zerodraft

Ok, so when I started writing yesterday about gift economies, it didn't *really* mean to be a post about my method for assembling the subject pool and about the people who have "gifted" me. Not that that post wasn't productive--it was.

However.

What I meant to write about was a post from lovely Larry Lessig, who wrangles through a discussion of how to connect our great-and-fabulous quid pro quo economy with what he calls the "second economy," the one in which goods, services, and ideas are exchanged but not with profit or return as the motivation.

A commentor tells Lessig this second economy might be called a "gift economy."

With my socialist/anarchist/communist leanings, I'm faintly familiar with gift economies. The reason I bring it up here, though, is that in trying to describe writers' networks, the word "economy" will probably be useful, as part of what I'll talk about is the exchange of "stuff": words, primarily, and ideas, of course. Which way are the ideas running? Which lines of the networks (which edges?) are these ideas flowing through? From whom to whom?

A writers' network, especially one existing on/through social software, is an economy; it exists because of the exchange--it is the exchange. And it is an exchange made of uneven and/or unexpected reciprocities, where often the "giver" often "gives" without expectation.

I expect to use the "network as (gift) economy" more fully after I find more sources. (Got any ideas?) The commentor to Lessig's post offers Lewis Hyde’s The Gift as one possible refernce, though he adds it's "not very hard-edged," which makes me wonder whether he's refering to a lack of academic rigor or to the author's inability to commit to the ideology of the concept.

At any rate, another possible discussion for the project.

Posted by madeline at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

OK, I need to figure out a way to get here.

The event will be a two day exploration of two burgeoning areas of social software: folksonomy and social networking websites. Drs. David Weinberger (Cluetrain, Small Pieces Loosely Joined), Nicole Ellison (MSU) and Cliff Lampe (MSU) will be featured attendees.

Dang. I really should try to go...somehow.

Posted by madeline at 11:21 AM | Permalink

I'm putting together, slowly, the list of possible blogs I'll use as a subject pool. My slow, intermittent work for the last several days has yielded a list with nearly 2000 blogs (this includes duplicates), and that's only the blogrolls from ONE PERSON's (David Weinberger) weblog. I'm not even half way though his blogroll yet, either.

The method for compiling and then selecting blogs for the project goes thusly (and was a gift from Collin): I began at Technorati's 100 most popular blogs. I worked my way down the list until I found the (at the time) highest ranking blog with a blogroll--most of those blogs listed on the Technorati top 100 do not publish/offer blogrolls. That highest ranking blog was Joho. I then began to follow the links to each of the sites on his blogroll, and copy/pasted their blogroll from that site into a Word doc.

I will continue to do this--for how long, I'm not sure--and when I have generated a list long enough (again, what's that look like? I don't know yet), I'll alphabetize the list and choose from those blogs that are the "most connected." Right now I've got B working on helping me (another gift) by importing the list into both Excel and Minitab, which count duplicates and does statistics stuff. We're just futzing with it now--I don't plan to be done with this step for another week or more.

I'm hoping that this will be a rigorous enough method for limiting the pool and for selecting the most "connected" writers. I've got a few concerns, though. The first is that right now, most of who is coming up--understandably so, considering that I started with Joho--are bloggers who are blogging ABOUT networks, connectivity, social software, social structures, etc. It seems like if I end up with a subject pool who take up the very discussion I'm working to engage, things will all get a little too "meta" for me. That is, it might be too difficult to orchestrate my discussion as separate from theirs. (?)

To remedy this, I'll probably construct at least one more potential subject pool that begins from a different blogger--one who is decidedly not part of the extended Joho network.

But I feel like I'm up against problems with this. This process seems a bit scattershot. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to begin from a "pure" place--a blogroll on a blog that is more certainly a central node.

Ah. What I should do is conduct the first subject pool centrality survey, and then take the most-linked blog from that initial list as my starting point, and from there generate the list from which I'll select the blogs for the network/rhetorical analysis...

Except really, that is what Technorati did for me in the first place. So. *sigh*.

I just feel like I need to be using a method or formula that is extensive and clinical-sounding, like eigenvector centrality. Of course, I go cross-eyed trying to understand all the "if this...let such-and-so be this..." But I'm pretty sure if I found someone who did understand all those lambdas to help me (that would, of course be another gift), I could make it work.

Next: the real reason I titled this entry "gift economies." It wasn't originally going to be about all the help I'm getting on this diss. But the post is too far gone at this point to try to recover my original purpose; I'll blog that tomorrow.

Posted by madeline at 02:43 PM | Permalink

I'm working now with Collin's charge: how can I go about beginning to define network theory? So I'm familiarizing myself with those existing ideas, theories, or systems that will help me or inform any theory I construct.

The first is:

Actor-Network-Theory. My exposure to ANT is limited; I've got Jeff Rice's post on ANT clipped--as well as stuff from John Law, and some of Anne Galloway's discussions of actor networks. I have yet to look to Latour's stuff, though I will since everyone references him.

John Law argues "that social agents are never located in bodies and bodies alone, but rather that an actor is a patterned network of heterogeneous relations, or an effect produced by such a network. The argument is that thinking, acting, writing, loving, earning -- all the attributes that we normally ascribe to human beings, are generated in networks that pass through and ramify both within and beyond the body. Hence the term, actor-network -- an actor is also, always, a network."

Also, it's important to note that while actors ARE networks themselves, it is not only human agents that create and participate in networks. ANT ascribes agency to the tools and machines (ugh, where did I just read a thing about the difference between tools and machines?? must find must find ah--Turkle talks about Marx's distinction between tool and machine. look it up). This reminds me of Selber's postcritical stance, which allows him to locate change agents not in the technology itself but instead "in a nexus of social forces" (8). Later, Selber posits that "[as] a human extension, the computer is not self-determining in design or operation. ... [It] depends upon a user, who if skilled enough can use and manipulate its (non-neutral) affordances to help reshape the world" (40). Essentially, Selber argues against the theory of autonomous technology (41) and says that the tools themselves hold no responsibility for cultural and social shifts.

I know that I'm creating an easy binary out of something far more complex, but I think there might be usefulness in my oversimplification. I understand that ANT is a slippery non-theory for some (like Rice), and for others is a full-blown ethnographic methodology where "follow the actor" is the refrain. But the other compelling approach that ANT offers is one in which inscriptions are studied. And it is in this application of ANT that strikes me: "Artifacts of all kinds, including documents, images, and other information artifacts, both carry and shape the work"(Van House).

These inscriptions, if we can take them up not only as texts like blog entries but also the social software (the tools, here) itself, become actants.

Selber doesn't say that technology is invisible. Clearly. But in order to define and describe a theory of network behavior that focuses on the social nature of writing and the performance of identity, it seems as though we will need to attribute at least a portion of network behavior to the tools themselves. (?)

Posted by madeline at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)