Digital Economy Reading Group

NEXT: 19 February 14-15
——————————-

Turner, F. (2006) ‘The shifting politics of the computational metaphor’. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press. Introduction and Conclusion.

To obtain a copy of the reading, please contact m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

LAST: 21 January 14-15
————————— 

Taleb, N. N.  (2007) The Black Swan. London: Penguin

======================

Monika’s notes:

Very interesting account of new potential.

You can get a massive market by collecting together different niche markets. It’s a matter of aggregation.

Technology(?) makes it possible to overcome constraints of space and time.

It makes a generic opening up of spaces possible. You can market stuff more widely than you could before. But it could be negative, too, when you don’t know and can’t know your audience. This has implications for trust.

Quality of products has changed. You can google/flickr a photo of anything. But they have a different aesthetic quality. And are free. Destroys jobs? Can destroy the original market (e.g for photographers). But does it change what we look for? In what way? Is there a grassroots aesthetics? collective aesthetics? Is it inferior to expert aesthetics?  

Long Tail more rhetoric than an argument? 

Mobile radicals example of Long Tail dynamics. E.g. 3D photography take up.

http://www.mobileradicals.com/index.php/Mobile_Digital_Art#m3Dcam

Is blogging another example? Political opinion / news / content provision outside the mainstream. Long tails of political opinion that under run the dominant antagonistic, personal story, celebrity style of reporting?

Taleb Long Tail doesn’t raise many questions - it’s trying to make a new trend. Has there been critique?

Candidate sources for critique:

Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture) argues that ‘roots’ of cyberculture are deeply ambiguous. Not providing a genuine political alternative, not actually oriented towards collaboration and the collective good in a political mindset or practice, but in a more individualistic spirit. The idea that self interst serves collective interest is integral to web 2.0 and therefore actually connected to phenomena and the hyping up of phenomena like the long tail.  

See anti-facebook

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

But that’s not news. There’s no counterculture outside mainstream culture. The two are always entangled. There’s no way to a genuine alternative. 

There is a continuous test (New spirit of capitalism)

Why are we researching digital economy?

• do we want to help PR
• make it more effective?
• make it ‘better’? how? what’s ‘better’?
• interrogate and understand its emergence?
• critique it?
• generate benefits,e.g. for healthcare or transport (as in the seed funded projects)

How to study? which phenomena?

Issues like ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘long tail aggregation of niche markets’ are really attractive and interesting but how exactly are they done? How do they come into being? Are they real phenomena? New? or just new shapes to old forms?

What are interesting questions to ask? Like all different communications media Web 2.0 generate opportunities and problems.

How should we study it? Specific empirical studies of unfolding digital economy practices. E.g. medical information, self-help groups, proliferation of websites and propagation ofn information.

What is an interesting question is how are people appropriating, managing, colonizing the space in ways that enable reflexive interaction?

11 November 14-15
————————

Luhman, L. (1988) Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. In Gambetta, D. Trust. Making and breaking cooperative relations. Blackwell.

You can download the whole book from Gambetta’s site: http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/General/Members/gambetta.aspx. 

22 October 13:20 - 14:20
————————————-

Georg Simmel and Everett C. Hughes (1949) The Sociology of Sociability
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 55, No. 3, pp. 254-261
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2771136

and Introduction to The New Spirit of Capitalism

Please contact m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk if you need a copy.

Notes by Monika Buscher
————————————

Like Mark, I left it too long to remember everything, so these are quite personal, incomplete notes.

Mark on Philosophy of money:

Discussion of whether value is something that is inherent in things or in our relationship to them. Argues for the latter. At first glance too much philosophizing and not enough evidence and empirical investigation, too individualized and psychologized. Value seems much more tangled up with economic and non-economic _practices_. But we should and will return to this book.

Sociability
I picked this, because Simmel’s work on sociability is the most widely cited and recognized contribution. It provides some explanation why co-presence is so important.

He makes a really good point, saying that sociability is all about personalities, but it is cut loose from ‘objective personality’ and ‘deep individual personality’. So people must present themselves as interesting, but not say anything really intimate. Sociability seems to be and is in mobs research regarded as a kind of ‘engine’ for social networking and I would (maybe) argue also for the digital economy. It also provides ‘oiling’ for it, in the sense that in the doing of sociability trust or distrust is made.

This doesn’t mean that people are sociable to create trust amongst each other. But in observing good form and watching others (fail) to do so, they find opportunity to build trust. Trust is actively made as people do sociable interactions - the way they stick to the rules and the way they competently breach them - if you know somone can do this, and will respect the delicate negotiations, you can probably trust them. See also Boden and Molotch on ‘The compulsion of proximity’

Because all there is are taken for granted invisible unspoken rules sociability is difficult to do across ‘classes’ or different cultural backgrounds.

Sociability is important as myriad conferences, business travels and - maybe also - the trend to make workplaces more social spaces, in reaction to the fact that as some people work more and more from home, it’s the social contact they need when they are at work.

Given that there is so much in embodied conduct - what is surprising is that people are doing such a lot of sociability and are so keen to do it online. Is it easier there? is that why (anecdotal evidence suggests) autistic people find it easier there? are we all a bit autistic?
Also: what is it that makes it easier? the asynchronicity? just the lack of speed? the lack of pressure for a need for repartee? (might find something on this in Ito et al (2005) Personal, portable, pedestrian’.

Our discussion connects to ‘new spirit of capitalism’. They build up a whole framework, too long to explain, but one element is that they say that part of the spirit of capitalism is ‘test’ - that capitalism is made in contest between different people’s different interests and needs. Sociability is one arenas for such contest. the practices of negotiating relations - e.g. class relations. If the contests are chaning, the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is changing.

At this point Mark said something quite exciting, but I have forgotten what it was. It was something like - interaction in digital spaces gives all concerned equal access to communicative resources. this makes the contest fairer?

Critique is integral to the spirit of capitalism, because capitalism does not only have to promote people pursuing individual interests, but also say that doing that serves common interest. So the test has to be legitimate to serve common interest. and critique discovers ever more hurdles to make test legitimate.

17 September 14:00 15:00
—————————————

We read 2 things:

1. Chapter 1, Marcel Mauss The Gift. Routledge. If you need a copy, please let me know m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

2. Lettl, C., Herstatt, C., & Gemuenden, H. G. (2006). Users’contributions to radical innovation: Evidence from four cases in the field of medical equipment technology. R&D Management, 36(3), 251-272.

Notes by Mark Hartswood:
—————————————

Notes from reading group on 17th September

(Leaving it too late – my notes are more sketchy than I remember.  This is really my summary of the book rather than reflecting what the group
discussed…)

One of the main points of ‘The Gift’ concerns how we might explain the ritual destruction or divestment of wealth in ceremonies of native peoples – typified by the Potlach, and how such displays are hard for us ‘modern folk’ to make sense of. It also serves to trace the routes of or legal / economic systems to prior systems of formalised legal / economic structures that we have today.

Explores very nicely the obligations of the giver and recipient, and the obligation to reciprocate (with largess).

This then becomes a very powerful way to help explain the ways in which people contribute in ‘digital economy’ type activities – for example:
open source software, file sharing etc etc where there is not immediately monetary reward.

‘Radical innovation’ - was interesting in that it brought to our attention an literature on innovation and user involvement that we hadn’t previously seen.

The emphasis of the paper was on certain qualities that were needed for users to be able to innovate in their own work setting, and being able to develop powerfully transformative techniques or technologies. The examples were predominantly from innovations developed by surgeons to support new types of surgical intervention.

This wasn’t really news to those of us who have been involved in PD (Participatory Design).

That users with a ‘unique set of characteristics’ could participate in this way is something that rankled with some, as it seemed unnecessarily elitist. There was a feeling that this unnecessarily mystified the process of innovation, and that rather mundane things like time, resources, motivation were really at stake.

Looking back at the paper just now, it seems a little more benign that I remember the discussion at the time suggesting (I didn’t read it properly at the time).

Also a distinction is made between ‘radical innovation’ and ‘incremental innovation’ that I am not sure that we explored at the time that it might be worth looking at again. (It may be that radical only happens at the end of a lot of ‘hidden’ incremental stuff…).

Hope that this is helpful to some. Feel free to contribute or amend things that I have misrepresented.

Best regards,
Mark.

27 August 14:00 15:00
—————————————-

Participants: Stuart Anderson, University of Edinburgh, Gary Graham, Manchester University, Mark Perry, Brunel University, Mark Hartswood, University of Edinburgh, Leon Cruickshank, Monika Buscher, Lancaster University

We met on Skype. It worked ok-ish.

Our Notes about the 1st Chapter of

Leadbetter, C. (2008) ’We-think. Mass innovation, not mass production.’ Profile Books.
http://www.wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx

and

Von Ahn, L. and Dabbish, L. (2008). Designing games with a purpose. Communications of the ACM August 2008, pp. 58-67. Download from
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1378719&type=pdf

can be found below.

Notes from reading We-think & Designing games with a purpose
============================================================
Participants/Authors of these notes: Stuart Anderson, Monika Buscher, Leon Cruickshank, Gary Graham, Mark Hartswood, Mark Perry

Verdict
————-
Interesting, populist, but with depth in places.

General
———-
Most people read more than the 1st chapter of we-think.

It is easy for most to like the general idea of this - that we ‘are what we share’, that more collaboration makes for better ideas, that more open-ness makes for more democracy. There are some really really nice real world examples in the book - e.g. about how IPR obsessed Cornish inventors got their come-uppance by an open and sharing community that made engines that were 3 times as efficient, or how humps in parks work. There are some good concepts/metaphors - for example:
‘we can create conditions for collaboration’
‘collective intelligence’
‘collbarotive exercise of individual responsibility’
‘the new normal’ (working for no pay and benefitting)
At times all this seems blue-eyed (innocent and way way over-optimistic), though. For example when he claims that we might be able to create and innovate together to defeat bird flu, tackle global warming, keep communities safe ….

New governance
————————————
Are there new models of governance emerging?
Is there more democracy?

Media: Changing the nature of the problem
————————————————————-
By using new technologies for making sense of issues and communicating, the nature of the issues changes. For example, an emergency or a disaster can be known in much more dimensions, from more and less mainstream perspectives, by more people.

Is the information better or not?

We are changing the rules?

Goffman
———-
It would be useful to look at studies of interaction in digital economies. Goffman a useful resource for thinking through new rules for interatcion. For example ‘ritual supplies’ of giving gifts. Trevor Pinch talk at E’burgh on Goffman explore ‘aggregated entities’, Karin Knorr Cetina on Goffman and markets, also at E’burgh.

Metaphors
————-
ways of desicribing the internet - Leadbetter’s metaphors fizzle out a bit, that is, are not substantiated or not pursued in depth, but they are evocative. Others:
Internet as ‘mirror’.

Games
———
Why games??? Why are games so effective as ‘conditions’ or ‘mechanisms’ or ‘structures’ for collaboration? They allow people to do something trivial and effortless, take time out, strongly rule governed, simple, rewarding.
What kind of games?
Miniclip is another example.

5 August 14:00 15:00
—————————————-

Participants: Stuart Anderson, University of Edinburgh, Mark Perry, Brunel University, Mark Hartswood, University of Edinburgh, Annamaria Carusi, Oxford University, Monika Buscher, Lancaster University

We met on Skype. It worked ok-ish.

Our Notes about the Introduction to

Benkler, Yochai (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

are below. You can download the book from Benkler’s website and buy it at Amazon.

Notes from discussion of Introduction to Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Nations
==========================================================================
Participants/Authors of these notes: Stuart Anderson, Monika Buscher, Annamaria Carusi, Mark Hartswood, Mark Perry

Verdict
———-
A novel and important contribution to the debate, some very helpful concepts and observations, but too simplistic and shallow in its analysis.

General
———-
In comparison to more popular science readings like Tapscott (‘Digital Economy’ and ‘Wikinomics’, a more academically sound and ambitious work. Written from an economist’s perspective. Apparently gathering influence within the research field. Does delineate communal positive effects eloquently.

NB: All our comments refer to the introduction only.

Social practices of production
———————————————-
Benkler argues that the convergence of an economy centred on information with the Internet gives rise to new nonmarket social production practices that are radically more decentralized, with far reaching consequences.

This is an interesting way of framing events, but there is not enough on What these practices are, how they are performed and how effects emerge.

Descriptions of practices seem simplistic and overly positive - there is no mention of obligations, duties. The assumption that people already have the ‘capital capacity’ to participate in the networked information economy is flawed. Even if the cost of ‘capital requirements of production’ (i.e. access to networked computers) now were negligible, not everyone would be able to be part of the rise of ‘individual practical capabilities’ Benkler observes.

Mentions an interesting phenomenon - that ‘the very fluidity and low commitment required’ to engage in peer production ‘increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter’.

Beyond Linux and Wikipedia?
—————————————-
These are very well known and much aired examples, but also very specialized ones.

Are there others?
Google - a mix of open and proprietary models of production
Storecards -

Accuracy?
Benkler uncritically parades these as models of open participation. But who actually participates? in case of Wikipedia only 2% [does anyone have a reference for this?]

How much does the information economy really matter?
——————————————————————————
Benkler suggest new concept of networked information economy.
In view of recent oil and food price rises, how important is the information economy?

Social ties
—————-
Benkler argues that we are using the Internet at the expense of TV, and seems to suggest that we are forming more and ‘better’ social ties than before. Is the Internet replacing TV? Is it better at creating social ties?

Rose tinted glasses x 2
———————————-
Benkler focuses very much on positive behaviours and positive effects. Seems to view networked information economy as a panacea. He foresees/forecasts a new information environment in which liberal values of individual freedom, genuine participation in politics, a critical culture, social justice can be realised. What about those who are being excluded?

There are important indicators missed here. For example, social mobility within the UK has decreased in recent years, not increased.

Liberalism
—————
Benkler seems to suggest that liberal democracy is a natural state societies will gravitate towards given half a chance. Has a rather limited view of what liberal democracy is.

Individualist/Rationalist models
————————————————
Like most (all?) micro-economists, Benkler builds his argument on the assumption that individual behaviour is the driver for economic/social effects.
Not the only way to think … read for example Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory, Amartya K. Sen, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 317-344

Emergence
————-
Promises insight into this phenomenon. Introduction doesn’t give much.

Technological Determinism
————————————-
Not very effectively justified.

Reflexivity
—————-
Benkler doesn’t use the term, but talks of a more critical and self-reflective culture. He argues that this offers ‘a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways (1) it makes culture more transparent, (2) it makes culture more malleable’.

This is interesting for efforts to ‘design cultures’ through collaborative design/co-realization, because it could help conceptualize how such design approaches can be brought to bigger issues (Co2 emissions, transport) and involve many people.

Examples of how data and models feature in the real economy can be found already - e.g. Hegdefunds (Look at the work of Donald Mackenzie, Dependability IRC)
People’s consultation of models and live data influences their behaviour, potentially making systems much more volatile. Drawing concepts from mobile communications research, one could call this ‘micro’ or ‘hyper-coordination’.

There is a tension between assumptions of increased reflexivity and the exclusion of many. Who’s doing and benefitting from reflexivity? How could participation be enhanced? Should it be?

18 July
———-

Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything

2006 Don Tapscott Anthony Williams

This book is about how a new paradigm of openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally changes … everything. These are interesting concepts but …
BUT …
* We need to better understand HOW these things happen and why. Also, they write as if change was something initiated by god’s hand, happening TO us. They literally say ‘participate or perish’. But actually, people make all this happen. So how are they doing that?What are the contingencies?
* This is written for a very particular audience: the educated west.
* It would be nice to know more about
- how time is translated into reputation and value
- how time and content are becoming the drivers of value creation/collbaoration and exclusion/inclusion
- the relationship between virtual economic practices and physical economic practices (e.g. digital content and physical services/products connected to that content)
- the relationship between not for profit digital economy practices and for profit ones. For example, when it comes to IP, what do you keep secret and what do you open up?
- what IS the added value? Why is Linux better than Microsoft?

2 July 2008
———————

Axel Bruns coined the terms ‘produsers’ and ‘produsage’. He writes about them in his book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, New York: Peter Lang.

We read: Bruns, Axel and Humphreys, Sal (2007) Playing on the edge: facilitating the emergence of local digital grassroots. In Proceedings Internet Research 8.0: Let’s Play, Vancouver.

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00010516/01/10516.pdf

Nice example project.

18 June 2008
———————

Lash and Urry 1994 ‘Economies of Signs and Space’

A very sophisticated and prescient analysis of emergent digital economy practices. Key concept: reflexivity. We will read more of this. Seminal.

Don Tapscott 1996 ‘Digital Economy’

An interesting, but ultimately derivative and thin popular account of the digital economy phenomena.

Next: 22 October 13:20 14:20
———————————————