I’ve been trying to sit with some of my frustrations about sociable technologies lately. I’ve been trying to work through them in order to understand why Liz’s frustration with blogging research resonates and why i start twitching every time people put together panels that pit blogs against “big” journalism. I wanted to let go of my boiling anger over the fact that YASNS do not look like “real” social networks.
I realized that all of these concerns come from a common root. Sociable technologies are all built on metaphors. They are often an attempt to model a set of practices already known in everyday life. Yet, as models, the technologies are not the same as the metaphors on which they are based. The result is an entirely new form that encourages entirely new practices.
Metaphors are not new in the technological world. Email’s metaphor was built into its naming. Yet, today, when we talk about email, we can draw on the metaphor of mail, but we all know that email is something entirely different. It is a fundamentally new communication system, not simply an electronic form of its predecessor.
My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a distanced vantage point.
What is special (and magnificently more frustrating) about blogs is that they stem from many metaphors, including newspapers/magazines, journals/diaries, and log notebooks. No wonder people are up in arms screaming that it’s not like a newspaper, it’s like a diary! or vice versa. They’re both right and wrong. If you’re stuck in a metaphoric understanding of blogging, the conflicting metaphors are problematic and discount your approach to the system.
Now that most people are on email, it is rare to have to explain that form. But when people were starting up, it was confusing. My grandparents thought that i couldn’t write because my emails were strewn with spelling errors, lacked capitalization and were often fragments. Nowadays, they get it because they get that email is different than letters.
With blogging and YASNS, people haven’t “gotten it” yet. Even many of the people creating these technologies still think that they’re building out the metaphors. Of course, if they stay trapped in the metaphor, they’re doomed to failure. It is crucial to understand that YASNS and blogs are different than their metaphoric precursors.
This is precisely why it’s bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it’s also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.
[Also posted at apophenia; more comments there]
1. Elijah Wright on July 1, 2004 3:32 PM writes...
If you're that deeply embedded in the practice - as I would say that a number of folks here are - then you can not easily maintain the illusion that you have objectivity.
Blog research by folks who are heavy bloggers is easily attacked in much the same way as other participant-observer research. For some disciplines, that's quite all right. For others, it is a bit more of a problem.
Permalink to Comment2. Stewart on July 1, 2004 3:47 PM writes...
"With blogging and YASNS, people haven’t 'gotten it' yet."
What do you know that they don't? (Not trying to be too aggressive; just not sure I believe there is anything to "get".)
Permalink to Comment3. Seth Finkelstein on July 1, 2004 4:33 PM writes...
"The result is an entirely new form that encourages entirely new practices."
You mean that It's A New Era, where Everything We Know Is Wrong?
Permalink to Comment4. Will Davies on July 1, 2004 6:55 PM writes...
Metaphors are one thing, but analogies are another problem altogether. Thought I ought to confess the following...
http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000767.html
Blogs are like all sorts of things.
Permalink to Comment5. christianhauck on July 2, 2004 4:42 AM writes...
a good metaphor is like a diagonal frog.
Permalink to Comment6. Roger Benningfield on July 2, 2004 9:18 AM writes...
Danah: "My grandparents thought that i couldn’t write because my emails were strewn with spelling errors, lacked capitalization and were often fragments. Nowadays, they get it because they get that email is different than letters."
It isn't email that's different. It's the growing lack of civility in our culture... "I don't care enough about you or my own words to even *try* to correct my typos, reach for the shift key, or whatever."
People who send emails comprised of a single word, with all the content in the subject, with no paragraph breaks, with no discenable beginning or ending to any given thought... I avoid their emails like a plague. I deal with them as little as possible, or push them toward IM, where their lack of consideration is masked by the medium's real-time aspects.
Permalink to Comment7. Jon Husband on July 3, 2004 2:41 PM writes...
yes and no, IMO. One could argue that social discourse, connecting, relating and being in community on dryland have been twisted, re-engineered and distorted by the various factors that have encroached on social life in the last 20-3o years or so - to the point where the only place you can create and participate in anything resembling dialogue is amongst close friends, in family and (perhaps) in sanctioned "places" such as universities or defined forums.
Arguably, blogs are re-creating some degree of the ability to construct dialogue. One of the only uncontrolled places left to let voice be what it will be is online.
And yes, online we are all busy re-creating what is sociology, in a new set of conditions -some aspects will be quite different, and I think we may find that many of the fundamental principles will take shape in very similar ways, tho' we will discover nuances and new possibilities from the collapsing of time and space, coupled with the "save" function.
The possibilities that excite me the most are those that may disrupt established understandings of power, control, reach and responsibility.
Permalink to Comment8. zephoria on July 5, 2004 2:34 PM writes...
Elijah - no one involved in qualitative methods is truly objective and i think that it's an illusion to think so at any point. The key is reflexivity.
Stewart - they don't get that blogging/YASNS are different than their metaphors. In other words, folks are still arguing for blogs as a replacement of journalism and YASNS as the way to manage your RL social network. Those tools are separate.
Seth - this is nothing to do with right/wrong. While blogs may have been built based on a metaphor of journals or newspapers, they are no longer related to those original referents. Blogs are entirely different than newspapers; both are valuable, but they must be considered differently.
Will - at least your analogies are hysterical!
Roger - i disagree wholeheartedly. Have someone transcribe what you say when you're talking to a friend. What happened to your grammar!?!? Email is not letter-writing... what you're doing is communicating. It's not an art - it's a process of information flow. You may disagree with the cultural norms that evolved, but they are norms set forward by a lot of people.
I don't know why Nancy White's entry didn't trackback, but anyone interested in this thread should read it.
[PS: Sorry that it took me so long to respond to all of these. Thank you so much for the great responses!!]
Permalink to Comment9. Elijah Wright on July 6, 2004 7:27 PM writes...
People confuse the words, "some bias is inevitable" with the words, "it is okay to promote biased work without accounting for that inbuilt bias".
People are weird.
Permalink to Comment10. Pete on July 7, 2004 11:55 AM writes...
Elijah - true dat. The issue is that while an intimate, ground level view of the social impact of a given technology can provide initial insights, they don't provide a meaningful global view. As Nancy White's post on this topic attests, my experience is not your experience. Understanding the patterns and practice of the medium through practice is one thing, but collecting subjective personal experiences and selling them as representative of the whole without additional data is intellectually dishonest.
Permalink to Comment11. James Cole on July 8, 2004 7:41 AM writes...
Minor comment: I don't think the problem is metaphor or metaphoric understanding, per se. Metaphor is pretty unavoidable -- all language and thought is, it seems, fundamentally metapaphorical (see, for example, Lakoff and Johnson's book "Metaphor's we live by") -- and the problems don't come from metaphor itself, but from poor application and interpretation of metaphors. What I think's going on in the situation you describe is seeing the described object too literally in terms of the metaphor, and more specifically, as the old thing in new clothes. This is a phenomena we're familiar with -- think of cars as horeseless carriages, or CDs as compact disks.
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