Interface Culture, Steven Johnson, 1997
Steven Johnson sets out to bridge the cultural differences between art and technology. His premise is that the computer interface is an art form, with similar functions today as the novel had in the 19th century: mediating between society and new technology, creating a sense of coherence in a time of upheaval.
Johnson addresses many questions that were popular with net-philosophers of his time but seem to have slipped off the radar screen more recently (unless I am much mistaken).
- How do we find our way around virtual information space?
- Does writing on a computer, for a blog or a website change the way we write? The way we organize our thoughts?
- How will pictures, videos, animations, text etc. combine to create a truly new medium?
Summary
Links mentioned in the book: FEED, Suck
Where the Victorian novel shaped our understanding of the new towns wrapped around the steel mill and the cotton gin, and fifties television served as an imaginative guide to the new suburban enclaves created by the automobile, the interface makes the teeming, invisible world of zeros and ones sensible to us. There are few creative acts in modern life more significant than this one, and few with such broad social consequences.
This may seem like a gross exaggeration, but Johnson puts this perception down to the fact that computers and the internet are relatively new, and their full potential has yet to be discovered. As he points out, the first radio and television shows were adaptations of theater productions. Similarly, Johnson sees the current internet landscape as souped up television rather than a truly independent medium; a PC functions mostly as a glorified typewriter, or file cabinet, or calculator.
As our machines are increasingly jacked into global networks of information, it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the dataspace at our fingertips, to picture all that complexity in our mind’s eye – the way city dwellers, in the sociologist Kevin Lunch’s phrase, “cognitively map” their real-world environs.
Representing all that information is going to require a new visual language, as complex and meaningful as the great metropolitan narratives of the nineteenth-century novel. We can already see the first stirrings of this new form in recent interface designs that have moved beyond the two-dimensional desktop metaphor into more immersive digital environments. … As the infosphere continues its exponential growth, the metaphors used to describe it will also grow in both scale and complexity.
Self-reflexivity
Johnson looks at ‘bad’ TV and sees precursors of new forms better suited to the internet. He calls these forms ‘parasite forms’ – they riff, comment on, and parody traditional storytelling and culture, e.g. Zoo TV, the Daily Show, tabloid news shows, Beavis and Butthead.
The technological changes that ushered in merchant capitalism did away with the old, aristocratic morality plays and introduced a new, rougher form – the realis novel, with its orphans and scoundrels and wayward heroines. In the same way, the electric technologies of the twentieth century have done away with the old storytelling forms, or at least scaled them down to assembly-line repetition, while simultaneously unleashing a flock of new organisms into the larger cultural ecology.
But here’s the rub: these new organisms don’t tell stories. They riff, annotate, dismantle, dissect, sample. Everything they do refracts back onto som other “straight” media, on which they rely for their livelihood. They relate to their story-driven predecessors the way a movie review relates to a movie. …
There may not be a great deal of “quality programming” in this mix, but the sheer quantity of this new genre – the diversity of the species – is remarkable. All the evidence suggests that the metaforms are evolving at a much faster clip than their storytelling competitors. … while the sitcom has languished, the self-referential “commentary” show has come into its own. …
Most critics who have addressed the growth of the “meta” form have acted as though there were something abnormal, something malignant about it. … using the language of epidemics.
It’s worth stressing here that the shift from story-telling to commentary – from host organism to parasite – is more than just standard-issue postmodernism. [The shift happened] because the mass media is now a fundamental, irreversible component of … everyday life … The infosphere is now a part of out “real life” – which makes commenting on it as natural as commenting on the weather. …
Metaforms don’t fare well in the analog world of television … But the digital world is another story. That world is the home planet of information filters. The parasite forms are fringe benefit on analog TV, a flourish. In the digital world, they are a fact of life. There is no such thing as digital information without filters. …
These metaforms, these bitmappings will come to occupy nearly every facet of modern society: work, play, romance, family, high art, pop culture, politics. But the form itself will be the same, despite its many guises, laboring away in that strange new zone between medium and message. That zone is what we call the interface.
The desktop metaphor
When Apple launched the Mac and its graphical user interface, the ‘cartoon’ icons led people to believe that this wasn’t a serious, work-oriented tool. For proper work, the text-input interface was considered superior. It took a long time for people to understand that the desktop metaphor allowed users to find their way intuitively around a computer.
The first reviews of the Mac and its brethren testify to the conceptual limitations that come out of working under one paradigm and then struggling to adapt to another: There are invariably blind spots and omissions in these transition points, things that seem intuitive with hindsight but were almost impossible to grasp at the time.
Once people figured out that metaphors worked, however, they overdid it. Johnson cites Bob and Magic Cap as two examples of applications that took their metaphors too literally. Bob used a living room and Magic Cap an office as their metaphors and tried to create simulations of these environments that were as close to reality as possible. In the world according to Chairman Gates, programmers seemed fated to become interior decorators, scattering bric-a-brac and binary potpourri across computer monitors world wide.
The paradoxical thing about these hypermetaphors was that they weren’t metaphorical enough. In the Poetics, Aristotle defined metaphor as the act of “givint the thing a name that belongs to something else.” The crucial element in this formula is the difference that exists between “the thing” and the “something else.” … Metaphors create relations ships between things that are not directly equivalent. Metaphors based on complete identity are not metaphors at all.”
A programmed living room on your screen can never compete with your real living room. In fact, it’s boring, just more-of-the-same. It takes the metaphor to its literal extreme at the expense of exploring the new medium’s unique potential. A bad simulation will never match up to a good metaphor. (Could this be one of the reasons that video-phones and video-conferences were so slow to catch on?)
There’s something perverse in this total deference to user-friendly simulation, like building a word processor that faithfully reproduces a mechanical typewriter; complete with stuck keys and worn-out ribbons.
Good metaphors enhance the user experience. However, in 1997, as perhaps still today, for the most part, the social fabric of cyberspace is still stitched together by the gossamer thread of text. A graphical environment often diminishes the depth of the social experience. However when graphic environments become content (rather than context) – as in online or video gaming, the role of architecture suddenly shifts. The architecture of that virtual space doesn’t frame the conversation – it’s a central component of it.
Links
The link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries, but it is only a hint of things to come. Hypertext, in fact suggests a whole new grammar of possibilities, a new way of writing and telling stories. But to make that new frontier accessible, we need more than one type of link. Microsoft and Netscape may be content with the simple, one-dimensional links of the Web’s current incarnation. But for the rest of us, it’s like trying to write a novel where the words are separated only by semicolons.
Johnson introduces Vannevar Bush’s idea of ‘trails.’ Essentially trails work the same way links do, linking information together based on meaning and context. However, trails are stable – they can be recalled and followed again. Instead of bookmarking a site, you can see all the other sites you called up in connection with a site to remind yourself of the meanings you found in them. (Today, that’s something we can only do mentally, building rough and ready maps of the internet in our heads.)
Text
Johnson finds text the most drastically changed and most underrated aspect of the internet as a new medium.
Writing on a word processor is radically different than longhand. It allows trial-and-error while writing and constant editing as you write. Many early computer users missed the direct flow of thoughts from mind to pen, but fast-forward a decade or two, and I can’t imagine writing without a computer. Even jotting down a note with pen and paper feels strained, like a paraplegic suddenly granted the use of his liegs. I have to think about writing, think about it consciously as my hand scratches out the words on the page, think about the act itself. Earlier each sentence had to be worked out in your mind before you wrote it down.
In a world dominated by icons and visual metaphors, the role of text – letters and word, rather than images and animations – has come to seem like an afterthought, an obscure walk-on part in a grand Hollywood epic. Words, in this lopsided paradigm, are always inferior to images. Anyone who knows anything about the history of writing systems – specifically the shift from hieroglyphic-style pictograms to phonetic spelling – will sense something bizarre in this hierarchy.
This is a very important point, but not explored enough in the book. Maybe Johnson underestimates visuals because they were more likely silly animations in his day and he didn’t experience the same seamless interplay between text and video or pictures.
Showing posts with label communications technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communications technology. Show all posts
Saturday
Life on the Screen
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle, 1995
Again, something I wrote a while back... Sherry Turkle's book about internet, postmodern philosophy and psychology remains interesting even though many of her examples sound rather dated today (1995 being something like the Triassic Period of the internet). See also some great reviews at Amazon, and Marshall Soules' collection of links about Sherry Turkle.
In “Life on the Screen” Sherry Turkle explores the many ways in which our sense of self, life, reality and society have changed with the rise of the internet and postmodern culture. She presents changes in attitudes and methods in areas ranging from computer programming and artificial intelligence to biology, psychology and language. As her focus is on the reciprocal effects of technology and society, she never presents a deterministic model, at one point specifically exploring all possible permutations of cause and effect between our technology (computers), the times we live in, and ourselves.
Throughout the book, Sherry Turkle explores how the development of computers and the internet was paralleled by changes of how we define life and intelligence. (Sherry Turkle’s interviews with young children facing this question for the first time in their development are particularly evocative.) Language was always a catalyst for these changes. Speaking of machines in terms of intelligence, thought, life and growth provoked strong reactions. As long as ideas about machines were not culturally appropriated as objects-to-think-with about living beings, the comparisons usually inspired a defensive stance and definitions of humans centered on emotions, and later physicality. As work on artificial intelligence and artificial life progressed, these definitions were highly threatened. Yet, the resistance lessened. New programming models were readily used as metaphors for evolution, growth and brain functions. As the metaphors became more familiar, they were no longer declared as such – the quotation marks around them were dropped – and it became normal to think of machines as intelligent, programs as evolving, or brains as networks. In such an environment, people even became willing to give computer-based psychoanalysis a try. Sherry Turkle provides many such examples of individual experience, technological progress and social trends to create a sense of their complex, simultaneous developments and interaction.
A central theme of the book is the “pastiche” of post-modern society and “tinkering” as the method suitable to working in it. This represents a move away from the modernist belief that our world can and should be explained in linear, rational, all-encompassing models, and a move away from the dominance of the plan. In contrast, society and the world are defined by their complexity and should be accepted as such. Understanding is reached by arranging thoughts, objects and information, and exploring the patterns and links which emerge as the original arrangement is changed and adapted. Infinite regress and circular reasoning are seen as useful tools rather than as flawed logic. When this iterative process of interaction is applied to computer programming, an artificial intelligence program may not only surpass its creator in skill (e.g. win at chess), but deliver surprising, unexpected outcomes. At the same time, the idea of a machine as a complex network of interacting parts, that allows for random variables and doesn’t require total understanding to function, has allowed us to accept such outcomes. We feel more comfortable with a machine modeled on the human brain achieving near-human effects, than if a completely rational, explainable machine achieves the same. Sherry Turkle shows how changes in psychological methods, computer-user interfaces, programming techniques, biology research and people’s experience with the internet contributed to “bringing post-modern philosophy down to earth”.
Another effect of the shift towards pastiche and tinkering is the dissolution of authoritative rules, methods or forms: Anything goes – all of it simultaneously. Different rules, conventions and morals co-exist, forcing each individual to engage in a “continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of the self”, choosing who to be and how to relate to a constantly changing perception of the world. Using the anonymity of the internet and windows-styled personal computers, more and more people are not just de- and reconstructing one self, but multiple personae. In online games and chats they can present themselves in any way they want. They can change their gender, appearance, interests, personality, opinions and more – and they can do this as many times as they like to create multiple selves who can engage in virtual society simultaneously. At best, people use their virtual personae to explore and expand the range of their own personalities; at worst, they will reinforce self-destructive behavior. In exploring psychological dimensions Sherry Turkle presents the idea that people can achieve a “moratorium”, a safe place for personal reflection and experimentation, in their online characters. Much like the ability to write allowed mankind to compare and analyze different versions of a story, multiple personae may allow a reflection on different aspects of one’s personality – fermenting an inner dialogue on identity. In a more pessimistic sense, the phenomenon of fragmentation so widely present in post-modern culture is particularly frightening in the context of multiple-personality disorders.
Sherry Turkle places a special emphasis in her book on the MUDs (rule-based role-playing games in virtual worlds) and the way people use and experience them for everything from relaxation or escapism to social networking and personality development. Her many examples show a highly individual approach. While this emphasis is at times irritating – there is so much else going on in the internet, which she only touches on – she is certainly right in viewing MUDs as a type of virtual frontier that of users are playfully exploring and creating. Also, MUDs are a part of programmer culture and thus very influential in other “more serious” developments of the virtual world. In MUDs as virtual societies, our cultural norms are being renegotiated: Many MUDs have virtual governments and economies which are developed and also challenged by its virtual inhabitants. New values are formed: Power is a function of playing and programming skill; ownership must be redefined; in open-ended games playing and creating becomes more important than winning. Throughout the game, players must agree on acceptable norms of virtual behavior, the accountability of real, anonymous people for digression from these norms, and most of all: How real is this virtual world? If killing is an essential feature of many adventure MUDs, does this mean rape is acceptable in the game? As MUDs fulfill more and more social functions, how real is the game becoming?
While civic discourse thrives in virtual environments, it seems to be disappearing from ordinary real life. Is real life not worth it? Or not vivid enough to merit attention? Experiencing the world through our screens, our sense of reality is distorted. Life can be boring, ordinary and slow; it depends less on our projections and imaginations. The more we model our physical world to resemble its simulations, the more consumerist and disappointing it becomes (e.g. in changing from town center to mall center). The reader experiences a shift from the traditional dichotomy of real and virtual to a continuum ranging from make-believe, to social engagement in a virtual environment, to relationships that shift between the real and the virtual, and finally to the world of physical objects. The extremes of this continuum are not clear: Real people shape the virtual world and the machines where it takes place; hardly any aspect of our “real” lives is unaffected by the internet.
As the boundary between real and virtual is blurred, as social norms lose their importance, as traditional social groups disintegrate, as people change their personae like their clothes, we no longer know what to rely on. We are also overwhelmed by complexity, and in true post-modern spirit, we begin to take things at face value – or rather at interface value. We forget that an icon on a screen is just a graphic representation or that a page on screen consists of bits and bytes, and nonchalantly take things as they are. However, in a world, where “anything goes”, the fundamental questions and values that make us human are all too easily forgotten. We find it convenient to change our answers or principles according to context. To remain true to ourselves as humans, our multiple personae and personalities must be joined in a constant dialogue, discussing our moral outlook.
“Life on the Screen” is based on hundreds of interviews Sherry Turkle conducted with MIT students, children, new computer users and others. They are presented as illustrative excerpts, all too quickly dismissed by some as a collection of anecdotes. Cycling through voices of scholar, author, writer, psychoanalyst, teacher, computer user and woman in society, Sherry Turkle’s observant pastiche of research, analysis and dialogue provides a rich imaginary landscape to explore and reflect upon.
Again, something I wrote a while back... Sherry Turkle's book about internet, postmodern philosophy and psychology remains interesting even though many of her examples sound rather dated today (1995 being something like the Triassic Period of the internet). See also some great reviews at Amazon, and Marshall Soules' collection of links about Sherry Turkle.
In “Life on the Screen” Sherry Turkle explores the many ways in which our sense of self, life, reality and society have changed with the rise of the internet and postmodern culture. She presents changes in attitudes and methods in areas ranging from computer programming and artificial intelligence to biology, psychology and language. As her focus is on the reciprocal effects of technology and society, she never presents a deterministic model, at one point specifically exploring all possible permutations of cause and effect between our technology (computers), the times we live in, and ourselves.
Throughout the book, Sherry Turkle explores how the development of computers and the internet was paralleled by changes of how we define life and intelligence. (Sherry Turkle’s interviews with young children facing this question for the first time in their development are particularly evocative.) Language was always a catalyst for these changes. Speaking of machines in terms of intelligence, thought, life and growth provoked strong reactions. As long as ideas about machines were not culturally appropriated as objects-to-think-with about living beings, the comparisons usually inspired a defensive stance and definitions of humans centered on emotions, and later physicality. As work on artificial intelligence and artificial life progressed, these definitions were highly threatened. Yet, the resistance lessened. New programming models were readily used as metaphors for evolution, growth and brain functions. As the metaphors became more familiar, they were no longer declared as such – the quotation marks around them were dropped – and it became normal to think of machines as intelligent, programs as evolving, or brains as networks. In such an environment, people even became willing to give computer-based psychoanalysis a try. Sherry Turkle provides many such examples of individual experience, technological progress and social trends to create a sense of their complex, simultaneous developments and interaction.
A central theme of the book is the “pastiche” of post-modern society and “tinkering” as the method suitable to working in it. This represents a move away from the modernist belief that our world can and should be explained in linear, rational, all-encompassing models, and a move away from the dominance of the plan. In contrast, society and the world are defined by their complexity and should be accepted as such. Understanding is reached by arranging thoughts, objects and information, and exploring the patterns and links which emerge as the original arrangement is changed and adapted. Infinite regress and circular reasoning are seen as useful tools rather than as flawed logic. When this iterative process of interaction is applied to computer programming, an artificial intelligence program may not only surpass its creator in skill (e.g. win at chess), but deliver surprising, unexpected outcomes. At the same time, the idea of a machine as a complex network of interacting parts, that allows for random variables and doesn’t require total understanding to function, has allowed us to accept such outcomes. We feel more comfortable with a machine modeled on the human brain achieving near-human effects, than if a completely rational, explainable machine achieves the same. Sherry Turkle shows how changes in psychological methods, computer-user interfaces, programming techniques, biology research and people’s experience with the internet contributed to “bringing post-modern philosophy down to earth”.
Another effect of the shift towards pastiche and tinkering is the dissolution of authoritative rules, methods or forms: Anything goes – all of it simultaneously. Different rules, conventions and morals co-exist, forcing each individual to engage in a “continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of the self”, choosing who to be and how to relate to a constantly changing perception of the world. Using the anonymity of the internet and windows-styled personal computers, more and more people are not just de- and reconstructing one self, but multiple personae. In online games and chats they can present themselves in any way they want. They can change their gender, appearance, interests, personality, opinions and more – and they can do this as many times as they like to create multiple selves who can engage in virtual society simultaneously. At best, people use their virtual personae to explore and expand the range of their own personalities; at worst, they will reinforce self-destructive behavior. In exploring psychological dimensions Sherry Turkle presents the idea that people can achieve a “moratorium”, a safe place for personal reflection and experimentation, in their online characters. Much like the ability to write allowed mankind to compare and analyze different versions of a story, multiple personae may allow a reflection on different aspects of one’s personality – fermenting an inner dialogue on identity. In a more pessimistic sense, the phenomenon of fragmentation so widely present in post-modern culture is particularly frightening in the context of multiple-personality disorders.
Sherry Turkle places a special emphasis in her book on the MUDs (rule-based role-playing games in virtual worlds) and the way people use and experience them for everything from relaxation or escapism to social networking and personality development. Her many examples show a highly individual approach. While this emphasis is at times irritating – there is so much else going on in the internet, which she only touches on – she is certainly right in viewing MUDs as a type of virtual frontier that of users are playfully exploring and creating. Also, MUDs are a part of programmer culture and thus very influential in other “more serious” developments of the virtual world. In MUDs as virtual societies, our cultural norms are being renegotiated: Many MUDs have virtual governments and economies which are developed and also challenged by its virtual inhabitants. New values are formed: Power is a function of playing and programming skill; ownership must be redefined; in open-ended games playing and creating becomes more important than winning. Throughout the game, players must agree on acceptable norms of virtual behavior, the accountability of real, anonymous people for digression from these norms, and most of all: How real is this virtual world? If killing is an essential feature of many adventure MUDs, does this mean rape is acceptable in the game? As MUDs fulfill more and more social functions, how real is the game becoming?
While civic discourse thrives in virtual environments, it seems to be disappearing from ordinary real life. Is real life not worth it? Or not vivid enough to merit attention? Experiencing the world through our screens, our sense of reality is distorted. Life can be boring, ordinary and slow; it depends less on our projections and imaginations. The more we model our physical world to resemble its simulations, the more consumerist and disappointing it becomes (e.g. in changing from town center to mall center). The reader experiences a shift from the traditional dichotomy of real and virtual to a continuum ranging from make-believe, to social engagement in a virtual environment, to relationships that shift between the real and the virtual, and finally to the world of physical objects. The extremes of this continuum are not clear: Real people shape the virtual world and the machines where it takes place; hardly any aspect of our “real” lives is unaffected by the internet.
As the boundary between real and virtual is blurred, as social norms lose their importance, as traditional social groups disintegrate, as people change their personae like their clothes, we no longer know what to rely on. We are also overwhelmed by complexity, and in true post-modern spirit, we begin to take things at face value – or rather at interface value. We forget that an icon on a screen is just a graphic representation or that a page on screen consists of bits and bytes, and nonchalantly take things as they are. However, in a world, where “anything goes”, the fundamental questions and values that make us human are all too easily forgotten. We find it convenient to change our answers or principles according to context. To remain true to ourselves as humans, our multiple personae and personalities must be joined in a constant dialogue, discussing our moral outlook.
“Life on the Screen” is based on hundreds of interviews Sherry Turkle conducted with MIT students, children, new computer users and others. They are presented as illustrative excerpts, all too quickly dismissed by some as a collection of anecdotes. Cycling through voices of scholar, author, writer, psychoanalyst, teacher, computer user and woman in society, Sherry Turkle’s observant pastiche of research, analysis and dialogue provides a rich imaginary landscape to explore and reflect upon.
Tuesday
Internet and quality of work/life
HBS is featuring Patricia Wallace's new book 'The Internet In the Workplace: How New Technology is Transforming Work.'
While having Internet access at work arguably has created efficiencies for businesses and organizations, the author explores complications that the Web brings for employees and employers. For example, how have round-the-clock e-mail and wireless devices affected employees’ ability to separate work and family life? What are the productivity and psychological effects of workplace surveillance tools? A psychologist, Patricia Wallace is the senior director of information technology and distance programs at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Wallace’s thorough examination of the issues triggered by this pervasive technology, combined with her insightful analysis, make this an important contribution to the literature of the effects of technology on society. Readers in nearly every industry or profession will find this book useful as they reflect on their jobs and careers.
While having Internet access at work arguably has created efficiencies for businesses and organizations, the author explores complications that the Web brings for employees and employers. For example, how have round-the-clock e-mail and wireless devices affected employees’ ability to separate work and family life? What are the productivity and psychological effects of workplace surveillance tools? A psychologist, Patricia Wallace is the senior director of information technology and distance programs at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Wallace’s thorough examination of the issues triggered by this pervasive technology, combined with her insightful analysis, make this an important contribution to the literature of the effects of technology on society. Readers in nearly every industry or profession will find this book useful as they reflect on their jobs and careers.
Network economy, flexible employment & social networks of affinity
Social implications of information & communication technologies, Manuel Castells, 1999
Since I still haven't read Manuel Castells' trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture," I thought this report, which he prepared for the OECD might be a good introduction to his work.
His analysis is interesting and maintains a balance between internet utopia and dystopia. My main complaint is that Castells points out the changing nature of work and the effects of ICTs on social networks, yet fails to link the two.
Social networks are part of the foundation of successful industrial clusters, especially of innovation-intensive clusters. All the way back to Granovetter's "The strength of weak ties" sociologists have been pointing out the importance of social networks for job hunting. They must be all the more important for "flexible work." The connection between changes in work and in social networks runs even deeper - as Richard Sennett describes in his particularly bleak "Corrosion of Character". At the heart of Sennett's argument is the blurring of boundaries between work and social life - a trend often ascribed to the globalizing economy. Castells lays out the groundwork for this topic, but unfortunately skips the analysis.
Introduction
Castell's focus is on ICTs' effects in changing social networks and on their impact on work and employment. He rightly points out that
technology per se does not determine social processes, and institutions. Technology is a mediating factor in a complex matrix of interaction between social structures, social actors, and their socially constructed tools, including technology. But because information and communication are at the core of human action, the transformation of the technological instruments of knowledge generation, information processing, and communication, has far reaching implications.
This makes any direct analysis of ICTs' effects almost impossible. While they have little direct impact, ICTs enable far-reaching changes in the flow of information, ideas, people, money, and goods and services. Each of these flows is subject to many other influences and has its own dynamic. And these dynamics, in turn, influence the direction of technological development. In such an environment, simple cause-effect statements are not only impossible to make, they are also pointless.
Economy and work
"Flexibility" is the key word in Castells' analysis of the economy in the information age. This flexibility is achieved through decentralization within firms and the creation of flexible and shifting networks between them.
To be sure, large business conglomerates, particularly multinational corporations, dominate the global economy, but they are internally decentralized as networks, and they connect to a complex set of equally networked, small and medium businesses. Furthermore, large corporations and their ancillary networks build ad hoc strategic alliances, thus forming networks of networks, in an economy characterized by variable geometry.
A global economy as a planetary unit can only exist because of the worldwide infrastructure in telecommunications, information systems, air transportation, and fast transportation/delivery systems.
(Of course, the internet is not the only thing linking thes intra-nets and extra-nets. As Castells well knows.)
The need for flexibility has important implications for the world of work. As Castells points out, technology does not destroy jobs. In fact, it helps economies create employment. However, there are significant differences to traditional long-term, stable, contracted, single-firm employment.
The network economy induces a great diversity of employment status: part-time, temporary work, self-employment, subocontracting. These flexible forms of work and employment represent already the majority of the labor force in the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy, and are progressing rapidly in the rest of the industrialized world.
In Silicon Valley, at least 50% of all new jobs created in the last 10 years, are in this category of flexible employment (Benner, 1999). These trends are taking place across the whole spectrum of occupational structure, among business consultants, and engineers, as well as among low-skill service workers. This flexibility is also the characteristic of most jobs of the urban informal economy in developing countries, the main source of job creation in the largest metropolitan areas in the world (Borja and Castells, 1997).
Much innovation research points out the importance of entrepreneurship and of knowledge spill-overs created through labor flows. New technology enables and encourages more flexible forms of employment. At the same time, these new forms seem to be accelerating technological innovation.
Social networks
Castells explains that even as social networks expand through the internet, they remain rooted in existing social practices and affinities.
The pervasiveness of Internet does not imply the emergence of a virtual society that would substitute for the "real society".
Computer-mediated social networks are largely connected to people's social practices, and existing networks. This finding largely echoes the classic study by Claude Fischer (1992) on the role of the telephone in the early 20th century, expanding socially rooted social networks, rather than displacing them. [...] Networks develop for specific purposes, and even chat groups are constructed around affinities, and shared values and interests.
Cities
In his analysis of urbanization, Castells notes a paradox that globalization researchers face time and again: Human activity is becoming more globalized and more localized at the same time. I am particularly interested in this paradox as it concerns production and innovation. Castells describes it on a broader scale:
Thus, there is at the same time, spatial concentration and decentralization of activities and human settlements. Yet,. the functional connections do not follow the pattern of spatial proximity, but the logic of the dominant interests circulating in these networks. Thus "the global city" is not one, or several, major cities in the world, but a composite space made of bits and pieces of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, but also of Buenos Aires, Mexico, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and of locales harboring dominant economic/information activities in any major urban center anywhere in the world.
Since I still haven't read Manuel Castells' trilogy "The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture," I thought this report, which he prepared for the OECD might be a good introduction to his work.
His analysis is interesting and maintains a balance between internet utopia and dystopia. My main complaint is that Castells points out the changing nature of work and the effects of ICTs on social networks, yet fails to link the two.
Social networks are part of the foundation of successful industrial clusters, especially of innovation-intensive clusters. All the way back to Granovetter's "The strength of weak ties" sociologists have been pointing out the importance of social networks for job hunting. They must be all the more important for "flexible work." The connection between changes in work and in social networks runs even deeper - as Richard Sennett describes in his particularly bleak "Corrosion of Character". At the heart of Sennett's argument is the blurring of boundaries between work and social life - a trend often ascribed to the globalizing economy. Castells lays out the groundwork for this topic, but unfortunately skips the analysis.
Introduction
Castell's focus is on ICTs' effects in changing social networks and on their impact on work and employment. He rightly points out that
technology per se does not determine social processes, and institutions. Technology is a mediating factor in a complex matrix of interaction between social structures, social actors, and their socially constructed tools, including technology. But because information and communication are at the core of human action, the transformation of the technological instruments of knowledge generation, information processing, and communication, has far reaching implications.
This makes any direct analysis of ICTs' effects almost impossible. While they have little direct impact, ICTs enable far-reaching changes in the flow of information, ideas, people, money, and goods and services. Each of these flows is subject to many other influences and has its own dynamic. And these dynamics, in turn, influence the direction of technological development. In such an environment, simple cause-effect statements are not only impossible to make, they are also pointless.
Economy and work
"Flexibility" is the key word in Castells' analysis of the economy in the information age. This flexibility is achieved through decentralization within firms and the creation of flexible and shifting networks between them.
To be sure, large business conglomerates, particularly multinational corporations, dominate the global economy, but they are internally decentralized as networks, and they connect to a complex set of equally networked, small and medium businesses. Furthermore, large corporations and their ancillary networks build ad hoc strategic alliances, thus forming networks of networks, in an economy characterized by variable geometry.
A global economy as a planetary unit can only exist because of the worldwide infrastructure in telecommunications, information systems, air transportation, and fast transportation/delivery systems.
(Of course, the internet is not the only thing linking thes intra-nets and extra-nets. As Castells well knows.)
The need for flexibility has important implications for the world of work. As Castells points out, technology does not destroy jobs. In fact, it helps economies create employment. However, there are significant differences to traditional long-term, stable, contracted, single-firm employment.
The network economy induces a great diversity of employment status: part-time, temporary work, self-employment, subocontracting. These flexible forms of work and employment represent already the majority of the labor force in the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy, and are progressing rapidly in the rest of the industrialized world.
In Silicon Valley, at least 50% of all new jobs created in the last 10 years, are in this category of flexible employment (Benner, 1999). These trends are taking place across the whole spectrum of occupational structure, among business consultants, and engineers, as well as among low-skill service workers. This flexibility is also the characteristic of most jobs of the urban informal economy in developing countries, the main source of job creation in the largest metropolitan areas in the world (Borja and Castells, 1997).
Much innovation research points out the importance of entrepreneurship and of knowledge spill-overs created through labor flows. New technology enables and encourages more flexible forms of employment. At the same time, these new forms seem to be accelerating technological innovation.
Social networks
Castells explains that even as social networks expand through the internet, they remain rooted in existing social practices and affinities.
The pervasiveness of Internet does not imply the emergence of a virtual society that would substitute for the "real society".
Computer-mediated social networks are largely connected to people's social practices, and existing networks. This finding largely echoes the classic study by Claude Fischer (1992) on the role of the telephone in the early 20th century, expanding socially rooted social networks, rather than displacing them. [...] Networks develop for specific purposes, and even chat groups are constructed around affinities, and shared values and interests.
Cities
In his analysis of urbanization, Castells notes a paradox that globalization researchers face time and again: Human activity is becoming more globalized and more localized at the same time. I am particularly interested in this paradox as it concerns production and innovation. Castells describes it on a broader scale:
Thus, there is at the same time, spatial concentration and decentralization of activities and human settlements. Yet,. the functional connections do not follow the pattern of spatial proximity, but the logic of the dominant interests circulating in these networks. Thus "the global city" is not one, or several, major cities in the world, but a composite space made of bits and pieces of New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, but also of Buenos Aires, Mexico, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, Singapore, and of locales harboring dominant economic/information activities in any major urban center anywhere in the world.
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