the rhetoric of human potential on its head (one of my preferred approaches to argumentation), we may invoke the metaphor of physics and observe that enterprise management today is all kinetic and no potential. The boss who is quick to “think on his feet” always trumps the reflective analyst, even when the latter comes up with more effective results. I do not particularly like these conditions; but we are not going to make them go away by (invoking the spirit of Marx once again) enfranchising the masses. I really wish I did have more constructive ideas for turning things around; but, from where I sit, I am hard pressed even to find sources of either commercial or political authority that might be able to lead the world of business out of this wilderness!

A Few Thoughts about the Social World

Now that the discussions on confused of calcutta are beginning to recognize the social world, this seems like a good time to sort out a couple of key observations.

First of all, I think that the best way to understand the nature of the social world is in terms of motivated interpersonal actions. In the Kantian spirit of breaking a topic down into its components, that means we need a theory of action (a major topic in social theory), a theory of motives (which has occupied literary theory as much as social theory), and a theory of interpersonal dynamics (which I happen to think is still beyond our grasp because most of our abstractions involve statics rather than dynamics). In other words we have a long way to go before we understand the social world well enough to take a theoretical approach to managing the impact of new technologies on it!

Furthermore, in my own efforts to develop a better understanding of interpersonal dynamics, I have been revisiting the concept of "legitimate peripheral participation," which constitutes the subtitle of the book Situated Learning by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. However, while Lave and Wenger try to argue the distinction between legitimate peripheral participation and apprenticeship, I am becoming more and more convinced that the former is just “newspeak” (thank you, George Orwell) for the latter. The world that now revolves around enterprise software is also a world of educational institutions that have devalued the practice of apprenticeship as some antiquarian artifact from the days of craft workers. I find it sad that, in order to convey its relevance to “knowledge work” (whatever that may mean), we have to dress this practice up in new terminology!

Semiotic Ignorance

Once again I see that JP Rangaswami, over at confused of calcutta, is waxing poetic over the Cluetrain motto that "markets are conversations. This time has argument is motivated by the Bengal Renaissance, which brought about a veritable explosion in creative writing. ("Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.") This has led to an interesting exchange of comments over whether or not the virtual conversations enabled by the Internet are raising or lowering "the social intelligence of our species." I have to react to this with an overwhelming need to vent, because, while I approve of debates that take place through the comments submitted to a blog post, I feel strongly that exchanges impeded by tunnel vision hardly count as debates.

Let me try to provide some context for my aggravation. On March 1, 2006 I was invited to give a seminar talk at the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory. This was at a time when the IBM effort in "services science" was charging forward with great vigor; so I saw this as an opportunity to exercise some sound argumentation on the basis of a contentious position. That position was that interpretation was a critical skill in providing effective service. There was nothing new about this, since Karl Weick had been saying the same thing for several decades; but I then argued that the capacity of a service provider for interpretation was impeded by a lack of understanding in five fundamental disciplines. Those disciplines (which will not be found in the department names of any university catalog) were phenomenology, semiotics, hermeneutics, narratology, and emotive valuation. This is my lengthy (Wagnerian?) prelude to the assertion that the confused of calcutta discussion about "the social intelligence of our species" is being impeded by a failure to grasp one of the most fundamental principles of semiotics.

That principle is the idea that any sign has a dual nature, whose two aspects are the signifier and the signified. Everything that was said about conversations in the confused of calcutta discussion, whether it involved printed matter in Bengal or an enumeration of the many things we see on our computer screens, was about signifiers. Those signifiers are the artifacts without which conversation would be impossible, but the conversation itself resides entirely under the aspect of the signified. Each of us relies on our capacities for interpretation to make sure that we are conversing about signifieds, rather than quibbling over signifiers.

This is why it is pointless to argue about whether or not the signifiers of virtual engagement (not just conversations) raise or lower "the social intelligence of our species." Such an approach is a distraction from "where the action really is." One has to take a broader view of the acts of interpretation (yes, I'm talking about verb-based thinking again) in order to grapple with a concept like social intelligence. (Indeed, one also needs that point of view to address the question of whether the crowd is wiser or madder than any individual member.) This is no easy matter; but, if we do not confront it, we are no better than the drunk looking for his keys where the light is better, regardless of where he dropped them.

To provide an example, let me try an exercise in examining the context in which interpretative actions take place. JP's description of Calcutta in the middle of the nineteenth century invokes memories of similar descriptions of coffee-house Vienna at the end of that same century (both heavily seasoned with caffeine and nicotine). This was not just a scene of conversations; it was also (in Chomskian language) the "surface structure" of a "deep structure" of cultural ferment. The "fermentation" would eventually burst out of the vessel that contained it, Europe would be consumed by a "war to end all wars," and the conversations of the coffee houses would be forever silenced. I am not interested in what is happening on the "surface" of the Internet, because I am too worried about what kind of brew is now fermenting!

Subjectifying the Object

One of my favorite topics is the way in which our techno-centric society tries to deny the humanity of the people it is supposed to be serving, preferring to treat them as objects in some vast "information management system" (usually so complex that no one can understand it), rather than the motivated subjects that they really are. If you hang around too much with the right (or wrong) postmodernist types, you might even slip into calling this "the objectification of the subject." However, as I discovered in my examination of the Cluetrain mantra ("markets are conversations"), the best thing to do with a motto is stand it on its head. If you are lucky, that will not only ground the motto in a more solid reality but also reinforce your understanding of the world beyond that motto.

Not too long ago, my wife bought some shampoo. (I suppose a few cognitive wheels just started grinding. Was that a deliberate non sequitur? Is he playing games with the noun "head?" Relax, reader; or, as the Brits like to say, "Wait for it.") The name of the product (honoring the use of case on the bottle) was "hello hydration;" but what really got to me was a sentence just above the line giving the quantity of shampoo in the bottle. That line read, "I'm a moisture packed multi-tasker." This really got to me. Here is a bottle of shampoo that starts out by greeting me with a salutation ("hello") and then wants to talk to me in a first-person-based declarative sentence! This bottle of shampoo, which has got to be an object by just about any criterion you can imagine (even before getting to all the databases that keep track of its production, distribution, and sales) is trying to act like a subject! Yes, dear reader, your wait is over: The world of marketing is now assaulting us with the subjectification of the object!

Can any good come of this; or is it just the clever idea of someone who figured that, if it worked for the pet rock, it could work for the "testifying shampoo bottle?" Well, I may be making too much of a silly marketing gesture; but something bothers me about a society that is willing to treat a shampoo bottle as a "subject" but cannot afford the same recognition to the members of some poor black family who lost everything to Katrina. Once I might have thought it extreme to view simple products like shampoo as a sign of creeping racism; but the more I look at how we reveal ourselves in how we use language in even the most mundane setting, such a perspective just does not feel that extreme!

More on the World's Second Oldest Profession

CNET News.com just ran a story by Sylvia Carr under the headline "Bill Gates' syllabus for tech and education." Here is the lead sentence:

Speaking at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum here [in Edinburgh] Wednesday, Gates laid out his vision for just how technology is going to transform learning.

This strikes me as an excellent point of departure for continuing to discuss the nature of the service economy and the question of what roles science and technology should be playing there.

Let me begin with the premise that, for all the talk about how we are moving from a production economy to a service economy, here in the United States, we have shown ourselves to be incredibly inept (if not customer-hostile) in the service sector (which probably goes hand-in-glove with our inability to keep up with the rest of the world in the production sector). I attribute our "service incompetence" to our lack of how to achieve quality in the world's second-oldest profession, which happens to be a service profession; and that, of course, is education.

As I see it, there are a variety of interrelated reasons why we have made such a mess of our educational system. The most important, which I have already discussed, is our effort to shoehorn it into production-economy thinking, assuming that the best way to improve the quality of education is to make it more efficient. From this position it is a short hop to the premise that the key to efficiency lies in better software, whether that software provides content (as in course material) or conversations (with teachers, students, and anyone else covered by the Cluetrain Manifesto). What is missing from this picture, however, is the assertion that socialization plays a fundamental role in the experience of education, a role with facets too subtle to be "managed" by the software "solutions" of social networking and virtual worlds. What distinguishes socialization is a committed approach to engagement (which, to be fair, is in Thesis 45 of the Cluetrain Manifesto); and, as we develop an appreciation for just how incapable we have become at social engagement, we see why our failures in education translate into failures throughout the service sector.

Now we should give Gates credit for a public face that is beginning to appreciate the value of engagement. However, while that appreciation may flow into his charity work, I doubt that anyone would claim that it is flowing into any Microsoft product! So, would you trust Bill Gates to "fix" our educational fiasco with a "Microsoft solution!" I most certainly would not!

Web 2.0 and the End of Science?

Gregory Lamb has written has written an extended, and probably troubling, article for The Christian Science Monitor entitled "Is this the end of the scholarly journal?" Lamb is far from the first to invoke the Internet as a point of departure for asking this question, but he has summoned an interesting collection of interviews and examples to explore it. This is enough to make his article worthy of examination.

The first source that Lamb quotes (in his third paragraph) immediately gives us a sense of where the wind is blowing. He is Mark Gerstein, a professor of biomedical informatics at Yale University and author of an article entitled "The Death of the Scientific Paper," which, as one might guess, has been published online. Here is the Gerstein quote:

The traditional journal publishing medium we've grown used to really needs to evolve and change because that's not the way people are accessing information.

"Accessing" and "information" are two relatively innocuous words; but, when they are combined, they never fail to send a chill down my spine, particularly because they have become a familiar mantra among the Web 2.0 evangelists. When did science become a matter of "accessing information?" No historian of science would find that phrase associated with Galileo or Einstein, although I suppose that much of the controversy surrounding Rosalind Franklin had to do with the fact that it was "her" imaging data that sent Crick and Watson down the path to the double helix. Nevertheless, the stories we read of Galileo, Einstein, and the double helix researchers (not to mention the vivid memoirs of Feynman) are primarily stories of observation and reflection. Have the new "informatic" disciplines displaced those fundamental practices that make science what it is; and, if we have lost those practices, can we really claim to be doing science any more?

The question is not one of whether online circulation of research documents is an improvement over the old-fashioned practices of journal editing and publication. Rather, the question involves what is happening to what Bruno Latour called "science in action," i.e. what it is that scientists do by virtue of which we recognize them as scientists. The legacy of observation and reflection reaches all the way back to a time when "scientist" was not in the working vocabulary and those reflective observers were called "natural philosophers," because their observations were directed at the natural world, rather than metaphysics. However, that legacy now seems to be running into a confrontation with what we might call the "Web 2.0 mentality," the result of which may end up being a major overhaul in our thoughts about both "science as a concept" and "science in action."

Before Web 2.0 became a buzz phrase, there was already a considerable amount of dime-store philosophizing over how Google and Wikipedia were changing the world. What seemed to be overlooked in the philosophizing was what these tools were actually doing: They were the new mechanisms for delivering answers; and, as a result, they were inspiring other innovative approaches to how the Internet could be used as an answer-delivery mechanism, some of which involved more powerful analytic techniques while others pursued to cultivation of social networks. These were the building blocks from which the glib entrepreneurs and venture capitalists could start infecting the general public with the "Web 2.0 meme!"

Does this have anything to do with science? Yes, science is driven by how we ask questions about the natural world and how answers to those questions drive us to ask more questions. This certainly does not diminish the value of the answers themselves; but it does call the concept of "delivery" into question, whether we choose to interpret it literally or metaphorically. Consider a Gedankenexperiment: Suppose you were occupied with the question of whether there is a connection between a woman's genetic structure and her risk of developing breast cancer. Suppose now that one day FedEx comes to your laboratory with a package. Inside the package is an old lamp and a worn-out book declaring this to be the legendary lamp of Aladdin and providing instructions for its use (including the loophole for being allowed more than three wishes). As a scientist you decided to test the lamp and genie with several challenging questions whose answers you already know, and the performance of each test is flawless. If you now decide to put your breast cancer question to the genie, would you be doing science?

At this point I am sure that my experiment will be challenged: How can you compare the Internet to Aladdin's lamp? Aren't you forgetting the ways in which the Internet connects you to your peer scientists around the world? This is sort of the "Cluetrain" strategy: It's all about the conversations. One of Lamb's unnamed sources stressed the importance of the principle that placing a scientific document online begins a conversation of annotations, comments, and critiques, thus becoming an "electronic Talmud."

I would not deny this challenge. I would just go back to the original question of priorities: What is at stake for you, my imaginary researcher? If an answer can be "delivered" by a mechanism that has nothing to do with "science in action," is that "delivery" an acceptable (desirable?) substitute for all the frustrations surrounding old-fashioned observation and reflection? Well, if you have a multi-million dollar grant from Pfizer supporting your efforts to answer the question, I am pretty confident that you would not refuse the lamp! You might draw heavily upon the Internet to write up your conclusions in a way that concealed the role of the lamp; and, in so doing, you would then find yourself back in the world of "science in action." However, sooner or later, word would get out about the lamp; and then concealment would no longer be necessary, nor would the practice of science as we know it!

I have tried hard to be judgment-free in developing this argument; but I shall not hide the fact that I believe that losing the skills of observation and reflection would be to our disadvantage. Nevertheless, I do believe that reflection is best exercised as a combination of solitary and group practices; and, on the basis of personal experiences, I have great appreciation for how the Internet (going back to the days before it was called the Internet) has helped me with my own reflective practices. Where I start to choke is when the Cluetrain crowd comes along and tries to convert those reflective practices into markets (and then the Web 2.0 crowd comes along in their wake to sell the platforms for those markets)! I also choke over the recognition that the practice of science has become like a horse that is constantly being whipped by the economic value of answers. Such a horse can go only so far before breaking down entirely; and that is why I fear that the "buzz" around the end of the scientific journal is actually an ugly omen of the end of the practice of science as we know it.