The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler

In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler discusses his vision of the role of technology in social change. He rejects an overly deterministic vision of technology (which he connects with Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan), but also rejects a view of technology as immaterial to a society’s direction:

A view of technologies as “tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do.” (17)

Instead, he adopts a “simple” idea that is “distinct from a naive determinism”:

Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense–if you have technology “t,” you should expect social structure or relation “s” to emerge–is false. (17)

To illustrate the point, he describes the different impacts that new ocean-going technologies had on Spain or Portugal (their land ambitions were curtailed by strong neighbors) and China (which focused inland). He also notes how the printing press impacted Protestant countries (where individual reading of the Bible was encouraged) differently than Catholic countries (where “where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain”).

He summarizes his position by saying the following:

Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. (17)

In regards to modern networking technologies (like the Internet), he warns:

The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. (18)

Cassirer’s work on the Enlightenment is quite unlike many of the other works of science studies I have worked on over the last couple of years. Most strikingly different, I think, is his focus on nearly-pure intellectual history. This focus, especially after reading texts like those of Bruno Latour, appears remarkably devoid of social, political, or economic factors. Partly, of course, this is due to Cassirer writing in 1932, with the attendant stylistic and linguistic differences from works today, but much of the sense of being “old fashioned” comes from the lack of discussion of forces acting on his narrative from outside of the intellectual sphere. From our perspective today, some 75 years after Cassirer, his work seems to lack the historical context which so fascinates us today.

Cassirer’s approach, though, brings forward a different kind of historical verity than can be found through an examination of cafe culture, or gender, or class conflict. His approach highlights a sense of the unity of the Enlightenment, the unifying focus on how we know things. Thus, Cassirer says in his introduction that he will discuss the Enlightenment “in the light of its unity of its conceptual origin and of its underlying principal rather than of the totality of its historical manifestations and results.” This kind of “high-level” historical unity can easily be concealed by more detailed studies of context, materiality, and so on, but it was the kind of unity of thought that self-consciously bound many in the Enlightenment together into a “Republic of Letters,” and its the “myth” of this unity helped shape our understandings of Enlightenment thought for centuries. Failing to engage with the Enlightenment as Cassirer did would be to do a disservice to a fundamental aspect of history, just as much as failing to go beyond his approach alone would also do history a disservice. In a sense, Cassirer approached the Enlightenment in the way those who lived it did, and while the result may have neglected other forces at work in the time period, his intellectual focus on “the universal method of reason” reflected a sense common to the philosophes, at the very least (see pages 7–9).

But even if I can value Cassirer’s high-intellectual approach, and see its utility in approaching and understanding a certain spirit of the times, I think he imposes to great a unity of thought in the period. Not everyone during the Enlightenment–even the literate–were French philosophes. Where, for example, does the Scottish Enlightenment come into play?

That said, Cassirer is not focused specifically on the thought of specific French philosophers, but rather, in some sense, on a kind of zeitgeist of the time. He writes, “The real philosophy of the Enlightenment is not the simply … what its leading thinkers … thought and taught [as] it consists less in certain individual doctrines than in the form and manner of intellectual activity in general” (see Cassirer’s introduction). His “unity” is thus a kind of idealized version of the epoch, not a recounting of its component parts.

Compare this approach with that of Dorinda Outram and Peter Gay. Otram never gives us a single, unified definition of what the Enlightenment means. She distinguished, for example, between different national Enlightenments, where the term came to identify distinctly different things. Gay, who Outram contrasts her on work with, operates much more in the tradition of Cassirer: for him, as for Cassirer, the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were primarily French philosophers: Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, for example. Gay too viewed the Enlightenment as a “unity,” and measures it in “terms of the lives of the great thinkers” (see Outram, p. 3).

Cassirer focused on “rationality” as the defining unity of the Enlightenment. Outram, and other “new” historians, tend to emphasize the social and political contexts of Enlightenment ideas, and include global connections between Europe and the rest of the world—something that never emerges in Cassirer, who is distinctly Euro-centric in his approach and understanding. Even staying within France, historians like Jessica Riskin seek to “show that these sciences [of the Enlightenment] were embedded within the contemporary culture, rather than acting upon it from outside” (Riskin, p. 5). Cassirer approach, in contrast, tends to position the intellectual elites as somehow “outside” the culture upon which they exerted a profound influence.

Image via Wikipedia

As another contrasting example, Outram points out that along with the new ideas of the Enlightenment came an changes in social integration and class distinctions. Recent historical research, breaking away from Cassirer’s approach, has highlighted major societal shifts in the access to ideas, perhaps most especially due to the growth and greater dissemination of print media. Additionally, new social institutions were constructed based on the interchange of these ideas, not just to show off wealth or rank distinct from intellectual pursuits. The growth of scientific societies, public lectures, cafes and even lending libraries illustrates this societal trend, which breaks down some of the separateness of intellectual ideal illustrated by Cassirer’s treatment of the Enlightenment. In short, Cassirer neglects the entirety of the public sphere that Outram considers critical to developing a more nuanced and complex understanding of the epoch.

But Outram, despite her attempts to add complexity to previous scholarship of the Enlightenment–like that of Cassirer and Gay–nonetheless still gives her book a title in the singular: “The Enlightenment.” So, despite social context, political complexities, and so on, there is nonetheless something unifying about what occurred during this period of time or, at least, something useful about the unitarian view of Cassirer and Gay. Yes, the period was more complex that is indicated by reference merely to a few French intellectuals, but nonetheless, the expressions and ideas of these intellectuals are exactly what historians and intellectuals then and now drew on to form their own ideas. Cassirer captures this in a powerful and influential way.

But returning to the limitations of Cassirer, one of the key aspects of the Enlightenment that he neglects is that of the connection–mentioned briefly above–between the intellectual and the public sphere. There is no room in Cassirer for Mary Terrall’s discussions of “sociability,” for example. She consideres sociability to be one of the most fundamental aspects of the Enlightenment (see Terrall, p. 3), but Cassirer neglects it almost entirely, concerned as he is with the thoughts of the eighteenth century. Thus, there is no room in Cassirer for the growth of public lectures, or even for scientific academies—he does not share Terrall’s belief that men of science had to link sociability with “private reading and writing” (see Terrall, p. 4). Terrall thus links the private (or intellectual) with the public, and considers both critical to a full understanding of the Enlightenment.

Many other important historical questions are left out if one relies strictly on Cassirer’s approach. Thus, Outram asks if the French Revolution was a consequence of the Enlightenment? Or if the Enlightenment was a consequence of revolution? The answer is not clear in her work, but nonetheless one can see that revolutions—French, American, or colonial—were clearly associated with, if not caused by, Enlightenment ideas. Cassirer’s vision of the Enlightenment, though, is divorced from such political and social considerations.

Despite devoting a chapter to the topic, Cassirer neglects religion. The focus on rationality and reason, which was identified by Cassirer, also led to the questioning of religious traditions, not just theological positions. Cassirer does bring this up in the realm of ideas, writing: “The lust for knowledge, the libido sciendi, which theological dogmatism had outlawed and branded as intellectual pride, is now called a necessary quality of the soul as such and restored to its original rights” (page 14). But the challenging of “theological dogmatism” did not mean the disappearance of religion, as it continued to be a major factor in society, philosophy, and what would become science. But though Cassirer delves into the religious or theological issues at the same high level as he does philosophical ones, he neglects–again, as he does in other aspects–the more practical ramifications of the Enlightenment’s challenge of religion, and religion’s influence back on eighteenth century ideas and practices.

As Cassirer makes abundantly clear, the Enlightenment focused on rationality and reason: “If we were to look for a general characterization of the age of the Enlightenment,” he writes, “the traditional answer would be that its fundamental feature is obviously a critical and skeptical attitude toward religion” (page 134). Religion, of course, had to adapt this new Enlightenment discourse. Terrall notes that–and Cassirer too discusses–Deism as one way out of the apparent contradiction between religion and rationality, with its total hostility to revelation as truth. Cassirer suggests, though, that Deism was checked, not by the resistance of priest or parishioners, but rather by “radical philosophical skepticism which repelled the attacks of deism and stalled its advance” (page 177). Maybe, but I suspect there were battles of power in the non-ideological realm that played roles as well, along with individual resistance by the masses. Terrall points out that another approach to integrating the ideas of the Enlightenment and religion, one less clearly discussed by Cassirer, was to reject the attempt to make Christianity “reasonable,” and return to a view of religion which emphasized faith, trust in revelation, and personal witness to religious experience (see Terrall on p. 122).

Image via Wikipedia

Beyond the (ideological) battles between religion and reason, the general notion of power–religious, revolutionary or otherwise, except perhaps in the sense of “intellectual power”–is lacking in Cassirer. Terrall notes this when she points out that ideas such as “natural law” and “reason” created new ways to define and legitimate power. And the new idea of “public opinion” (identified by Kant as requiring tight control to avoid disrupting order) and the “public sphere” (developed further by Habermas). New power relations partly resulted from intellectual ideas, but these ideas were not created, developed, and promulgated in a vacuum. Analyzing them as such leaves out too much and changes the fundamental nature of what the Enlightenment was.

From my perspective, and for my interests, Cassirer leaves off entirely too much of the materiality and detail of the Enlightenment. I myself am simply not fascinated by the intellectual back-and-forth of the philosophes without the grounding context of their individual personal feuds, political wrangling, public spectacles, and technological innovations.

I can understand, as I noted above, that understanding and engaging with the intellectualism of the Enlightenment at the level Cassirer approaches it, is important to understanding, at the very least, the historiography of the eighteenth century. His approach is fundamental to approaching and dealing with the Enlightenment as a modern historian–but for me, my true interests remain less idealistic than Cassirer’s. In short, his is an overly intellectual history of ideas, one that provides useful, but limited, insights into some aspects of the Enlightenment.

Related articles

• Dorinda Outram on the Enlightenment (inpropriapersona.com)
• Science and Sociability in Mary Terrall’s The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (inpropriapersona.com)
• Ideological Archeology: The Counter-Enlightenment (I) (politeia-station.net)

The fear of relativism seems odd, also, when we consider that in daily life we are able to produce what most people, including law courts, regard as rational justifications for our knowledge claims. We do not think that such claims are absolutely true, under any conditions, now and forever; they are always revisable if additional evidence or a useful new conceptual framework appears. … Whether we are right or wrong to do so in particular cases, we routinely and confidently take such positions with respect to health matters, legal issues, and the everyday choices we must make. The arguments between absolutists and relativists seem to float free of such everyday experiences and the ways we think about them.

This kind of pragmatic approach to issues of truth and knowledge match my own predilections. I get frustrated by those who insist that truth is absolute and fight against relativism because it will lead to chaos and anarchy. I also get frustrated by relativists who insist that we cannot judge the world around us because we are simply imposing our own cultural values on others. Both positions seem absurd to me, and it’s nice to see a discussion of the pragmatic, everyday middle ground (a middle ground I’ve been trained to occupy as a lawyer as well).

Now that I’m on my second quarter of a PhD program in the History of Science, I am continuing to think about why I am doing this and what history  has to offer, both to me and to the world at large. One concern I already have is with the apparent obsession with the book as the primary mechanism of disseminating the work of historians.

To begin with, I’ve noticed a tendency in the discipline of history — common in many disciplines, of course — to focus inward (or backward?) and to avoid engagement with the rest of society. In departments of history right now, there is a distinct, and understandable, preoccupation with budget cuts and the lack of tenure-track faculty positions. The latter issue has caused a certain sense of crisis in history departments, especially amongst graduate students who are now consistently warned about the lack of jobs and the challenges of adjunct teaching. The former should lead to an increasing desire to justify the place of history (and its departments) in academy and society. Surprisingly, however, I have not seen a great deal of such justification as yet. Mostly I have instead seen the discipline continue to focus on the itself and its own concerns — to draw inwards. Academic disciplines are conservative, though, and a shift to engage with contemporary society in a real way is not easy.

That said, certainly I have seen a newer generation of historians focus on socially relevant issues, including culture, ethnicity, technology, etc. I have not, though, seen this focus reflected in the marketing or communications of the discipline. The shift to greater societal engagement, then, is not so much about contemporary issues, but is instead a problem of a failure to engage effectively with meaningful mechanisms of modern communications.

While I do believe that Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other forms of social media are one potential means of communication yet to be engaged with fully by historians, I see this failure reflected more basically in a disciplinary obsession with full-length books (as opposed to article-length pieces or other shorter scholarly works). The tendency in my history seminars is to assign these long books for discussion. Legal, medical and scientific scholars, on the other hand, prefer journal articles to books (with the exception of textbooks, which serve a different purpose).

History values the book first. Publishing your dissertation as a book is essentially required if you want a chance at a tenure-track position. Reading at least a book per week per seminar is mandatory. Google Books is revolutionary, as it provides electronic access to books, something that is hardly revolutionary when it comes to articles!

Books can be wonderful, and can capture the sweep of history in a way that an article cannot. Such a sweeping approach, pulling the reader along for the ride, can make for good story-based history if well written, well edited, and not too caught up in historical detail. (General readers don’t want footnotes!) If more historians produces this kind of work, that might be a great thing for public understanding, and might even benefit the discipline. But those aren’t the books I’m talking about.

Most of the books I see in history are aimed at other historians (though they might pretend to be readable by the public, to try to entice a publisher to bite). Even the really good ones could often have been cut in half with some good editing. They certainly would have been more useful to me as a scholar if they had been published as a focused series of articles. And despite my sense that a good book aimed at the general public can be a great thing, wouldn’t more shorter pieces that are accessible at least to inform journalists — or as resources beyond Wikipedia — also benefit the public rather directly? I think people generally are expecting shorter, tighter, more focused written work today, for good or ill. I also think historians should stop fighting that trend, and start embracing it.

Honestly, I don’t know whether the general public would read more history if it were shorter. (Despite my hopes, I suspect not.) But I do think the work of historians could be more readily accessible to other disciplines — law, medicine, sociology, and so on — if their works were packaged in a more focused form than the book. This might go a long ways towards justifying the utility of history within the academy by encouraging other disciplines to make use of its work. Combine this greater accessibility with greater use of social media and modern self-marketing tools, along with a strong dose of the ongoing trend to engage with contemporary issues (while informing that engagement with a strong dose of historical understanding)  and I think historians and their discipline would receive a much higher valuation from both within and without the university.

So how about it, historians? Can you give up your precious books?

Citations in science are important as a mechanism to follow the evolution of science and because they are employed as an indicator as to the importance of scientists and institutions: the higher the number of citations of an article, the greater is its recognition. This measure of success implies increased sources of funding, recognition, salaries, etc.

According to Camacho Miñano and Núñez Nickel, the problem arises when the authors, instead of altruistically choosing original sources which facilitate the ideas on which their reasoning is constructed, cite because of spurious interests, attempting to increase the possibility of successfully publishing in the scientific journals.

via Discrimination in the citations that scientists use.

My immediate reaction is, well, not shock: of course scientists use “spurious” criteria when choosing what and who to cite! Would anyone who has prepared a scientific paper for submission to a peer-reviewed journal actually disagree? Scientific articles need to get published, after all, and scientific ideas need to be supported against dispute and disagreement. This is true even if the science is “good” and “true.”

Still, it’s nice to see research that recognizes this, as too often people view science as so objectively true as to be free of social influences, politics, etc. But realizing that this is not true does not make scientific discoveries or innovations any less true, just adds back in some human complexity and social context.

For more on this concept, try writers like Bruno Latour and works like Science in Action. Not uncontroversial in its whole, but it does do an excellent job opening up discussion on the “non-scientific” aspects of scientific articles. (No one in the law should be surprised by any of this, but attorneys sometimes seem to forget regardless.)

Related articles by Zemanta

• “The granting system turns young scientists into bureaucrats and then betrays them” (zzzoot.blogspot.com)
• Open Science And Closed Science: Aren’t Papers Supposed To Be A Part Of The Conversation? (techdirt.com)

Image by ramesh.rasaiyan via Flickr

Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing”:

If someone actually figures out something that works well, then that’s useful info to us, and would allow us to then incorporate those findings into our own offering. That’s actually good for everyone…

via Is It Really Such A Problem If People Sell Your Works? Or Is It Just Free Market Research? | Techdirt.

I don’t disagree with this reasoning, at least in the case of the professional production of intellectual property (not necessarily for profit), and most especially when the producer continues to produce content. Thus, this idea makes perfect sense in the case of Techdirt (or most media companies, Twitterers, blogs, newspapers, and so on), since their real value is not in any one particular story, but rather in the relationship between readers/consumers and producers/innovators.

I do worry about “one-off” artists — painters, designers, novelists, musicians — anyone who may invest countless hours in the production of a single item that can then be easily reproduced at virtually zero cost. (Note that my above points would apply to a music label, perhaps, or even a movie studio, since they produce a constant stream of content which can create relationships.) How do we encourage the small-time innovator who may not produce more than a few works? How do we keep free-riders (I might include music labels and publishers in this list…) from discouraging true, one-off innovations by people who may not be interested in innovating in business as well?

I do not have a good answer to this, but I think it’s an important question. (I also think this possibility is used by media companies to “hide the ball” when it comes to their desire to hold onto profitable IP.) If we don’t find some way to resolve it, I suspect we may never have proper IP reform that works for the “little guy.”

What does it mean to our culture that we have imposed the most draconian restrictions on the reuse of intellectual creations than at any other time?

1. We are the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves.

2. No work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon.

via The Public Domain in 2 Twitter sized bits.. | The Public Domain.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt adds to this:

For people who don’t recognize the importance of the public domain and the nature of creativity, perhaps this seems like no big deal. But if you look back through history, you realize what an incredibly big deal it is — and how immensely stifling this is on our culture. And then you realize this is all done under a law whose sole purpose is to “promote the progress” and you begin to wonder how this happened.

via Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse | Techdirt.

The changes and restrictions of copyright are unprecedented. Yet our technological progress — and cultural output, at least — has grown exponentially over time, even as our IP restrictions have increased. Is there a correlation or connection?

I believe over-restrictive copyright hampers innovation, but I also believe it’s not a simple equation. It’s about balance, and I’m looking for evidence to find the “sweet spot” that balances the rights of creators with the utility to end-users.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Current themes evident in copyright arguments from 100 years ago (inpropriapersona.com)
• Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse (techdirt.com)
• Does Copyright Foster or Hinder Innovation? (inpropriapersona.com)
• What does it mean to be in the public domain? Thoughts about the AP licensing scheme. (inpropriapersona.com)

The Uneasy Case for Intellectual Property Rights in Traditional Knowledge by Stephen Munzer, Kal Raustiala:

Should traditional knowledge—the understanding or skill possessed by indigenous peoples pertaining to their culture and folklore and their use of native plants for medicinal purposes—receive protection as intellectual property? This Article examines nine major arguments from the moral, political and legal philosophy of property for intellectual property rights and contends that, as applied to traditional knowledge (TK), they justify at most a modest package of rights under domestic and international law. The arguments involve desert based on labor; firstness; stewardship; stability; moral right of the community; incentives to innovate; incentives to commercialize; unjust enrichment, misappropriation and restitution; and infringement and dilution. These arguments do, however, support “defensive” protection for TK: that is, halting the use of TK by nonindigenous actors in obtaining patents and copyrights. These arguments also support the dissemination of TK on the internet and via other digital media and the selective use of trademarks. The force of these conclusions resides in the importance of a vibrant public domain, and the absence of any plausible limiting principle that would allow more robust rights in TK for indigenous groups without permitting equally robust rights for nonindigenous groups.

I discovered this useful and interesting discussion of the relationship between intellectual property and traditional knowledge thanks to a pointer from Lawrence Solum at the Legal Theory Blog. As he notes there, this has often been a quite confusing area of the law, and this article does a good job of going through the issues in an understandable and useful way. Recommended reading.

Related articles by Zemanta

• SSRN Papers Dealing with IP, Development and Innovation (inpropriapersona.com)
• Information as Property from the Scholarly Kitchen (inpropriapersona.com)
• Against Intellectual Monopoly (inpropriapersona.com)

For libraries, and the people who use libraries, it is the exceptions and limitations to the legal protections granted to rightsholders that provide the basic mechanism for access to copyrighted content. “The role of librarians is to protect and promote access to knowledge and learning materials”, said Rilwanu Abdulsalami, Deputy University Librarian at Kaduna State University in Nigeria. “One of the key ways to achieve this is through well designed exceptions and limitations. Where the law is inadequate and needs to be changed, we will advocate for that change.”

I recommend you read the whole post.

Breaking the silence about Spring — RealClimate:

Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the USDA have kept show that those same lilacs are blooming as much as two weeks earlier than they did in 1965. April has, in a very real sense, become May. This is one of the interesting facts that you’ll read about in Amy Seidl’s book, Early Spring, a hot-off-the-press essay about the impacts of climate change on the world immediately around us — the forest, the birds, the butterflies in our backyards.

An well-written review of an intriguing book that takes seriously the changes to the climate visible to all of us, and not just the observations or theories of the scientific community: “listen to the farmers and gardeners, and the observations of regular people: they are meaningful.”

The book is Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World, by Amy Seidl.