In the past and for my hacker course, I have taught Paul Ceruzzi’s History of Modern Computing but the book was a little too dry to fly high with first year students but thanks to Joe Reagle’s excellent syllabus on the Impacts of Technology, I read a short but very sweet (and teachable) piece by him entitled An Unforseen Revolution: Computers and Epectations that not only gives a window into the early history of the computer but provides a very nice conceptual entry as to why it is hard for inventors of a new technology, such as the computer, to “foresee” and fully come to terms with its future uses, full range of capabilities, and utlimately its impact.

Basically the context of invention combined with the training of inventors (which in this case, the first American digital computer, the ENIAC was invented by a physicst and an engineer for mathematical computing) stitches and thus initially limits the vision (and thus use) of the technology largely to its original purpose, while precedding technologies provide the conceptual juice drunk to understand the meaning of new technologlogies. So while today we clearly think of computers as a meta-machine, that can be whatever-machine-in-the-world-we-so-desire (so long as someone programs it to be “that” machine), in its time, with people so accustomed to machines as having one function, the cultural imagination was stuck. As Ceruzzie humorously conveys, “a machine having such general capabilities seemed absurd, like a toaster that could sew buttons on a shirt. But the computer was just such a device; it could do many things its designers never anticipated.” p. 126

With the passing of time came new innovations (Ceruzzi identifies new developments in programming as key in this regard) and use in new settings (notably businesses), the stitches were loosened and finally unraveled so that the computer came to take on the meaning it has acquired today.

One perennial topic of inquiry in the field of STS concerns how particular contexts and other factors shape new meanings, visions, and uses, or just limit them, along with unearthing the labor that goes into making new inventions or scientific theories more generally accepted. This is a great little piece to teach incoming students about some of these concerns in STS, and without a lot of heavy-handed anything.

And to make the project of teaching really fun, add this short clip from the Muppets, where Dr. Bunsen Honeydew totally ignores the Very Large Gorilla about to gobble him up because of his blind faith in technology.

While anyone who has had a

1) medical condition and 2) access to Internet in the last five years

probably knows that patients are increasingly using the net (and now google) to diagnose medical conditions, it is only now that the “medial establishment” is starting to recognize or really admit to the reality of this widespread phenomenon and even doing studies on them, such as the one released a few days ago by the BJP Googling for a diagnosis—use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet
based study. The study sought to ascertain how effective google was as an aid in medical diagnosis. As various new outfits are reporting it is moderately high.

What I love about this study and the corollary reporting is the naive tone they have to assume, transmitting the news as if the public knew very little about this, and would in fact, be induced into surprise!!!!!!!!!! when first facing the new. But in fact, I think it works in the opposite way. The surprise is that they took so long to admit to what was in front of us for many years now.

While the news articles reporting on the study stay within the province of doctors, the report acknowledges, in fact opens with, the fact that patients may be forging the path in Internet-diagnosis. The authors write in their second paragraph:

“It seems that patients use Google to diagnose their own medical disorders too. After evaluating a 16 year old water polo player who presented with acute subclavain vein thrombosis, one of us (HT) started to explain that the cuase of the thrombosis was uncertain when the patients father blurted out “But of course, he has paget-von Schrotter symdnome. Having previously googled the symptoms, he gave us a mini-tutorial.. and the correct treatment for the syndrome. This experience led us to ask “How googe is google in helping doctors to reach the right diagnosis”

Again, what I love about the tone of this opening is that it is as if these doctors stumbled on a great but deeply hidden fact to make a breath-taking discovery, one that, however, since is it is SO very emergent and thus still not *really* verified by Science, they must proceed with great caution, qualifying with phrasees like “It seems that patients use Google to diagnose their own medical disorders too”. I am sure they and most doctors are personally are not so naïve but since this has been something virtually without no official acknowledgment among professionals and in the journals, the genre of writing just requires it to be framed cautiously.

As fun to read are the comments, for they stretch from moral panic:

“The implication that ‘googling’ be an adjunct to proper medical school training, continuing medical education through courses and reading peer reviewed journals is laughable and bordering on dangerous. I am shocked that this has been published by the BMJ.”

to celebration:

“For the modern dermatologist, the internet is indispensible and google is only the start, and for this reason a desktop computer with high speed internet access is an essential tool for all clinicians. Long live the information superhighway!”

While others muse on the broader emacipatory possibilities

“One can imagine the benefit to young doctor in developing country who now have access to a grand medical library in their hands.”

I am especially interested in this very dynamic because it is one pillar propping my next project on psychiatric survivors, which exceeds the particular topic of challenges to psychiatry in its general focus on medical/patient reconfigurations following from Intent-based activism, self-help, diagnosis, and critique. And for those who think I have made a radical departure from my last project, here is where I see one (of two or three) threads of continuity: for patients are generating an enormous amount of “amateur” knowledge, that I think is not unlike the peer-to-peer production of software hacking, and it is a form labor usually accompanied by a strong critique of expertise and other medical practices.

I am now reading some literature on patient activism, like the issue from the February 2006 in Social Science and Medicine that collects 11 articles on patient organization movements. For those who work on this topic, the collection is worth your while and the editorial introduction by Kyra Landzelius is stellar. It is not only written beautifully (which I think is rare for these openings because it is often a rote, unimaginative regurgitation but this was a pleasure to read) but provides an engrossing overview of some new trends and some of the diverging forms of politics that arise from what is really a motley bunch of organizations and contests in patient and anti-patient activsm.

She opens by defining four spheres that shape and inform the forms of contents that are part and parcel of these patient movements, the four being:

1. Revolutionary feats in technoscientific engineering
2. Restructuring of healthcare systems across industrialized nations
3. A Revised contract between science and the public stemming from a criss of confidence in science
4. An upsurge in the articulation and diversification of health activisms (p. 530)

These four are key but I was shocked that there was no specific inclusion—though it comes out plenty in the introduction in other ways—of the Internet. For while I am no techno-determinist, the Internet I think, can’t be ignored for it has fundamentally changed the map and tenor of patient activism, allowing for more rapid connections between various stakeholders, providing a medium by which those officially unrecognized illnesses are given shape and form, and where an ethical cultivation of self-help, self-diagnosis, self-medication, along with copious critique and forging of alternatives is happening, right before our eyes, virtually in real time.

It is the medium by which a new chapter of patient activism is being written and I think it is a real mistake not to give it serious attention and credit. And perhaps one of the most interesting things about it is that it without it, it would leave many otherwise home-bound, sick folks, without a medium by which to engage in political activity or even community self-help, for let’s face it, these take a lot time and energy.

When you are sick and home-bound, for example, there may be a limited number of types of engagements you literally have the energy to partiicpate in and the Internet lowers the barrier of political entry because of its ease and because you can still type away, even when feeling otherwise totally awful… This may be a brute material point but nonetheless, key to understanding the political power of the Internet.

Now of course the question left is will Google capitalize on this and create “Google Diagnosis”?

Read and perhaps sign the letter urging discussion for open access in Anthropology!

So how do you manage your time and daily activities?

I have decided that as much as I have tried managing my life through digital mediums usually in the form of PDAs or some web application, they failed for feeling to remote to help. To organize my life, I rely on treeware stuff: a calendar, scraps of paper, and post it notes. I think I need the tangibility of the paper and my hand moving for anything to really register the urgency.

There are times that I do rely on emailing myself reminders and I do like that system. So it was good to find out about a simple web tool, Neptune based on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done that sends you email reminders among other things. Its functionality is not extensive but I think it is simplicity that helps to to “get things done.” I was reminded of it today after being told that Getting Things Done is a really good book to read to end the vicious cycle of procastination. Maybe I will finally get around to reading out. But if you already do use a web took to organize your projects and like the method outlined by David Allen, docheck out Neptune.

I just got back from 4S, which happens to be one of my favorite of the “large” professional association conferences. Ok, 15 minutes to deliver talk is the equivalent of being treated as canned sardines, and thus totally unpleasant, but I feel like I can go to most any talk and find it relevant or interesting to my own work. I t is certainly more manageable too in terms of size than something like the AAAs which also gives you a paltry 15 minutes to present and worse, the association has been treading in some ethically problematic territory lately, so much so, I would rather throw my money to the other AAA.

While in Vancover, my Internet access was near to nothing (I was staying with a friend who I have not seen since the summer of 2002, but alas, thanks to chatting we have been in pretty consistent contact). When I came back I came across some discouraging but not so surprising new news on the AAA and their cowardly decision to fight the FRPAA that would mandate open access for articles derived from federally funded research… The cherry on top of the cake was they dissolved the AnthrSource Steering Committee formed precisely to figure out how to open up access, no less!

Alex Golub, a Savage Minds blogger, and a now ex-member of AnthroSource committee has written an excellent roundup of the story (link above) and Peter Suber, also has two very nice summaries, including links to the appropriate documentation.

This year since I am curtailing my time on the conference circuit, I decided not to go to the AAA conference because frankly I am totally annoyed with the professional organization. I am usually quite proud to be or at least amused after I tell folks that I am am anthropologists (most react as if I had decided to embark on some real courageous path) but I am quite embarrassed about the association that is supposed to represent my interests and the profession at large.

The links on SM point to and flesh out the problems with AAA’s refusal to jump on an exciting opportunity to free up some knowledge but I want to just emphasize three of the most problematic parts of their decision:

1.The most offensive part is that in reality the proposed bill is quite conservative in so far as it only asks for what should already be (a) given. That is, if the government is using tax dollars to fund research, it has every right to demand the fruits of such scholarship is made available to tax payers. Right? Given the neoliberal moment we are in, in which the government is retrehcnhing on all sorts of supports, this bill is admirable and I am afraid that if it does not pass it can be easily used by conservatives to justify future cuts of such funds. And given the very uncontroversial nature of the bill, it is not surprising that so many of the social science and humanities associations did not protest the bill… Anthropology sticks out as a sore sore thumb in fact.

2. The AAAs deployed FUD tactics to justify their position saying that open access would jeopardize peer review… Sigh. That is just so off the mark and the AnthroSource steering committee letter addressed this point well.

3. Many anthropologist know first-hand how appalling access outside of Europe, US, Australia, Japan etc, can be, even for academics and thus, AAA’s lack of support for this is also implicitly sanctions the “North” “South” Division that have plagued the field and all of academia so long. And for a field that has often been very thoughtful about these power/knowledge dynamics, it is doubly even more stinging… Is there really such a strong disconnect between the association and discplinary ethical currents?

Since the last few days have been:

Cold…
Snowy….
and thus utterly and totally northern (Albertan) Canada, I thought I would write a little about what, in the last couple of months has taken my fancy here and what I have found a little annoying.

Since the general tenor of life in Canada is similar to the US, many of the differences are subtle. Take for example that coke (the drink) is not made with the high fructose corn syrup but “fortified” instead with plain ol’ sugar, (I guess they don’t have as strong of a corn lobby here); the radio station “Joe FM”, is like the American counterpart “Jack FM” (which has taken over the radio waves in the US, playing “what we want” minus the DJ), in that it has the same collection of cheesy 80s and 90s music, and the same generic Jack(ass) announcer, but in fact, there are still Djs for most of the day… Canadians I guess do put some limits on what large megacorporations can do to destroy people’s livelihoods.

Other differences are a little more noticeable. Top among them is radio in Edmonton is about a million times better than the US, even in major cities. There are 4-5 alternative type FM stations, including CJSR the U of Alberta radio station, which I would say is a notch up or two from most college radio stations. They really know what they are doing and I really recommend The Terradome as well as the dance music they play on Sat night.

There are a few things that strike as remarkably different, and of course, health care, is totally number one on the list. I have been fairly impressed with health services and so far, 2 out of 3 doctors I have seen (one to remove my staples, one to check up on my moles, and one just to set up a visit with my primary doctor) totally dissed on American doctors and medicine. And I don’t blame them. With so much hysteria, almost moral panic, among right winged Americans, about the awful state of Canadian socialized medicine, I too would want to vent in whatever way I could when some American specimen came by the office. When I leave here I will probably miss the most and it will be a very tragic day if Canadians move even an inch closer to our broken system

There are a class of differences that are just a little odd like:

Curling… There is a curling club literally right around the corner from where I live. One night, when I was in a foul mood, I was dragged there, pretty much against my will, in the hopes of purging my bad mood. It mostly worked. I have never been up and close with curlers, and this club and two viewing decks. We went to the cozy upstairs one, with a wooden bar, smooth wooden tables, couches, and warm fire places. 80% of the people in the club were up there… And of course… Why would you spend time on ice when there is beer and warmth upstairs? But then again, brooming outside of house cleaning does seem like a heck of a lot of fun.

Another odd thing is they just don’t plow the streets here or shovel much. It does not snow much (although it already dumped a lot since Friday) but because it never melts, it does mean a constant white and icy swath over the city streets and sidewalks. Thankfully there is free health care because I bet a lot of people fall and break some collection of bones.

People don’t lock their homes, but they do for the most part lock up wireless access. Maybe it is just in my hood which is close to the University so this bears a little more research but I find it annoying and ironic given that you can just go into people’s homes.

The West Edmonton Mall… For those who don’t know it is the largest in North America… Aside from the crazy indoor water park and amusement park with upside down roller coaster and all, it is not all that impressive because it is long instead of tall. What I liked about it the most though were the postcards proudly displaying the mall that were being sold in various stores, were clearly from the early 1980s…. I picked up a few they were so retro.

There is a small class of frustrating things and number one of them so far is:

Teleus… I don’t even want to go into it but trust me, they suck.

The mail is slow and spotty. But this is also a US problem too. Though there is supposedly mailforwarding from Canada to the US, it is basically a lie. Don’t fall for it if you move! While I had changed my address for the most important mail, I did not change it for things like my Alumni college magazine. And basically will never see that stuff (which is probably ok).

But mailing stuff to the US also kinda is unpredictable. I mailed something to PR, for example, and it was supposed to take 6 days… It is now bordering on the 3rd week.

There is a little window into life here in Canada… And so far, so good.

This morning I got back to an article that has been on and off my work-plate for a year now, one that I have to turn in to a discussant for my 4S panel as well for an edited collection of articles on the intersection between art, activism, and biopoltics.

Part of my efforts meant attacking a virtual “stack” of articles and one of them was one of best journalistic articles I have read in a long time. Exceedingly clear prose is combined with good references, hard numbers and just the right amount of passionate verve to make reading actually fun and not just another nameless, faceless cog in the academic research wheel. The article mentioned a couple of interesting studies that while sadly not linked from the article (but I am going to take that was an editorial and not authorial decision), they were pretty much cake to find by doing a little poking and prodding on the Internet.

So for example, one of them was published on PLoS Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature and stands pretty strongly on its own right. But what is even better are the long list of citations (many with links) that would otherwise be frankly, a *total* time consuming bitch to find like the correspondence between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies:

# Food and Drug Administration Division of Drug Marketing Advertising and Communications (1997) Effexor warning letter. Rockville (Maryland): Food and Drug Administration. Available: http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/june97/effexor.pdf. Accessed 14 October 2005.

Total gems given to you right there on a silver plate. That is what I love about Internet based research…

On the other hand, this extreme access is not always so peachy. The amount of data now available can be experienced as a totally mind-numbing, frightening, chaotic infolanche (as one of my old adivsors liked to call it), which translates into a lot of academic “hunting and gathering” not to mention all the sorting, sifting, cataloging, and then of course trying to remember what the heck you have just amassed in the first place, even with the aid of tags and all

I am not sure if things have gotten easier or harder because this is all I personally know but what I do know is that there are times when I just love the hunt, losing myself for hours, following links, gathering articles, enlivened, exicted about research and there are others when the woolly mammoth of infomartion gets the better of me.

Joe Reagle who is thick in dissertation writing on wikipedia, has written a very thoughtful note on how he is handling his citations. Given that so many of them are from online source snad thus more like moving targes than the steady, bound book and journal article, they require different conventions.

Many moons ago, when I started my project on F/OSS I imagined that it would stay within the purview of anthropology, hacking, science and technology studies to bleed only a little bit into legal studies and only because I was dealing with the fraught politics of intellectual property law. As it turned out, the Law, with a capital L, as on object of analysis and site for the production of cultural value, turned out not to be peripheral but utterly central… And since, I have pretty much stayed within the territory of legal studies, vastly interested in the more invisible cultural and political effects of the law.

Recent obsessing on this topic has led to a nascent thesis about law, discrimination, politics , and civil rights that I am looking to substantiate (so if anyone has any citations or helpful hints, do pass along) and it is this: When there are positive changes made in the law, it can come with various political costs. And the one I am interested in, is how, given other conducive conditions, legal changes that look awesome on paper, can work to undermine its potential by breeding a type of complacency of (in)action, largely because it seems as if the worst of the problems have been fixed. So if we look to the American legal context of 1960s and 1970s as a prime example, it is clear there was a heck of a lot of turmoil in the arena of civil rights, much of which, many liberals and progressives would say, led to positive legal transformation. During this period the content of many laws were purged of overt discrimination that, for example, which led a lethal blow to segregation and started to dismantle some of the worst pieces of scaffolding of mental health law (just to cite a few examples).

At one level while we may easily recognize these changes as laudable and even perhaps “progressive,” the effects of it may be less so. Once legal content is purged of the “ugly,” this can breed an ugly form of complacency, in which the problem seems (re)solved, so people no longer feel guilt and attention is diverted away from any number of things, like: 1) new problems not necessarily addressed in the law 2) the rise of new laws or 3) the fact that the law is empty unless actively applied.

I have yet to read anything directly related to this theory or apply it myself but it is something that has been on my mind for a couple of years now. But after talking about this topic from a friend, I decided to finally take crack at “The Law in Shambles” a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Thomas Geogheghan, a labor lawyer from Chicago. While it did not specifically address the issue I am raising (though it got pretty close in a number of places) I got more than I had bargained for; it is truly incisive (though frighteningly depressing) look at the current state of the law, and also, like so many of the PPP’s, much more fun to read than any most academic book or articles.

For those who don’t know the PPP publish a series of short pamphlets and it was started by the legendary anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, who is also known to be a little prickly himself (but it softened by his humor). They are often written by academics on contemporary topics of political interest (read: very biased) in a manner that is a lot looser and free wheeling than any article or book that would come out of an academic journal or publishing house. The PPP allows its authors to unbuckle a few notches off the sometimes uptight, constraining academic belt of writing and the result is often impassioned, funny, and yet remarkably astute essays. If Montaigne were around today, he would surely be proud of his essayistic legacy.

The title of the book sums up the the topic at hand. His explanation as to why the (American) law is in disarray has not to do with the law in the abstract but with the total disintegration of a certain class of institutions and a specific class of law (namely unions , the law of trusts etc.). As institutional supports from the New Deal have been thrown out the door, it is the individual, largely through tort law, who has had to wield the fury of the law, in defense of a slew of individual rights and to defend themselves against new forms of attack (the worst being lawsuits brought forth by “charitable institutions” like hospitals).

While the law is conceived as something we are all equal under, of course, it is access to the law, which makes all the difference in terms of making it a viable (or not) as social tool. With the demise of the unions, he argues, came the death of certain type of contract law in employment, and the stellar rise of tort law, which conceives of wrongful acts not as breaches of contract (which would apply to all persons under the contract) but as matters of personal injury. Whereas in the past unions would arbitrate contract law, wielding the power of numbers so that individuals were not burdened and burned with the expense (of time and money) of the law, with tort the law becomes formalized, conceived, and imagined in highly individual terms (even when grouped into class actions, it becomes a matter of proving personal injury), the effect of which, he argues is “meaner and more complex” than contract for four reasons 1) The name of the legal game is to discover “motive,” which is about as confusing as it can get and thus more arbitrary 2) It is more expensive than old contract law 3) Cases rarely go to trial (didn’t really get the importance of this point) 4) Because its focus is on motive and intense and subjective states, everything is open to scrutiny, so that “I can force you to tell me everything—what is in your secret heart. Not to mention in your tax returns.” The result is torts produced a bitter, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian, legal world, which in turn makes for experiencing the law as an arbitrary force.

This individualization of the law through tort also intersects with many other changes such as the demise of regulatory power that add more fire to the disintegration of the law and the subsequent experience of law and life as arbitrary. And it is this chapter (From Administrative Law to No Law, The Rise of the Whistleblower and Trail Lawyer) which got me a little closer to my own point that I brought up above. For example, he writes:

“Once, when I filed suite to get the Labor Department to enforce the child labor laws for 16- and 17-year olds, kids whom they do not even pretend to protect, I got nowhere. I met with the Solicitor who told me: “Look, suppose I agree with you. How would I ever get the money to enforce it?” He was right. If I had won and they had issued regulations, it would have only been worse. In Labor, as in agency after agency, we have a vast complex body of law—which would take mandarin to learn—that no one enforces.. The law is “there.” On paper. Indeed, it is a lot of paper. How much paper? Fifty volumes, in paperback in total. I know because I counted. But as to big chunks in these volumes, there is no one there to enforce it.” p. 48

Lots of paper I think can make people comfortable in thinking that famous Virginia Slims Slogan, “We’ve come a long way, Baby,” when it fact, it can often just means what it literally looks like, “Damn, that’s a buttload of paper.”

There is a lot more packed into this tiny book, covering the deep gulf between left and right, the stagnation of an old constitution that is impossible to revise, the loss of accountability in all branches of government, the redrawing of districts, and the slight expansion and curbing of of majoritarian voting in the last hundred years. It gets a little shrilly by the end, but you know, it is all pretty upsetting stuff and it is good to shrill from time to time.

Though he never refers to neoliberalism, capitalism, or postmodernism, this book is also a great companion to a class of this literature on the rise of fragmentation and instability in social and cultural life brought forth by changes in the economic system (thinking here of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, etc). In fact, I think it does a much better job than at relaying how it is that vast sectors of society experience fragmentation, instability, and frustration.

Does the world of open source/ software experience a disproportionately higher number of internal memo leaks than other fields of endeavor or is it that I am just watching more closely?