AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Getting Down to Work

I have much to do, tons of writing and thinking and course preparation (since I typically want to re-engineer my courses from scratch almost every time, not that I can actually accomplish that goal). I also have too many blogs to read. Every few days I find myself saying, “Oh, heavens, I haven’t even looked at (your name here)’s blog in days. . . .” I have to come to terms with my incapacity to read ’em all daily, and with the likelihood that many will escape my attention for more than a few days.

At the same time, I have to keep on top of the daily obligations. In the next eleven days, I’ll have two adult ed discussions to lead, a an academic talk on the internet and education, and preaching at Leigh Waggoner’s ordination to the priesthood in Eau Claire (no web site for Christ Church Cathedral, somewhat to my surprise). So I have to take my to-do lists extremely seriously for the next few days. No snickering, out there. No matter how interesting your ideas are, my mind will focus fiercely onto the topics at hand — which means that I’ll probably blog a lot while I procrastinate.

Pure Science

Josiah and I were interested in learning more about the Apple Music Store built into iTunes 4, so we tried to figure out what to buy as a test. While we were exploring, we discovered that the Firesign Theater’s epochal Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers was on sale at the canonical ninety-nine cents for each side of the record. Well, it’ll be no test of audio fidelity, but we knew in an instant that we had to download it. This proved an exceptionally simple procedure, and relatively fast (considering that each selection was twenty minutes long). Our solemn report, after listening to the recording when Margaret was out of the house churning out many pages of her thesis: the Firesign Theater is every bit as funny in AAC format as they are on a scratchy old LP. I still remember much of the dialogue word for word (which is why we had to listen while Margaret was away). “. . . And there’s hamburger all over the highway in Mystic Connecticut. . . .” I’ll wait till you stop laughing.

Next, we’ll choose an intensely fine musical track to examine closely, but that may have to wait a day or two.

In the Void

In case anyone emailed me over the weekend, the kerfuffle at our server probably lost me a few messages — so please don’t think I’m ignoring you. About the only things that came through were messages from my Mom and mother-in-law asking why they couldn’t load this page, and the ton of correspondence regarding social software (mostly from here which seems to have arrived several times over).

Apple’s Records

If — as pretty much everyone, including the link-rot prone Boston Globe predicts — Apple announces an online music service at their press conference this afternoon, they may be on the right track. But 99 cents per track is still too much to pay for music in the lossy MP3 format, without packaging, when the recording industry bears no inventory cost, and especially if (as reported) the scheme includes limitations on copying.

What the industry needs to catch onto is that a low-cost, high-quality file sales program itself drives out “piracy.” At, say, 25 cents per selection, it’s simply not worth my time to seek out a copy of the New England Blues Prophets’ version of “Caledonia,” download it (possibly several times, allowing for dropped connections), find out that it’s a poor encoding or a Madonna-style spoof, or not even the selection I had been looking for (P2P file labelers are notoriously sloppy). Even at minimum wage, my time is worth more than that. The problem, I suppose, is that I might download the Blues Prophets’ Greatest Hits for 25 cents apiece, and re-sell them online for ten cents each. But I couldn’t do it above the table; buyers would be highly vulnerable to fraud; it would require the buyers’ seeking out unadvertised distributors (publicly advertising this resale would fall under extant copyright restrictions unless the sellers could demonstrate that they had paid the requisite licensing fees). Why put the time into tracking down Sleazy Al’s House o’ MP3s to see whether he has bootlegs of Lou Reed if you can simply go to www.loureed.com and download his latest songs directly?

So, props to Apple for pushing the music recording-and-packaging industry toward the tracks, but they’re not on the clue train yet. I’m dubious about the success of this venture till someone cuts the prices.

[After the announcement] OK, Apple got right the question of limitations on copying, and I haven’t compared MPEG-4 with MP3, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on the question of sound quality. The price is still too high, but the rest of the venture looks intriguing. I’ll download iTunes 4 and report back.

Eric on digID Developments

Eric asks for readers for his posting on the ways various approaches to digID are converging — and if you care about digID, you always ought to read what Eric says. (I wrote this before the server problem that kept me offline this weekend — sorry it arrives late, Eric.)

Nuisances and So On

How to put this delicately? When, a while back, we were discussing the plusses and minuses of a life in academia, a casual reader might have gotten the impression that there were two classes represented: those who departed academia after having been bitten hard by venal prima donnas or self-serving incompetents (or both), and those who enjoy immunity from those hard knocks (and who may fall under suspicion of themselves being among those venal self-serving biters). Inhabitants of academia might be unsuited for or incapable of other employment; emigrants from academia, under this schema, are well-adjusted people who recognized a malign institution and departed from it rather than adjusting to its abusive-family cycle of psychic violence.

As I say, “a casual reader” might have come up with such an interpretation. Our friends in Blogaria maintained a more nuanced discussion than that; I’m deliberately superficializing.

And this afternoon, I’m noting for the record that some people wind up on the receiving end of unwelcome bites, who decline either to relinquish the opportunity that their positions in educational institutions offer for actually helping students to understand weighty and intricate matters (on one hand) or to become abusers (on the other).

It is all quite complicated — as most important topics turn out to be.

Lessig at Northwestern

So I got here. Margaret was determined to arrive in Evanston in time for me to hear Larry Lessig give his presentation at Northwestern, so although we observed speed limits between Rochester and Evanston, we clamped down on food, drink and haircut stops. And now I’m sitting beside Rex Masterson in a small presentation room on the Northwestern campus. The title of the talk was announced as “Is Intellectual Property Copyrightable?” but the first slide bears the title “Building the Creative Commons.”

Much of Lessig’s presentation repeats material from Lessig’s famous OSCON speech (without any suggestions that free-software developers had done any less than they ought to have) and subsequent discussions among Lessig and his conversation partners; anyone who’s been reading here will know what he’s saying, so I’ll reserve my overview of the presentation or after the “More” button.

In the presentation and question-and-answer, Lessig displayed real depth of feeling and commitment, not only about copyright and creativity, but also (especially) about drug patents and the African phase of the AIDS pandemic. Lessig made it clear that he has no problem with drug patents, as opposed to software patents which he (pace Dave Winer) called “insane.” He excoriated the political inertia that withholds patented drugs from Africa — where they could save tens of millions of lives — for fear of compromising the high prices they charge in the US. Lessig went so far as to compare inactive US citizens of this historical moment with Germans of the thirties and forties who stood idly by and permitted the government to execute millions of innocent citizens.

He walked through the premises, decision, and ramifications of the Eldred case, and his voice caught a couple of times. “Every morning,” he said, “I wake up and think of a couple of questions I wish I’d answered differently. . . .”

After the talk, I mentioned the coming Disseminary roll-out to Prof. Lessig, and — in a landmark moment that memorabilia collectors will savor for ages — obtained from him his digital autograph. I asked for it on behalf of his ardent fan Mary Hess, to whom I dedicate this, typed with his own fingers on my TiBook (in Lucida Grande, in the Notebook feature of NetNewsWire, in case anyone is keeping track):

Larry Lessig

Lessig begins with a history of Steamboat Bill > Steamboat Willie > Mickey Mouse, illustrating the principle of creative re-use of public-domain materials. A further example: gruesome folk tales to Grimm(?s) Fairy Tales to Snow White and Cinderella. Not just Disney, though; he reminds us of the dojinshi manga-remix scene in Japan. Both the dojinshi and manga show ?extraordinary creativity,? according to Lessig. He shows the Bush-Blair love duet as a further demonstration ? rip, remix, burn with ingenuity. Culture, in this model, is not simply consumed (as a couch potato), but set into creative motion. Companies committed to the rip-mix-burn culture stand to profit from behavior that the RIAA regards as a fundamental threat to ?the music business.?

Lessig supposes that manga is dead in the US; he proposes that the of the thriving ?remix? culture starves the creative atmosphere that feeds manga.

Lessig describes a ?copyright war? in which (according to Jack Valenti) our children are the terrorists. This war defines copyright as a traditional value that we must defend from piratical copiers. Lessig rebuts by illustrating just how fluid the legal principles of copyright have been over the years: in terms of duration, purpose, proportion of published work that was registered to copyrighted, and concentration of copyright holders. Today, everything that bears copyright is copyrighted for a full 95 years, because there is no need to apply for an extension. And everything is copyrighted, automatically, without any effort on the creator?s part.

Lessig uses the work done by (whom?) who calculated that only 2% of the works covered by the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act are presently commercially available.

The intent of the first law was to prevent a subsequent publishers from reprinting a prior publisher's work, and in order for the first publisher to enjoy that protection, he had to register his copyright and deposit a copy of the work in a copyright repository. We've gone from a default position of freedom to a default position of control.

How does he suggest that we respond? First, by attending not to the extremes ? who suppose that all content should always be preserved (on one hand), and that no content should ever be protected (on the other) ? but to interactions among people who reckon that some content should be protected to some extent. Lessig points to Creative Commons as an organization for ?cultural environmentalism.? He uses the Dinosaurs’ Anti-Mammal Protection joke. A story I hadn't heard before: he was flying United Flight 235 toward San Francisco, listening to the cockpit radio channel on his headset. on a collision course. The tower and the cockpit were not talking to each other, because the flight was United 235, and the tower was calling flight 253. Lessig wondered why simple technological devices couldn’t smooth out that wrinkle so that his plane might not be stuck on a collision course with some other aircraft; by the same token, he hopes that some way may be found to head off the collision between the entertainment corporations and the customers who pay the fares. I’m not sure the metaphor works, but it’s an unnerving story; I’m glad I never listen to the cockpit channel.

Why DigID?

David Weinberger frequently poses the question, “Why do we need a digID system different from that which we already have? We can buy books and underwear from Amazon, file our taxes with the IRS, plead for student aid on FASFA forms at the Department of Education, pay numerous bills, contribute to keeping Burningbird online, bid for Beanie Babies on eBay. Who needs more?” It’s a much more powerful argument than proponents of digID usually recognize. As a fence-straddler (albeit one who likes some forms of digID more than others), I have one main response to David’s challenge: Passwords.

I have passwords at more sites than I can name (I could begin to count them, but I’d surely leave some out, which is part of the problem). We know that a proper password isn’t a word you could look up in the dictionary, certainly isn’t a family or pet name, includes non-alphabetical (ideally non-alphanumeric) characters, isn’t consistent from site to site, and changes periodically. Software solutions (such as Apple’s Keychain) help by saving encrypted versions of your passwords; but they depend on the user having her or his Keychain installed on the computer in use (Oops! You’re at a library terminal; too bad!), and they yield access to all one’s passwords if a hostile operator gets control of the computer on which the Keychain is installed.

The insecure, low-tech answer is simply to carry around a piece of paper with your usernames and passwords written on it. The possible unsatisfactory consequences of that tactic need not be spelled out.

A single-sign-on digID system has many potential failures and abuses — but something appeals to me about having, as it were, a digital face that doesn’t need to remember that if this is my bank, I’m “Alonzo” and my password is “swan-zo,” but that if this is the Visa bill, I’m “blogiskopos” and my password is “n0tlikely.” I’m forgetful; I’ve reached the point of needing to record my usernames and passwords somewhere; and I object to the institutionalized anxiety that obliges me to act as though al-Qaeda were after my student loans.

Disarming DRM

How about this? A series of ads/spots showing people enjoying various implements that they’ve bought: a book, a rolling pin, a lawn mower, a painting (if it were a long spot, you could even show the eager buyer delightedly making the purchase). In each situation, it develops, the product comes with a noodge from the company who intervenes and stops the owner from doing something with it that the manufacturer doesn’t like. (Halley can write the salacious version of one of these for the venues that publish her work.) The user in the ad is obviously exasperated, and the ad leads up to a slogan such as, “Don’t tell me how to use my hammer!” (or “. . . what to do with my hammer,” or “what to do with my movie”).

Friend of a Helpful Friend?

Can anyone walk me through implementing “Friend of a Friend” step-by-step? Into which template (for instance) would one install it in a Moveable Type site such as this one?

What Time Is It?

Margaret hadn’t known that Lawrence Lessig was speaking at Northwestern this evening at 6. Because I let that slip yesterday, she’s now determined to get home in time for me to make the lecture. We’ll see; but if I get there, I’ll live-blog it.

Zzzzzzz

Long day driving. Nate’s okay, though he’s tired, facing end-of-term and summer concerns. Another long day tomorrow.

Pointers and Conversations

I’m late to point to Mitch Ratcliffe’s ”Invisible Dogma,” but I wanted to get there even if late; I hope I’ll have a chance to respond to his very sharp account of tools and impediments and organizations and thinking, and I still want to put in my ha’penny on truth and lie in a blogging sense (linking to David because that’s where all roads lead). Had good conversations today with Ross Wagner, a colleague at Princeton Seminary (and we ran into Brian Blount also), with Juliet, and reading Gary Klein’s book Sources of Power (with a view toward teaching pastoral practice at Seabury.

Tomorrow will be a travel day, up to Rochester to see Nate (just an overnight, no extra time to call or visit Liz, sad to say).

Princeton Sights

When I get my files in order, this spot will be reserved for a picture of Witherspoon Street in the spring (much nicer with a blue sky, but I didn’t have that opportunity),



of Small World,



and of the Camel cigarette box that a coffee-shop neighbor had lying on her table (my photo turned out too blurry). I’ve no use for cigs, but the packaging is positively brilliant. It makes me want to buy some just for the box.

Memorandum

Princeton is exquisitely beautiful in the spring. Don — my friend and former colleague, who died several weeks ago, loved Princeton in the spring. I miss Don (will try to make time to visit his grave) and I remember him especially with all the trees in bloom.

Phooey

Well, I wrote a long appreciative response to David Weinberger and Tom Matrullo this morning, then i started up a betaware game and crashed my system, thus losing this morning's ruminations. I’ve got to get a keystroke saver. . . .

In fewer and less-well-chosen words than this morning’s, I acknowledged that David cites me as “more positively enthusiastic about digID” than he is. That’s true, though to a less dramatic degree than I would say. If I’d been expressing myself judiciously, I’d probably have said not that “I’m a cheerleader” (a frightening picture for anyone who knows me) but that “it sounds as though PingID provides a good enough protocol for us, the people, to exercise a more-than-trivial role in shaping digID, so I’m willing to root for them to catch on as the digID norm.” After all, David has pointed out that we already participate in unsystematic, haphazard, often covert digID in our current online activities; and Eric has convinced me that digID will be non-optional for someone who wants to buy from Amazon, file taxes online, check his rotisserie-league baseball team, and other online activities. I’m enthusiastic about what looks to me like the most commendable of several alternative futures, though I share much of David’s dubiety about the whole thing.

Tom wonders how I reconcile my interest in “natural” signifiers of identity with my hermeneutical emphasis on language as convention (specifically, with regard to names as markers of identity). I could allow that I’ve always been attracted to the Stoic and Confucian doctrine that entities have transcendentally proper names, and that the philosopher’s job is to associate the right names with the right entities. I could, but despite that attraction I remain a resolute Cynic conventionalist when it comes to language and communication. I feel no identity-stake in my DNA sequence; I feel some attachment to my fingerprints; I feel a certain warmth of association with my handwriting; I’m resigned to my face; and I like my name.

But I could manage just fine with some other name, and I would think myself to be the same guy. When I was playing the Game Neverending (before it ended) (that is, “went on hiatus”,0 I played the role of Peter Verona in a way quite congruent (so far as I can tell, and so far as game rules permitted) with the way AKMA lives his life. Now, when I correspond with other GNE players, it feels odd to address them by their physical-world names, but I can get used to that. You can call me Dave Winer and him AKMA, but I’m still a theologian and he’s still a Berkman Fellow.

But I need to think more about this — it’s mostly just off the top of my head, for now.

Easter in Exile

This is the first time I can remember, in literally decades, when I haven't been up to my ears in Holy Week and Easter preparations. I miss that whirl, that massive adrenal surge that gets you through eight days of preparations, services, sermons. I miss feeling Easter joy physically, as well as spiritually.

At the same time, it’s been good, in a way, for me to spend this week in exile from my seminary and parish responsibilities. Participating in church isn’t a choice as such; I’m accountable to my church and to God for how I deploy my energies, and I don’t have a genuine excuse for absenting myself. I mean, it’s quite true that I’m not even in the same time zone as my congregation and school, but I’d have wanted to duck out even if I were in Evanston, and I might have given in to that accedie. So saying, “Ooops, sorry, out of town” doesn’t tell the whole story.

There’s a grace, though, in being known so deeply that there’s no point in my trying to justify myself, there’s no point in advancing rationalizations for my impatience or frustration or laziness. It’s what I am, who I am, and that’s the guy God called to serve Seabury and St. Luke’s; and my temporary aversion to that service reflects on me, not on the people beloved by God who are worshipping there today — and at the same time, I’m myself set free to come back to Evanston with a renewed appreciation for a gospel that can wait out my moods, can nod at my kicks and harrumphs, and bring me back a little older and (we may hope) more patient.

It’s Easter. That’s a good time for shucking off the sin that clings hardest where we like it, and get cleaned up, spruced up. A good time for me to see whether I can’t be gentler, more loving, more patient with unchosen circumstances, and appreciate them as part of a complex, beautiful, needle-sharp shimmering gift. It comes as a gift, Easter does, and life does, and I do love them.

What Are Blogs?

What are television programs? (60 Minutes? American Playhouse? Bowling for Dollars? Fawlty Towers? The 90-second Lottery results spot?) What are films? (Apocalypse Now? Night of the Living Dead? Baby’s first steps? The Thin Red Line? Kangaroo Jack? Zapruder’s memento of a presidential drive through Dallas?)

Steve’s musings (here and here) about what blogs are and how literary they are turn up all sorts fascinating ideas and comments, and I want to jump into the truth-and-falisty thread if I have time, but (so far as I can tell) any but the very most minimal definition of weblogs will be defeated by use. Blogs provide so malleable a medium that a writer’s (or jusst plain user’s) imagination will outweigh the stipulated definition any time. On the web? Necessarily. Logs (hence, in some way date-stamped)? Probably. But apart from that, my deep-seated suspicion of attributing definitive qualities to genres and even to media inhibits my offering any helpful advice on Steve’s paper. . . .

Prima Facia

My thanks for David Weinberger for picking up my ponderings about DigID. David allows that he resists the “feel like a number” school of DigID-resistance, but charitably reckons that I’m not just pouting and putting on a Bob Seger record.

I hope he’s right about that; I don’t want to prevent any form of DigID, not at all. If anything, I’d be intrigued to see PingIP or some other such protocol attain wide usage, soon. I’m a cheerleader.

I’m not uncritical, though, and the basis for my critical concern involves the habits, assumptions, and comfortable expectations that give shape to everyday life. Sometimes, it seems to me, prognostic prophets of DigID have paid closer attention to Minority Report or Mission: Impossible than to card-carrying non-scripted human beings. The ordinary citizens whose acceptance will make or break DigID do not feel the same interests and urgencies as the engineers or business planners. Many of them sympathize exactly with Bob Seger’s dissatisfaction at feeling like a number, and that’s a problem that Ping and other DigID companies will need to attend to closely.

But more importantly, I’m concerned about what sort of cyborg, or post-human, or what-term-you-will I become when my sense of who I am depends less and less on my carnality, and more and more on otherwise-invisible characteristics. I suspect that a significant part of the O.J. Simpson verdict involved appropriate skepticism about the DNA evidence. A jury that can compare a police artist’s sketch with my face can judge for themselves whether the resemblance is strong enought to warrant convicting me — but when the “evidence” in question bears no perceptible connection to either the crime or the alleged perpratrator, I can understand a juror’s discomfort with the idea that she or he must vote to convict or acquit based on evidence that does not itself manifest any connection with the alleged perpetrator.

Moreover, and here the problem strikes me particularly forcefully, when the day comes that I no longer warrant my identity in a transaction by means of a physical, or a mechanical, gesture — when the natural, obvious, assumed, tacit, ordinary ways I assert myself no longer function as identity markers, then we may no longer think of ourselves as human in the same way that the West has done for decades. That possibility, with the promises it offers and the perils it portends, raises big queestions for me. To put the question with blunt economy: If you identify someone by non-“natural” characteristics, then it’s worth wondering how many parties to that sort of transaction still think of themselves as human.

From the Grimy to the Delightful

It was a long, frustrating drive through Pennsylvania, twice stuck in long, long traffic jams — but Pippa’s happily off with her friend, Margaret and I are back with Juliet, and Juliet has wifi. I’d have driven from Akron to Princeton just to get a decent connection; last night the phone line kept dropping me offline after seventy seconds or so. Now I go to sleep. . . .

Pippa on Traffic Prisoners

As we cruised past a miles-long traffic back-up just east of Toledo, Pippa looked across the highway and crowed, “Adios, losers!” We had a little talk after that.

More on Identity

This one’s been brewing a long time, since before Eric catalyzed it the other day by claiming (in an email) not to have been talking about DigID. In the entry to which he was alluding, Eric referred with approval to James Hillman’s particular spin on personality (was this in response to something from Chris? or was it Doc?). Now, how far removed is “personality” from “identity,” Eric?

One of Hillman’s points — and it’s been years since I read him, so he may have changed tack, and I almost certainly have forgotten key elements of his argument — was that the West’s monotheistic religions had warped the spirits of their adherents by imposing an unnaturally singular, centered model of reality (and consciousness): one deity, one true centered personality per believer, and so on. Hillman, last time I checked, thought that polytheism was truer in the sense that interested him — that is, truer to the life and experience of his clients. (He opted out of metaphysical arguments; so long as his clients made more satisfactory sense of their lives on premises congruent to polytheism, he was satisfied.) As best I remember.

That’s how Eric got me thinking about the ways that we constitute, identify, recognize personalities.

Once I started thinking about recognizing a person, the following premise came together i ways that I’ve been trying to fine-tune since last October (I bent Phil Windley’s and Jon Udell’s ears with a stream-of-consciousness version back then). The primary concern that I have regarding DigID involves the possible effects of DigID alienating radically us from that-which-marks-our-identities.

Think with me: We mark identity primarily with reference to faces. When the Army want to catch Iraqi fugitives, they distribute cards with those fugitives’faces. If we want graphically to represent one person recognizing another, we can show a thought balloon containing a picture of the second person’ face. When airlines want to endanger constitutional liberties to make plane flights safer, they ask for identification cards that include pictures of our faces. (Although we probably recognize people’s appearnaces by a gestalt of their height, proportions, carriage, and so on, the sign, the trump card of appearance is the face, such that in all these examples, the face serves as the shorthand representation of the whole body.) Moreover, notice that our faces are fundamentally public; there’s nothing particularly secret about my face, and anyone who wants to defraud the world by pretending to be me will have ample opportunity to record my face and adjust his or her appearance to match mine. My face is public, and yet it is something undeniably mine; I see it in the mirror every morning when I brush my teeth, and if I want it to look different, I’m the one with the prerogative to go to a reconstructive surgeon and request a Michael Jackson job.

At one remove from facial appearance come subtler identifiers: my handwriting, for one, and my fingerprints. These mark me as myself, and I recognize my connection with them; Still, there’s a remoteness to that connection. My handwriting seems to manifest something peculiar to my identity, but it wouldn’t be that hard to simulate. My fingerprints would be harder to forge, but I don’t have only a mechanical association with them; they’re the imprint of my fingers, but I never spend any time looking at them, I don’t identify with them. I acknowledge that my fingerprints or my handwriting adequately indicate my identity, but that indication lacks the affective dimension that my face evokes. Moreover, these are only tangentially public; I can more readily withhold them from the world (though at the cost of a certain eccentricity).

The same principle applies, to an even greater degree, to the miracle-identifier of our day: DNA sequences. I acknowledge that my DNA is mine in a theoretical kind of way; but I have no direct way of knowing what my DNA sequence is. I can look at my fingers to see my fingerprints. Where do I look to see my DNA? The opacity of DNA (and other sophisticated biometric identifiers) comes at the price of remoteness from what I (or you, or any non-forensic-expert observer, such as a typical juror) can perceive as my identity.

So this is what concerns me: if our identities become more and more remote from what we understand actually to be us, how does that change us? Do we want to set those changes in motion simply in order to use eBay and Amazon with more confidence, or perhaps to file taxes and vote online? Is there a way to attain the goal of a reliable, sound DigID scheme that respects my need to feel a connection with what effects my public identity?

Thought Ownership

One of the topics on which I wanted to blog, but haven't had time to add discursive value, is the conflict between my ed-tech bete noire BlackBoard and the organizers of InterZ0ne, and two presenters at the conference.

I don’t endorse unlimited h4x0r-ing of proprietary systems; but it’s important to observe that BlackBoard’s privacy/security features may not be as private and secure as they claim, and that one of the effects of (hypothetically) closed systems is the energy-overhead required to keep those systems closed. Now, all BlackBoard users will be paying not only for the web services, but also for the lawyers who are trying to prevent open discussion of BlackBoard’s impaired security structure. I don’t expect those legal fees to diminish over time.

Whoops!

Last night I was moving from my tax-filing conquest to the financial-aid-form challenge when I realized, late on April 14th, that I hadn't filed Nate’s taxes. Done. Whew!

Mood Swings

Our day got off to a marvelous start as Margaret received an email saying that her paper proposal was accepted for the Systematic Theology section (a very competitive section, with blind submission, so that she was in the pool with some big theological wigs) of the grand yearly professional meeting. She practically levitated off the bed, since we had agreed that although her proposal was terrific, the bare odds were against her being invited to read it. Margaret was reluctant on the first clause, but had latched onto the second. The news that she’ll be on the program exhilarates her and encourages her.

But then we got a phone call in the afternoon from one of our dearest friends on earth, saying that one of their children had been taken to the hospital this morning after some mysterious affliction had struck him. He just didn’t wake up this morning; only after some serious treatment did he stir at all. The hospital brought him around, but everyone’s spooked and he’s going in for some extensive brain and blood testing tomorrow.

That doesn’t just cozily “put things in perspective”; it blows everything vaguely resembling perspective away, leaving you aching with sorrow and sympathy, disconnected from all the stuff that you ought to have been tackling. If you have a spare prayer, candle, positive thought — and in the current state of the world, we recognize that they’re scarce — keep young Andrew and his family in mind.

Loose Joint

Right about now, Trevor is leading Seabury students through David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined, so that someone so inclined can read (Jeff’s permalinks are screwy — he discusses SPLJ on April 13, 7, and 6) a number of reports on what they think about the book. This passed the threshold of blogging because this morning David notes a review of the book, and urges those who haven’t already bought their copies of the book (and he knows there are some of them, because he’s been keeping track) should do so now before the paperback edition drives all of the more attractive, more profitable hardcover copies out of the market. Authors always complain about the covers that get slapped onto our books, and publishers rarely listen; in this case, David is absolutely right.

While I’m talking about David, I took the geography test too. I recognized all the names (except “Western Sahara,” which I didn’t know had attained name-hood) but all the new -stans tripped up my percent score.

Quiet Weekend

We had a pleasant, moderately busy weekend. Josiah sang the role of Jesus in the Passion this morning, while Pippa sang in the choir and I said mass, and Margaret shepherded Trevor and Susan and our friend Jacob (who was Margaret’s host in Oklahoma). Margaret’s working on a short description of [Christian] home-schooling for a theological encyclopedia, while she finishes up her thesis. Stuff like that.

There are a number of things to which I'd like to point you, but the whole weekend passed without my feeling an irresistible urge to blog, so I’m indulging my lassitude. Tomorrow will be furiously busy, and then off to Princeton. . . .

Launches and Vapors

At the risk of seeming an awful procrastinator, I’m thinking we’ll have to push back the Disseminary roll-out till after Easter. We could always just go ahead, but it seems silly to invite activity and engagement from people during the busiest week of the Christian year. Among the most interested readers will be some who have a mountain of other things to keep them distracted, and Trevor and I both will have a ton of things to do. If we wait till the week after, though, we can be more readily available to respond to whatever happens (if anything), and that’ll give me more time to work up sample materials.

Investors Alert

I’m not playing BlogShares (and all my retirement funds are in a lump where TIAA-CREF puts money from financial know-nothings as opposed to daring, entrepreneurial types who have to manage their own pensions), but I’m vain enough to be flattered that my stock has performed adequately. The problem is that all the value of AKMA’s Random Ltd. is locked up in my old blog address, whereas any future enhancement of my value will depend on developments here at the Disseminary address. So I advise anyone with a hypothetical financial interest in my blog to call attention to what was merely a change of corporate address. If necessary, you can make the case that AKMA’s Random is merely a holding company for all the addresses that have been associated with this digital literary endeavor: the dusty old Seabury address, the sturdier Seabury-Moveable Type address, the transitional “sabren” address at Cornerhost, and the new, firm, Disseminary address.

Blogging Jim McGee

Jim McGee has come to Seabury tonight to talk with us about “knowledge management”; I’ll be live-blogging his talk, of course. You, in turn, will be stuck with my notes.

Jim begins by citing (and showing a clip from) John Cusack in The Sure Thing; a young woman tries to stop him from entering a room, saying, “You can’t go in there,” to which John Cusack replies, “Of course I can — This is America. I can go anywhere.”

Jim argues that most people in organizations have been trained not to think, and especially not to think in public, whereas seminarians are presumably being prepared to go out and preach week after week. But Jim points out that in organizations, the system gets clogged if everyone tries to think; much of the same applies to the educational system in general. Jim asserts that now, increasingly, it’s imperative for people to know how to think in public.

“When is thinking important in organizations?” Jim asks. Why is that? Because they need 5% making decisions about where the ship is going, and everyone else pulling on the oars.

Jim asks what happens to the guy who thinks up the sail; in this system, thinking upsets the established order. The system as designed works as long as everything remains stable, but when the oar-powered boat shows up to fight a sail-powered boat, the old system breaks down.

The time balance the modulates from innovation to a new system has compressed considerably. Much of twentieth-century economic growth has come from (Taylorism, Fordism) extracting more productivity out of a single factory model. That’s reached its limit; now we have to learn what to do when everyone in the organization thinks. We now live in a world where innovation has to fit in as a part of the economic process.

Jim poses the question of what’s real thinking and what’s people pretending to think. He instances political talk shows; someone suggests business staff meetings, and Jim cites Jack Valenti on DMCA, and promotion committees in academic settings. A lot of things pass for thought, but not much thinking; we have, largely, forgotten what thought looks like.

More people in the organization need to be thinking, through the whole organization. Jim’s next example seems to come from a Back to the Future movie, where one character expects another character to write his reports for him.

Jim asks, “Should we talk about knowledge workers or about knowledge management in organizations?” He argues against the idea that only the elite in an organization should do all the thinking, bringing a clip from the Hepburn/Tracy film Desk Set (which according to Jim has some of the sharpest insights into the way that technology intersects with people — Jim laments that hardly anything has changed in the ways technology is marketed and adopted).

Jim cites several illusions expressed in the clip. The first is that knowledge management is about precise answers to exact questions. But knowledge, yoiu can’t touch; you know you’re a knowledge worker if (a) 80% of your time is spent doing things that “aren’t your job”; “It’s not my job” is no longer a reasonable excuse; (c) Your mother doesn’t understand what you do; (d) Your boss doesn’t understand what you do; (e) You don’t understand what you do. Knowledge workers don’t fit onto an assembly line.

But Jim says we all live in this world. How do we even begin to observe what we’re doing in order to improve it under these conditions? What we typically do is to measure productivity with knowledge workers in the same way that we measure the productivity of industrial workers. Can you walk into an organization and see somebody of importance reading a book? Reading a book doesn’t look like you’re busy; we can’t measure the output.

Jim presents a big schema for process in knowledge work. Sorry, no way can I even begin to describe this diagram here. There aren’t very many boxes in knowledge work, and they’re all connected in feedback loops. Well, okay, here’s a try:

Indetify and Frame Problem
Specify Stopping Criteria
Select Appropriate Tools - - Identify and Collect Data
Create Work Products and Deliverables
Evaluate and Assess

(and all these are connected with interwoven arrows)

Douglas Adams’s definition of understanding technology:

1) It’s everything that’s invented before you’re born;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make your fortune out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things;

And Jim changes the slide before I can get number four.

He’s modulating to blogging, now. Weblogs make the process of thinking visible. They’re chronologically ordered, relatively short, categorizable, and available for others to react to. This technology introduces the possibility of beginning to narrate work in project settings that opens up thinking within organizations.

Jim suspects that we have a set of illusions about what thinking looks like. For instance, maybe we get a bright idea and instantly turns into a Harvard Business Review article. Jim applies a business model to his experience of writing a book; the writing process involves experimentation, deletion, reconsideration, and so on, in ways inimical to a linear business plan.

What about blogs in, for instance, parish administration? Jim observes that blogs open up and build community in a new way. They contribute to building a trusted persona; it adds depth and texture to your persona, especially in a parish environment. They offer a way to discover commonalities, shared interests, and make possible personal and community links.

Jim also cites news aggregators as a connection device. Aggregators are the secret amplifier: they bring the new materials all to one spot, and Jim can track his organization as his workgroups split off and tackle various aspects of a problem.

Blogs constitute a tool for an individual knowledge worker: they’e a contemporaneous account of knowledge work activities, a way to increase personal visibility in knowledge work. They make a sharable space for making knowledge public, eliminating barriers to publishing to the web, so that sharing becomes the trivial byproduct of doing. They make a natural fit with communities of practice; weblogs plus aggregators support self-discovering and self-organizing communities of practice.

At this point, the presentation shifted toward a free-for-all discussion. Trevor, in one comment, describes Jeff and Tripp as “the two über-bloggers of the Seabury blogging movement.”

I Should Give Blood More Often

It turns out my blood is desirable, even valuable (a chorus of relatives and acquaintances cry in unison, “at least something about him is valuable!”). Yesterday, a representative of my local blood bank called to ask me to come in, right away, because they needed my blood. Since I prefer polite daylight phone calls to midnight tapping at the window, I agreed to come along voluntarily, and this afternoon I found myself walking through the fresh air and sunshine to the hospital.

That fresh air must have dislodged an idea jam, or something, because several neat ideas presented themselves while I was walking and bleeding. First, I thought about DigID — but I’ll blog that separately. Then, I thought about different textures of knowledge. Sometimes we know things in a precise, immediate, problem-solving sort of way; we can call that “acute knowledge.” For acute knowledge, one wants a consultant or fixer — there’s no point for most of us to have an electrician on retainer, because our homes are adequately wired. Other times, we know things in a long-run, habituated, way, which I thought of as “chronic knowledge.” (Someone smart like Clay Shirky or Jim McGee probably has already thought this out and developed more pertinent names for the phenomenon, but I haven’t taken time to check.) An acute approach to depression might entail saying, “Pull yourself together; suck it up and get on with life.” That’s why we go to therapists instead, who ask things about our childhood, and why HMOs then step in after twelve sessions to say, “Pull yourself together; suck it up and get on with life.” One might guess that practitioners of acute knowledge are quicker to propose more sweeping changes, and practitioners of chronic knowledge slower, depending on the circumstances.

Of course, that distinction is oversimplified, and where the interesting thinking comes in is in deliberating about the balances and nuances. Is ethics a field for acute or chronic knowledge? Many scholars in ethics treat the field as a set of acute problems, for which one might devise a consultant’s sort of fix-it answer; some others emphasize the extent to which ethics involves attaining the kind of life (ethos, ηθος, right?) within which acute problems arise less frequently, with less urgency and confusion. Again, neither sort is mutually exclusive.

Various people have different strengths when it comes to types of knowledge. Some folks develop storehouses of institutional memory and experiential knowledge, while others have their bright ideas in flashes. When a company must lay off workers, whom do they lay off, and how does affect the knowledge that abides with the organization? Questions such as that one stand usefully to be clarified by considering not just what someone knows or how long they’ve worked for the firm, but also how they know what they know.

Gnash, Gnash

I’m really resigned to not obtaining a portable CD/MP3 player — cognitively — really I am. But I do keep getting annoyed that it should be so hard for be to find a workable instance of such a thing. I keep thinking of MP3 CDs I’d like to make, or thinking about iPods and how much rather I’d like to have a nice, simpler, less expensive device. The premise of CD/MP3 player makes so much sense. . . .