Applied Humanities

When Tad Hirsch opened his talk by describing design as "applied humanities," he was guaranteed a warm reception at the UCSB Social Computing Workshop. As a specialist in tactical media, Hirsch has done important work in "activist infrastructure" by using mobile phones and site-specific sensors. His most recent project, Dialup Radio, provides links and a demo number to hear "freedom phone" broadcasts in Zimbabwe that connect citizens anonymously to news sources and sites of grassroots organizing. He also developed Speakeasy, which is designed to link new immigrants in a Chinatown community to multilingual volunteers with social service expertise to whom calls can be routed. Hirsch said that he was drawn to mobile phone networks because he thought that they offered a "ubiquitous kind of accessibility" that provided more "opportunities for shared projects," although they were too frequently underused for this purpose. Hirsch is part of the Zones of Emergency project at MIT that also includes VP friend Trebor Scholz, and his other projects range from the whimsy of Tripwire, which consists of monitoring devices for aircraft noise that are disguised as coconuts, to the gravitas of an unnamed 2004 project that caused him to be served with a subpoena.

Hirsch described himself as committed to "promoting social change through a particular form of collective action." In some important ways, he said, "all computing is social," and this fact is demonstrated in the "hows and whys of technology." As an example, Hirsch pointed to the work of fellow participant and UC Irvine graduate student Brian Rajski who is writing a dissertation about social computing the the mainframe Cold War era. As he said "notions of collaboration and communication and community are intertwined with the history of computing," because "early computing systems were dependent on sharing." According to Hirsch, the contemporary incarnation of these practices also "increases the number and the frequency of social contacts," particularly now that they are "evolving to include more than text."

He also noted the "proliferation of free and open source software tools," such as Drupal, that provide "novel applications or sites for collaboration," particularly now that blogging software and content-management can be combined. From Hirsch we learned about Crabgrass, a social networking web application for movements working for social justice, and about Yahoo's Fire Eagle service in which the user can choose to share location information with the API, although "location-awareness still largely a dream." He discussed the sharing potential of "sensorware" as well, such as the Cambridge Mobile Urban Sensing project in which individuals can monitor air quality and potentially other information about the local environment. He also praised free and open data visualization tools through which "random groups of people are creating new data sets," such as Many Eyes.

Hirsch emphasized that it was important not to neglect "traditional kinds of advocacy" in pursuit of techophilic coolware. For example, he pointed to the online medical community PatientsLikeMe, where those with the same condition can upload and share their own data, from symptoms to medications in order to find common "points of advocacy" for new kinds of treatments and clinical trials, just as AIDS activists had done in earlier decades.

Of course, he conceded that these kinds of project face "fundamental challenges" based on privacy, security, and history, because they potentially place a participant at risk. In political hot spots, dissidents can face dire consequences for breaking unjust laws, and patients could be manipulated by pharmaceutical companies posing as peers. Hirsch closed with some basic questions: "What are the rules of engagement? How can these processes be manipulated?"

If Hirsch argued that all computing was social, Peter Kollock countered that the dot.com crash seemed to show that computing was still actually insufficiently social. In his remarks, he looked back to the one billion dollars invested in what was breezily called "B2B," an attempt to build online markets for the wholesale industry, which Kollock called an "an astonishing disaster," because "they didn’t realize that it was an exercise in social computing" and could only see the process as an exercise in efficiency. In their naive model of the market, online exchanges would "reduce marketplace friction for both buyers and sellers," as one chart showed. However, by "wanting to make it all about price" they coded "behavioral realities" out of the interface and compounded their errors with 1) a failure to model and 2) a failure to harvest extant social wisdom in existing systems, which people were not aware of if they weren’t traders. For example, they couldn't see "favors as risk management device" or the reality that commodities weren't really commodities that could be aggregated, because even gasoline was "modified and had flavors" and had geographical considerations to manage. He pointed to the wisdom of Valdis Krebs of Orgnet.com and Matthew Mahoney of SocialText as better contemporary models that avoided the mistakes of the earlier B2B approach.

These presentations stimulated a lot of conversation about emergent behavior. Alan Liu asked, "Are these kinds of consequences predictable?" Liu pointed to the work of Paul Strassman and its willingness to acknowledge that some things are formalizable and some are not, and therefore it was important to accept the necessity of inefficiency, particularly if there were behind-the-scenes activities that were making the system work. To follow this point, Larry Sanger emphasized the importance of recognizing the distinction between collaboration and aggregation.

There was also a lot of talk about improvisation and the importance of flexibility, particularly in virtual environments. As Liu pointed out, IBM found itself surprised by what people did in their office space in Second Life , and that in the university virtual worlds create needs for new kinds of pedagogical rules. "Do hands have to be raised?" "Should flying be forbidden?" Liu argued that these questions about authority meant that "by definition it is going to be emergent." Furthermore, as others pointed out, "some groups desire to be loosely confederated" and that "optimization" may not be "really what people want." In closing, medievalist Carol Pasternack reminded the group that the old dichotomy between determinism and free will was still relevant in the current world of social computing.

Blue Sky Diving

Rama Hoetzlein and Pablo Colapinto led the "Blue Sky" session for the UCSB Social Computing Group, which was designed to show their brainstorming about "engineering architectures of participation." Some of their insights were explicitly borrowed from the world of corporate consulting and market research. For example, they cited my high school classmate John Battelle on his work on the "database of intentions" in which "not everything is voluntary." They also mentioned learning from Forrester Research about the continuum from "people" to "objectives," "strategies," and -- finally -- "technologies," to which they added the term "issues." As Alan Liu pointed out, perhaps the Social Computing Group was still excessively focused on the middle part of that spectrum, given their interest in purposive actions in the public sphere.

To show the critical role that design and art can play in discourses about social computing, which are often dominated in academic professional and research associations by those in the social sciences and information sciences, they showed Hoetzlein's Quanta, which can serve as a "knowledge dissemination project" that may be more meaningful than many Web 2.0 applications, although it includes some of the same interpretive mechanisms, such as timelines, which can also be important features of many social networking sites.

I've put in boldface many of the key terms of the Blue Sky presentation, such as extending, teaching, distributing to show the literacies that they were sketching out that included ubiquitous computing technologies. They also thought more traditional web-based involving, commenting, journaling merited attention, such as the Annotated NY Times, where the group found readers deconstructing the Spitzer scandal and the MySpace variant of what I have criticized as "Facebook journalism."

The group included measuring, predicting, conspiring as important concepts, in what might seem to be an initially unlikely triumvirate because they acknowledge how "trust metrics" and "quantum computing" that measures the immeasurable may be linked to certain ways of navigating the Internet that go back to the etymology of the term in "breathing together." In the geopolitical sense, this could mean what the Atlantic Monthly has characterized as "Jihad 2.0" or -- as the audience pointed out -- it could be a veiled woman using Bluetooth technology to show her face to everyone with a compatible device for ubiquitous communication. They argued that organizing, rewarding, policing were also key functions and showed Santiago Sierra's analog artwork about putting laboring unpaid people literally in a box.

The group argued that visualizing, abstracting should not be tied to current versions of "the social graph," since it might just as easily turn out to be something entirely different, such as "The Social Giraffe," which represents a "different kind of geometry" or "whole other animal." In that spirit of fancy, which should not be a bad word in social computing -- although it often is, the group added fantasizing, narrating to the list and displayed Matthew Johnson "Liberty City vs. New York City" Flickr set.

It is interesting to note that they prefaced examples of their own imaginative creations with a discussion of high risk social computing that was illustrated with the cockpit of the Atlantis space shuttle to make the point that the "more you represent information" the more you are potentially in danger of "the glass cockpit syndrome," which deprives users of the "knowledge that they are actually flying." Certainly, given that many pilots in many airports take off and land in response to e-mail messages, our own proximity to this kind of social computing is certainly worth recognizing. (This syndrome is important for other highly mediated fields outside of avionics that also depend on simulations for training, such as medical technology.) According to Liu, books like Gene Rochlin's Trapped in the Net could be useful for understanding this pathology.

Beyond all or nothing, fly-or-crash scenarios, the group asked "how do we season our information?" In other words, how do we handle all the nuances of our informational personalities and dispositions. To demonstrate this point, they showed a mock-up of "Dis-Play," "an information free-for-all," in which the user can click on someone to assume their identity and adjust their "grain of salt slider" to indicate the appropriate level of skepticism for messages from the outside world. As they suggested, one could generate one's online presence for a month and then "go to Bermuda," much as guests at fancy hotels can check their Blackberries at the front desk. As they jocularly suggested, perhaps you might want to “automate love life but have more control over your blog.”

Inspired by "hardware for intelligence," such as QR codes or vision systems, the group also proposed "The Social Spectrum Camcorder," which would combine identity detection, exposure settings, annotated community feedback, intuitive adaptive filtering, and a geospatial engine to generate a product that could be a marked-up digital standard. They also suggested installations for graveyards or libraries where messages could be sent from the past to the present such as “go six bookcases back,” so that more of the world would become "a game or a puzzle," and one could "leave information behind on your own time."

Other hypothetical projects involved interrogating spaces and connecting notions of graphs to awareness of a number of different ontologies in which we can orient our "friends" (or whatever we would call them) in relation to music or careers or disciplines. They also talked about a social dynamics simulation called Social Evolution that is based on grid computing but functions like The Sims video game, although the computer runs the character rather than the player. Finally they showed "Chalk," which dematerialized the computer interface entirely, so that an e-link could cause chalk drawings by children to appear on sidewalks at other playgrounds throughout the world.

Slides, including the group's inventions, are here.

In a gentle critique of the designers, Bill Warner pointed out that too often policy is put last, which is particularly regrettable given the economies of attention at work in our society. Elsewhere during the day, Warner also noted the dangers of "end of history" arguments and the uncritical acceptance of ideologies of liberalism, especially given the existence of current intellectual property regimes.