Institute Of Network Cultures, Koolaid Is The New “Kritikal” Options Rating

[Jon Awbrey]

The Institute of Network Cultures maintains an engaging complex of activities, blogs, conferences, discussion groups, and assorted websites. A lot of what I read there is bit too much the Helium Hermenautical Armchair (HeHa) for my down-to-earth tastes, but I do see a concerted effort toward real understanding that is but rarely encountered these days.

I'll just collect a few links here —

Institute of Network Cultures : Main Portal

Society of the Query : Collaborative Research Blog

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Geert Lovink posted notice of a First Monday article by Jutta Haider and Olaf Sundin, titled “Beyond the Legacy of the Enlightenment? — Online Encyclopaedias as Digital Heterotopias”.

On that same topia, er, topic, Andrew Famiglietti posted notice of his essay, “Tasty Theory Clusters”, found on his blog, Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

Joseph Reagle posted notice of his essay, “Wikipedia : The Happy Accident”, on the CPOV List.

Jon

[Kelly Martin]

Joseph Reagle posted notice of his essay, “Wikipedia : The Happy Accident”, on the CPOV List.

What bollocks. I absolutely refuse to believe that nobody believed in a "writable web" prior to the invention of wikis, if for no other reason than that I myself had the idea (even if I never implemented it) as far back as 1993. And if someone of my puny intellect had the idea, I'm sure others did too.

[Moulton]

Web-based community discussion boards (like Motet) came online around 1995.

[Jon Awbrey]

Joseph Reagle posted notice of his essay, “Wikipedia : The Happy Accident”, on the CPOV List.

What bollocks. I absolutely refuse to believe that nobody believed in a "writable web" prior to the invention of wikis, if for no other reason than that I myself had the idea (even if I never implemented it) as far back as 1993. And if someone of my puny intellect had the idea, I'm sure others did too.

I attended my first seminars on “Groupware” at U of M in 1985–1986, where research entrepreneurs from Business, Cognitive Psych, and EECS were building a joint co-lab for stuff like that, and they were a few years behind the MIT Media Lab. I'm hardly what anyone would call an early adopter when it it comes to any kind of technology, so I know that all this was probably already old hat by then.

Jon

[Eva Destruction]

Vannevar Bush's Memex proposal dates right back to 1945 and was essentially a mechanical precursor of Wikipedia (linked microfilm sheets would be retrieved on command and the reader would be able to annotate them). The US Navy had ZOG up and running on internal shipboard networks by the early 1980s; there were no doubt other open-editable networks running before that.

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Patrick Lichty has been stressing his interest in wiki-based communities in general, a meta*perspective that naturally appeals to me.

Here's a comment I posted in regard to that Big Picture POV —

Having participated in several wikioid start up projects before I ever heard of Wikipedia, and still participating in a wide variety of similar projects today, I share this point of view.

The feature of social-technical architecture that most markedly distinguishes a wiki system is its "erasability". This is a major boon to people, like me, who never manage to write anything anywhere near the way it needs to be on the first 20 or 30 drafts or so. And its aid to collaboration is clear, at least, among folks who are capable of genuine dialogue in pursuing joint work.

The point where erasability becomes a disabling bug in the groupware is when some participants in a debate discover that they can "win" arguments simply by deleting the opposing arguments.

Once that happens, even a little, the people who resort to this type of easy win almost always become hopelessly addicted to it — it becomes an automatic reflex, often literally enforced by bots — inquiry is short-circuited and the "community" has to be protected by scare-quotes from then on out.

— Jon Awbrey, 18 Mar 2010, CET 19:18

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Mathieu O'Neil announced his paper, “Shirky and Sanger, or the Costs of Crowdsourcing”. It appears in the current special issue of the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) on Peer-to-Peer and User-Led Science.

Jon

[thekohser]

CPOV Listings …

Mathieu O'Neil announced his paper, “Shirky and Sanger, or the Costs of Crowdsourcing”. It appears in the current special issue of the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) on Peer-to-Peer and User-Led Science.

Jon

Bravo:

...we could say that the community management of anonymous expertise, as practised on Wikipedia, results in extraordinary costs, in the form of uncertainty and flawed perspectives for users; irresponsibility and increased judicial and police work for producers; to say nothing of the consequences of the resulting concentration of legal competencies.

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Juliana Brunello posted an excerpt from the First Monday article, “Signs of Epistemic Disruption : Transformations in the Knowledge System of the Academic Journal” by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis.

Andreas Kemper added an interesting comment about missed opportunities for author funding as it affects the German scene, but I don't know enough about this to know if it has more global implications.

Maybe Greg could take a look at it?

Jon Awbrey

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

I posted an update on the progress at the Magna Farta con-stitutional con-vention —

CPOV Pilgrims who are following WikiPlex's Progress --
to wit, its "foundering" attempts to up-date itself
to the Year 1215 -- will find that a portion of the
action has shifted to the scenes of Meta-Wiki-Medea:

meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag

Ciao,

Jon

I suppose we should start a pool on when the purges of e-ristocrats will commence — but positive numbers only, no fair counting pre-purgees …

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

TheUsualSuspect incites a discussion of our Imperious (Co-)Leader's imperiosity …

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

I posted another comment on the thread Greg needled to ask the question, “Community Run or Royal Decree?”

Some of you will have heard it before …

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Juliana Brunello posted a list of tools for researching various aspects of Wikipedia.

I think we have discussed almost all of these at one point or another, but a few of them I don't recall having seen before, and it's handy in any case to have them all listed in one place.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

From Alan Shapiro, an n-teresting pointer to a wild and wooly link-o-rama, n-cidentally tangent to the m-bedding thread that I x-tracted for x-amining Joseph Reagle's e-vocation of the Universal Encyclopedia Vision (UEV).

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Juliana Brunello needled a thread on the recent Global Politician interview with Sam Vaknin, titled “The Wikipedia Cult”, that is already being discussed here on its own thread.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Juliana Brunello needled a thread on “The Wikipedia Cult”, the recent Global Politician interview with Sam Vaknin, which was also being discussed on its own thread here.

Jon

Reply to objections on the use of the word "cult" —

The good of a concept or a term of description, more or less following Kant and Peirce, is that it unifies a manifold of sense impressions.

As it happens, my work on social and technical means of facilitating inquiry led me to study the factors that "block inquiry", in other words, that inhibit critical reflective thinking, long before I ever encountered the worldview of the Wikipedian true believer. One of the telltale signs of a closed belief system that I kept noticing was one that I dubbed the "cul-de-sac" — rhymes with "cultist act". This is any plank of a belief platform that keeps those who stand on it from reflecting critically on its fundamental structures and evaluating their suitability for the espoused common purpose.

For my part, I am skeptical of the hypothesis that "Peter Damian" asserted to lead off that sample thread — I don't think I'd trace every deleterious effect of the Wikipedia Complex to a single mad belief — but I can see some sense in trying to unify the manifold of otherwise senseless impressions.

Jon Awbrey, 31 May 2010

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Juliana Brunello posted notice of last March's First Monday article by Vasilis Kostakis, based in part on interviews with a couple of our local lights, and asked for reflections on the theme of “Transparency”.

Jon

[Jon Awbrey]

CPOV Listings …

Juliana Brunello posted notice of last March's First Monday article by Vasilis Kostakis, based in part on interviews with a couple of our local lights, and asked for reflections on the theme of “Transparency”.

Jon

I have of course written — as most WReviewers have — till I'm blue in the phalanges on this particular subject, so here is all I could work up the joules to say at this late date:

One of the founding ideals of the wiki paradigm was akin to what W.S. Burroughs called the “Naked Lunch”, where everyone would be able to see exactly what was on everyone else's fork.

Wikipedia has strayed so far from that ideal that it no longer makes sense to refer to the WMF+WP+Wikia+PM+IRC+SecretMailingLists+WhoWitsWhat system as a "wiki" at all. There is chamber upon chamber and storey upon storey of smoke-filled rooms that no faint body of researchers will ever be able to bring to light in a decade of digging and probing.

Jon Awbrey, 02 June 2010