“For the purpose of this report, interaction (that is face-to-face interaction) may be roughly defined as the reciprocal influence on individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence. (…) A ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants. Taking a particular participant and his performance as a basic point of reference, we may refer to those who contribute the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants. The pre-established pattern of action which is unfolding during a performance and which may be presented or played through on other occasions may be called a ‘part’ or ‘routine’.” p. 26/27

(At which point Goffman refers to Von Neumann & Morgenstern’s The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour in a footnote).

“A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropiate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be realized.” p. 81

(Reminder to myself: on p. 232/233 Goffman describes five perspectives for analyzing ‘social establishments’: technical, political, structural, cultural and dramaturgical).

“In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character effectively attempts to induce others to hold in regard to him. While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads to audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation — this self — is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited, or discredited”. p. 244/245

The next paragraph is even better maybe; Goffman regards the person as a “peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time”, while the means for producing selves are “often bolted down in social establishments”. The theater metaphor provides him with the idea of a ‘back region” with “tools for shaping the body”, a “front region with its fixed props”; co-participants on stage and an audience. He then states: “The self is a product of all of these arrangements, and in all of its parts bears the marks on this genesis.” p. 245.

(It’s this framework that allows for applying ‘Goffman’ to the scene of personal publishing.)

“A character staged in a theatre in not in some ways real, not does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence man; but the succesful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques — the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations.” p. 246/247

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, London, 1990 (1959).

Goffmann applied to blogging by Danah Boyd: http://www.zephoria.org/alterity/archives/2005/03/goffman_and_pos.html.

A beautiful book, for various reasons. First of all a wonderfull overview and introduction into Latours view on technology. Secondly a very precise account of how a revolutionary type of metro never gets ‘off the ground’ — because of the love for technology (and other reasons), or rather the lack of it: Aramis is a project that does not go through translations… that is not negotiated enough. (Who loves has to negotiate and change). Thirdly it shows that one can write a true sociological novel, or do novelistic sociology. (A bit what Powers does from the side of the novel — Latour and Powers love each others work).

“By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.” p. 23

“Give me the state of things, and I’ll tell you what people can do — this is how technology talks. Give me the state of human beings, and I’ll tell you how they will form things — this is the watchword of sociology. But both of these maxims are inapplicable! For the thing we are looking for is not a human thing, nor is it an inhuman thing. It offers rather, a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between waht humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans. It translates the one into the other.” p. 213

“The work of folding technological mechanisms can go from complication to complexity. This is because technological detours go from zero to infinity according to whether the translation goes through intermediaries or through mediators.” p. 219

Bruno Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology, Harvard UP, Cambridge &c., 1996 (1993)

“The thirteenth-century Franciscan, St. Bonaventura, said that there were four ways of making books: ‘A man might write the works of others, addding and changing nothing in which case he is simply called a ‘scribe’ (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a ‘compiler’ (compilator). Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a ‘commentator’ (commentator) … Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an ‘author’ (auctor).’ ”

Quoted in Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communications and Cultural Transformations in early-modern Europe, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 121/122

I promised to up some quotes from Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ambient/, a book that takes a closer look at some of the webdevelopments of the past two years, focussing on yes, findability, traceability, and wayfinding. What to say about a book like this one? Yes, I recognize the problems that Morville identifies, yes, he gives a good overview of current developments (the chapter on the Semantic Web versus folksonomies is balanced and therefore quite good), yes in this very American way that also will appeal to intelligent businessmen, he gets his message across and also refers to Wittgenstein of Lakoff & Johnson when he likes too, or to some obscure psychology-paper if that’s necessary. His writing style is maybe a bit too informal, too much talking-as-if-he’s-presenting-in-front-of-you, but I’m not unsympathetic towards such a pedagogic approach (because that’s what it is). So why does a book like this leave me unstatisfied? Firstly because he doesn’t have new information for me (but he probably has for others). Secondly because when he is critical — and Morville certainly is critical — he only skims the surface, doesn’t dig, doesn’t go into the entangledness of politics, economics and technology. It never becomes really dark and dirty: he believes in markets, intelligent customers and discriminating consumers — but abhors fastfood. He’s not always optimistic, he knows — and points out — that humans are blind and lazy in many respects, but he certainly believes that we have the power to design technology that is good for us, as the internet shows. Nevertheless, if one is not so up to date, this book might bridge the gap.

Well, some quotes then…

“This fast food approach to information drives librarians crazy. “Our information is healthier and tastes better too” they shout. But nobody listens. We’re too busy Googling.” p. 55

“The Web allows our information seeking to grow more iterative and interactive with each innovation. The berrypicking model [of aquiring information] is more relevant today than ever.” p. 60

“The human natural tendency in information seeking is to fallback on passive and sampling and selecting behaviors derived from millions of years of [evolution]” p. 61 (Actually a quote from Marcia Bates, 2002)

“Most of the world will never be ready for the Semantic Web. And We’re still waiting for the few that constitute the rest to catch up.” p. 133

“… most categories we emply in daily life are defined by fuzzy cognitive models rather than objective rules.” p. 133 [Morville pits Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By against the Semantic Web].

“How will we make sense of this tower of babble? In the midst of this cacophony, to whom will we listen? Who will we trust? Will we rely on formal hierarchy or free tagging, library or marketplace, cathedral or bazaar? Will we place our confidence in words or people? And are we talking about cyberspace or ubicomp? The answer lies in the question, for we will not be bound by the false dichotomy of Aristotelian logic. To manage complexity, we must embrace faceted classification, polyhierarchy, pluralistic aboutness and pace layering. And to succeed we must collaborate across categories, using boundary objects to negotiate, translate, and forge shared understanding.” p. 153/154

“Findability is at the center of a fundamental shift in the way we define authority, allocate trust, make decisions, and learn independently.” p. 162

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, O’Reilly, Sebastopol Ca. 2005.

More Morville: http://www.findability.org/.

There was no chance for live blogging at the SLSA-conference.

Here’s what I typed at some point: “No, no live blogging, and how I miss being able to quickly check something online, find a reference, an answer to a question, the name of an author mentioned, while listening to a presentation. How I miss multitasking, just reading some blogs while listening. How I miss it, to write down my notes in a disciplined way, and upload, while listening: my mind will not wander that much. But there is no airport here, not for me. And a marked difference between new media conferences and the academic world is that almost nobody here is using a laptop during sessions, which make me think I am not playing by the rules here when I have my laptop open and start typing.”

‘Ein neuer Service im Netz war früher an der Idee der Software orientiert, eine halbwegs stabile Versionsnummer rauszubringen. Heutzutage ist alles, gerne auch beliebig lange, Beta.’

Sacha Kosch, WEB 2.0 Einleitung, in Debug 98, http://www.de-bug.de/texte/4137.html.

(I’m reading through 2 years of DeBug issues).

PS, the catchword is of course ‘perpetual beta’. Knew that, but some things one forgets when reading a different language.

http://decodeunicode.org/; a wiki with about all the unicode-characters! So, thousands and thousands an thousands of characters from all written languages.

‘Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference material, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.’

Allan Kay & Adele Goldberg, ‘Personal Dynamic Media’, Computer 10 (3): p. 31-41, March 1977. (Quoted from Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort (eds.) The New Media Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge &c, 2003, p. 394.)

We have that, don’t we.

Close Encounters is thet title of the conference where I’ll be speaking for 20 minutes on wednesday 9.00-10.30, in a panel with Tobias van Veen and Trace Reddell. Tobias asked me to propose a paper in the panel that he and Trace Reddell were proposing & we got accepted: http://www.slsa.nl.

So more than 10 years after my 4-year stint as PhD student at the University of Amsterdam ended, “I’ll be back”. Richer qua experience, being more & widely well-read and with a string of published articles in my bag. But also: not having written anything for an academic magazine ever (hmm, or does writing a review for Krisis count?). Also I have never spoken at an academic conference. I am looking forward to 3 days of listening to papers. I hope I will be able to do some live blogging.

Btw, I will be speaking about blogs & mp3-blogs, memory, hoarding, mixing and the transformation of, well, the culture of enjoying music. (Still have to find the right words, les mots justes).

This is already from last week (21th May): the presentation of the Ubiscribe POD. Only now I’m beginning to realize what we’ve done…

PS, left to right: your blogger, Inga Zimprich, Jouke Kleerebezem, Sandra Fauconnier, Claudia Hardi.