Harman is amazing on a number of levels, and if you’re someone who comes from STS and/or contemporary philosophy, you should definitely be reading him for his academic musings.  Even if you don’t care about recent developments in post-Heideggerian object-oriented actor-network sociotechnicopistemology, the American sportswriter turned Egyptian professor is worth reading for his insights into academia, life, and academic life (which are three way different things).  But back to my original point, the man is prolific – he blogs as often as most people tweet, giving his thoughts on everything from the recent crisis at Middlesex philosophy to personal reflections on the writing process.

Obviously he formats his posts and checks them for errors, but it doesn’t seem like he spends that much time thinking about what he should blog about or if some particular topic is worth posting.  He just writes about what ever is interesting to him, sometimes just sharing a link, other times giving commentary, and (where I find him most invaluable) doing both, sharing an excerpt of something that someone wrote with his thoughts on the matter.  It might be an essay one of his colleagues wrote regarding speculative realism’s view of innate qualities of objects, but it is more likely to be about plagiarism by students, whatever fiction or non-fiction book he’s reading, the latest conference he went to, or the English-speaking abilities of Cairo taxi drivers.  This can sometimes be overwhelming — say, when I open up my feed reader and find ten posts written while I was sleeping — but I’ve realized it is the right approach.  Not only has he kept me informed about topics, ideas, books, conferences, controversies, and so on that I would otherwise not know about, but he also offers a window into his world. I’ve never met him, but I feel like I know Graham Harman.

Contrast this with me.  I haven’t posted an update in months, and the last one I did was formatted much like a short academic paper and took a good hour or two to write.  I have about a half dozen drafts of posts that I’ve spent way too much time on — not writing, but thinking, second-guessing myself, googling to see if I’m original, and so on.  They are long, but that’s not a inherent problem.  Rather, they are filled with things that just don’t need to be in a blog post: no specific words or phrasings, but  instead the awkward insecurities that permeate all formal academic writing at the beginning stages.

Maybe it is part of being a grad student, where I feel afraid that I’ll accidentally offend someone or, more likely, just say something stupid.  Maybe it is because my site is first and foremost an academic portfolio constructed with blogging software, a professional, polished, public space in which I can present a slightly more interactive CV.   Maybe it is because I’ve been part of an pedagogic culture in which blogging is overwhelmingly just a digital form of the standard one-page essay summarizing and responding to the week’s course readings.  And as I write that last sentence — which may be interpreted as a slight jab towards some of my favorite professors — I realize exactly what my problem is: I have to stop myself from obsessing too much, or else I’ll never actually blog.

Thus comes the title of this post (which, by the way, is a riff on the amazing We Have Never Been Blogging, a Latourian blog which itself is a rift on the book We Have Never Been Modern).  I haven’t been writing blog posts, I’ve been writing short essays about topics that are only worth the time and energy for blog post.  That’s not to disparage the people who do publish academic essays with blogging software, it’s just a different thing.  And having broken my new rule again with a good ten minutes of rewriting that last sentence, I’m just going to end this post now.

So all this to say that I’m going to be blogging again, and with a new understanding of what that means.  I don’t think I’m as interesting as Graham Harman and I don’t plan on being as prolific as him, but I do plan on easing up on the slack.  For me, blogging is an immediate activity, something that you  put out there when you think of something that you find interesting.  I hope you do and that is the ultimate point of this, but not something that can be dwelled on.

If you are interested in the history of contemporary science, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, citation analysis can be a useful tool to discover broad trends in scientific research.  In this area, the ISI’s Web of Science is the de-facto source for this data, claiming to be the most comprehensive database of articles and journals. They index articles using a number of categories, including author, title, publication, subject, topic, and more. With a built-in results analyzer, it is very easy to chart the top authors in a subject, the journals that publish the most in a given field, or, as I was interested in, the growth of a particular topic over time.

I’m currently researching the history of a software suite for the simulation and modeling of molecules, and it is commonplace to cite its debut article if research has been done using the tool, making citation analysis quite painless. I learned though archival research that a certain feature was added in 1990 that would make the simulation of enzymes much easier.  The obvious question is if it had any measurable effect on the amount of research being done with this tool to study enzymes. So I told ISI to give me a list of all articles citing the original software article with the topic “enzyme” between 1985 and 1994. I found the most beautiful results:

According to the citation counts, it seems pretty clear that enzyme research using this program took off dramatically after 1990.  Knowing that correlation doesn’t equal causation, I restrained myself from thinking that the introduction of this new feature in 1990 caused the growth, but I knew that there had to be something here.   Perhaps enzymes were getting interesting after 1990 for some external reason (increased funding or relevance, new discoveries, etc) that caused both the new feature and the increased research.  So I did a database-wide search for all articles on the topic “enzyme” and analyzed it by year.  What I found was even more remarkable:

After 1990, all enzyme research appears to take off dramatically, with a 300% increase a single year.  I knew I was onto something here, and candidates kept coming into my mind: did the Human Genome Project spur this massive interest in enzymes?  Was there a general increase in science funding at this time, a worldwide biology research initiative (like the International Geophysical Year), or the takeoff of the biomedical/biochemical industries?  Whatever it was, I had a lead on something big, something that I hadn’t seen in any of the literature on the history of contemporary bioscience.

I began to search the literature for bibliometric research with phrases like “after 1990″ and “after 1991″, combined with various synonyms for rapid growth.  I found a number of other historians and sociologists of science who were making the same kind of argument that I was considering: important events happened in 1988-1990, and these events had to have at least some effect on the massive explosion of articles in a given discipline, subject area, or sub-specialty.  All of them used ISI, and all of them narrowed their search by topic.  While my intent was to find something in fields related to biochemistry, I these articles were making the argument across the sciences, including nanotechnology, materials science, mental health, oceanography, and more.  So I ran the same kind of analysis as before, but this time with a wide range of topic keywords (and scaled the results by the relative increase in citations from the previous year):

As is clear, topics from numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary fields remain steady until 1990, have a massive increase, and then plateau.  The effect is anywhere from 140% to 330%, but the fact that they all occur in the exact same year seems too perfect.  Even if there was a massive, across-the-board increase in science funding, research cycles are so varied – some kinds of studies can expect findings in six months, while others can take years.  The lack of residual effects after 1991 makes this even more unlikely: while the percent increase from 1990 to 1991 is varied, the growth from ’91 to ’92 is no more than +/- 10%.

Occam’s razor leads me to believe that these anomalies are an artifact of ISI’s Web of Science, not scientific publishing itself.  The most likely situations would be that in 1990, 1) a large number of new journals (most likely less popular ones) were added, 2) new kinds of research materials (books, conference proceedings, data sets, etc) were added, or 3) ISI’s method for determining article topics was changed (such as including author keywords or abstracts).  I suspect #3, and after far too much digging, I found some confirmation in a 1994 essay written by ISI’s founder:

Through large test samples, we concluded that the titles of papers cited in reviews and other articles were sufficient to add useful descriptive words and phrases to the citing paper. This was later confirmed in studies by A. J. Harley, as Irv Sher and I recently reported.11, 12

In 1990, ISI (now Thomson Reuters) was able to introduce this citation-based method of derivative (algorithmic) subject indexing, called KeyWords Plus®. 7, 8 In addition to title words, author-supplied keywords, and/or abstract words, KeyWords Plus supplies words and phrases to enhance these other descriptors and thereby retrievability. These KeyWords Plus terms are derived from the titles of cited papers, which have been algorithmically processed to identify the most-commonly recurring words and phrases.

Unfortunately, this new algorithm for topic indexing appears to have been introduced without distinguishing it from the old one.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to just search for pre-1990 style keywords in post-1990 articles, meaning that ISI’s topics and keywords are useless for historical bibliometrics that span across this date.   And thanks to what I’m calling ‘the 1990 effect’ (someone give me a better term, please!), many researchers are being led down a deceptively misleading path!

“Internet” is often spelled with a capital “I.” In keeping with current trends in internet studies, we prefer the lower case “i.” Capitalizing suggests that “internet” is a proper noun, and implies either that it is a being, like Nancy or Annette, or that it is a specific place, like Madison or Lawrence. Both metaphors lead to granting the internet agency and power that is better granted to those  who develop and use it.

I cannot disagree more.  First off, as someone who considers myself part of the emerging ‘Internet studies’ field, I did not know that this was a “recent trend” and had difficulty finding confirmation outside of this volume – although that can be forgiven, considering that we are at a very fragmented, even pre-paradigmatic point. (Readers: If you’ve seen this trend before, please comment!)

However, my most basic and linguistic objection is that the Internet satisfies the general conditions for being a proper noun: it refers to a unique entity.  While I do believe that the best category for the Internet is place-based, we capitalize far more than beings or places – which are the only classes that Markham and Baym give.  However, we don’t need to go into the whole ontological debate about whether the internet is a being, a place, an organization, a nation, a brand, an ideology, or any other class of entities that we capitalize.  There is only one Internet, and we can cleanly divide between on-line and off-line in the abstract – even if it becomes a lot murkier in practice, as with God and the Third World.

Given that the famed lowercase scholar danah boyd is one of the authors in the edited volume, I next thought that the editors may be taking from both boyd and feminist author bell hooks, who explicitly defy standard grammatical conventions in order to to make a political and/or philosophical point (they claim to de-capitalize their names to draw attention to their works and not themselves).  So I think it is better to focus not on the correct grammatical rules of Standard English, but the core motivation that they give: does capitalizing ‘Internet’ give it a kind of agency and power that we should instead attribute to the Internet’s developers and users?  I would argue that capitalization does give the Internet agency and power – and that this is a well-needed move.  Or to be more specific, this move does not magically give the Internet a power or agency it previously did not have, but rather acknowledges that the Internet’s technological infrastructure does things beyond what its developers and users intend.

In fact, one of my biggest frustrations with the proto-discipline of ‘Internet studies’ is that many scholars pass over the important roles played by the material technology upon which all of our interactions are mediated.  Now, I’m certainly not advocating a return to the technological determinism that was all the rage in the 60’s and 70’s. However, I do believe that the 80’s and 90’s have left us in a state where many of us are too wary of swinging back to Martin Heidegger and Lewis Mumford in order to seriously examine the materiality of the technologies that support the communities and practices we study.  A large amount of research in Internet studies focuses exclusively on human/social behavior in technological spaces, with only a few token gestures towards the way in which the ‘tubes’ fundamentally transform our interactions.  I think this is because we spend most of our time demonstrating that technology is socially constructed, leaving ourselves blind to how society is also technologically constructed.

The Virtual Worlds Almanac

The process is incredibly easy.  You submit a URL with your e-mail and a few optional pieces of metadata, and WebCite will permenantly archive that URL.  For people who have a massive list of links they need to archive (like me), WebCite lets you upload an HTML file – all the anchor tags will be archived.   It does well with text, images are hit and miss, and plugins like flash are not supported.  Also, some websites (like the New York Times and CNN) have Javascript-based advertising redirects or anti-framing measures that make archiving impossible.

Still, it is better than nothing.  My standard citation practice for all sites is to search the Internet Archive first, and then use WebCite if I do not find the page I need.  It also provides a layer of accountability, as the header for each archived page shows the URL and when it was archived.  I’m sure there is some way to fool the site into archiving the wrong URL, but it is better than self-archiving.

WebCite is funded by a consortium headquartered at the University of Toronto, and they plan on making money through grants and institutional and subscriptions.  I’m a bit skeptical of this business model, but I guess it works for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

You may also notice that nobody’s talking, at least out loud. Like all chat software, WC lets you send private messages, but it also enables you to talk in private groups, so there’s no real impetus for public discourse. Besides, most here have one thing on their minds, and it ain’t badminton. The typical experience is stumbling into a room, seeing two avatars nose to nose over in the corner, and realizing — just as at any cocktail party — that three’s a crowd. Bizarre? Sure. Sick? Maybe. A sign of modern alienation? Unquestionably. Yet in a way it’s a relief to know that even in this newest of mediums, there’s a place for the oldest of urges.

As I scan the room, I see that more than half the students have laptops on their desks. Just as many chat obtrusively on their cell phones, while checking their e-mail or sports scores… I feel uncomfortable in this space. It’s not “my space.”

He continues, grieving “the loss of the emotional bond and shared frame of reference” that he once had with his students. Then Bochner goes on an extended description of bad behavior he witnessed in his undergraduate class, which includes cell phone rings disturbing class, leaving to go to the bathroom without permission, listening to music, as well as noisily consuming food and drinks. He believes this is a natural consequence of what he sees as a professionalization of the university, in which students are treated more like “customers” who are always right instead of, well, students. He then ends his essay by declaring his resolve to ban technology from the classroom in order to provide a more meaningful discussion.

As someone who types over 70 words per minute but can barely write legibly at one tenth of that speed, I take issue with Professor Bochner’s equivocation of the use of technology with bad student behavior. I feel that laptops in particular can be used responsibly in a classroom, and even if they are not, playing solitaire or checking Facebook during class is most assuredly not on the level of talking on one’s cell phone or listening to music during class. First, they are not disruptive to other students on any level. Second, students who are prone to ignoring lectures will do so by whatever means possible – take away the laptop and students will pass notes. Finally, this is a self-defeating practice: if the course lectures really are important, students who ignore them by surfing the Internet during courses will perform badly in the course.

In addition, I feel that laptops in classrooms have significant educational value, especially in large classes. I did my undergraduate at a fairly large state school, the University of Texas at Austin, which as a large state school is similar to Professor Bochner’s school, the University of South Florida. I have had my fair share of huge undergraduate lecture courses in which I was stuffed into an auditorium with over 100 other students. I cannot seem to find his course in the catalog, but I would assume it was a large lecture course in which students rarely, if ever get the chance to meaningfully discuss course material. My experience with these courses are that they require students to soak up a professor’s lecture and then either regurgitate it in a final exam or refine it into a final paper. Either way, there is a lot of transcribing going on, which Bochner acknowledges when he references a scene in Real Genius that portrays a college classroom as a tape recording of a lecture being recorded by a classroom full of tape recorders. Laptops provide a way for students like me to take notes at a rapid pace without having to spend a significant amount of time afterwords listening to a recording of the lecture. Instead of producing an awkward condensation of a lecture on paper that often makes no sense weeks later, I can take almost ten times more notes when I type as opposed to when I write.

Secondly, Internet access may have its distractions, but it also provides access to a wealth of information that students can use in real time to supplement lectures. All too often (especially when students in one discipline take upper-level courses in another discipline), a professor will mention a theory, event, or individual that was not previously covered in the course. Students who get the reference will understand it, but those who have not had the same background as the professor will not. For example, when a professor of mine opened a lecture by claiming that a certain theorist we had read provided the foundation for Gadamerian hermeneutics – a throwaway line that actually had some significance in my understanding of the work in question. I pulled up an article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which gave me a brisk understanding of the theory in about forty-five seconds. Not perfect, obviously, but I think my understanding of the lecture was improved by exploring this reference during class.

I agree that technology in the classroom poses significant threats to the quality of education in classroom environments. However, an outright ban on technology in the classroom – which may or may not include the pen and paper – is not the right answer. If one wishes to curb disruptive behavior, then ban disruptive behavior instead of banning all the little things that could be disruptive. Students having extended conversations with each other during class is just as bad as students talking on cell phones in class. In both cases, students should be warned and then sent out for this behavior. If someone is obviously not engaged in class, then they should be told to pay attention and participate or risk being thrown out. This applies for students who are playing video games on their laptops as well as daydreaming. I see no need to ban potentially useful technological devices when their misuse is the real issue at hand.

A Google Search for "Phenomenology of Spirit" suggests "Nebraska State Flower"

If you don’t believe me, try it out yourself! The sad thing is that by making this post, I am making this association closer in Google’s eyes. What to do?

When it comes to the whole non-commercial use issue, I admit that I bought into a pretty powerful narrative: that I could very well be sitting on valuable content which some evil businessperson could exploit for their own gain – if only I didn’t have that non-commercial clause.  Then I realized how I plead with journals, conferences, and other academic sources to take my content, do whatever they want to with it, and publish it without giving me a dime.  This is because in academia, exposure is far more valuable than money.

It is not likely at all that some publisher is going to stumble upon my site, compile all my posts, copyedit them, and publish them for a profit.  The copyleft nature of these licenses guarantees that they must license their derivative works under the same license, and I don’t know of any commercial presses who have printed books that are freely licensed except for academic celebrities like Lawrence Lessig – why sell something everyone can get for free?  Yet even if they did and paid me nothing, I would be quite grateful.

The second issue I had was with someone editing my work, which is why I had chosen the no derivatives CC license.  However, my two biggest fears were protected by the GNU FDL and CC licenses that allow derivatives.  Others still have to give you attribution when remixing your work, so my worry that someone would take one of my posts or papers and expand it into a prize-winning masterpiece was unfounded, not to mention misanthropic.  Also, if someone edited my work to include something despicable like Nazi propaganda, both licenses ensure that my name cannot be used to endorse the derivative work.

Another big point for me was the realization that everything on the Internet is effectively public domain – not legally, but effectively.  Anyone can already do anything they want to anything they can find on the Internet and redistribute it however they want.  I’ve put papers up on my website before I switched to a CC license, and the awesome legal force that is copyright hasn’t stopped someone from plagiarizing off me (funny story – it was for the same class taught by the same professor at my university the semester after I took it).  What am I going to do – DRM my blog?  No, those of us who rail against the music industry for using a failed business model should realize that we in academia have been using a failed model too.

So I have decided to release everything under two licenses: the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, and the GNU Free Documentation License 2.0 or later.  These licenses are similar, although there are a few nuanced differences that make them incompatible.  Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, while many other wikis and blogs use a Creative Commons License.  This ensures that content on my site can be reused on all sites that use these two licenses.

I feel bad that I have not written a new entry in so long. I feel like I should apologize – not to the readers, but to the software, to the site itself. Even in the case of my Twitter account, which is written for the six or seven individuals who happen to be following me, it sits on my front page, giving me a list of all who have Twittered – with my name strikingly absent. The interface is designed so that I can instantly update my status, and I feel compelled, like I have some obligation not to the seven followers of my Twitter account, but to the software itself.

Now, obligations imply normativity, and normativity implies an ethical relation: I ought to write a new post; I ought to update my status. How did I get into a situation whereby these collections of code could make ethical demands upon me? Obviously, the responsibility lies with me – the concept of ethics presupposes the concept of decisionmaking, which in turn requires me to conceptualize myself as a free agent capable of making autonomous decisions even if I have no other reason to believe this – in a gross simplification of Kant, how can ethics make sense if you don’t have control over your own actions?

Because I am responsible for my ethical framework, I was the one who let the software make such a demand upon me. Or, more accurately, I am the one who perceived the demand as originating from the software, in addition to being the one who perceived it in terms of a demand as such. Ultimately, I am the one who brought this ethical relation into being out of nothingness. Now, it is a silly question to ask whether or not I “actually” have an ethical relation to the software, that is, to ask whether or not the demand that I perceive is real or “simply” my imagination going wild. Perhaps this doubt would make sense if we were talking about the existence a physical object (it doesn’t, Descartes was on the wrong track), but an obligation is a duty precisely because it is perceived by the ethical agent as such.

Obviously it is possible to have an ethical relation to a non-human or even non-living things. For example, one might feel an ethical duty to preserve the Grand Canyon or the Swiss Alps for a reason other than to preserve it for the pleasure of other humans or the survival of various lifeforms in and around the area. Someone may feel an obligation to the landscape itself that is almost an aesthetic relation – a desire to preserve it in all its beauty and majesty because those qualities are inherently good for their own sake.

However, it is an entirely logical to ask whether I ought to have an ethical relation to the inanimate, whether I ought to subordinate my will to its demands. In one sense, feeling ethically responsible to things might seem irresponsible to humans, and therefore quite unethical from a humanistic point of view. A better example is that of the Tamagotchi, the pocket computer that simulated a pet, which the user would have to feed and clean or else it would die. Does someone who owns a Tamagotchi have an ethical relation to the simulated creature inside, to the point where it is ethical to shirk one’s duties to other humans and lifeforms to care for the computer program? It seems that human-centered ethics would answer in the negative.

However, can we justify this form of ethics without slipping into existential relativism, whereby an ethical obligation is a good ethical obligation because I believe I should follow it? I think that because I can even ask that question, we’re into ethics proper and I’ve proved my point.