Cloud Street

Thursday, May 25, 2006

When there is no outside

Nick Carr's hyperbolically-titled The Death of Wikipedia has received a couple of endorsements and some fairly vigorous disagreement, unsurprisingly. I think it's as much a question of tone as anything else. When Nick reads the line
certain pages with a history of vandalism and other problems may be semi-protected on a pre-emptive, continuous basis.

it clearly sets alarm bells ringing for him, as indeed it does for me ("Ideals always expire in clotted, bureaucratic prose", Nick comments). Several of his commenters, on the other hand, sincerely fail to see what the big deal might be: it's only a handful of pages, it's only semi-protection, it's not that onerous, it's part of the continuing development of Wikipedia editing policies, Wikipedia never claimed to be a totally open wiki, there's no such thing as a totally open wiki anyway...

I think the reactions are as instructive as the original post. No, what Nick's pointing to isn't really a qualitative change, let alone the death of anything. But yes, it's a genuine problem, and a genuine embarrassment to anyone who takes the Wikipedian rhetoric seriously. Wikipedia ("the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit") routinely gets hailed for its openness and its authority, only not both at the same time - indeed, maximising one can always be used to justify limits on the other. As here. But there's another level to this discussion, which is to do with Wikipedia's resolution of the openness/authority balancing-act. What happens in practice is that the contributions of active Wikipedians take precedence over both random vandals and passing experts. In effect, both openness and authority are vested in the group.

In some areas this works well enough, but in others it's a huge problem. I use Wikipedia myself, and occasionally drop in an edit if I see something that's crying out for correction. Sometimes, though, I see a Wikipedia article that's just wrong from top to bottom - or rather, an article where verifiable facts and sustainable assertions alternate with errors and misconceptions, or are set in an overall argument which is based on bad assumptions. In short, sometimes I see a Wikipedia article which doesn't need the odd correction, it needs to be pulled and rewritten. I'm not alone in having this experience: here's Tom Coates on 'penis envy' and Thomas Vander Wal (!) on 'folksonomy', as well as me on 'anomie'.

It's not just a problem with philosophical concepts, either - I had a similar reaction more recently to the Wikipedia page on the Red Brigades. On the basis of the reading I did for my doctorate, I could rewrite that page from start to finish, leaving in place only a few proper names and one or two of the dates. But writing this kind of thing is hard and time-consuming work - and I've got quite enough of that to do already. So it doesn't get done.

I don't think this is an insurmountable problem. A while ago I floated a cunning plan for fixing pages like this, using PledgeBank to mobilise external reserves of peer-pressure; it might work, and if only somebody else would actually get it rolling I might even sign up. But I do think it's a problem, and one that's inherent to the Wikipedia model.

To reiterate, both openness and authority are vested in the group. Openness: sure, Wikipedia is as open to me as any other registered editor d00d, but in practice the openness of Wikipedia is graduated according to the amount of time you can afford to spend on it. As for authority, I'm not one, but (like Debord) I have read several good books - better books, to be blunt, than those relied on by the author[s] of the current Red Brigades article. But what would that matter unless I was prepared to defend what I wrote against bulk edits by people who disagreed - such as, for example, the author[s] of the current article? On the other hand, if I was prepared to stick it out through the edit wars, what would it matter whether I knew my stuff or not? This isn't just random bleating. When I first saw that Red Brigades article I couldn't resist one edit, deleting the completely spurious assertion that the group Prima Linea was a Red Brigades offshoot. When I looked at the page again the next day, my edit had been reverted.

Ultimately Wikipedia isn't about either openness or authority: it's about the collective activity of editing Wikipedia and being a Wikipedian. From that, all else follows.

Update 2/6/06 (in response to David, in comments)

There are two obvious problems with the Wikipedia page on the Brigate Rosse, and one that's larger but more diffuse. The first problem is that it's written in the present tense; it's extremely dubious that there's any continuity between the historic Brigate Rosse and the gang who shot Biagi, let alone that they're simply, unproblematically the same group. This alone calls for a major rewrite. Secondly, the article is written very much from a police/security-service/conspiracist stance, with a focus on question like whether the BR was assisted by the Czech security services or penetrated by NATO. But this tends to reinforce an image of the BR as a weird alien force which popped up out of nowhere, rather than an extreme but consistent expression of broader social movements (all of which has been documented).

The broader problem - which relates to both of the specific points - goes back to a problem with the amateur-encyclopedia format itself: Wikipedia implicitly asks what a given topic is, which prompts contributors to think of their topic as having a core, essential meaning (I wrote about this last year). The same problem can arise in a 'proper' encyclopedia, but there it's generally mitigated by expertise: somebody who's spent several years studying the broad Italian armed struggle scene is going to be motivated to relate the BR back to that scene, rather than presenting it as an utterly separate thing. The motivation will be still greater if the expert on the BR has also been asked to contribute articles on Prima Linea, the NAP, etc. This, again, is something that happens (and works, for all concerned) in the kind of restricted conversations that characterise academia, but isn't incentivised by the Wikipedia conversation - because the Wikipedia conversation doesn't go anywhere else. Doing Wikipedia is all about doing Wikipedia.

Monday, May 15, 2006

Who's there?

At Many-to-Many, Ross Mayfield reports that Clay Shirky and danah boyd have been thinking about "the lingering questions in our field", viz. the field of social software. I was a bit surprised to see that

How can communities support veterans going off topic together and newcomers seeking topical information and connections?

still qualifies as a 'lingering question'; I distinctly remember being involved in thrashing this one out, together with Clay, the best part of nine years ago. But this was the one that really caught my eye, if you'll pardon the expression:

What level of visual representation of the body is necessary to trigger mirror neurons?

Uh-oh. Sherry Turkle (subscription-only link):

a woman in a nursing home outside Boston is sad. Her son has broken off his relationship with her. Her nursing home is taking part in a study I am conducting on robotics for the elderly. I am recording the woman’s reactions as she sits with the robot Paro, a seal-like creature advertised as the first ‘therapeutic robot’ for its ostensibly positive effects on the ill, the elderly and the emotionally troubled. Paro is able to make eye contact by sensing the direction a human voice is coming from; it is sensitive to touch, and has ‘states of mind’ that are affected by how it is treated – for example, it can sense whether it is being stroked gently or more aggressively. In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son’s abandonment, comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him and says: ‘Yes, you’re sad, aren’t you. It’s tough out there. Yes, it’s hard.’ And then she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing, she tries to comfort herself.

What are we to make of this transaction? When I talk to others about it, their first associations are usually with their pets and the comfort they provide. I don’t know whether a pet could feel or smell or intuit some understanding of what it might mean to be with an old woman whose son has chosen not to see her anymore. But I do know that Paro understood nothing. The woman’s sense of being understood was based on the ability of computational objects like Paro – ‘relational artefacts’, I call them – to convince their users that they are in a relationship by pushing certain ‘Darwinian’ buttons (making eye contact, for example) that cause people to respond as though they were in relationship.

Further reading: see Kathy Sierra on mirror neurons and the contagion of negativity. See also Shelley's critique of Kathy's argument, and of attempts to enforce 'positive' feelings by manipulating mood. And see the sidebar at Many-to-Many, which currently reads as follows:
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Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Some day this will all be yours

Scott Karp:
What if dollars have no place in the new economics of content?
...
In media 1.0, brands paid for the attention that media companies gathered by offering people news and entertainment (e.g. TV) in exchange for their attention. In media 2.0, people are more likely to give their attention in exchange for OTHER PEOPLE’S ATTENTION. This is why MySpace can’t effectively monetize its 70 million users through advertising — people use MySpace not to GIVE their attention to something that is entertaining or informative (which could thus be sold to advertisers) but rather to GET attention from other users.
...
MySpace can’t sell attention to advertisers because the site itself HAS NONE. Nobody pays attention to MySpace — users pay attention to each other, and compete for each other’s attention — it’s as if the site itself doesn’t exist.

You see the same phenomenon in blogging — blogging is not a business in the traditional sense because most people do it for the attention, not because they believe there’s any financial reward. What if the economics of media in the 21st century begin to look like the economics of poetry in the 20th century? — Lots of people do it for their own personal gratification, but nobody makes any money from it.

Pedantry first: it's inconceivable that we'll reach a point where nobody makes any money from the media, at least this side of the classless society. Even the hard case of blogging doesn't really stand up - I could name half a dozen bloggers who have made money or are making money from their blogs, without pausing to think.

It's a small point, but it's symptomatic of the enthusiastic looseness of Karp's argument. So I welcomed Nicholas Carr's counterblast, which puts Karp together with some recent comments by Esther Dyson:
"Most users are not trying to turn attention into anything else. They are seeking it for itself. For sure, the attention economy will not replace the financial economy. But it is more than just a subset of the financial economy we know and love."

Here's Carr:
I fear that to view the attention economy as "more than just a subset of the financial economy" is to misread it, to project on it a yearning for an escape (if only a temporary one) from the consumer culture. There's no such escape online. When we communicate to promote ourselves, to gain attention, all we are doing is turning ourselves into goods and our communications into advertising. We become salesmen of ourselves, hucksters of the "I." In peddling our interests, moreover, we also peddle the commodities that give those interests form: songs, videos, and other saleable products. And in tying our interests to our identities, we give marketers the information they need to control those interests and, in the end, those identities. Karp's wrong to say that MySpace is resistant to advertising. MySpace is nothing but advertising.

Now, this is good, bracing stuff, but I think Carr bends the stick a bit too far the other way. I know from my own experience that there's a part of my life labelled Online Stuff, and that most of my reward for doing Online Stuff is attention from other people doing Online Stuff. Real-world payoffs - money, work or just making new real-world friends - are nice to get, but they're not what it's all about.

The real trouble is that Karp has it backwards. Usenet - where I started doing Online Stuff, ten years ago - is a model of open-ended mutual whuffie exchange. (A very imperfect model, given the tendency of social groups to develop boundaries and hierarchies, but at least an unmonetised one.) Systematised whuffie trading came along later. The model case here is eBay, where there's a weird disconnect between meaning and value. Positive feedback doesn't really mean that you think the other person is a "great ebayer" - it doesn't really mean anything, any more than "A+++++" means something distinct from "A++++" or "A++++++". What it does convey is value: it makes it that much easier for the other person to make money. It also has attention-value, making the other person feel good for no particular real-world reason, but even this is quantifiable ("48! I'm up to 48!").

Ultimately Dyson and Carr are both right. The 'attention economy' of Online Stuff is new, absorbing and unlike anything that went before - not least because the way in which it gratifies fantasies of being truly appreciated, understood, attended to. But, to the extent that the operative model is eBay rather than Usenet, it is nothing other than a subset of the financial economy. Karp may be right about the specific case of MySpace, but I can't help distrusting his exuberance - not least because, in my experience, the suffix '2.0' is strongly associated with a search for new ways to cash in.