The Ed Techie

Wealth of Networks session

On Friday John Naughton ran an interesting session around Benkler's Wealth of Networks. It was particularly welcome as I feel rather guilty that I've never actually finished Benkler's magnum opus.

John first set the context for the book, talking about the semiotics of the title and borrowed Castell's term about informed bewilderment to describe our current state when we look at the changes around us. That is, we have no shortage of data about what's happening, but we are still unsure as to what it all means. Benkler's book can be seen as an attempt to cast a scholarly light on this state of bewilderment.

Part of the reason for this bewilderment is that our analytical tools are not as useful as they once were (which is not to say they are completely useless). As John put it economics can be categorised as the analysis of scarcity, whereas what we have in a digital world is abundance. The scarce resource now is attention, and here the competition is now greatly increased from the days of TV dominance.

John also talked about the 'convergence fantasies' of many industries which always boil down to 'converge on to my device'. He argued that convergence happened long ago - onto the net.

He summarised Benkler's book as having six main arguments:

• Until recently we had a highly industrialised info economy
• This marginalised non market cultural production (“social production”)
• ICT has reduced the cost of production and publication
• Greatly enhanced power and potential of social production
• This has major implications for economic, social cultural and political life
• There will be a struggle between old world and new world.

We then went on to discuss three issues:

1. How plausible is Benkler's analysis?
2. What might it mean for education (and the OU)?
3. What might it mean for society?

In terms of 1) I made the point that to an extent it was empirically true - that in open source communities, wikipedia, flickr, etc social production was already a major economic force. So even though critics (Carr, Gorman, Keen et al) may argue against it, the best response is 'yes but look at the facts'. I was reminded of Clay Shirky's memorable phrase regarding AT & T programmers when they first saw open source support in action:

"They didn't care that they'd seen it work in practice, because they already knew it couldn't work in theory."

John set up a wiki for the session which has further references. 

Kindle inches towards the free content scenario

Amazon's Kindle received a lot of positive and negative attention this week. The positives seem to be that people like the device, it goes some way to capturing the tactile and emotional element of book reading, and the connectivity adds another dimension. The negatives seem to be that the DRM and pricing model.

To me though it represents another small step towards the scenario of digital content becoming free. Quoting yourself is bad form I know, but in my post on the Future of content I said

"let us consider what would happen if digital paper really arrived (despite several proclamations digital ink and paper have been stubbornly difficult to realise, but that isn’t the point of my argument). It felt like real paper, you could have it bound in books like real paper, you could write on it like real paper. But crucially the content it displayed could change, you could search it, and it could record all those annotations you made.

Even as something of a bibliophile, this begins to look tempting to me. I like having books as objects on my shelves, but I used to like having vinyl albums and CDs also, but now I only have MP3s (and clear shelves). If digital paper were so good it overcame the 3 benefits of books above, then it would have significant advantages over real paper. "

Kindle isn't there yet, but it's another step along the path. And what we will see happen now is the disintermediation of publishers. As an author I can now publish direct to Kindle. And as Clay Shirky argues, when it comes to a face off between fame vs fortune, fame wins.

Last month Radiohead, this month the Kindle, perhaps the future of content will be with us sooner than even I anticipated.

Books, playlists and the granularity of ideas

I have mentioned this before, but thought I'd revisit it (hey it's the summer holidays, time for reruns all round). In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger gives a nice analysis of how the digitisation of content has altered our perceptions of what we thought was the basic unit. In talking about music he says

"For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs ... As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track."

Nick Carr disagrees with Weinberger, stating the artistic structure of the album, using Exile on Main Street as an example (wonder why he didn't choose a Steps album, say). Clay Shirky has a good refutation of Nick's claim saying that if the artistic integrity of Exile were as strong as he claims, then it would survive digitisation - it doesn't when you look on iTunes, most people download Tumbling Dice. I'm with Shirky/Weinberger on this, although I know what Nick Carr means, but the album didn't have an intrinsic artistic integrity, rather the economics as outlined by Weinberger came first, and then some artists began to explore the album as an integrated unit. If digitisation had come first then maybe they would have explored artistic avenues open to them through that means, but they would have been unlikely to come up with the album as the logical conclusion to musical output. It's atoms and economics that made this so.

I wonder if the same isn't true of books. They have a longer pedigree and greater cultural value than albums, but essentially they are containers for ideas. Their format, size and existence is largely a result of the economics of atoms. An individual could only be in one place at one time and speak to an audience of limited size. Therefore to get an idea across to a wider audience you need a format that is transportable, easily interpreted and has a low(ish, illiteracy still being a big problem) threshold to participation. This is something the church understood early on.

In the academic world we also have the article, which because of the economics of stuff, is bundled together with other articles in to a journal, ie a smallish book. So even though the article may be smaller in size, it still follows the economic route determined by the book (with the interesting addition that the publishers don't do any of the work involved in its production and take all the money). But with the digitisation of knowledge then it is free to follow its own path.

I don't doubt that the book will continue to exist, but it will not hold the monopoly on being the conduit for ideas. Just like Exile on Main St, some books have an integrity that justifies the format (ironically Weinberger's book is one such), but just like many albums used to be a couple of good singles plus filler, so many books seem to be a good idea stretched over 100,000 words. This isn't the author's fault necessarily, they had a good idea, and the book is the dominant means of getting it out.

But this need no longer be the case - an online essay, a blog, a podcast, a collection of video clips - all these are perfectly viable means for disseminating ideas. As well as the book losing its monopoly, so does text - audio and video can be used effectively. We only used text because it was transportable when ideas were tied in with physical objects. And if ideas become the equivalent of tracks, then perhaps the user creates the equivalent of a playlist by pulling these together around a subject of their choice.

I wish I'd thought of that #243

This is such an obvious, yet brilliant idea (via Beth's blog). Meredith Farkas had a book coming out (social software in libraries), and rather than have some dull cover foisted upon her by the publishers from their standard stock of photos, she set up a competition in Flickr. The winners got - a free copy of the book! While I'm sure it's a good book, it's obvious that the prize wasn't the motivation for entering, people just really enjoyed the chance to be creative. The pool can be found here. Below are a couple of my favourites:

And all are better than the publisher generated cover of my book:

Lazy graphic designers beware...

My Amazon ranking - whipped by the long tail

Looking at your books ranking in Amazon can be a mildly obsessive pastime, like checking your Technorati rating (465,937 since you ask). In Amazon yesterday I had risen to the giddy heights of 9,432. To put that in context Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is 97, Moby Dick is 1,428 and Perec's Life A User Manual is 639,483.

But before I could purchase the yacht, it seems my fantasies of retirement were scuppered by the long tail. Sales fall off very quickly after the first 1000 or so, as this article explains. So at around 10,000 it is selling 11 copies every 5 days. It'd have to be a pretty small yacht under those circumstances. And this seems to have been a peak (probably a couple of friends bought a copy out of pity), as today I am at 63,108. Of course it would be a very sad person indeed who looked up how the books of their colleagues were doing, so you won't catch me doing that, oh no.

(Thanks to Chris Pegler for the link).

Why write books?

I reflected on being a blogger recently, and one might ask yourself, why blog? Chuck Olsen's blogumentary gives some pretty good reasons. Having just had my second book come out, perhaps the question  now is why write a book? After all, it takes ages, it's out of date before it's printed, it exists largely in isolation compared with all the blogs, wikis, social software. And so on.

Here are some possible reasons:

i) Money - you're joking, right? Maybe for the Dan Browns of the world, but the return on investment for most academic books operates somewhere between 1/10th and roughly equal to minimum wage. I remember doing some consultancy after my first book had been published. In two days I earned more than the book had brought in over the year, and it had taken seven months to write.

ii) Bibliophilia - or at least something to do with the physicality of books. To paraphrase Johnny Thunders, you can't put your arms around a blog. Society has elevated books to items of worship also, despite the crappy footballer biographies, the plethora of chick lit, the endless stream of Da Vinci code copies, etc, we still revere books.

iii) Reputation and status - now we're getting nearer to it I think. Following on from above, anyone can write a blog (democratisation is after all one of their big claims) but writing books is still reasonably uncommon. Most of the parents of my daughters classmates earn more than me, live in bigger houses and drive Mercedes, but I always have the trump card of 'I've written books' up my sleeve. Of course, it never quites comes down to such blatant competition, but there is an element of ego in writing a book. Which is ironic really, since blogs are often decried for being all about self-publicity.

iv) Creative impulse - there is something in this, the frustrated novelist and all that. But being a blog writer does fulfill this function to an extent, although there is something about having the extended time and space to explore ideas over 80,000 words.

v) Knowledge transfer - hmmm, I could play the altruistic card and pretend I am doing it solely to add to the sum of human knowledge, but a book isn't necessarily the best medium for this now. There was a time when that would have washed, but a blog or website would be as good a means now. I do think there is some good interplay between the two media though - you read a good book on the train and then find the author's blog for more regular thoughts.

vi) Cognitive housekeeping - writing a book (and reading one) is a good means of wrapping up a subject, drawing a line under it and putting in a drawer. A good book on a subject acts as kind of shorthand for a lot of issues. For instance, you can say to a group of knowledgeable people 'it's a long tail kind of thing', and be understood.

There are probably some more reasons, but that's my lot for now. Not a particularly compelling list is it. Would I write another one? You bet!

My book is (finally) out

With definitely more of a whimper than a bang, my book Virtual Learning Environments, was published by Routledge last week. I'd contacted them the week before and asked 'when is it coming out?' 'Next week' was the response.

Anyway, it was good to receive the advance copies last week, although I made the mistake of reading it and immediately finding a second book of omissions, changes, changes of mind, etc lurking beneath the surface of this one. Perhaps I'll write a post on things I should have covered in a few months time.

The book is aimed at a range of users - anyone involved in e-learing basically. It will be interesting to see whether it meets the needs of the techies, the educator who is tentatively using their VLE, and the manager choosing their institutional VLE.

The anti-social life of information

I was on campus at the OU yesterday. We have something of a parking crisis, which for a campus in the middle(ish) of nowhere, this is bad news. The response to this has been to outsource parking control to a firm who hand out £80 fines. Well, you can guess where this is going - I spent twenty minutes trying to park and eventually opted for a less than legitimate place as I had a meeting to make. When I returned less than an hour later I had a parking ticket. I was incandescent with rage (anyone who witnessed me discovering it might be tempted to add 'literally' in to that sentence).

What particularly aggravated me was that I had been in a meeting which was trying to find ways of saving the University lots of money by more efficient course production techniques (I favour use of RSS feeds). At the same time the University was busy raising some extra revenue (and the fee does seem vindictively high) by slapping a ticket on me.

It struck me that this is one of those relatively small things that have a disproportionate impact on staff relations. I certainly felt less devotion to the cause afterwards. As a keen e-worker it made me reflect that for all their evocation of the benefits of real social contact, Brown and Duguid should produce a sequel (they can have the title of this post if they want) which looks at some of the downsides, such as the tyranny of open plan offices, gossip, distractions. I want to set chapter 5 aside for parking...

Get beyond the title James

Rather an off topic post, so look away now if you wish:

Listening to Oliver James (a TV psychologist in the UK) promoting his new book on 5Live in the car yesterday I had one of those 'I'm shouting at the radio' moments. James asserted that although Dawkins' Selfish Gene was published in 1976, it was probably not until the greedy eighties that it became popular as it was used to justify self-interest. Huh? Dawkins book is (partly) an attempt to explain how altruism occurs within the process of natural selection. Indeed in his analysis of game theory he sets out how selfish behaviour works to the detriment of society as a whole.

Two possibilities occur to me here - the first is that James is a critic of evolutionary psychology. That's fair enough, it's a scientific theory and you can argue with it. But what I think is wrong is to deliberately frame it in a social and moral context that is simply not true.

The second possibility is that James hasn't read the book and has simply taken the 'selfish' in the title and the summary part about natural selection and made the erroneous assumption that the book should have been called 'In praise of selfishness' or something. Just in case he's in any doubt, The Blind Watchmaker is not in fact a textbook for manufacturers of poor quality timepieces.

Given this misreading of Dawkins, you don't hold out much hope for the rest of the research underpinning his book, do you?

As an aside, my five year old daughter loves evolution. It started with the deceptively simple question 'where do sharks come from?'. I commenced with a mummy and daddy shark -based explanation, but she cut me short 'no, before there was a mummy and daddy shark.' 'Ahhh, evolution.' I now operate a martini approach to this, giving the explanation anywhere and anytime. So, for example we will be in a queue at Tesco, clutching a packet of Jammie Dodgers when she will ask, 'dad, tell me about evolution....'

publishers not getting it

I asked my publisher if I could make some chapters of my forthcoming book freely available on line. After a month of deliberation they have come back with a 'no' from the rights department (but I could link to their contents page if I wanted - gee, thanks). I sighed with the inevitability of it. They just don't get it do they, publishers? On a purely capitalist  note putting out a few chapters is a very effective marketing ploy. People will read a couple but are unlikely to find all they want and so, my guess, will be more likely to buy the book.

A slightly less direct effect is that releasing some chapters generates discussion around the ideas, which in itself creates the context for the book. Okay, my book is not exactly The Tipping Point or The Wisdom of Crowds, but within its readership this environmental massage is probably still worthwhile.

But the point is a bigger one - I understand publishers need to make money, but they haven't recognised the fundamental shift that has happened in value. It is no longer about what you keep protected that counts, but the extent to which you, are connected, linked to, commented upon, shared with. If you can't be connected to you don't exist.