Here’s the announcement of an evening of thoughtful thought thoughtfully presented by at The New School on April 13:

danah boyd will argue four points. 1) Networked publics are changing the way public life is organized. 2) Our understandings of public/private are being radically altered 3) Participation in public life is critical to the functioning of democracy. 4) We have destroyed youths’ access to unmediated public life. Why are we now destroying their access to mediated public life? What consequences does this have for democracy?

Trebor Scholz will present the paradox of affective immaterial labor. Content generated by networked publics was the main reason for the fact that the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for most Internet traffic last year. Community is the commodity, worth billions. The very few get even richer building on the backs of the immaterial labor of very very many. Net publics comment, tag, rank, forward, read, subscribe, re-post, link, moderate, remix, share, collaborate, favorite, write. They flirt, work, play, chat, gossip, discuss, learn and by doing so they gain much: the pleasure of creation, knowledge, micro-fame, a “home,” friendships, and dates. They share their life experiences and archive their memories while context-providing businesses get value from their attention, time, and uploaded content. Scholz will argue against this naturalized “factory without walls” and will demand for net publics to control their own contributions.

Ethan Zuckerman will present his work on issues of media and the developing world, especially citizen media, and the technical, legal, speech, and digital divide issues that go alongside it. Starting out with a critique of cyberutopianism, Zuckerman will address citizen media and activism in developing nations, their potential for democratic change, the ways that governments (and sometimes corporations) are pushing back on their ability to democratize.

Friday, April 13, 2007, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
New York City
Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff, and alumni with valid ID

I wish I could be there. [Tags: danah_boyd trebor_scholz ethan_zuckerman sociology economics media ]

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On March 21, at 6:30, I’m holding a Berkman “Web of Ideas” discussion of whether and how participatory culture encourages participatory democracy. The discussion is open to all. (The Berkman Center is at 23 Everett in Cambridge: Map.)

It’s not obvious that just because we’re participating in our culture more, our democracy will also change. Certainly, politics and culture are not distinct realms, so our expectations in one should affect the other. But not necessarily. Take some prototypical objects of cultural participation. What would you choose? Wikipedia? Blogosphere? File sharing? Second Life? Delicious.com? AssignmentZero ? What is our participation in those and what does that participation teach us? How much of that is political? And do the lessons transfer? For example, Wikipedia teaches us — well, those of us who think Wikipedia is awesome — that credentialed authorities are not the only ones who can be trusted. But does that apply beyond building encyclopedias? Does it affect our view of, say, policy experts in the government? What are we learning and does it apply?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I’m not coming in with an hypothesis. I’m hoping you’ll come and remind us of what Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler have to say on the topic. And who else?

So, let’s talk. [Tags: culture politics participatory_culture participatory_democracy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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At EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com, I’ve posted about the joy of reading an edition of Hamlet that surfaces hundreds of years of scholarly disputes about the meaning of Shakespeare’s words, disputes that often are without resolution. We don’t know what the old bird/bard meant, but that’s all the more reason to love him! [Tags: shakespeare everything_is_miscellaneous hamlet hermeneutics ]

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Here’s a question I try to answer in the latest issue of my (free) newsletter: If too much information is noise, what’s too much meaning?

In fact, here’s the table of contents of that issue. (Note: The answer I come up with is not good enough to count as a spoiler.)

[Tags: doep puzzle everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Yochai Benkler, author of the single most important book about the Internet — The Wealth of Networks — is giving a “theme-setting” talk.

He points to the wide distribution of computer power and “insight, intuition and experience” across the population, as opposed to their concentration during the industrial revolution. The behaviors that have already been there but on the periphery — friendship, cooperation, decency — now move to the core. We see “commons-based prodiuction,” i.e., produciton without exclusion from the inputs and outputs. This decentralizes the authority to act. “The commons locates authority to act where capacity resides.”

It enables peer production and sharing: cooperation without control or the price system. It is based on social relations. (See “Sharing Nicely.”) He points to the success of open source software, and to a mapping of Mars craters by a collaborative process (“Martian clickworkers”). Also, of course, Wikipedia. He asks us to imagine when Wikipedia started that someone predicted that Nature would find it about equal to Britannica in its science articles in five years. He concludes: “We’re beginning to see a solution space, rather than a particular phnenomenon.” There’s a “load balancing of motivations over time” — people can contribute when they want and for whatever reasons they have.

“Building such platforms is hard.” “Coase’s Penguin” says peer production tasks require modularity, granularity and integration. (He says he’s been working on seeing how this works. He’s looking at experimental literaure on cooperation and reciprocity, game theory, evolutionary biology and anthropology. “There are more design levers than I initially thought.” Factors include: Self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline and fairness. Introducing money can muck things up.

So long as large-scale needed to be concentrated, we were llimited to firms and governments, or we could work in decentralized form through the market. Now we’re seeing a non-market decentralization via social sharing and exchange…a parallel form of production. We go from recording industry to p2p, Microsoft to open source, Grollier to wikipedia, telecoms to Skype. And there are new “opportunity spaces,” from well behaved appliances to production tools. He points to the BBC citizen journalism effort, among other examples. [Yochai moves very quickly. . This is the double fudge Death by Chocolate form of knowledge overload.]

But, this is a threat to incumbent business models. So there’s a battle on. Yochai shifts to politics. “The core idea is that people now as a practical matter can do more for and by themselves.” And they can do more in loose assoiciation with others. When it comes to democracy, our epxerience “is purely with a mass mediated public sphere.” We’re beginning to learn what it means to have a networked public sphere. He recounts how concerns about e-voting machines from Diebold were raised by activitists, put out info, and how it spread.

The Internet democratizes. It’s boring by now, but important, he says. The first generation objections are generally unfounded: “The Daily Me” fragmentation hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t polarize the way claimed. For one thing, polarization is a matter of interpretation: Is 85% of links pointing to like-minded sites a sign of polarization or its opposite? And the power law misses the topology of the Net that hooks small sites to large sites as part of a community. Those large sites then can get the word out.

There’s a strong “see for yourself” ethic. We come to understand that everything we read is a provisional judgment, rather than training ourselves to seek authority as we did in the mass distribution system.

The Human Development Index depends on who and how produces information, Commons-based and peer production are beginning to help: open source, open academic publishing , free hs science texts in South Africa, BiOS and BioForge out of Australia.

The threat is being played out over institutional ecology. “Rules can make some actions easier or harder.” Incumbernts are trying to make distributed production harder, more expensive, subject to permission. And there’s a push back to be free and productive. Broadband duopoly vs. muni broadband. “Trusted computing systems” vs. general purpose devices. Software patents vs. free and open source. DMCA vs. sharing and open innovation. There’s been a tightening up of all the “toggles,” e.g., copyright. “Law has been systematically optimized for control-based business models…”

“But we’re beginning to practice new ways of being free and equal human beings.” This is subject to a persistent battle.

Now there’s a panel: Mark Cooper, Elliot Maxwell, KC Clafy and Gigi Sohn.

Elliot Maxwell talks about Yochai’s ideas applied to pharmaceuticals. Among other things, he points to the PLoS library of failed clinical trials.

KC Claffy (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis). Things we cannot measure on the Internet: The topology from one point to another at any layer. Propagation of routing. Router won’t give us its entire state (it’s second best routes.) One way delay from two places on the Internet without customized instruments. Can’t get an hour of packets from the core. Accurate flow counts. Accurate bandwidth. How much spam, phishing. A commons infrastructure would allow all this. (See this presentation.)

GG Sohn from Public Knowledge first praises The Wealth of Networks. Then she says that her one complaint is that Yochai gives the government too much of a break.

Mark Cooper wants to chart a course between Yochai’s optimism and Lessig’s pessimism. Yochai points to the use of collaborative production in the material economy. But, in his politics he shrugs off the attacks under the claim that in the long run the superior mode of production will prevail. “I think he’s clueless about politics.” But, “we can build an alternative politics on Yochai’s epistemological and moral base.” We need more than the blogosphere. We have not yet shown we can transform the public sphere. The public sphere needs institutions that transform the routine activities of daily life. [Yes, but how we do this except by having good ideas an implementing them? E.g., come up with another Creative Commons.]

Q: (isenberg) Yochai, would you like to address whether loose goosey has a chance against righty tighty?
A: There’s a common thread between Gigi and Mark. In the long term we care about social practices rather than policies, laws and institutions, because those are subsystems we occupy and life practices are the outcome. Law matters, but the critical question is: Do we need an affirmative set of rules that will enable things, or is blocking bad law and rules enough? I used to work on reforming laws and was pessimistic, and now I’ve flipped. “I do think that what we’re seeing in the Net roots, in the blogosphere, in the global access to knowledge is that political organization is also shifting away rom the standing institutional model, toward more ad hoc networks that mix different kinds of players nad get updated over time…and that disconnect and reconnect, rather than relying on stable institutions…I see the future of political engagement being much flatter, ad hoc…” [Tags: f2c yochai_benkler economics peer_production ]

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I did the “wrapup” at BeyondBroadcast, and tried to talk about the thought I keep coming back to but am never able to articulate. At least it was brief – under 10 minutes, I think. Here’s the outline of what I said:

1. What’s the thread between participatory culture and participatory democracy? Why think one has to do with the other? How can participatory culture be “transformative,” as Henry Jenkins suggested in his terrific opening talk. (Digression: The mainstream media are focused on including “user-generated content” on their sites as their response to participatory culture, but that’s not transformative.)

2. Well, what is democracy. There are bunches of definitions: Majority vote, society of equals, government that gets its authority from the people. But most important, it’s ours. The government isn’t theirs, the way it was the king’s.

3. So, what does “ours” mean? Again, there are bunches of definitions: What the law gives you control over, on our side, of our nature or essence. But, when it comes to culture, look at the difference between your study of a foreign culture and your participation in yours. Culture is ours because it makes us who we are; we are indistinguishable from it.

4. But, participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It’s ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we’re inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it’s not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours.

5. So, how does this new ours affect democracy? (And it’s more likely to affect democracy before it affects politics since those folks have a death grip on power.) How does this ours get turned into an us that operates politically? I dunno. I.e., this talks makes no progress on the question it raises :( [Tags: beyondbroadcast07 culture politics democracy media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Berkman Fellow (and MacArthur genius) Lewis Hyde is giving a Tuesday lunch talk on who owns creative content. [As always, I’m paraphrasing, typing quickly, getting things wrong, leaving things out.]

I.

He begins by quoting Goethe in the 1830s about his writings as “the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe” (quoting Goethe) vs. Emerson in “Self-Reliance” writing, “Insist on yourself; never imitate…” Lewis says our protocols around “intellectual property” side with Emerson. Defending “IP” against being enclosed can be seen, Lewis says, as defending a particular way of being human.

Science, he says, is collective. He cites Benjamin Franklin’s work on electrical theory. “None of what he did was the result of a solitary genius,” Lewis says. His equipment came from friends. He worked with three other folks in his lab. Franklin worked with Leyden jars (the first capacitors) which obviously were not invented by Franklin or they would have been called Franklin jars. Franklin also depended on Newton’s Optics, especially Query 21: “Aether (like our air) may contain particles which endeavor to recede from one another,” giving Franklin the idea that electricity was a fluid [Don’t trust my paraphrase here!]. Franklin also used Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood. “Finally, it was a culture that believed in open communication.” E.g., some German scientists published work on static electricity, which was published in France and translated into English. “This is how all scientists work: All collaborative and cumulative,” says Lewis.

Yet the image of Frankilin is that of a solitary genius with the mind of a “child of nature,” i.e., someone with an immediate relation to nature.

The 18th century idea of open communication arises from their view of the nature of truth. Franklin wrote to friends that his ideas are “crude and hasty,” but (Franklin wrote) communicating scientific ideas often improves them. “Collective inquiry is less prone to error than individual inquiry,” said Franklin. “The breeding ground of the truth lies in the breeding ground of conversation.” Franklin did not defend his ideas about electricity on the ground that “If they are right. Truth and Experience will support them. If worng they ought to be refuted and rejected,” he wrote. “Disputes are apt to sour one’s Temper.” The truth arises in conversation, not in solitude, reports Lewis.

This affected Franklin’s view of the ownership of ideas. He declined a patent on the wood stove (which is not known, one might add, as the Leydon stove) because inventions come out of a community. Private interests may prompt a person to defend his ideas whether right or wrong, Franklin thought, says Lewis.

Salston in The Common Thread about the Human Genome Project says that you have to have protocols of non-ownership if you want to do science. In this he is like Franklin.

Franklin’s work was the result of a collective being that bears the name Franklin, Lewis concludes.

II.

Franklin often published anonymously, which was a gesture to indicate that the author intended to write impartially, Lewis says, speaking for the public good, not private ends. Thomas Paine explained the anonymity of Common Sense:e “Who the author of this production is, is wholly unnecessary to the public, as the object for attention is the doctrine itself, not the man.”

It was believed that each individual has only a partial view: a part of the truth, and partial to one one’s own interests. Opinion (which we would call “belief” these days, says Lewis) existed between truth and falsity. It was assumed to belong to individuals. It wasn’t as certain as truth, of course. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin gave a speech saying that he had doubts about the Constitution, but he had doubts about his doubts. “I consent…to this Constitution … The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good,” Franklin said. Each must doubt his own doubt for the sake of the public good. “He asks them to give up their partial views,” Lewis says. His speech itself modeled that.

“For the 18th C., self-sacrifice is constitutive of citizenship in the public sphere. The citizen cannot own his or her ideas.” Where writers claim their writing in their own distinctive voice, it will be harder to create a lively public sphere, Lewis says. [Or the character of that public sphere changes, and certainly how it supports truth. The Internet is a lively public sphere, but it is not a selfless distilling of truth. Truth is something else on the Net.]

“Can you come up with a case in which self-erasure in public utterance enables a valued way of being?” Lewis asks himself. He answers that when judges issue opinions, they frequently plagiarize the briefs from the attorneys. But, says Lewis, plagiarism is the wrong term. Legal writing tends to be written by communities, and you can’t claim it by copyright. Having your work cut and pasted without attribution into an opinion is a sign of success and honor.

A second example. The MLK “I have a Dream” speech copyright is owned by his estate and it charges for its use. Our practices around public discourse constitute who we are, says Lewis. The King estate has moved MLK from one category to another. “It is a type of patricide,” concludes Lewis.

Overall point: The choices we make about the commons is a choice about what type of being we are. Hollywood has one view. Franklin had another.

Q: (me) That was amazing. Just to pick up one point, the 18th C view of anonymity is so different from ours, from what you say. They were anonymous in order to present a non-partial, non-individual belief whereas we tend to use anonymity to enable us to be so partial and individual that we dare not sign our names. What does that tell us about who we are and our relation to truth?
A: I’ve hidden some trap doors in this talk. E.g., you had to be somebody before you could become the nobody of anonymity. Women and slaves didn’t have enough standing to be able to erase themselves through anonymous works. So, my response to your question is to complicate the 18th C view of anonymity.

[I missed the next question, but here’s Lewis’ answer.] A lot of this goes back to the myths of how authors make a living. The myth is that you make your living out of copyrights, which is true for only a tiny handful of writers.

The Spectator was in fact a persona, says Lewis. The Spectator was everywhere observing. This is like print itself, says Lewis. Franklin began his career by ripping off The Spectator. His brother was the first to publish a newspaper “without authority.” The self was shaped by the development of a free press.

Q: You over-emphasize the social side of self.
A: Because individualism is not in danger. I think Franklin’s solution to the circle of self and group was humor. “If I had become humble, I would have been proud of my humility,” Franklin said. He was incredibly vain and a dedicated humble servant, and he managed the interface with humor.

Q: (JP ) (i) When Franklin gave up patents, he was wealthy. (ii) Do you have a normative view about mashups?
A: (i) His wealth was another trapdoor I tried to hide. His wealth repositions his argument. I’ve searched his works for every remark on patent, and I’ve found one case where he argued for granting a patent to people who wanted to immigrate from the UK with a patent for a technique used in the UK…He was simultaneously for patent and for piracy of a British patent. (ii) We’re in transition. We need to preserve a balance. I do believe in one of the original arguments for patent: To establish people apart from patronage.

Q: (me) Are you saying we should go back to the 18th C sense of self? You seem to like it. [Hmm. It sounds hostile in print. It wasn’t in person. Not at all.]
A: I’m using history as a way of exploring the self. We can’t go back to the 18th C, but it provides one way of opening up the question. It’s not 18th C to say we’re collective beings, not just private individuals.

Q: (me) But at the next level of detail of how we’re social and private and our relation to truth, are we now different?
A: It’s going to be different because it’s not a print culture any more. It will have different self formations.

Q: (doc) Has the modern corporation affected the self?
A: Michael Sandel’s Democracy and Its Discontents. [Tags: lewis_hyde commons patents benjamin_franklin copyright copyleft anonymity ]

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Paul Graham, the massively talented essayist, has published a piece that further explains the ideas in his “Taste for Makers” article. The new piece is called “How Art Can Be Good” and it is, of course, excellent.

I’m proud to say that he was stimulated to do this in small part by my interview of him (video) at the Berkman Center. I’d like to think I annoyed him just enough to push him over the edge to write the new essay :)

A couple of days after our conversation, I wrote up a response to “Taste for Makers.” But it slipped between my cracks–I have become all cracks, no flooring–so I never posted it. I’m posting it here, even though it’s now obviated by Paul’s new essay, “How Art Can Be Good.” But I did the work, and I want to get it “on the record” so to speak. I’ll come back to “How Art Can Be Good” soon…

Paul Graham was motivated to write his essay, Taste for Makers by his father saying that something was just a matter of taste, as if there were nothing more to be said on the topic. Taste is not subjective, Paul argues. In his essay, he gives a dozen principles for designing beautiful things, principles that he urges are eternal and even—in my interview with him last week (video here)—trans-planetary: The proverbial space alien would respond to at least some of these principles. (Question I should have asked him: A space alien might, but do dogs? Dolphins?)

I agree that taste is not merely subjective, and Paul’s principles taken together and apart seem like helpful advice. (I am not a “maker” in Paul’s sense so I don’t have standing on such questions.) The case for taste needs to be made now more than ever, and Paul makes it with his usual casual elegance (which, we learned in the session I had with him last week, was the effort of non-casual labor). But I disagree with how he makes the case and the picture of art that flows from it.

The case for taste needs to be made because the alternative is ignorance, arrogance, and despair. “I don’t like Bach,” uttered by someone who has only heard one piece, forced on her by her seventh grade music teacher, betrays a type of aesthetic fundamentalism that thinks works can be experienced directly. You just sit down and listen. If you don’t like it, that’s the end of the story. In fact, the seventh grader doesn’t know how to listen to Bach. Further, as Paul points out, if left unchallenged, she’s implicitly told that she is a competent judge and that therefore beauty goes no further than the surfaces she experiences. Ignorance, arrogance, despair.

But, the way past this does not require affirming principles that, because they are eternal (or at least long-lasting) and trans-species, have the properties we expect of the objective.

Paul defines taste as the ability to recognize beauty. It is not “merely a matter of personal preference.” To be clear, I think we ought to differentiate taste from mere taste. Of those two, mere taste is far less problematic: Something is merely a matter of taste if it is simply a personal preference. I like chocolate ice cream and hate mint. You hate chocolate and like mint. If there’s nothing else to be said, it’s merely a matter of taste.

Taste is harder to understand, in part because in recent years it’s taken on an elitist cast, so there are cultural politics involved in its use. Think about when and on what occasions you might say, “She’s a woman of taste,” or “She’s got good taste.” Frequently, that’s a way of saying that a person likes expensive things. If talking about curators of major museums, the term “taste” may actually mean “mere taste”: If I say I like the taste of the curator of the MOMA, I’m probably not acusing the curator of the Met of being unable to recognize beauty; I’m probably saying that I happen, subjectively, to prefer the choices hanging at the MOMA.

So, “taste” is a tough word. Paul’s definition—the ability to recognize beauty—has the advantage of acknowledging that beauty is not a matter of mere subjective preference. But Paul’s definition may imply too simple a relationship between beauty and experience. Beauty and our recognition of it is conditioned by elements that Paul ascribes to mere fashion. (Fashion is, in Paul’s understanding, a trend in what I’m calling mere taste. Mullets are a matter of fashion.)

The problem with tying the non-subjectivity of taste to beauty is that beauty does not consist of a set of properties that can be specified, agreed upon and applied. Paul’s design principles say that beauty is simple, eternal, symmetrical, resembles nature, is hard but looks easy, is often slightly funny, is often strange, is often daring, etc. Of course Paul isn’t saying that these are either necessary or sufficient. But, any design principles cannot do more than capture the current taste in beauty. For example, I think Paul’s “Good design is simple” resolves into the tautology that “Bits that are extraneous are extraneous.” But which ones are extraneous? Even as an exhortation to prefer fewer bits to more bits (or, as Paul brilliantly explained it in our discussion, to prefer designs that compress better), it fails to capture periods in which, say, paintings tried to express the excessiveness of G-d’s gift or plays that revelled in language that no real character would ever have uttered.

Design principles can only capture current taste because beauty is not (despite Paul’s second principle) eternal. Sure, we can go back and point to paintings from hundreds of years ago that are still beautiful, and find the design principles that differentiate them from the ones that “fail the test of time.” But taste is built into this proof: Paul points to a Bronzino as a painting that still works and a van Eyck as one that does not (among examples I chose), explaining that the van Eyck is needlessly complex while the Bronzino has a simplicity beneath its surface. But, this can’t be evidence that simplicity is an eternal property of beauty because the selection of which old paintings are still beautiful is itself at issue. It’d be like me proving that sourness is an eternal property of beauty in the culinary arts by including pickles and lemon meringue pie and excluding leek soup and quiche from the list of beautiful cooked works.

It’d be different if there were agreement across ages and cultures about what goes on the list of The Beautiful. But taste—genuine taste—has fashions. The length of the fashion wave seems to lengthen at about the hundred year mark, lending credence to Paul’s view, but there are waves of taste nevertheless. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies have come into and out of fashion, and not just among the play-going public. Vermeer seems more prominent than fifty years ago. We find more beauty in Bronzino than van Eyck because that’s how our tastes run these days. We like the simple over the florid.

But I most definitely am not saying that it’s a matter of mere taste. Paul can tell us why he prefers Bronzino. He can bring us to see what’s there. Some of it is a fundamentalist reading of the painting: Notice that the background is extremely simple. Notice that the pattern on the dress would compress well. But some of what he says explains what isn’t on the surface of the painting: It was a court portrait, for which there were certain rules. By understanding the historic context, we see the beauty that’s there.

This is exactly what the best critics do. Simon Schama’s Rembrandt’s Eyes, for example, tells us about the historical and political climate in which Rembrandt painted The Night Watch. Someone who sees that painting free of that context and who pronounces it “boring,” is not seeing what’s there—or, more exactly, isn’t seeing what isn’t there.

But, that such criticism works is empirical evidence that eternality is not a design principle. Beauty is situated in one’s time and place because it is a way of seeing, and seeing is never fundamentalist. This has a few consequences.

First, it means that we can’t engage in the project of gathering up the beautiful and seeing what it has in common to find its eternal properties because recognizing beauty is itself a situated act. We don’t see The Night Watch the way the Dutch at the time did, just as we can’t see western Medieval art the way the people of the time did. Through education and imagination we can get closer or further from that experience, but if you’re a 21st century atheist brought up in a surfeit of images, you are miles away from the experience of a 15th century person seeing a picture of Heaven opening up or of St. Sebastian being pierced with arrows. Include those works in the canon, and simplicity will not show up as a virtue, but sanctity will.

Second, Paul thinks that fashion is the residue after the eternal, trans-species properties of beauty are subtracted. But in dropping out what’s context-dependent, much of the experience of beauty is lost. In fact, we can’t even understand what we’re looking at. The more we understand about the particulars of the time, place and person, the closer we get to seeing what’s there. Now, I think that Paul would say that a 15th century person viewing Piero del Pollaiulo’s painting of St. Sebastian might be distracted by the context-specific elements of the painting, whereas its beauty (if this is a beautiful painting, and I’m really not sure about that, but I do know that a photo of it is available on the Web, which is why I chose it) is what survived its context and is visible to moderns and to space aliens. I don’t know how to respond to that except by saying no. For me, a painting is not only an arrangement of color and form. Often, a picture depicts something. Its content is part of its beauty. But its content is dependent on time, culture, belief, language, history…It helps to know that that particular Bronzino painting was a court portrait, that the garden behind Mary in the van Eyck is planted with “lilies and roses symbolizing Mary’s virtues,” and that the guy pierced with arrows was a saint thought to be capable of interceding during plagues.

And this is why taste is not merely subjective. It’s not because beauty is objective, to be seen or missed. Nor does beauty devolve into a set of properties, since the properties themselves require us to make aesthetic judgments: Which bits are extraneous? When does symmetry become formula? Rather, taste is a defensible recognition of beauty. If all you can say is “I don’t like Bach because he sucks,” your taste is mere taste. As you learn more about what to listen for—what’s in the work and what isn’t in the work—the better your taste is and the more beauty you’ll find.

This leaves some huge questions. Suppose tasteful people disagree? I like Mozart’s string quartets more than I like his symphonies, and I like his symphonies more than I like Schumann’s Lieder. I may understand all three equally. (I don’t, but I get to make up my examples.) I may even be able to point out to others what’s beautiful about the Lieder while changing the station when they come on the radio. The difference is a subjective element in taste. To say that taste is subjective in this way, however, doesn’t mean that it’s nothing but subjective. Taste is a response to an object. Paul is right, imo, to point to that object and to remind us that taste is not merely subjective.

The object, however, is complex because it is a human creation, and thus has meaning within a particular context and situation. The same painting isn’t the same throughout time. It’s not just that during the 1960s, we rediscovered Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of Hell because they looked so “trippy.” Rather, the 15th century painting of St. Sebastian simply cannot look the same in an age of devotion as it does in an age when religion seems at best quaint. It may be beautiful now and then. It may even be beautiful continuously throughout history. But it is not the same painting and it isn’t the same beauty. Things don’t have beauty the way some nuggets have gold flecks in them and others don’t.

But, that doesn’t mean that taste merely subjectively picks out what’s beautiful, and that motel wall art is as beautiful as a Rembrandt. Rather, taste enables us to see the beauty that’s there, ideally in ways we can articulate and discuss. It may not be convincing the way a test for gold flecks is, but it is defensible. What we need to learn to see frequently is precisely the particulars that time has obscured. Taste, as the discussion of the beauty that’s there, thus is always unearthing more beauty.

Taste doesn’t just respond to beauty. It makes beauty.

[Tags: art aesthetics beauty paul_graham philosophy]

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In about an hour, I am giving an informal, 20-minute opening talk at the University of North Carolina’s social software conference. I share the floor with Thomas Vander Wal (his blog), the information architect who coined the term “folksonomy,” and someone who knows far more about the topic than I do. So, I’m going to stay as general and meaningless as I can. Here’s what I’m thinking of saying:

Why do we care about folksonomies? They’re easy to minimize as either (a) Just another tool in the kit, and/or (b) A phenomenon that’s been around for a while (e.g., eBay users’ preference for “laptop” over “notebook,” or language itself). But they’re genuinely exciting. Why?

Yes, they’re useful. I don’t want to downplay that, but the interest is out of proportion to their utility.

I think folksonomies have excited us because of what they say. They are symbols. But of what?

First, we’ve embraced folksonomies so fervently also because they stick it to The Man. We don’t need no stinkin’ experts to organize ideas and information! There is, of course, inefficiency built into expert-based taxonomies because they have to choose one way of ordering, and that one way is necessarily infested with personal, class, and cultural biases. As Clay Shirky says, “Metadata is worldview.” But beyond the inefficiency, simpy having someone else have the authority to say “It shall be filed thus” is a statement of political authority. Even when the experts do a good job—as they usually do, because they’re experts—it is still an implicit statement that someone else’s way of thinking is better than yours.

In the face of this, folksonomy says not just that we each have our own way, but that something like ours emerges from it. Folksonomies are proof of the power of emergence. Emergence is a fascinating phenomenon because it explains complexity through intrinsic simplicity. E.g., termites build complex towers by following rules so simple that they fit in a termite’s brain. But there is also a political side to our interest in emergence, beyond its explanatory power. Emergence is hope. It says (or we take it as saying) that left to ourselves, without extrinsic structuring or regulation or governance, we will be magnificent. This is beyond the hope implicit in democracy, that says a group will be able to live together if all are given equal power. We won’t just live together, but something far beyond the capabilities of any of us will emerge. Simply by being together, cathedrals will emerge.

Folksonomies also embrace excess. Publishing and broadcasting by their nature require us to trim the fat from our world. That’s how those systems survive—a publisher that published everything would go out of business on day one. Folksonomies, on the other hand, promise us that we will manage even if we include everything. In fact, folksonomies do better when there are massive numbers of tags. (They also are most useful when they remain diverse. A folksonomy that creates absolute momentum around a single tag, so that over time everyone uses only that tag, is not just non-optimal, it’s dangerous…a “tyranny of the majority.”)

Finally, in embracing tagging and folksonomies we’re rejecting the essentialism our Western tradition began with. Essentialism says that of all the ways of understanding a thing, one is its real way. This makes intuitive sense to us, because we recognize that using a hammer as a doorstop is an oddball use of a hammer; it remains first and foremost something we use for hammering. But essentialism is expensive to maintain. Its metaphysics are convoluted and unbelievable. It inhibits thought. It reflects cultural hegemony. It is unenforceable. And it alienates meaning, putting it into the world rather than among us where it belongs. Folksonomy returns meaning to us, but makes it larger than any one of us. We shouldn’t need folksonomy to do this; language itself should be proof enough. But essentialism has been such a powerful force that we do need folksonomy to kick it in its teeth one more time.

Essentialism includes not just the essences but also their arrangement, their ordering. Folksonomy makes that, too, ours…although, as anything more than a reflection of how we’ve joined and disjoined meaning, it makes me nervous. Beyond the tyranny of the majority, folksonomizing meaning removes the poetry of essentialism, replacing it with statistical averaging.

But folksonomy is not, will not, and should not be our only way of ordering the world. And that’s part of folksonomy’s symbolism as well. Or at least I hope so.

I wish I hadn’d written this post in such a hurry :( [Tags: folksonomy tagging taxonomy philosophy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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On Monday, I’m trying out a talk I’ll be giving at the U of North Carolina a few days later. The talk is called, for now, in a doomed attempt to be slightly light-hearted about it, “Being and Tags. Here are the five sections (not counting the zero-based prologue):

0. Three orders of order
1. Tiny tags
2. Are taxonomies real?
3. Can tags be wrong?
4. The miscellany beneath
5. Tagging meaning

The section that particularly worries me is #2—Perhaps you’ve heard that there is no one true taxonomy?— mainly because I think it argues against a position no one really holds. But I can’t tell any more.

I’m also worried about the presentation style. I’m trying to be more precise than usual, so I’ve written out a talk, tightly integrated with Powerpoint—yes, Powerpoint, dammit!—with tons of animations. While I carefully prepare presentations, I never read them from a script. Except for this one.

The whole thing is headed for disaster.

Although the Monday night talk started out as one in my Web of Ideas discussion series, it’s been assimilated into the Harvard-Yale Cyber Scholars series. So, at 6pm you can here Yale’s Shyam Balganesh talking about “Social Costs of Property Rights in Broadcast.” I’m on at 7pm. We’re serving Indian food. It’s open to everyone. [map] [Tags: tags taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous berkman philosophy aristotle]

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