So I was alerted to this collection of essays in The Lancet on Medicalisation in the 21st century. The line-up of folks are some of my favorite in the field (Nancy Tomes, Nick Rose, Jonathan Metzel) and it is good to see this discussion happening in the medical journal. Sadly it is not open access but if you really want to read them and don’t have access to the journal, just ping me, and I am sure I can make something available.

In the shade of the commons, to download go here

Open Hybrid Space

While I use delicious, I find it somewhat of a chaotic mess, even if you can eventually find stuff thanks to le tagging. Because of the chaos, I have decided to compile a simple list of my favorite articles and books. Most of these are good for teaching and make a worthy second read. I have had to rely on memory to get most of the articles I have on the list there so there will be others coming soon. I am also more interested in getting the articles there than the books (and actually am putting books that I would use to teach with which is why there is not much up there now).

Since there are few topics about academic etiquette than get me as excited as the norms of citations, I was quite fascinated by Joseph Reagle’s blog entry on the topic, a discussion that spanned a summary of Helen Nissenbaums’ work on the subject to his own wrangling with how he should recognize others who have independently reached similar conclusions as his own.

Citations fascinate me because they are one of the few tangible inscriptions that reveal just how much of our work is indebted to others; it is “stimergic” (and if you don’t know what that is, read Joe’s entry as his moral wrangling over citations had to do with this term, his use of it and the discovery that someone else came up with it also). Despite the fact that all disciplines use them, we use them slightly distinctly. Lawyers use them in lawyerly-like ways: they cite the crap out of everything (it is kinda annoying but kinda helpful) and this makes total sense: they are covering their asses (lawyers know how to do this well), they are following the logic of their own practice as case law is quite citational, and well, law professors usually have one if not two research assistants, and this I am sure helps them in covering their citational bases.

Another big difference in practices of citations is between a conventions that includes the name of the person you are citing in the body of the text and those that stuff all that data in a footnote. I can’t stand the later convention, not only because it is a pain in the neck to have to go back to the footnote JUST to see who the heck the author is citing but I think the credit should be right there, springing off the page so that the politics of collaborative recognition are, well, very evident (and I do understand that if you are citing a buttload of folks, that sometimes it is just better to do that in footnotes and sometimes with history they are citing way to may folks to really do it effectively in the body of the text).

Joe raises some fundamentally thorny questions of who and how do we cite given that we may come up with an idea with the power of our own little brains, only to find out (gasp) that others, past and present and very unknown others, say something similar. On the whole, I tend to try to make clear, as Joe did in the example he provided, where I am totally taking the idea from someone to apply to another idea of mine and where I have an independently crafted idea and I am citing others so as to support my own position, which usually only strengthens my own argument. And what I find is that just because a cohort of folks may be working on similar topic (open souce, hackers), since we do so from our own perspectives and methods, most of the research will be “original,” though not as much as we tend to perform to our superiors. Also I sometimes find myself with an idea, which I consider as my own, but where I am so in need of a citation because it is an idea that seems at an intuitive level to be right on but it is hard to truly substantiate with the data I have (I am in that position right now and am desperate to find someone who says what I say and thus have a means to support what otherwise seems like a lofty idea…)

And in fact, one thing that bothers me about citations is that we don’t seem to take seriously that the date of publication may not just tell us when something was published but help us gauge if something can become “dated.” What I mean is that when (and I guess if) I publish my book on hackers and Debian, it will not be a reflection not of some timeless aspects of hacking but firmly based out of the time period (roughly 10 years give or take 3 or 4) that I was either researching and writing about the topic. And while you can and should cite folks who wrote stuff in the past because that stuff still matters (a lot of what Steven Levy says for example still holds water) a lot changes. And yet I can’t stand how folks then cite someone as “wrong” when in fact all that went wrong is that time does what it does best: MOVE FORWARD and social phenomenon change along with the passing of new moons. This is not as likely to happen in the hard sciences but sure as heck happens with anything in the so-called human realm (which is why it bothers me that the social sciences and humanities model our citational and journal practices so similarly to the hard sciences, when it seems there are enough differences to warrant more differences than there are but that is a whole other topic). So now I try to note where my analysis diverges because the context so radically changed and really leave critique for those things I can safely and fairly disagree with on its own terms.
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Technology and science are, at times, part of some solution. But once unleashed in the world, they can also perpetuate problems and act as barriers.

I just finished two articles that have addressed this conundrum in provocative ways and I recommend both to read just for the sake of reading as they are written stunningly well and if you teach a course related to science, technology, medicine and society, these two would make excellent introductions to the importance of critically dissecting science, technology, and medicine (and I think you could unpack them for hours and hours, which is very helpful if you are looking to fill up some time).

One, Happy Meal is by the author of the immensely popular Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan. In the article he starts with the simple suggestion of trashing most fast/junk/processed food in favor of whole foods, notably plants. But then he delves into the much more complicated topic of the science of nutrition, making a pretty sharp critique of the field, especially for 1) its reductionism 2) and the ways in which the food industry mobilizes nutrition data it is favor and often to the detriment of furthering the goals of real nutrition.

After I posted the link on an IRC Debian channel, I had a pretty heated conversation with a number of Debian developers about the nature of science and how one goes about critique it (and mobilizing data to make counter-claims). As often is the case, we ended up arguing over the merit of his attack (though everyone agreed that his food suggestions were quite sound, and I find this disjuncture pretty interesting), as some felt like his attack on the science of nutrition went too far. I did not feel like his article was anti-science or alarmist but saw it as attacking a particular configuration of nutrition science (the reductionism, the inability to admit more complexity, and the turning away from common sense principles), which carry with it serious consequences in the so-called real world. He offers a critical edge that I think does not attack the principle of science generally (after all, he is using the techniques of skepticism and he marshals plenty of scientific data, like studies on omega 3s and 6 to make his point, though he does not only employ the rhetoric of science, which I think is key to understand his critique too) but just what is sees as a particularly problematic rendition of it that is especially problematic for nutrition (though I am sure many of his critiques are easily transfered to other domains).

Here, for example, is an attack on reductionism:

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

And muses on the effects of this narrow path:

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

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But you will see here that he reaches into scientific facts so that he is not throwing out the bathwater with the baby:

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Thanks! A number of folks have sent me the Science articles. Many many many thanks. Now I am on hold from hell with earthlink trying to cancel the create dialup I had in PR. They just proudly announced that the current hold time is less than 15 minutes (and I already had waited 15 minutes, got through, and was disconnected mysteriously).

Despite my claim that I would post the Science articles on money once I got access via the U of A library, well, they have a 5 year moving wall, so I won’t be doing that anytime soon.

If anyone does have access to the article because they are subscribed to the magazine or are a member of AASS, please feel free to pass along copies to me. My contact info can be found on my CV.

So I am back to le study of le hackers, trying to write a super-secret paper that I will present in January and then of course I am back with and to my beloved book (which for now has the following title: “Freedom’s Pleasures: Hacker Practice And The Limits of Liberalism” but I am sure it will morph, endlessly).

As part of my transition I just finished re-reading one of my favorite articles on the history of Usenet: If I want it, it’s OK: Usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech by B. Pfaffenberger (available here for download.

When I released one of my dissertation chapters where I addressed the phenomenon of the Cabal, Bryan was nice enough to write me and point me to his article, which also examines the existence of Backbone Usenet Cabal.

The artile, which provides just the right mix of history and commentary, analyzes how a free speech ethic came to be valued on Usenet and the ways in which technological and social factors co-mingled to facilitate and dampen the free flow of expression.

You are provided with classic Usenet quotes like:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea–massive, diffi-
cult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling
amounts of excrement when you least expect it. (Spafford, 1993b)

You learn about the early attempts to control spam by the likes of “CancelMoose:”

In 1995, a secret, shadowy figure known as the CancelMoose
devised a spam-canceling program called a cancelbot.”

And then in the end, he provides his challeng to one of the dominant STS theories of the time, SCOT:

“It should be noted that this picture is at odds with the predictions of the social construc-
tion of technology (SCOT) theory (Pinch & Bijker, 1987), in which the outcome of a period
of technical controversy is ascribed solely to social factors. Underlying SCOT’s dogmatism
is a justifiable aversion to technological determinism, the doctrine that a technology’s con-
tent leads irresistably to predictable social consequencesÐ a doctrine that is simply the re-
verse of SCOT’s insistence on social causation. Two wrongs, as we were taught in kinder-
garten, do not make a right. What we see in the history of Usenet is a contingent outcome
that is shaped neither exclusively by social nor by technical factors, but rather is best under-
stood as a long process in which contesting groups attempt to mold and shape the technol-
ogy to suit their endsÐsometimes successfully, and sometimes not. They are as likely to be
blindsided by technological developments as they were to succeed in changing the system
to meet their ends. As this article attests, it is one thing to create new technologies with a
coherent social vision, and it is quite another to control the way it grows and develops.”

I could not agree with him more. I think what he is highlighting is that if we dip into the historical record, we have instances in which technology can trump the social and vice-versa (and often instead it is a co-mixture), so in the end, understanding the impact of technologies is less about theories of technology and more of a historical question…

Because the web 2.0 “crowd” is so “smart” the intelligence agencies are thinking of tapping into this so-called collective wisdom and you can read about new efforts designed to create open source spying in the NYTimes. And make sure to check out Chris Kelty (who was on my dissertation committee) excellent commentary

At the University of Chicago, the Department of Economics was right across from my home-stomping ground, the Anthropology Department. Less than 30 seconds away, the world views and methodologies packaged for students were actually much much further apart not do to physical space but mind space.

Though “there” (not physically the whole time) for 8 years and now gone for two, it only today, this morning before the sun has arisen, when I have had more concerte exposure to what econ undergraduate students get taught during an introductory course thanks to a very well-written article, What We Learn When We Learn Economics.

The article’s author is clearly biased in certain respects but what is nice is that he demonstrates well that the articulation of a largely free-trade, market-heavy theory of economics made famous by a group of Chicagoans, which is given in the name of neutrality, is also, like any sort of model, not free entirely from bias and blinders. And whatever your take on free trade economics is, the article is quite well-written so take a dip!