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[I forward the following from Phil
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Notes and recommendations.
So I've moved to Los Angeles. People ask me why, and the true reason is that Los Angeles is the big city and San Diego, bless it, is not. When I first got here, I needed a ritual to mark the occasion. So I grabbed a cell phone and a copy of Business 2.0 (the cyber business magazine whose name I accidentally mistyped the other day as Release 2.0, which is the title of Esther Dyson's book), drove to Santa Monica, found a juice bar with sidewalk seating, ordered a double wheat grass and a cranberry smoothie, sat in the sun, and returned phone calls. This was interesting for about five minutes, and then I wanted to get back to work. So much for LA rituals.
My new department at UCLA is the reconstituted library school. Most
of the library schools have been going through revolutions lately
as they position themselves at what is allegedly the new center of
the universe -- the nexus between information technology and social
institutions. The department's official name is still Library and
Information Science, but we have some paperwork lost somewhere in
the bureaucracy that is supposed to change our name to Information
Studies, which I'll admit makes me feel a little better. Not that
I diss librarians, quite the contrary, but nobody wants to be in
a department whose official subject matter they know nothing about.
I'm learning, but still. The opportunity here is to comprehend and
shape, in our own small way, the emerging generation of information
institutions -- public or private, gadget-focused or service-focused
or both, within organizations or between them, formal or informal,
educational or political or whatever, etc. A great deal is known
about all of this, and it's a matter of abstracting out its essence
and applying it to the new situation in the world. If you've read
my TLS article,
So UCLA is a happening place. Come visit. You'll probably be hearing more about our plans, at least if you stay on this mailing list.
Here again, for those who might have missed it, is the new command for unsubscribing from RRE. Just send a message that looks like this:
To: requests@lists.gseis.ucla.edu Subject: unsubscribe rre
Please forgive us if you're getting mail that you didn't expect to get, or whatever. Transitions like these are always clumsy. The RRE Web page has been updated with the new facts, and here is its URL:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
Let me know if anything is wrong with it.
My note about the Times Literary Supplement, which published my piece on information technology and institutional change, may have left the impression that I was mad at them. Not so. Publishing in magazines is always difficult. They've got their own production pressures and everything, so mistakes happen. The bottom line is that, Internet or no, the print publications still have the audience. And the TLS people didn't change the meanings of any of my words, which in my experience is the exception rather than the rule.
I poured hot oil on the whole concept of disintermediation the other day, and got several interesting messages in response. Rather than try to respond to these messages individually, let me expand on the point a little bit. The problem with the concept of disintermediation is not that nothing resembling it ever happens. Rather, like most of the concepts that we use to talk about the networked society, it tends to reify one end of a complex spectrum of phenomena.
The problem is analogous to the problem with the concept of virtual communities. Amidst my railing against cyberpundits, I do make an exception for Howard Rheingold, who is a real intellectual. For one thing, he wrote his "Virtual Community" book way back in 1993 -- and it still holds up well today. But the phrase "virtual community" is nonetheless disastrously misleading. Even though Howard knows better himself, the phrase tends to set up an opposition between two extremes: the mythical face-to-face community of American civic ideals where nobody even picks up the telephone, and the totally Internet- mediated community where nobody even knows where anybody else lives. In fact, in reality as we find it in 1998, most communities lie at points between these two extremes, and we only confuse ourselves when we try to use the exteme concepts to analyze any real case.
And that's the problem with the concept of disintermediation. One could (and some do) try to define a concept like "pure intermediary", which is basically the kind of intermediary for which the theory of disintermediation applies. In the market context anyway, this is the kind of intermediary who does absolutely nothing except pull standardized information from sellers (or buyers) and transfer it to buyers (or sellers) with minimal processing. Even if such a concept could apply to some real case in the world, it is still misleading because it invites us to ignore all of the other stuff that the vast majority of real intermediaries do. Disintermediation does have the great virtue, in addition to the other sarcastic virtues I mentioned, that it identifies a class of social enemies that information technology can be employed to purge. But if our goal is economic efficiency, social justice, rational design, or honest social theory, then we need to throw away that drama and get ourselves a serious anatomy and physiology of intermediation.
What, then, do intermediaries do? Once we compare and contrast them, we discover that they do all sorts of things. They deal with the innumerable details that resist standardization. They hear about all of the pitfalls that their clients run into so they can warn you about them. They process, analyze, and synthesize information. They watch over the social environment for relevant issues. It varies a lot, and it not terribly helpful to try to analyze the matter in the abstract.
So to make matters concrete, let us spell out a particular scenario that proponents of the disintermediation theory are likely to approve of. That scenario involves XML. XML is cool. Perhaps the purists will cringe at me for putting it this way, but it's a cross between a document markup language and a database notation. XML documents come in definite, predefined types, and each type has its own set of specialized tags. Someone could write (and probably already has written) a "DTD" (document type definition) for resumes. People who are looking for work could mark up their resumes using the relevant tags, put them on the Web, and make them visible to some Web crawler that indexes XML pages. Then an employer could search for suitable job candidates by typing some keywords into a resume-specific search engine. The search engine could probably be constructed automatically from the DTD. Presto, no more want ads, and not even any more "job boards" on the Internet. Likewise, industries that produce heavily standardized goods like electrical or mechanical equipment, where any product can be almost completely characterized using a fixed list of parameters, could get together to create DTD's for their products. Then instead of going through market-makers, they could simply publish their catalog online as a set of XML pages, and anyone wishing to shop for such goods could simply type in a search request at a generic XML search engine.
That's the scenario. I didn't invent it; quite the contrary, it's the conventional wisdom in many quarters. So what's wrong with it? Not that much, so long as you stick to the cases for which it works. The key is standardization. If the task at hand is simply matching "wanters" with "havers", and the match can be defined in standardized ways, then XML provides a generic platform for building the necessary tools. The deep principle here is the symbiotic relationship between information technology standards and standards out in the big world. The more information and communication technology you have, the more incentive you have to standardize things like agricultural goods, mechanical parts, computer programmers, etc etc. And, reciprocally, the more standardized things are in a given social world, the more incentive that world will experience to adopt another round of information and communication technology. That doesn't mean that things necessarily will get standardized -- standardization can be costly. But it does shift the balance.
To see this, think about two more examples, EDI and libraries. Read a brilliant article by Eric Brousseau, "EDI and interfirm relationships: Toward a standardization of coordination processes?", Information Economics and Policy 6(4), 1994, pages 319-347. It's about the reason why EDI (electronic data interchange) has stalled, and secondarily why electronic commerce faces unexpectedly steep challenges. EDI was supposed to integrate companies more closely with their suppliers by creating an open channel for orders and other associated data. The problem, as Brousseau points out, is that relationships between companies and their suppliers vary a great deal in their stability. In some cases, the relationships are very stable and predictable. Orders don't vary that much, and it doesn't take much data to specify them. In those cases nobody needs a complicated, expensive computer system to send and receive orders; the telephone is plenty, or just a standing order with fixed quantities. At the other extreme, as in the construction industry, things are so unpredictable that orders cannot be specified over a data line using a moderate number of parameters. Once again the telephone is required, or face-to-face interaction with complicated paperwork.
EDI, like many technical systems, requires fairly large economies of scale before it becomes affordable -- that is, a lot of companies have to adopt it so that the costs of developing it can be distributed. And that never happened because it was simply not useful enough to enough companies. Electronic commerce on the Internet might be more successful because it unbundles several layers of functionality that EDI systems enclosed in one complicated package. The bottom layers -- the functionality of the raw Internet before any applications are installed -- can be applied to many, many purposes. As a result, many firms have multiple incentives to connect to the Internet, and the fixed costs of developing the Internet can be spread so widely that nobody even thinks of them as costs. The pattern can then repeat with all of the other elements of electronic commerce functionality, layer by layer. In each case, however, the story is the same: the technology is useful when it fits in with standardized elements of the institutional world around it. The more such elements one can identify, the more value the technology delivers. And as the payoff from standardization increases, the incentive to standardize things increases as well.
Libraries epitomize another pattern: stuff in the world that is sort of standardized, but not standardized enough that all of the effort can be pushed to the margins of the system. Library collections encompass an amazing variety of stuff, in hundreds of languages, in all kinds of formats, with all kinds of exceptions and quirks and details, and librarians have spent centuries refining methods for cataloguing the stuff. To make the administration of their catalogs as efficient as possible, the librarians keep using information technology to push the effort, so to speak, upstream. The OCLC database in Ohio, for example, pools much of the world's cataloguing effort. Publishers are asked to prepare rough drafts of catalog entries. Individual libraries customize catalog entries to their local purposes. Each record is the result of a whole elaborate division of labor organized by a sort of monastic cult that lives and breathes the very detailed standards that make the results consistent and thus useful.
These people, the catalogers, are intermediaries in the vague sense that they stand between authors and readers. (Another problem with trying to apply the concept of disintermediation to everything is that you're tempted to interpret everything as an intermediary, whether that's a useful way to talk about it or not.) You're not going to disintermediate them. Instead, what needs to happen is happening: the people themselves keep reshuffling and reorganizing the work. We can learn a lot from them. See Chris Borgman's forthcoming book for details.
That's not to say that the whole publication system should stay the way it is. Just about everybody in the research world is longing for the day when we can get rid of commerical journal publishers who acquire intellectual property from research institutions for free and sell it back to them for thousands of dollars at a time. This won't happen, however, until the value that those intermediaries add to research publications gets added someplace else in the value chain. That is why most of the best innovations in journal publishing are happening in technical and scientific fields. ARPA and NSF, visionaries that they are, have thought hard for many years about the infrastructure of scientific and technical research, and they have encouraged the use of standard tools. That includes spectacular tools such as the Internet, but it also includes mundane tools like the LaTeX document formatting system. If everyone who publishes technical information uses LaTeX then it becomes much easier to run a journal, and much of the value that publishers add (typesetting, copyediting, and so on) becomes unnecessary.
Is this disintermediation? Again, you can stretch the concept to fit. It's much more useful, however, to map out the reshuffling division of labor that becomes possible as the rising tide of standards makes information technology more useful. We'll still have intermediaries in research publishing, but their functions will be different. Their functions should be moved away from commercial firms to university consortia and professional organizations so that intellectual property and other contractual constraints don't motivate the intermediary to slow down the transition. (If a journal editor decides to move his or her whole journal and editorial board from a commercial publisher to a nonprofit organization overnight, a lawsuit is likely to result.)
It's a trade-off: as we move those functions around in the system, we lock ourselves into a whole new set of standards. Those standards may facilitate compatibility and cooperation and efficiency, but precisely for that reason the standards themselves may become hard to change, and the fixed costs associated with adopting the standards may tend even more conclusively to marginalize those institutions, for example in less developed countries, that cannot afford them.
I read a semi-humorous story once, about five years ago, by a guy who had just finished running for a council seat in his town. This guy happened to be Jewish. Now in the old days, a Jewish candidate for town council would wake up one day to find rumors that he had been eating the town's children or planning to sell everyone out to international bankers or something like that. We're far beyond that now. Instead, this guy woke up one day to find rumors that he had accused his opponent of anti-Semitism. He lost the election.
I thought about that story this morning as I read an article about the response to Hillary Clinton's speculation, in an interview with a Little Rock newspaper, that prejudice against Arkansas contributed to the bizarre attacks on her and her husband. Representative Jay Dickey (R-Ark) responded to Hillary's comment as follows:
"It is sad and unfortunate that Arkansas is depicted by the first lady as a backward state, worthy of ridicule and prejudice," Dickey said. "It would be much better if the first lady would make a mature and responsible assessment of the situation and not blame us Arkansans for their troubles." (NY Times 8/12/98)
I had to read this several times, it was so twisted. Hillary's point was obviously that the alleged prejudice against her state was unfair -- otherwise her argument would make no sense. Despite this, Rep. Dickey simply pretended that she had endorsed the prejudice. And Dickey's comment is not isolated but part of a very common pattern nowadays in which people who point out prejudice and discrimination are themselves blamed for the prejudice and discrimination that they are pointing out. It's an argument that is so primally senseless that is hard to know how to respond to it. And that, I am sure, is very much the point: to make a harsh, confusing, and really loud noise and then keep moving to the next news cycle and the next attacks.
Some versions of the pattern are more destructive. Take Clarence Thomas' view, expressed in a speech the other day, that affirmative action should be repealed -- and even that it is racist -- because it presupposes that blacks are inferior. This view was quoted widely in the press as if it made the slightest sense. What affirmative action presupposes is that blacks suffer from pervasive, institutionalized discrimination. Reasonable people can disagree whether affirmative action is the best response to that entrenched pattern. Thomas' comment, however, like Dickey's, is so senseless that it is hard to come up with any response to it -- you can't analyze a logical argument to identify its fallacies until you can find the first semblance of a logical argument to analyze. Lacking such, one is put in the position of guessing or reconstructing an argument, itself a hazardous procedure because it invites accusations that one has put words into the person's mouth. That's what things have come to in the United States: utter nonsense shapes public policy because it goes unanswered, and it goes unanswered because it is utter nonsense.
Another, related argument contents that promoters of affirmative action want to create equality of outcomes when a free society needs to be based on equality of opportunity. I would swear that I have heard this argument a thousand times. Yet it, too, is so twisted that it is difficult to make any sense out of it. Promoters of affirmative action believe that all social groups have the same innate talents, so that massive, systematic inequalities in "outcome" -- educational attainment, economic power, and so on -- are prima facie evidence of discrimination. In particular, they interpret inequality of "outcome" as evidence of inequality of opportunity, and so they propose various measures to level the playing field, thereby creating equality of opportunity. That's what affirmative action is -- a wide variety of measures to level playing fields that have been (and are being) tilted by discrimination.
So what's going on? Even though the parallel grammatical construction -- equality of outcome, equality of opportunity -- creates a surface impression of logic, the argument itself (if you can call it that) only makes sense on the assumption that discrimination does not exist -- or, worse, that the only kind of discrimination that exists is affirmative action. You can believe that different social groups suffer unequal opportunities because of discrimination without supporting affirmative action as a remedy. But if you don't believe that inequality of outcome implies inequality of opportunity, then you must believe in one of the other logically possible alternatives. Those alternatives are not terribly numerous, and all of them are much closer to racism than the position that is held by the supporters of affirmative action.
But the worst and deepest of these twisted arguments is the one about "playing the race card". You may recall that in the primary elections in Alabama recently, the mayor of Birmingham, who happens to be black, endorsed the challenger in the primary for governor, whereupon the incumbent (who believes that Alabama is permitted by the Constitution to establish a state religion, and whose campaign manager was Ralph Reed) and his allies engaged in a round of classical race-baiting with all of the codes -- pictures of scary black men in afros, you name it. When the mayor objected to this, he was accused of "playing the race card", something that the good citizens of Alabama apparently just won't stand for.
When this happened, I wanted to slit my wrists and die. You, of course, recall where this phrase "the race card" came from -- it originated with O.J. Simpson's murder trial, in which the defense presented evidence of the LA Police Department's racism and incompetence in order to raise a reasonable doubt that O.J. might have been framed. The jury found this evidence all too congruent with their own experience and let him off, despite the otherwise overwhelming evidence of his guilt. When someone now cites that phrase in some other situation, what are they doing? That's right -- they're likening that situation to one in which a wealthy black man gets away with murdering a white woman. This is, obviously, the same primitive racism that I grew up around in rural Maryland, only now it has become repackaged under this fancy, indirect, high-tech rhetoric. It is so very sad.
Ill Wind at CNN, including documents, from the LA Weekly http://www.laweekly.com/ink/archives/98/37lede2-080798-intro.shtml
Some documents on virtual universities and the like:
California Virtual University http://www.california.edu/
Restructuring the University for Technological Change by A.W. Bates http://bates.cstudies.ubc.ca/carnegie/carnegie.html
Virtual Teaching in Higher Education: The New Intellectual Superhighway or Just Another Traffic Jam? by Jerald G. Schutte http://www.csun.edu/sociology/virexp.htm
Using Information Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity by William F. Massy and Robert Zemsky http://www.educom.edu/program/nlii/keydocs/massy.html
Milken Exchange on Education Technology http://www.milkenexchange.org/
end ```
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