Ranting and Reflecting

The Secret to Everything

2011-07-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

I have been pestering friends and colleagues, lately, with the claim that I have discovered the secret to everything. While I readily admit that I am engaging in gross hyperbole in order to engage the attention of people whom I wish to bounce the idea off of, I really do think I have stumbled on to something important. So as not to be coy, I will cut to the punch line as say that "play" is the secret to everything. Over the next few posts I plan to develop an argument in support of that claim.

The Role of the Imagination

2011-05-06T05:01:00.000-07:00

Way back in August of 2010 I started a thread on the role of the imagination in information systems research. Sadly, I got side tracked by other things and left the thread dangling. While I haven't written much about the role of imagination, I have certainly been thinking about it. And I have come to the conclusion that developing a powerful but disciplined imagination might well be one of the most important roles of education. Yes, I realize, that is another bold sweeping statement. But I would not make it, if I did not think I could back it up.

Since classes are done (except for a bit of grading) and summer time is here, I have the luxury of musing and wool gathering for a while. So I thought I would pick up this thread on the imagination. I will eventually get to the role of imagination in information systems research. But, for now, I just want to develop some foundation thoughts about the imagination.

Do I Really Believe All This Whacky Stuff?

2011-04-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

I have gone on some whacky rants in this blog which may leave the critical reader wondering - "Does he really believe all that whacky stuff?" After all, getting rid of teachers to improve education? Come on, now. And claiming that belief in global warming is grounded in apocalyptic thinking? That is just plain weird.

But the question is not whether or not I believe all this whacky stuff. The question is - Am I willing to explore unconventional ideas to see where they go? The answer to that is - Yes! And here are two reasons why that is important.

First, most of us walk around believing a lot of things that are simply not true. There are so many examples of this that it is hard to pick any for fear of not being representative. But, for the sake of argument, people believe general things like: their spouse is loyal, if you work hard you will reap rewards, and people are basically honest. Specific things include: sure I'll be able to pay off all those students loans, I can rely on social security for my retirement, and this new military action will be of short duration.

Like good conspiracy theorists we tend to accept, uncritically, confirmatory evidence while ignoring evidence that challenges our views. Sometime we are just naive. Sometimes we are in complete denial. But, what ever the reason we are vulnerable. And the longer we believe a thing that is not true the more vulnerable we become and the higher the cost when we cannot deny the truth any longer.

The only way to avoid this is to allow the unallowable and consider the validity of ideas that we would prefer to reject. The more naive one is about some things the more likely they are to be naive about other things. Similarly, the more critical they are about some things, the more likely they are to be critical about other things.

The second reason is that the solutions to our biggest problems often lie outside of the range of possibilities that we currently understand. If we knew how to solve them we would have. The problem is that we don't know how to solve them. And we don't know how to solve them because the solution lies outside of our current understanding.

So, allowing a whacky idea and seeing where it goes reduces our vulnerability from beleiving things that are not true and allows us to solve problems that might otherwise be unsolvable. Those sound like pretty good reasons to me.

How Will This Play Out?

2011-04-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

I thought I would wrap up this rant on teachers and distance education by laying out what I see as happening over the next few decades. First, I should mention that there is a fair amount of history behind this effort and I am only picking it up in the middle of its evolution. Back before computers we had a concept called Programmed Instruction which I felt had a great deal of merit. That gave way to Computer Aided Instruction which, in turn, gave way to Distance Education.

Currently, most distance education uses a web based delivery system such a Moodle or Blackboard which allows an instructor to put things online for students to access via the Web. This is a big improvement because it removes the co-location requirement from education. That is, you don't need to have the teacher and the student in he same room in order to provide education. At the same time, these tools can only be described as inadequate and barbaric. As a matter of perspective, I would compare this to the early days of the Web when web pages were created by entering HTML tags into a text editor.

Following this analogy further, we can see the next generation of tools as analogous to the web page editors that came out in the late 1990's. Tools like Frontpage and Macromedia made the authoring of web pages easier and allowed page designers to focus on the creative aspects of the things they were trying to create rather than the tedious technical aspects. I think we will see similar advances in authoring tools for course ware. Currently, there is a hodge podge of tools such as Camtasia, Audacity, and Powerpoint that allow a course designer to think a little more creatively about course design. Nonetheless, there is a long way to go and I see the next generation of educational software as focusing on support for course authors. I should mention that I also believe that delivery mechanisms will improve. But it is the authoring support that will require a bit of a leap.

Once, authoring tools have been advanced I see yet another major advance in support of the manufacturing of education and that is the exploitation of video game technology. We have a lot to learn from video games and education can be made much more effective and much more enjoyable.

I am usually much better at predicting what will happen than I am at predicting when it will happen. This is because predicting what will happen only requires finding a pattern in the trajectory from the past to the present to the future. But when things will happen is trickier because that often relies on the convergence of unpredictable events. Nonetheless, if I had to place a time frame on this I would say that the advances in authoring tools will happen over the next decade while the exploitation of video game technology will occur in the following decade. Once we have these technologies in the mainstream, I doubt that it will take more than one additional decade to completely convert the educational systems from a teacher based system to a system that manufactures education.

Coaching, Interpreting and Motivating

2011-04-22T14:19:00.000-07:00

In this post, I want to give some examples of jobs that teachers of the future might do in place of what we see as their primary role today. Looking into the future is like trying to look around a corner. So, I am not completely sure how this will turn out. But, I think I can give some examples of kind.

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to divide educational activities into two categories: there are things you just have to learn and things that change who you are as a person. The things you just have to learn are things like grammar, math, science, foreign languages, interpreting essays, computer programming, vocations and the like. These are usually the things that are tested on objective tests and these are the things that should be automated.

There are also a lot of personal habits that you need to develop including figuring out how to get things done, figuring out how to make sense out of things, and figuring out how to get yourself going. These requirements give rise to new roles for teachers and mentors: Coaching, Interpreting, and Motivating.

Coaching: Do you need to get organized? Do you need to manage your time better? Do you need to figure out how to approach problems and tasks so that they do not seem overwhelming? Do you need to prioritize or just not forget important things in the chaos of daily life? Well, if the answer to any of these things is yes, you need a coach. A coach will help you develop a disciplined way to achieve your goals.

Interpreting: Are you wondering what it is all about? Is life not as satisfying as it should be? Do you wonder why good things that happen to you are not as good as things that happen to other people while the bad things that happen to you are worse? If so, you need someone to help give you perspective. You need an interpreter. An interpreter will help you find ways to look at the events of your life so that they not only make sense but can be understood in the most positive way possible.

Motivating: Do you have trouble achieving your goals. Are you slow to get started in the morning due to lack of interest? Do you lack the discipline to do things that you feel are important to do? Do you need someone to light a fire under you or better yet ignite your inner fire? If so, you need a motivator. A motivator will help get you energized so that life is not a constant uphill battle and so that you can achieve things the make your life more satisfying.

These three examples are roles that cannot easily be done by automated educational software. They are roles that really do require a person. Teachers, generally, enjoy these aspects of teaching the most and most people, when looking nostalgically back on their favorite teacher are remembering him or her in one of these roles.

So, automating the less exciting aspects of education will free up teachers to address these more interesting and in many ways more important roles.

Manufacturing Education

2011-04-21T03:56:00.000-07:00

Few people would argue with the claim that our educational systems are not producing the quality product that they should be producing. Few would argue with the claim that education is far too expensive, far too uneven in quality; far too unreliable, and far too ineffective. What they would argue about is how to fix it. My suggestion from the past few posts would be to automate the process of teaching and to manufacture education.

Using the manufacturing model we can produce higher quality education that is much more reliable, consistent in quality, and affordable. But, in order to do this we have to move education from the classroom and into cyberspace. But, this is a big step and many people have reservations about it. They are concerned with loosing the personal contact they had with both teachers and students. They are concerned with the behavioral and social aspects of education. These are certainly valid concerns, and I would address these concerns in two ways.

First I would put these concerns into perspective. That is to say, people tend to exaggerate the interpersonal aspects of education. While you may fondly remember a teacher you had some where along the line, overwhelmingly most of the teachers you have had are forgotten or, if remembered, you cannot remember much good about them. Further, the bonding with classmates is also way overstated. How many of the hundreds of classmates you have had over the years do you still keep in touch with. For most people the answer is - precious few.This is not to say that there were not important things going on in the classroom beyond the basic education. There was socializing, maturing and a host of other less tangible areas of growth occurring. What happens to them? Well, that brings me to my second point.

By getting teachers out of the educational process, you free them up to do things that are more rewarding, more interesting and more productive. I would use, as an analogy, the introduction of computers into organizations in the 1960's. Most jobs that existed in the 1950's were gone by the 1970's. Instead of having people do monotonous clerical work, they began doing jobs that required intellectual skills and decision making. While there was great fear that computers would create massive unemployment, they, instead, just made most jobs more interesting. That is, they freed people up from boring work and allowed them to do more satisfying work. Automating education will do the same for teachers. In the next post, I will speculate on what some of those jobs might look like.

But, What Will the Teachers Do?

2011-04-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

When a craft becomes abstracted, formalized, refined and embedded in a technology, the practitioners of that craft typically go in one of three directions. The more adept craftsmen start designing and developing formalizations. The most adept begin developing processes for producing the formalized products. And the least adept simply become users of the formalizations.

This all sounds very abstract so let me provide a more concrete explanation in the case of craftsmen. As manufacturing processes began to replace craftsmen, the more adept craftsmen became engineers and started designing products. These products would not be hand made as in the hey day of the craftsmen. They would be produced by a manufacturing process. The most adept of the craftsmen would develop the manufacturing processes. The least adept of the craftsmen would become repairmen for the products. It is interesting to note that as the products and the processes that produced them improved in quality, the demand for repairmen would decline.

Now let's apply this to teachers. The more adept teachers will begin designing online courses. The most adept teachers will begin developing methodologies, processes and software packages for the creation of online courses. And the least adept will be users of these online courses, a job that we currently refer to as facilitators. Note, by analogy, that as the quality of the courses improves the need for facilitators will decline as the need for repairmen has declined.

This, of course, implies a massive dislocation in the work force of educators as well as massive resistance on the part of those who wish to protect the status quo. How will that all play out? Well, I'd have to think about that before offering any answers.

Sacking the Teachers

2011-04-18T05:01:00.000-07:00

Not unlike our romantic fascination with the bards and the craftsmen, we have a similar fascination with the noble teachers. But, realistically we know that the quality of teachers is very uneven as well. There are a few really good ones; a lot of average ones; and far to many really poor ones. In fact, I wrote earlier in this blog that the reason that we do remember that special teacher is that there were so precious few of them.

But, my goal here is not to beat up on teachers. Rather it is to argue that our present approach to education with a teacher in the class room in front of a crowd of students is simply not the best way to achieve results in education.

It isn't that bards and craftsmen were a bad way to do things. They were the best we could do at the time. However, until we abstracted and formalize their art, externalized it and refined it over time did we achieve any remarkable results. The same is true for teachers. Until we formalize and externalize their art through technology and refine it over time we are not going to achieve the gains that we are looking for in education. Further, until this education is mass produced it is going to continue to be far too expensive for most people to take advantage of.

If we want high quality, reliable, and affordable education, we are going to have to sack the teachers like we sacked the bards and the craftsmen. Given the pressures on the educational systems to produce a better product, I am fairly sure this is going to happen. The question is should you embrace it or remain in denial about it?

Sacking the Craftsmen

2011-04-17T05:25:00.000-07:00

In the early years of the 20th century, Frederick Taylor studied the efforts of craftsmen and developed the concept of scientific management. The premise behind scientific management is that craftsmen and the professions in which they are embedded are a hindrance to productivity. Not unlike our romantic fascination with the bards, we have a similar fascination with the noble craftsman. But, realistically. it is likely that you would find that the quality of the craftsmen was very uneven as well. There were a few really good ones; a lot of average ones; and far to many really poor ones.

Further, our progress in manufacturing, at the time of Frederick Taylor, was not at all unlike our progress in literacy. The approaches are un-leveraged, unreliable, uneven in quality, and not affordable by all. If Henry Ford had his cars made by craftsmen, most of us would still be driving horse and buggy rigs. Until we employed technologies that improved reliability, increased quality, and made products affordable to all, we did not solve the manufacturing problem. In fact, very little of what we have today would be available if we had not sacked the craftsmen. No computers. No Internet. No High Definition TV. No cell phones, not to mention iPads, iPhones and video games. In fact, no cars or kitchen appliances. The list goes on and on.

Sacking the Epic Poets

2011-04-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

If you ask someone to name an epic poet, it is very unlikely that they will be able to name anyone other than Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Certainly, Homer was a good one and the quality of his work forces us to look back romantically on the profession of the epic poet.

But consider a couple things that we tend to forget. First of all, as great as Homer may have been, it is very unlikely that he was representative of the rank and file poet of the day. Chances are that the average poet of the day, who's stock in trade was the recitation of epic poems, did a fairly mediocre job. They probably forgot lines. More than likely they missed the point of the stories they told. And, they probably injected a lot of their own opinion into their stories. So, if you were a resident of 8th century BCE Greece, it is likely that you would find that the quality of the epic poets was very uneven. There were a few really good ones; a lot of average ones; and far to many really poor ones.

The second thing that we tend to forget is that you would have never even heard of Homer if it were not for the two technologies that put the epic poets out of business - writing and printing. Further, we can thank both of these technologies for our modern levels of literacy. Writing allow us to provide a literary product of consistently high quality and printing allowed us to provide it in an affordable fashion. So, if someone in the 8th century BCE were to ask how to improve literacy, the answer would be to get rid of the epic poets and embrace new technologies.

We have a similar situation with teachers today. There were a few really good ones; a lot of average ones; and far to many really poor ones. Further, our progress in education is not unlike our progress in literacy. Our approaches are un-leveraged, unreliable, uneven in quality, and not affordable by all. Until we employ technologies that will improve reliability, increase quality, and make it affordable to all, we are not going to solve the education problem.So, just like progress in literacy required getting rid of the epic poets, progress in education relies on getting rid of teachers.

Granted, it took almost three millennium for literacy to improve dramatically. But things happen much faster these days as we will see in the next example.

Getting the Instructor Out of the Loop

2011-04-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a colleague, a few weeks age, about distance education and I said something along the lines of "education will not improve until we get the instructor out of the loop." I said it because I like to make bold and challenging statements. I like to make bold and challenging statements because, more often than not, they provide useful insights. Even if they are wrong, they give me something to think about. Some times they even resonate. Some times they turn out to be subtle truths.

When I made this statement, I had no idea how much it would resonate. Nor did I have any idea how I would come around to seeing it as a subtle truth.

I actually started this post a couple weeks ago because I had to think about it. I know how offensive it will be to many. I know how it will turn off a lot of people. But, after thinking about it very seriously I have decided that it needs to be said. In fact, I will clarify it just a bit and say that education will not improve until we get rid of teachers. Stay tuned. I think I can back up this outrageous claim.

What About Reliability?

2011-03-22T06:28:00.000-07:00

Let's say, by way of analogy, that you went to a car dealer and bought a new car. You barely get it off the lot before the engine falls out. The salesman comes over and laughingly says - "Oh, you got one of Bob's cars. His engines always fall out." Would you put up with that? No! Of course not! We expect reliability in automobiles and would never put up with variations due to the person who made it. Never in a million years!

And yet, every time a student signs up for a class it is a crap shoot not unlike the analogy above. This is well known among students at all level who informally pass on information about which teachers to avoid. Teaching evaluations often report the problem, but do little to fix it. Taking things into their own hands, students go to sites like RateMyTeachers or RateMyProfessors to pass on this knowledge to fellow students. If all classes were reliably of consistent quality, this would not be necessary. But, they are not.

How can you deliver education of consistent high quality? Well, you have to refine it over time and delivery it in a consistent manner. This means, in short, getting the instructor out of the loop. Asynchronous distance education means lower cost, higher quality, and more reliably consistent delivery. So, what is the future for instructors? Perhaps I'll tackle that next time.

Why Was That Memorable Teacher so Memorable?

2011-03-10T04:56:00.000-08:00

One of the arguments put forth by people who emphasize the role of the instructor in distance education is that teachers often influence our lives in very positive ways. People will say things like "I remember Mrs. Jones in third grade who really helped me get over some hurdle and restored my confidence." This is a good thing and I don't wish to diminish it. Having people to influence us in positive ways is, well, positive. However, I would ask - Why was Mrs. Jones so memorable?

Was the moment of inspiration and support from Mrs. Jones so memorable because it was such a rare occurrence? What about all the time spent with other teachers? Why was that time no so memorable? Was it because they really weren't all that good?

As you think back over all the dozens and dozens of teachers you have had for thousands of hours, how many fall into the categories of memorable, forgettable, or even want to forget? I think most people nostalgically interpret those three minutes of inspiration from Mrs. Jones as an endorsement of the teaching profession. I would say that if that is all you can remember from dozens of teachers over thousands of hours that is hardly an endorsement.

Just How Important is that Instructor, Anyway?

2011-02-28T06:13:00.000-08:00

One of the major issues in distance education is the role of the instructor. This can be seen most clearly in distinction between asynchronous and synchronous distance education. In asynchronous mode the student interacts with prepared course materials in an asynchronous fashion which means they fit the course work into their schedule and do it as they feel like it rather than at an appointed time. There may still be an instructor or even a facilitator available. But the role of the instructor is greatly diminished. In synchronous mode the student must appear at assigned times when the instructor is there and interact with the instructor and class mates. The synchronous mode is largely although not completely an extension of the classroom into cyberspace.

There are four main drawbacks to the synchronous model. First, the student has to appear at an assigned time. Second, the student must proceed at the speed of the class. Third, synchronous education is not scalable which means class sizes are still limited although no longer by the size of the room. They are limited by the number of students that one instructor can attend to. Finally, synchronous mode, like any custom made product is expensive and the products are not reliable.

One of the main arguments put forth by the advocates of synchronous mode distance education is the importance of the instructor and the role of the instructor in education. Over the next few posts, I am going to take the devil's advocate position and argue against the importance of the instructor. In fact, I am going to argue that the importance of the instructor is largely a myth and that the negative consequences of instructors far out weight the positive ones. This is, as you might imagine, not a popular position to take. But, I believe, it needs to be considered.

Something to Think About

2011-02-17T05:11:00.000-08:00

There was a news announcement yesterday that Borders Booksellers had declared bankruptcy. I can remember when they first opened in my area. It was the most impressive bookstore I had even been in. They not only had a vast selection, they had depth. They had books you normally couldn't find elsewhere. The staff was knowledgeable and helpful. The store had ambiance. There was a social aspect to it which was nurtured over the years with coffee shops, string quartets and the like. It was everything an online bookstore was not. In fact, if ever there was an argument in favor of a bricks and mortar bookstore over an online bookstore it was Borders. And yet, they still lost the battle.

It occurred to me that many of the reasons one would cite for why Borders was superior were the same reasons that people would cite for why face to face education is superior. There is a social environment. There is ambiance. There is a benefit to being there not the least of which is networking and access to experts. But that didn't save Borders. Will it save bricks and mortar universities?

Some of the older universities have huge endowments that will protect them for a while. I suspect that Harvard for example could survive on its endowment for an extended period of time. So, they probably have little to worry about. But, what about the thousands and thousands of universities that are not Harvard. How will they fare? I don't know. But it is certainly something to think about.

A Different Perspective on Distance Education

2011-01-31T05:03:00.000-08:00

We tend to face the changes of the future with some resistance. This is natural because most people are adverse to change and the bigger the change the greater the resistance. However, it is often useful to view it from the opposite perspective. That is, imagine you are in the future rolling back the change. How good would that be?

So, for the sake of argument, imagine a future where all education is available over the web. People can try different things and find what they are good at. They are not restricted from programs because of geography, program size or space limitations. They can proceed according to their own interests and at their own pace. They can easily fit it into their busy schedules

And then, for some reason, the unthinkable happens. The web goes down. Educators trying to find a back up way to educate people would say, "Well, if we could get them all in the same room at the same time in small groups we could do it that way." Does anyone really think that could work?

It is hard to imagine a world in which distance education is commonplace having to revert back to the way we do things today. Perhaps the way we do things today is not the best way. Maybe it is just making the best of a bad situation.

Distance Education

2011-01-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I posted to this blog. All the usual excuses apply. I was busy. I was tired of writing for a while. Heck, I was just lazy. But, I am over it and ready to start posting again. I have done a lot of work with distance education over the past six months and am going to jot down some of my notes here.

I think distance education has enormous potential both educationally and economically. That is to say, there is money to be made and people to be educated. The biggest problem at the moment, as it usually the case, is a failure of both understanding and imagination. I would point to the early days of the web as an analogy. In the early 1990's it was hard to see applications for web technologies. By the mid 1990's that was sorted out. And by the late 1990's we had the dot com bubble. I don't think distance education will happen quite as quickly. But, I think it will happen. And the impact will be of similar magnitude. So, I am going to write down some of my thoughts about this emerging phenomenon here over the next few weeks or months.

Did I Learn Anything?

2010-09-05T04:51:00.001-07:00

I started this blog almost two years ago in an attempt to learn more about blogging. So, it seems relevant to ask – Did I Learn Anything? The answer is yes, absolutely yes, I learned a great deal more than I could possibly explain. However, for the sake of economy I will pare it all down to five major lessons.

1) Blogging is good even if nobody reads it – it is writing practice and it becomes part of the historical record. People used to write letters to each other and save them in the attic. Historians pour through these personal correspondences to get a ground level view of a period from the perspective of people living during that period. In the future, historians may consult any records you may have created. Further, blogs are both easier to search and easier to read than personal letters. So Blogs, like letters and diaries become a rough draft of history.

2) Blogs can be used to great advantage as public research notebooks or even public journals. Maybe you don’t want to wait for historians. Maybe you have something to say today and would like to share it with others who have similar interests. You don’t have to be an academic or professional researcher. You can be a movie or music critic. You can provide opinions on beers or single malt whiskies. Maybe you have a special interest in your family history or the history of your home town. Anything that captures your interest probably captures the interest of somebody else as well. So you blog become the focal point of a shared conversation on a topic of interest to you and others.

3) Using a technology like blogging changes the way you look at the world. Your view of the world probably solidified sometime between your 18^th and 25^th birthdays. But the world continued to change. The longer you go without an update the farther out of touch you become. Blogging can help you keep up to date in two important ways. First, just reading the blogs of others will keep you up with the way people are thinking at the moment. Blogger are more likely to live in the present than people who don’t blog. Second, there is always a culture surrounding a new technology. They are more likely to buy certain products such as Smart Phones and more likely to watch certain shows like The IT Crowd or The Guild. Exposure to this sort of thing keeps you current in your thinking.

4) The only way to really understand blogging is to blog. Like so many things you can’t learn how to blog by reading, talking or planning. You have to try it. If you have nothing to say, your muse is probably asleep from lack of use. Write you first post on not having anything to say. Write your next one on how hard it is to choose a topic. Just start writing. Eventually, as in conversation, the words will begin to flow.

5) If you start blogging you will start doing other things. No, blogging does not lead to crack cocaine. But, if you blog, you might start posting message to a forum, or sending emails through “Contact Us” pages. You might start emailing more or IM’ing more or texting more. You might join a chat room or a Facebook group. You might even create an alter ego in Second Life. Just take that first step and other steps will likely follow.

And with those observations, I close my first blog. It is now part of the historical record and I am on to other things.

Another Academic Year Begins

2010-08-30T04:22:00.000-07:00

How many jobs are there where you get a fresh start twice a year. You get to start over again, fix your mistakes and put more effort into the things that worked. Well, there are not many jobs like that but being an academic is one of them. We get two fresh starts every year. We call them semesters. This really is one of the best things about being an academic. Every time a semester ends you can review it and see what did not work out as well as you would have liked. And every time a semester begins you have a chance to try again.

Fortunately, I am happy to say, most of the things I am working on are working well. I have three major classes which are my teaching focus and they are all advancing nicely. I used to teach way more classes and did not do nearly as good of a job. But, I am pleased to say that my classes are going well.

My research is not going as well as it has in the past. But, there are several reasons for that which are not really important enough to get into here. But, with my new interest in imagination I will be slowly getting that back on track again.

I have invested heavily, time wise, over the past five years in virtual worlds. Sadly, all that effort did not pay off as well as I thought it would. There are many reasons for that and they are probably not important enough to elaborate on. This is also one of the reasons why my research lagged. I was hoping for some productive new veins of research in virtual worlds. That did not come about.

However, I am turning my attention from virtual worlds to social interaction technologies. Hopefully, this will pan out a little better.

A new semester begins to today. And with it begins new initiatives, new ideas, new hopes and new directions. What more could one ask for?

A Progression of Ideals

2010-08-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

It may come as a surprise to most people but scientists do not study the things in the world, they study idealizations of them. This is a very Platonic approach and even more surprising when one considered the fact that modern scientists probably see themselves more as the children of Aristotle than as the children of Plato.

Galileo introduced the idea of studying idealizations into physics. If you take an introductory class in physics you will learn about ideal springs, frictionless inclined planes, and free fall in a vacuum. These are all idealizations.

Max Weber introduced the concept of ideal types into social science. He said there is no such thing as a bureaucracy, but we study this idealization because it has greater value in advancing our knowledge.

In information in particular and areas of technology in general, we are concerned not with idealizations of physical phenomena, nor with idealizations of social phenomena. We are concerned with idealizations of artifacts that will exist in the future. And studying artifacts that exist in the future requires imagination.

The Role of Imagination in Information Systems Research

2010-08-17T04:17:00.000-07:00

I like being propelled along in my research by the pursuit of compelling new ideas. New ideas are exciting and often provide the energy needed to make progress on older ideas once they have lost their luster. I have discussed a number of new ideas in this blog. Most new ideas don't really go anywhere of significance but some do seem to last over time. For example, it was over fifteen years ago that I started exploring the role of stories in computer ethics. And I am still working on that very rich vein of research.

I have latched on to a new idea that I will be pursuing this year and hopefully for many years to come and that is the role of imagination in information systems research. This idea did not just occur to me. Rather it coalesced out of a lot of other ideas I was working on.

Certainly the role of imagination in writing stories is a big part of the work I am doing in writing stories to explore the ethics of technology. In that course, I have been increasingly emphasizing the use of the imagination. It is the imagination that allows us to consider, compare and choose between possible worlds. And choosing between possible worlds is at the heart of the ethics of technology.

As part of the justification for development of the imagination, I began to develop arguments for the importance of imagination as a business skill. My students are, after all, business students. And success in business is a thing they care about. As I worked on these arguments, I began to realize that most business skills can be considered as analytical skills or imaginative skills. For example, to understand why a thing is happening you need analysis. But to figure out what you should do requires imagination.

My interest in the imagination began to creep into other area that I was work on until, one day, it dawned on me that imagination is vastly more important than analysis in information systems research. I will develop that theme over the next few posts.

The Travails of Writing and Publishing

2010-08-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

I love to write. In fact, I can't help writing. I write everyday and some days have quite an impressive output to show for it. Writing is a way to organize your ideas and express your creativity. It feels good to write. And if I go a day without writing it is like a day without exercising or a day disrupted by an ad hoc event or a power outage. It just knocks me out of my groove.

You would think that writing and publishing go hand in hand. You write a clever piece and a publisher gets it to market for you. But, it is nothing like that. Publishing is a business and publishers care about sales. Even academic publishers have similar concerns. They are less heavy handed to be sure. They care about readership and citations and reputation. But all of that translates, ultimately, into sales. If a publisher cannot get people to pay for reading their publications they cannot survive.

This, in turn, translates into a wide variety of seemingly odd behaviors. Recently, there was a discussion on a listserv that I subscribe to over whether or not it is appropriate for a journal editor to ask authors to cite papers from the target journal. Presumably, the editor did not want the author to miss an important paper on the topic of submitted paper. While that is possible, it is more likely that the editor was concerned about exposure for the journal's offerings or even, cynically, the citation index.

I have sent book proposals to publishers only to have them rejected because they did not match the publishers 'list'. That is, they want books of a particular kind and that is the primary concern. This does not make sense if you believe the publisher's first concern is quality publications. However, if you realize that similar publications will be attractive to their customer base hence making marketing much easier, it does make sense.

I once submitted a proposal to a publisher for a book that I expected to be around 60,000 words. It was almost finished and that seemed like a nice round number once I had completed the revisions. The publisher said they could not sell a book unless it was 100,000 words. They encouraged me to extend the book in question to that length. I could not do it. I had said what I had to say in 60,000 words and to stretch it to 100,000 words would require a lot of filler. Next time you are wading through a book with a lot of pointless junk in it, remember that you are probably wading through filler that the publisher requested in order to accept the book for publication.

Due to my passion for writing, I have numerous books in various stages of completion. Realizing my innate inability to accept the terms of publishers I have decided to put them on my website and give them away for free. If you would like to see what I have, go to my webpage and click on Books in Progress. This is not as crazy of an idea as it may first seem. As an academic I write to achieve recognition for my ideas. Giving the manuscripts away for free will maximize exposure. Granted, I won't make any money on them, but few academics actually make much money on their books. And if they do make money, it usually involves some sort of compromise - it is a text book really written by a committee or it is a popular press book which is a little thin on academic substance.

The only serious drawback is that of recognition within my own institution. If I can claim to have a book published by an academic press, that carries academic prestige. If I say I put my book on my website for free download, there is substantially less prestige accorded. However, I have never been one to care much about prestige. So, putting my book on my website for free works well for me. Now, if nobody cares enough to download them even for free, well then I do have a problem.

Looking Ahead to AY 2010-2011

2010-08-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, one of the things I intended to do was to give people a glimpse of what academic life is like. So, I thought I would shift gears for the month of August and talk a little bit about what I am thinking about for the upcoming academic year.It is now August and that means two things. Summer classes are over and I have to start working on my classes for the Fall.

There is a caricature of an old professor teaching from yellowing, faded notes that he developed when he was a newly minted PhD and hasn't updated since. If you ever find that guy, let me know. I'd like to get a few tips from him. I post my teaching materials on a website for students to download. For years I have been attempting to get them set up so I can just copy the materials from one semester to the next. I have yet to achieve that. I am always tinkering, trying out new ideas, polishing bits that didn't work as well as I would have liked, experimenting with new techniques and assignments. So, every semester I review and revise my notes and syllabus before uploading them once again. A chunk of August will be devoted to that. I like to begin the school year with all my teaching materials completed because things will get crazy as the year gets underway and I will not have time to get back to my notes later in the semester.

I will also be doing some writing. Two of the classes I teach do not have appropriate books available for them. This is because I cooked up the ideas for the classes rather than just following somebody else's work. I write a lot but since my ideas are not mainstream I have not had a great deal of luck with publishers. So, I decided to make them available as a free download at my website. More about that later.

I am also planning to take on a new research project this coming year. It is an outgrowth of my work in other areas. I want to examine the role of imagination in information systems research. Talk about outside the mainstream. No wonder I have trouble finding publishers.

We will also taking some new directions with the school beginning this year. We moved into a new building a couple years ago. And we have a new Dean, whom I have not yet met, beginning in September. The school is primed for change. It will be interesting to see which way it goes.

Role Play and Roles

2010-07-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

The roles that I discussed in the last post can be thought of as roles defined in a bottom up fashion. That is, you do something which indicates a role preference and then get suggestions for other things that maybe be suitable to someone who enjoys that role. But, bottom up role definition has some problems.

Let's say that you are a creative, artistic, imaginative person who has for some reason been steered away from being who you are naturally. Let's say further that you have adopted a serious person complete with a set of interests that are appropriate for that serious persona but not really suitable to who you are. If your serious person reads only nonfiction then it is likely that bottom up approach will only reinforce this mismatch. You order dull books on history and the algorithms suggest more history books. How do you break this cycle?

I think one answer may be virtual world role play. I run into endless people in Second Life who are there because they can behave in ways that feel much more natural and yet would not be acceptable for some reason in real life.

Several months back, I wrote a few posts on a concept called StrengthsFinders which was developed by the Gallup Corporation. The premise of StrengthsFinders is that there are certain things that you are hard wired to do and doing those things are virtually effortless for you. I think this idea can be extended beyond business strengths to roles in general. There are things you can do that are virtually effortless and feel natural. If you do those things life is easier and more satisfying. However, for any number of reasons people often get steered away from roles that are natural for them and into roles that are not natural. Role playing in a virtual world allows you to explore different roles and possibly find roles that are more satisfying for you.

Facebook and Roles

2010-07-19T12:59:00.000-07:00

Last time I explained how you adopt roles based upon purchases at places like Amazon or Netflix. People who bought (or rented) Product A also liked Product B. Next let's consider how your role becomes solidified through use of a social interaction technology such as Facebook.

Consider some of the actions you perform on Facebook. You friend people. You join groups. You use applications such as quizzes or play games such as Farmtown. And you post bits of news about yourself and read bits of news that others have posted. Each of these activities refines the role you play as yourself.

First of all, you select friends based on some similarity of interest. Some have friends only from work. Others exclude friend from work. Some select friends that they know for real. Others only have virtual friends. Some people will accept friend requests from anyone while others are very choosy. The point is that you are defined to some extent by the company you keep online and the friends you select will begin to define you over time.

You join groups based upon your interests or based on the recommendation of friends. The groups will in turn affect the advertisements that you see, further reinforcing your evolving role. When you post information about your day "I had a great lunch at a new restaurant" you are suggesting possible activities for your friends. Note the similarity here between the Amazon claim "People who liked Product A also liked Product B" and "I liked Restaurant X so you might like Restaurant X." Postings, obviously, are not limited to restaurants. People post their experiences with books, movies, concerts, and all manner of activities.

This is not, of course, limited to Facebook. Your Twitter feeds or your virtual world avatars have a similar effect. Through mediated social interaction you negotiate and refine your role and the roles of other's around you. Next time, I will take this a step further with role play in virtual worlds and see how that impacts your evolving roles.

Roles and Identity

2010-07-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

I am not going to be coy about it, carefully building an argument and then springing the conclusion on you. I am going to go straight to the punchline and then go back and support it. The next era of computer applications following the Age of Information will be the Age of Roles and Identity. This next step is no more obvious given our understanding of information systems than the evolution of information systems was obvious given our understanding of automation. In fact, most people who were in the thick of things in the automation stage of computer applications simply could not grasp the changes that were about to come. And similarly, people who are in the thick of things in information systems will probably have a hard time grasping the shifting focus to roles and identity. So, let me begin with a very concrete example of how information leads to the definition of roles and identity.

Let's say you go to Amazon and order a book. Next time you show up at the website they may very well suggest another book for you based on the previous purchase. You may buy the recommended book or you may not. If you show up again, you will be offer more suggestions. Over time, assuming that you do buy another book now and then you will have sorted yourself into a de facto category of people who like a particular cluster of books. That cluster of books, to some extent defines you. And the longer you accept this role, the more it becomes who you are.

Another great example is Netflix. You order a dvd from Netflix and then rate it after you have viewed it. Netflix then turns around and suggests others shows you may like based upon the dvds you have ordered and your rating of them. Over time, as with Amazon, you sort yourself into a de facto category of people who like a particular cluster of movies. And, that cluster of movies, to some extent defines you. And, again, as with the books, the longer you accept this role, the more it becomes who you are.

We have seen in recent years that Amazon has tried to extend this idea. People who bought this book liked this music or this video game. Your cluster becomes larger and begins to define you more fully. This is how information leads to roles and identity. Now how about the other direction? The need to define roles (or categories) more precisely will lead to a need for more information. Do people who read Piers Anthony vote in a consistent manner? No? Well how about people who read Piers Anthony, listen to Red Hot Chilli Peppers and watch The IT Crowd? If that still isn't enough, how about if they have Starbucks coffee more than twice a week and go to the gym at least once?

Information gives rise to roles and roles give rise to the need for more information. But, we are nowhere near finished. Over the next few posts we will explore this further. What if you are the kind of person whose doesn't like to be that kind of person? How many kinds of people are there? Matching who you are with what you are. And the value of role play. I think it will get interesting. I hope you stay tuned.

And Then There Was Information

2010-07-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

Some time in the late 1970's William Kent published a book entitled Data and Reality in which he provided some philosophical grounding for the design of databases. Although it is still somewhat difficult to get through today, it was totally incomprehensible in the late 1970's. One of the zen koans that he provided was that database design should model information rather than the way information is processed. For database designers of the day, this was no more meaningful than the sound of one hand clapping.

Databases in the 1970's were design to support data processing systems. They were really little more than fancy files with some handy functional features like support for transactions, data independence and the like. The were storage and retrieval mechanisms used to support data processing. In fact, early data bases did not even have query languages.

But a new idea was emerging in the late 1970s and that was the idea that all the data that was being processed might have a secondary purpose as information about the organization. This information could, potentially be used to better understand and more effectively run the organization. As obvious as this is today, it was a novel observation at the time and it took a while to catch on.

Of course today well designed databases are designed primarily for information and processing is merely the means by which the information is kept up to data. But as data processing (automation) gave way to information systems there were a lot of entrenched views of data processing systems that needed to be over come.

In keeping with the expanding model I am developing here I would like to point out a few things. First, when automation was the primary usage of computer applications, it was far from obvious that the next stage would be information systems. In fact, it took quite a while for that idea to catch on. Second, as automation systems created information giving rise to information systems, information systems in turn created a greater demand for automation. That is, when you are modeling the organization in information you need more and more automation to provide more and more information.

Now we are in the era of information systems and the question that I started this thread with was - can we see what the next stage of evolution will be. If the model is consistent, it will not be obvious from what we have today and as we evolve into it, it will create an even greater demand for information. But, to find out what that next stage is, you will have to come back next week.

Next Came Automation

2010-06-28T03:38:00.000-07:00

By the mid to late 1960's the usage of computer systems in automating business record keeping processes was well underway. Although the machines were still called computers, most people had forgotten about the role of the computer as a computer and thought about it as a data processing machine. At the time, the term of choice for what computers were doing was data processing. In fact, one of the premium professional organizations was called The Data Processing Management Association. And many corporate departments who were responsible for these activities had the term Data Processing figuring prominently in their name.

Over the two decades from the mid 1960's to the mid 1980's most corporate jobs changed substantially as work that had previously been done by people was picked up by the computer in automated data processing systems. And people, who had, themselves, been the data processing system were now users of the automated data processing system.

Early computer systems were often justified on the basis of the number of jobs they replaced in the cost benefit analysis. "If we automate this process, we can get rid of twenty clerical positions." would be a typical claim. Although, as I remember from the time, it is unclear that any jobs were every really lost.The notion of automation required that jobs be lost to justify it. However, the real reason why these systems were being built was that everybody else was building them. And if you didn't keep up you would surely fall behind.

We can make two observations about the relationship between computation and automation that will help us extend this model later. First, computation gave rise to automation although that extension is not at all obvious. One would not look at a computer systems and automatically see an automation system. Second, the increased usage of the computer for automation gave rise to a greater demand for computation. This is, the world demand for computers turn out to be far more than five because data processing dramatically increased the demand for computers.

In the Beginning there was Computation

2010-06-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

There is an apocryphal quote attributed to Thomas Watson the head of IBM at the time the computer was invented. As the story goes, when asked about the size of the world market for computers, he replied "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". Although there is little evidence that he actually said this, the story has taken on the status of urban legend and is also revealing of our understanding of computers at the time.

The computer was not really invented in the 1940's, it was resurrected. Charles Babbage did the foundation work in the early 1800's attempting to develop a machine that could compute the roots of polynomials. That notion of a computational machine stuck in the very name of the device that we still, to this very day, call a computer. Early computers were not seen, as they would be later, as information processing machines. They were seen as computational machines. Hence the name and the misunderstanding of the market implied by the apocryphal quote. If the computer had remained a mega calculator there may very well have been a very limited market for it.

Fortunately, some of the engineers at IBM, at the time, had a little imagination and could see beyond the basic computational capabilities. I can imagine that this caused no end of internal conflict at IBM as their cash cow, at the time, was the Electronic Accounting Machine which processed information on paper cards. Suggesting that the computer be used for this purpose was not only a suggestion that they replace their entire business with a new mode of processing, but it also suggested that information be encoded, not on cards which you can see, but in bits of electricity that you cannot see. So, although this seems obvious in hindsight, it was quite a leap of imagination at the time.

By the late 1960's the use of computers in automating business record keeping systems was in full swing. In fact, computation was, at this point, a fairly minor use of computer power. The computer resources used, for example, to compute your pay check are minor compared to the processing necessary to get the information ready for the computation and producing the paycheck once the computation is completed. If the name of these machines was updated along with their function, they would have been called automaters rather than computers. But, that did not seem very important at the time. So the old name stuck.

The point that I would like to close this piece with is - the computational power of computers led to the use of computers for automation. And this theme of computer usage leading to greater usages will be expanded upon in subsequent posts.

How Long Will The Information Age Last?

2010-06-14T03:53:00.000-07:00

Alvin Toffler published a book in 1980, called The Third Wave, which caught the attention of the mass market as well as numerous academics. In this book, he attempted to explain the turmoil we were experiencing in the 1960's and 1970's as the third wave of change for human civilization. More specifically, he saw the evolution of human civilization as undergoing three major transformative revolutions. The first was the agricultural revolution. The second was the industrial revolution. And the third (the third wave) was a transition to a post industrial society. This post industrial society has become known as the Information Age.

I am neither a staunch supporter nor a staunch critic of Toffler's characterization. On the positive side, he provides a thought provoking characterization of the evolution of civilization. It is easy to understand and it got a lot of people thinking about what was going on. On the down side it is one of many, many possible characterizations and I always have a bit of trouble when authors include the present in their historical perspectives. That said, he did popularize, although not coin, the term Information Age.

I think that most people tend to accept the fact, free of critical reflection, that we are in the Information Age. It is not clear to me that this is true. But if it is, we can ask how long will the information age last and what will come next?

The agrarian age lasted thousands of years while the industrial age lasts only hundreds. If progress is speeding up and we can draw on the patterns of the previous ages, then the information age should last only decades. If this is the case, then something new ought to be coming along very shortly. What is it?

I don't want to fall into the same trap that I just criticized Toffler for and provide a historical perspective that includes the present and the near future. I do think, however, we can look at patterns from the past to the present and provide reasonable speculations on what might be coming next. Over the next few posts I am going to look at the evolution of computer applications from the automation of the 1960's to the social interaction technologies of 2010 and see if we can find any useful patterns.

Global Warming as Apocalyptic Thinking

2010-06-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

It is a good thing that not many people read my blog or I would set off a fire storm with this next claim. However, I believe, that the current obsession with global warming is yet another example of apocalyptic thinking. Bear with me as I make my case.

First, let me say that I agree philosophically with much of what the global warming movement is concerned about. We are wasteful of our resources. We are overly dependent on fossil fuels. We should learn to live in harmony with our environment. We are living a technologically subsidized unsustainable live style.

The problem is that these are philosophical, perhaps even spiritual beliefs. When people try to make them scientific claims, in support of their beliefs, I have a problem with that. It is like saying 96% of all atheists go to hell. Therefore you should be a Christian. Or in a more realistic vein, one might claim that religious people live 14% longer than non religious people. There are lots of good reasons why one might choose to be a Christian. But, statistics about atheists are not among them.

Using scientific data to shore up philosophical beliefs is always problematic. Don't forget that 'scientific' data was used to prove racial inferiority in the 19th century. So, I am always concerned about the barrage of 'scientific' data used to support the global warming belief system. Why? I believe that underlying this movement is subconscious vein of apocalyptic thinking. Following the subtext model from the previous post consider this subtext of global warming:

1) We have gotten off track. We have sinned. We had allowed our greed to consume us. Our consumption is our of control. We have failed to show respect for things greater than ourselves. We have engaged in the sin of hubris thinking we are greater than we are.

2) Things will be set right by forces beyond our control: We must pay for our sins. We will suffer. We will be punished. The earth will strike back at us and we will be exiled, once again from Eden. Glaciers will melt. Seas will rise. Populations will die. Fertile farm lands will become dessert.

I don't mean to suggest that there is not a problem we should be concerned with. We have way more people on the planet than we can sustain without substantial technological leverage. If it weren't for technological advances of the past couple centuries, Malthusian cycles would have kicked in. But technological subsidies are not limitless and the Malthusian cycles will kick in at some point. Fuel efficient cars and alternative energies may buy us a little time but they do not solve the problem.

If we were serious about solving the problem we would be talking about population control rather than whipping ourselves up into an apocalyptic religious frenzy that avoids the real problem.

Well, for those of you who do read this blog and are fed up with my ranting about apocalyptic thinking, you will be happy to know that in the next post I will move on. Thanks for your patience.

The Y2K Bug as Apocalyptic Thinking

2010-05-31T07:45:00.001-07:00

There are two key elements to apocalyptic thinking. First, we have gotten off track some how, and, second, punishment will be doled out or things will be set right by forces beyond our control. Neither of these components holds up well under scrutiny. But, the beliefs that make up our worldview are generally unquestioned assumptions about reality that do not hold up particularly well under scrutiny. If they did hold up well under scrutiny they would be part our scientific knowledge and not part of our worldview. (Of course, belief in science is a part of our worldview that also does not hold up well under scrutiny. But, that is another argument for another day.)

The claim that we have gotten off track some how suggests that there is a track that we should be on. If there is one, it is largely one of our own construction. That is, we believe a bunch of things about how the world should be and when our behavior varies from those beliefs, we feel we have gotten off track.

Second, as discussed earlier, there is a difference between retribution and likely outcomes. If you run across a busy street there is a good chance that you make get struck by a car. To suggest that you 'deserve' to get struck by a car suggests that our moral equilibrium is being enforced by transcendental powers.

Consider the subtext of the Y2K Bug. I apologize for the dramatic wording but, I believe that it helps make the point.

1) We have gotten off track: We have sinned. We have been seduced by the idol of technology. We have given ourselves over to technology sacrificing our free will and free spirits. We rely on technology for our very being. Our worship of and reliance on technology is just modern day idolatry.

2) Things will be set right by forces beyond our control: We must pay for our sins. We will suffer. We will be punished. The coy mistress of technology will turn her back on us leaving us vulnerable to loosing all that we find holy. Banks will fail. Airplanes will fall out of the sky. Medical technology will take lives instead of saving them. As people struggle to survive, civilization may come to an end.

When the clocks ticked over to the year 2000 and nothing happened, did anyone ask - why? Did anyone try to justify their beliefs? No, because beliefs are beliefs and require no justification. Believers still believe and will point to all the effort that went into preventing the problem. Disbelievers still disbelieve and see all the spending leading up to the year 2000 as money wasted. Never the twain shall meet and it will never be resolved.

Remember the Y2K Bug?

2010-05-24T04:11:00.000-07:00

It hasn't been that long. A little more than a decade ago, in the time leading up to the new millennium, there were dire predictions about the potential impacts of a bug in computer software known as the Y2K Bug.

The premise was very simple. Since the 1960's dates were represented in computer programs as a two digit number. So, 1968, for example, was represented as 68. You could always tell which year preceded another year because the earlier year would have a lower number. 68 comes before 69 and so on. However, at the turn of the millennium, this was no longer true. The year prior to the change in millennium would be 99 and the next year would be 00. So, any bit of decision logic within a program that relied on subsequent years having a higher number would fail.

There were, no doubt, many software programs that contained this flaw so I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. However, what is really hard to believe was the extent to which the implications of this flaw were extrapolated. As the clock ticked over to the year 2000 computer systems throughout the world would just shut down; crash from the Y2K bug. Elevators would stop working; Planes would fall out of the air; Life support equipment would stop its life support functions. Even more dire consequences were batted around. It could be the end of life as we know it. It could be the end of Western civilization.

Less dire but more personal consequences were predicted. You won't get your bills on time so you can't pay them on time. Since you don't pay your bills, you will loose your house and car and your good credit score.

And, yet, none of that happened. Why not? And why did we ever believe it would?

Let me offer a few observations. I am reluctant to use the word 'facts' as 'fact' are a matter of perspective and perspectives on this issue were all over the map.

First, the less one knew about computer systems the more likely one was to believe in the Y2K bug.

Second, most computer software, especially that written by competent software professionals, would not have this problem.

Third, if software written by professionals did have this problem, fixing it would be a fairly straightforward maintenance task.

Fourth, the real focus of this problem was computer code written in the 1960's and 1970's by non professionals who not only created the date problem but wrote such poor code that maintenance would be a nightmare. The underlying problem here was not the way the date was represented. The underlying problem was the lack of maintainability of the computer code.

So, there was a real problem but it was of very limited scope and very limited consequence. How, then, did this get extrapolated into the end of civilization as we know it? The answer, I believe, is that it is a great example of modern, secular apocalyptic thinking. And that will be expanded upon in the next post.

Examples of Apocalyptic Thinkings

2010-05-17T04:40:00.000-07:00

There is no shortage of examples of apocalyptic thinking throughout history. Certainly, Old Testament prophets who railed against the evils of society were a classic example. Society had gotten off track some how and the judgement would come. We see this repeated as recently as in the early days of the United States where a series of religious revivals called Great Awakenings sprewed forth apocalyptic hellfire and brimstone rhetoric. The most recent of these was barely a hundred years ago. So this is not an artifact of the far distant past.

There is also no shortage of incidents where people thought the end of the world was coming. Most recently, we had a fascination with the Prophecies of Nostradamus regarding the new millenium and when that did not happen, we turned our sights to the Mayan Calendar prediction of the world ending in 2012. In fact, there was a blockbuster movie made with that name (2012) and exploring that theme. So, again, these ideas are not just artifacts of the distant past.

There are more striking examples of apocalyptic thinking in recent years. David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, more common know as the Waco sect, believed that we were in the end of days. And the enormous popularity of the Left Behind Series (a series of books about the rapture) suggests that apocalyptic notions still capture the interest of many.

But, are these just examples of people far from the mainstream? Or do regular, otherwise normal, people show signs of apocalyptic thinking? They do, and the examples may surprise you.

Apocalyptic Thinking in Practice

2010-05-10T04:55:00.000-07:00

Equilibria are very common in nature. But, are equilibria enforced by laws of nature or by a higher power? If you believe that an equilibrium is enforced by a higher power and that the equilibrium is based on human values, then you are engaging in apocalyptic thinking.

Consider a few examples. Let's say that a child constantly talks back to his or her parents until the child gets sent to his or her room; or some other appropriate punishment. We might say that they got what they 'deserved'. If somebody consistently performs poorly at their job until they get fired, we might also say they got what they 'deserved'. In these two case the 'higher power' (the parents in the first case and the boss in the second case) brings things back into an equilibrium based on human values (respect and hard work).

However, if we turned a glass full of water upside down and the water poured out, we would not say that the water got was it 'deserved'. The water simply followed the laws of nature. But, with people, at what point is the equilibrium enforced artificially and at what point is it merely natural law? If somebody spends their money foolishly and goes bankrupt, is that artificial or natural? If a company goes backrupt due to mismanagement is that natural or artificial? If an economy goes into a recession after a period of growth, is that natural or artificial?

Clearly, at some point, equilibrium have natural and not artifical causes. However, if you beleive that all equilibria are the result of intervention from a higher power metaphysical or divine, you are a card carrying apocalyptisit.

Next we will look at some examples of apocalyptic thinking in history up until modern times. In the following posts, I will provide some very recent examples to show that apocalyptic thinking is still alive and well.

Elements of Apocalyptic Thinking

2010-05-03T05:34:00.000-07:00

The roots of apocalyptic thinking are so fundamental to the way we see the world that it is difficult to see this as anything other just the way the world is. However, it is not the way the world is. It is the way we see the world. Before attempting to justify that claim, let me lay out the elements of apocalyptic thinking.

First, there is a belief that their is a 'right' way that things should be and they have gotten off track from that. Second, if we don't do something to set things right, forces beyond out control will set them right for us. Further, there is an element of retribution in the forces beyond our control setting things right. That is, there is some element of punishment for not have kept things on track for ourselves.

Let's say that an unfortunate investor put money in a lot of risky "get rich quick" schemes and landing up loosing everything as well as incurring a lot of debt in the process. Consider the following two statements.

1) He got what he deserved for trying to get rich quick.

2) The probability of loosing everything increases as the riskiness of investments increases. However, there is also a chance you could win big. There are also possibilities for small losses or small gains.

The first of the two statements is more of a moral assessment than an objective assessment. People should work hard and invest prudently. If they do not, bad things will happen. The second allows for the fact that when people gamble, some people actually do win. So retribution is not built into the fabric of reality.

We would like to believe that retribution is built into the fabric of reality. Consequently, we tend to notice instances where the apparent retribution takes place, while ignoring cases where it does not. Thus, our selective data gathering tends to support what we would like to believe is the case.

There are several problems with the elements of apocalypticism. First, the 'right' way is something we impose on the world based on our human values. Doing all the 'right' things makes the human race prosper and grow. This probably not the 'right' thing for the other inhabitants of the planet. Second, the forces of nature are, well, the forces of nature. They do not bring things back into line with human values. They just do what they do. Third, although we do see elements of equilibrium in nature, equilibrium is not retribution.

We apply this apocalyptic notion of retribution to issues of all sizes from individual to social to global. And the magnitude of the retribution ranges from small hand slaps to total destruction of human life. In the next post we will take up the range of applications of this notion.

Religious Roots of Apocalyptic Thinking

2010-04-26T07:53:00.000-07:00

About 3,500 years ago a Persian prophet named Zarathustra asserted that Gods could not be good in some cases and bad in others which was the case, at the time, in most polytheistic mythologies. He said good is good and evil is evil - setting the stage for later beliefs that the earth is a battleground between the forces of good and the forces of evil. This world view, at the risk of being simplistic, allows evil to gain ground at times only to be pushed back by the forces of good. The tension between good and evil is at the heart of apocalyptic thinking. Even if one does not believe in good and evil as a religious doctrine, the underlying concept can also be found in secular thinking. People who believe in balance and harmony see imbalances or dis-harmonies being brought back into balance and harmony as an aspect of the natural order.

Another key religious doctrine is the concept of interventionism. This can best be understood in opposition to a well know opposite doctrine. Deism, a religious view that became popular after the enlightenment, claimed that God created the world and left it to run on its own. Their view can be summed up easily in an example. Let's say you have two clock makers. One made a clock that runs perfectly and requires no further work. The other made a clock that requires constant attention and repair. Who is the better clock maker? Clearly the first one is. The deist view of interventionism is that it is like the second clock maker. Why does God have to intervene all the time? Why couldn't he have just made the world perfect and let it run?

Despite the strengths of that argument, most people are interventionist. They believe that God has a hand in things that go on in the world and that he steps in from time to time to set things right. This notion of the forces of good stepping in to set things right provides much of the religious basis for the apocalyptic view of the world.

Psychological Roots of Apocalyptic Thinking

2010-04-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

There are two uniquely human cognitive or psychological characteristics that lead to an apocalyptic view of the world. This will not immediately make sense to the reader. But, I ask your indulgence as I develop the argument. One of these characteristics is our ability to imagine and the other is our moral sense.

Our ability to imagine allow us to, among other things, envision a world different from the one that exists. We can see a world with farms instead of chance discoveries of grain, domesticated herds rather than following wild herds, man made shelters instead of caves. Our ability to imagine allows us to create societies, governments, economies, technologies and so on. Because we can imagine a world other than the one we live in, we sometimes see the imagined world as better and try to bring it about, or wish to have it brought about.

Our moral sense allows us to see beyond our basic needs and consider the needs of others. Others can include other people we know as well as people we don't know and future people. We sometimes even extend our moral sense to animals and nature. Our moral sense allows us to consider a world in which fairness, justice, respect, orderliness, and predictability figure in heavily.

Given our imagination and our moral sense, it is possible for us to envision a world, unlike the world in which we live, where fairness, justice and so on rule. It is also possible to desire to bring such a world about or desire to have it brought about. And it is this desire, I believe, to have a fair and just world, that provides the psychological basis for apocalyptic thinking.

Allowing Possibilties

2010-04-12T04:57:00.000-07:00

Another way to increase your mental flexibility and improve your ability to be proactive with new ideas is to take an idea that you may normally reject out of hand and allow the possibility that it may be true - or, at least, that it may have merit. We tend to see life as black and white, and even the shades of gray do not allow for the variety of possibilities that are really out there. Is monarchy better than democracy? Would society be better if everybody was not equal? Should there be a mandatory age at which people are terminated? I choose these examples because they are ideas that most people would not even want to consider.

However, each of these ideas does have merit. And by finding the merit in these ideas, you can see that it is better to consider ideas than to reject them out of hand. I suspect that most people, after considering them, would still reject them. However, consider this: Monarchies can be more efficient than democracies. Regardless, of what we might want to believe, everybody is not equal. And as people age, their maintenance costs increase while their productivity decreases. Might that money not be better spent on younger people?

This exercise is useful to see that even the most offensive of ideas still have some merit. And that raises the question - what other ideas that really do have merit have we simply rejected out of hand?

In the following few posts I am going to consider a question that I alluded to earlier. In our modern secular age, do people still believe in the apocalypse? I am gong to argue that they do. I am going to argue that the children of the enlightenment are not nearly as secular and modern as they like to think that they are and that there is abundant evidence that apocalyptic thinking still dominates our modern world view. Do you think I can convince you? Well, stay tuned.

Being Proactive with New Ideas

2010-04-05T05:42:00.000-07:00

The alternative to being reactive to new ideas is to be proactive with them. That is, instead of accepting new ideas when there is absolutely no other choice, embrace them early and consider the possibilities and implications.

There are three primary advantages to being proactive. First, you have more time to adjust to new ideas. That is you can work through the implications and how they will affect you before you actually have to accept them. This advanced preparation is less of a psychological shock. Second, you can, potentially, take advantage of new ideas by thinking them through before hand. And third, you are less likely to become out of touch over time as each new idea by itself is not as threatening as an accumulation of new ideas.

There are, of course, disadvantages to being proactive with new ideas. You don't want to jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Not every new idea survives. In fact, most don't. So, if you are overly proactive to new ideas, it looks like you are just following fads. And, in fact, you may well be.

So, how do you embrace important new ideas and not jump on every bandwagon that comes along? First, you have to evaluate new ideas critically. Look at them intellectually rather than emotionally. Our emotional reactions to new ideas may not be the best assessment as they are, well, new. Emotions are good judgements but tend to work a little better in situations where we have some experience. We need to step back and evaluate new ideas critically rather than just reacting to them. Second, we need to reflect on our successes and failures. Did we accept ideas that didn't work out? Did we fail to accept an idea that did prove its metal? Over time you can get better at this.

Personally, I think being proactive is the best strategy in a dynamic world. And if you are going to be proactive, you have to refine your approach.

Being Reactive to New Ideas

2010-03-29T04:26:00.001-07:00

In the last post, I mentioned that you can face new ideas with one of two predispositions. You can be reactive or proactive. A reactive person resists new ideas until the support for them is so overwhelming that they have no choice but to accept them. The primary benefit of this approach is that you don't have to accept every silly idea that comes along. New ideas often come along like fads and die out just as quickly. The reactive person invests no time or energy in these ideas until they have clearly proven their worthiness. The problem, of course, is how much evidence is required to prove the worthiness of an idea?

At one extreme if the person does not require much evidence before accepting a new idea, then they are really just being a proactive person but not doing it very well. At the other extreme, they may be way out of step with the people around them having failed to accept ideas that have become mainstream.

Personally, I would find it difficult to be a reactive person for two reasons. First, I would find it hard to know when it is time to give in. And, second, I would find it difficult to have to finally give in to an idea that I had resist for a long time. Further, I would find the idea of having to continually adjust and give in to new ideas difficult. But that is me and others may be different.

I would think that being reactive would be a good approach for one who is living in static times. However, for one who is living in dynamic times where things are constantly changing, this would be a strain. I would think that for dynamic times such as the present that being proactive to new ideas would be a lot easier on a person. And that is what I will turn to in the next post.

A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

2010-03-22T04:35:00.000-07:00

I borrowed this phrase from William Coleridge who said that the enjoyment of fiction requires "A Willing Suspension of Disbelief". In other words, you have to believe, at some level, that the fictional representations are or could be true. If you read fiction with skepticism, you may fail to fully appreciate the literary experience. However, I would also like to apply this phrase to the advancement of knowledge.Which, in my opinion, also requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

At any given moment in time, most of what most people believe is not fully true or possibly out right wrong. We are constantly changing, updating and modifying our shared bodies of knowledge. These changes can come in huge jumps like Newton's theory of gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity. And they can come in little hops like the decision to exclude Pluto as a planet. Personal knowledge changes as well. Anyone can attest from their own personal experiences that things that they used to believe no longer seem to hold. The question is - how do we get from one position on what we believe to be true to another position on what we believe to be true?

It seems to me that this can be done, generally, in one of two ways: proactively or re actively. We do it re actively when we simply cannot hold an old view any longer. We do it proactively when we allow for the fact that new evidence may arise and that we may have to change our minds about some things. If we are being really proactive, we can anticipate the implications of new information and consider what might possibly be true as a result. And if we wish to be proactive, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

I am not going to judge whether it is better to be proactive or reactive. This is probably a matter of personal taste, personality, disposition, flexibility and any number of other things. I can say that for me, the preference is very much in the proactive camp. I prefer to know what might be true long before it becomes established. However, for the sake of fairness, I am going to look at the pros and cons of being reactive versus being proactive. Then I will develop an example - apocalyptic thinking. Yes, it could be true.

Believing Fiction

2010-03-15T06:31:00.000-07:00

Last week's suggestion for improving you mental flexibility was pretty straightforward - just continue to expose yourself to new ideas. This week's suggestion is going to be a little further out there.

Next time you read a work of fiction, try an convince yourself that the story is actually true. This is not too difficult if it is a romance or detective fiction. Such things could actually happen and many times are based on true stories. However, what about horror or science fiction? Could you convince yourself that Stephen King's The Stand or Micheal Crichton's The Andromeda Strain really happened? Could you convince yourself that either is based on a true story?

Actually, the premise of The Andromeda Strain (a lethal microbial life form was brought back to earth on a space probe) is plausible. So, is the premise of The Stand (the military experiments with a deadly virus which escapes into the world). Since they are plausible, they could have really happened. Why wouldn't you have heard about them? Well, there are lots of reasons why such events might be covered up. As you look for explanations to support your claim that these things really did occur, you find that it isn't that difficult to come up with plausible scenarios. In fact, this is what conspiracy theorists do all the time.

The point here is not to make you paranoid or to turn you into a conspiracy theorist. The point is to show you that, with the proper motivation, it is not that difficult to convince yourself of something. And, if you managed to convince yourself of something here that you know is not true, how many of the other things that you believe to be true are nothing more than things you have convinced yourself of in the past for various reasons.

For any given person, much of what they believe to be truth is, in fact, not true. George Washington never did cut down a cherry tree. And the people in Columbus's Day did not believe the world was flat. Many of you believed, at some point, that Pluto was one of the nine planets. Similarly, for any given person, some of what they believe to be false, is, in fact, true. Nobody has it all exactly right. But your mind, vulnerable to inflexibility, will lead you to believe that you do have it exactly right. Hopefully, the mental exercise described here will help you maintain greater flexibility and allow you to update your view of the world as new information comes along.

Receiving New Ideas

2010-03-08T04:07:00.000-08:00

There is an oft told zen story about a student who is frustrated with his inability to grasp the ideas that his master is trying to teach him.

"I am just not getting it," the student complains to the master, "what should I do?"

The master invites the student to sit and offers him some tea. The student accepts the offer and the master begins to pour tea into the students cup. The cup fills and begins to overflow onto the table.

"Master," the student exclaims, "My cup is full."

"That is your problem," the master replies, "your cup is full."

When your mind is full of things, you cannot receive new ideas. It is too full of the old ideas. And the longer the old ideas stay in there, the harder is it to replace them with new ones. This is a problem because the world is constantly changing and it is necessary to accept new ideas in order to keep up with it. After a while you become very rigid in your views. They become more inconsistent with the world around you. And you can find fewer and fewer people who would agree with you on things. So, what do you do.

Well, the answer is fairly simple, actually. You have to be diligent in your acceptance of new idea. When you read the newspaper, for example, instead of reading it from the perspective that they are all idiots and you are the only one who really knows what is going on, read it from the perspective that there may actually be something in there to be learned. That doesn't mean to just naively accept everything. But it does mean to give it a fair chance.

And, that is only a start. You should seek out new ideas and new ways of looking at things. Read books, take classes, explore new ideas. Watch movies and TV shows that you would not normally be attracted to. It has to be an active effort.

Just like you have to get off the couch and get some exercise, you have get out of the valley your mind has settled into and exercise it with some new ideas. New ideas are the key to mental flexibility and it takes effort to achieve it.

Keeping Your Mind Sharp and Agile

2010-03-01T04:46:00.000-08:00

Over time our thinking become very rigid. Our minds shrink wrap around the things we know and resist letting in new ideas. This is not good for most people and for academics it is a disaster. It would be analogous to a professional athlete becoming soft and doughy from lack of exercise. Fortunately for professional athletes their careers are relatively short and when the natural effects of aging set in, they no longer have the demands of their profession to deal with. However, for academics this is not the case. Academics can continue to practice their profession well into old age. We have a comedic archetype of an aging academic reading from yellowing pages of notes lingering for years at deaths door while continuing to deliver lectures. This archetype is a bit unfair. But, it is not unheard of to have academics continue to work well into their 70's or even 80's. So, the question is - how do you keep your mind nimble and sharp and resist the forces of aging?

Well, part of the answer is that many academics don't. Some begin their careers fixed in their views and some acquire the rigidity over time. However, this is unfortunate and not necessary. It is possible to remain nimble and flexible in your thinking. And it is not a great deal different from maintaining physical flexibility.

In the absent of any efforts to combat inflexibility, our bodies become inflexible over time. Muscles shorten and we loose our range of motion. We combat this by stretching. And the same thing is true of mental flexibility. We combat it by stretching our minds. I would add, parenthetically, that we also become inflexible emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and in any number of other ways. The remedies there are the same - stretching. But, I am going to limit my discussion to mental flexibility.

Over the next few weeks I am going to look at three ways to maintain mental flexibility: exposure to new ideas; using fiction for mental exercise; and the pursuit of non conventional ideas. Warning: This will start out exactly as you expect and get very weird before it is all done.

Is This Really The Best Way To Do Things?

2010-02-22T07:46:00.001-08:00

The past few posts on the nature and role of the university may cause people to ask if this is really the best way to do things. The answer, I believe, is yes! If universities were any more efficient they would be dangerous. In order to explain that outrageous claim, allow me to digress for a moment.

Machiavelli, the author of late Medieval book of real politic called The Prince, provided sage advice for keeping a Prince in power. However, what few people know is that he had second thoughts later in life about the advice that he had given. When you think about it, a monarchy is really the most effective form of government as long as two conditions occur. First, the monarch must understand what it good for the people he or she is governing. And, second, the monarch must be competent enough to achieve what is good for the people. If the monarch is corrupt (or at least does not make the needs of people primary) or if he or she is incompetent, then monarchy is not such a good idea. And therein lies the problem. Given what we know about people and human nature, it is unlikely that these conditions will be met. Hence we need a form of government that does not rely so much on a single person.

In steps democracy. It isn't that democracy is the most effective form of government. It isn't. It is slow, ineffective and often contrary. However, given our understanding of human nature, it is the most likely to be the most effective over time. It is not the most efficient. It is the most risk free. A monarch can use his or her power to very efficiently take a nation in a very wrong direction. If a democracy goes in a wrong direction it does so very slowly with much debate and discussion and many opportunities for correction.

Universities are similar to democracy in that they are slow, inefficient, and often contrary. However, as the guardians of reality, that is exactly what we want. We do not want to go tooling off in the wrong direction with great efficiency. We want to make sure that if we go in a wrong direction we do so slowly with much debate and many opportunities for correction.

Indeed, if you look at the history of universities, this is exactly what happens. It is exactly what we want to have happen. And therefore it is the best way to do things over the long term.

Guardians of Reality

2010-02-15T04:02:00.000-08:00

Our perception of reality is in a constant state of flux. I use the phrase "Our perception of" to avoid philosophical arguments although the statement is equally as true without it. What appeared to be real to an ancient Egyptian was very different from what appeared real to an ancient Greek. Different again for a Medieval noble, and different again for scholar during the enlightenment. Our modern view and postmodern views are, again, very different. We can loosely define reality as our perceptions of the physical world, our social structures and values, and our spiritual expressions. It is what we think, believe, feel, experience and so on. And it is constantly changing. The comedian Lily Tomlin once said "What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch" And that is about as serviceable as any philosophical attempt to nail it down any further.

Reality changes because we are changing. We try new things. We learn new things. We reject old idea and accept new idea. We have new experiences and new concepts. If our perception of reality were static, they would, over time, fail to meet our needs. And, at the same time, if they changed too fast we would have a hard time keeping up with it all. So, in order to maintain the stability of reality we need a social institution that is on one hand tasked with advancing reality, and, at the same time responsible for maintaining its stability. And that social institution is the university. A couple easy examples will clearly illustrate this.

First consider the role of the university in education. On one hand the university indoctrinates students into the corpus of existing knowledge. This is a reality maintenance function. On the other hand, university classes encourage students to think for themselves. This is the advancement function. How can you tell students on one hand to learn what you are teaching them and one the other hand to think for themselves? Well, it is just part of the role of the university in maintaining and advancng reality.

Second consider the role of the university in research. On one hand the university generates new ideas. H.L. Mencken once said "There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who believes it". One of the responsibilities of the faculty is to put forth and entertain new ideas. There is no tenet of our worldview that didn't start out as a stupid idea at some point. And yet, there are processes in place to keep stupid ideas from escaping out into the world of real people. There are tenure committees, peer reviews, commentary, viscous fights between differing schools of thought and so on. So the university allows reality to advance by adding new ideas, while keeping that advancement from happening too rapidly.

So when we complain about the vagaries of the university - the teachers who no longer want to teach, the researchers who no longer wish to pursue research, the administrators who came to the university to avoid administration only find them selves in administrative roles - you have ask: is the guardianship of reality important and can you think of any better way to do it?

Academic Service

2010-02-08T03:08:00.000-08:00

There is a rich assortment of Academic Service roles within the University which I am going to simplify into two categories: voluntary committee work and paid administrative work. Voluntary committees usually involve some sort of policy making while administrative roles generally involve running something. Neither hold up particularly well to scrutiny.

Most academics have some sort of voluntary committee work and the effort required can vary greatly. There are committees that literally never meet and these are considered plum assignments as one can meet their obligations for service without doing anything. Other committees meet frequently and are usually addressing a problem that the committee members feel is important. The two extremes are rare and most committees meet now and then with limited attendance and limited productivity. As far as I can see, committees serve two purposes. First, they engage faculty in the workings of the university and allow faculty to meet other faculty that they might otherwise have no way of knowing. This is a good thing because faculty tend to become rather isolated in their teaching and research. Getting to know other faculty helps develop a sense of community among the faculty. The second is that committees keep faculty engaged in the policies of the university. Again, faculty tend to become rather isolated in their teaching and research. So committees allow them to stay in touch with any changes that may be brewing. People often forget that these are the two primary purposes for committee work and think that committees should be productive; that is, they should get something done. This misses the point and if a committee gets something done, it is a by product of the other two objectives.

Far fewer faculty have paid administrative roles. These roles include running a department, a program, or a school, all the way up to major administrative roles within the university. As I mentioned earlier, most academics prefer life at the university to the administrative life in a corporation. So why do some faculty migrate into these roles. In fairness, I should say that some if not many did it reluctantly. However, may actually pursue these roles. And there are two reasons, as far as I can see why they would do this. First, it needs to be done. That is, somebody has to do it. Faculty are an odd group of people and are reluctant to be led by someone who does not understand what they do. As a practical matter this means another academic. Academia is a culture unto itself. And one of the tenets of that culture is to only accept leaders from within the ranks. The second reason, also touched upon earlier, is that at some point most academics run out of steam for teaching and research. If they wish to remain vital and contributing administrative service roles provide that opportunity.

People looking at the univeristy from the outside often see the inner workings as bizarre, non productive and often neurotic. But, there are good reasons for the university being the way that it is. Universities are the "Guardians of Reality". And that will be the topic for next time.

Service: The Saftey Net of the Dispossessed

2010-02-01T05:09:00.000-08:00

One of the great ironies of academic life is that many bright young people pursue academic careers because they find the idea of administrative life in the corporate world to be less than desirable. And, then, they find themselves, after a productive decade or two, in the administrative life of the university. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to sustain your productivity in research over the long term. And it is equally as difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching.

There are three reasons why it is difficult to sustain your productivity in research. First, research requires mental energy. Mental energy declines as one ages and one is unlikely to engage in challenging new research as they get older. Second, research requires enthusiasm. Younger researchers are often driven by a desire to discover and be recognized for that discovery. As you publish paper after paper that few people care about, it is difficult to maintain that idealistic enthusiasm. Finally, the audience for research can be very fickle. What was a hot topic one decade can be a hard sell the next and an impossible sell after that. Since one is unlikely to embark on new avenues of research later in their career, they find that there is simply no audience for what they would like to write papers about.

Similarly, it is difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching. Initially, it is a heady experience standing up in front of an audience of students and telling them things that they want to know or need to know. It is also quite satisfying to adjust over time to their challenges. Further, it is exciting to learn new things and pass them on. However, at some point there are no new challenges in the classroom. You have been asked every conceivable question multiple times. Students fade into one another as you have difficult remembering all the names. And you, some times, dread giving a lecture as you know you may very well bore yourself.

This does not happen to everyone. But it does happen to an overwhelming majority. This is really the point where one should move on to other things. But, if you have been an academic all your life and know nothing else, what can you move on to. The answer, of course is service to the university. There are any number of service roles from voluntary committee work to well paid administrative positions. Next time we will explore the richness of those alternatives.

The Curse of Soft Requirements

2010-01-25T04:35:00.000-08:00

I suppose that soft requirements is an oxymoron. If something is required, it is a requirement. If it is not required, then it is not a requirement. However, I think most people would understand the phrase soft requirements as things that you need to do where the exact nature or criteria are unclear. As academics we have two soft requirements: keeping up with the advances in our fields and publishing our own advances in respectable outlets. Both of those soft requirements are worded vaguely on purpose, because in the real life of an academic they are equally as vague.

Keeping up with the field means that as new things happen, you stay on top of them. This, however, can mean many, many different things. Is it keeping up with research, or news events, or technology, or policy changes, or current trends among practitioners? It could be any of those things. In my field of Information Technology, you could spend all your time keeping up with advances in just one area of the technology. This is unusual, however, as most fields do not have as much in the way of evolving and emerging technologies. Most people believe, somewhat naively, that if you are an academic in a specific field that you will be on top of everything happening in that field. This would only be possible, of course, if there were 5000 hours in a day and you had several hundred clones. Nonetheless, people tend to be aware of what comes across their field of vision and unaware of everything that doesn't.

Publishing in respectable outlets is also a bit squishy. In an ideal world, it would mean respected peer reviewed journals published in paper form. However, the world is not ideal. Peer reviewed journals often have a long lag in publication and focus on concerns largely of interest only to academics. This makes their relevance questionable. If you are in a hard core academic discipline, this is not a problem. But in a professional school it is. On the other hand, if you go to web based publication or widely read practitioner publications, it is considered to be lacking in rigor. So, you can't win.

That should be the mantra of academics. You can't win. And that is the curse of soft requirements. No matter what you do, there will be a few who think it is great and many who think it is a silly waste of time. So, you can work long hours only to find that others think you are just wasting your time. And this causes many academic to simply not work long hours. It is a rational response. You can work like a fool and face criticism or you can do nothing a face criticism. As Mark Twain would say, the wages are the same and one way is a lot easier.

After a while you find that academics who are productive can't help being productive and academics who can help it stop wasting their time. But what do they do instead? They have to do something and most turn to service, the homeless shelter for the academically dispossessed. And that will be the topic for next time.

Blessings and Curses

2010-01-18T03:49:00.000-08:00

Now and then I like to provide some insight into life as an academic. And since I don't have a better topic on my mind this morning I thought I would write about one of the greatest blessings of my academic professional life. And that is that I have an enormous amount of control over my time. The things that I have to do are limited. I have to meet with my classes and when it gets down to it that is probably about it. If you don't show up for your classes the university could terminate your tenure. So that can be thought of as a hard requirement.

There are also firm requirements. I need to prepare for my classes. While I actually spend an enormous amount of time preparing for my classes, there is a wide variation in how much time academics spend in general. I spend a lot of time for several reasons. First, I am interested in the material that I teach so broadening and deepen my knowledge is something I enjoy doing. Second, I like teaching so I am constantly looking for ways to improve the delivery. Third, my field of Information Technology is constantly changing so just keeping up with what is going on requires time (in fact, a LOT of time). It would not be unrealistic to say that I spend two to four hours in preparation for each hour I teach. However, I think I am at an extreme end of the spectrum. It is easily conceivable that once one has their lectures nailed down they may spend very little, if any, time in preparation. But, clearly, if one puts in no preparation time for their classes, it will eventually show up on course evaluations. So, it is best to be prepared. This is a firm requirement because you have some wiggle room in how you pursue it. But, if it gets bad enough you can be pulled out of the classroom with dire consequences.

If one were to think about this in terms of hours per week, the hard and firm requirements could translate into as few as four hours a week (two 2 hours classes with no preparation time) and as many as 22 1/2 hours per week (three 2 1/2 hour classes with two hours of preparation for each hour of class) .

One of my colleagues once joked that the nice thing about being an academic is the flexibility - you can work any 80 hours a week that you choose. But how did we get from a range of 2 to 20 hours of hard and firm requirements to 80 hours a week? The answer is that the flexibility which is a blessing is also a curse. And as we get into the soft requirements next time that curse will become more obvious.

Power, Wealth and Fame

2010-01-11T04:36:00.000-08:00

I listened to a book on CD last week entitled 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It provided 48 laws (actually conflicting pieces of advice) on how to become powerful or more powerful. It was worth listening to and most of the advice was fairly sound although it would still take a fair amount of thought and reflection to apply it to the greatest advantage. Many of the reviews of the book on Amazon were offended by the Machiavellian tone of the book and this got me to thinking about power and related goals such as wealth or fame.

Aristotle said that happiness is the only goal that we seek as an end in itself. We want to be happy simply because we want to be happy. However, other goals, such as power, wealth or fame, we want because we think they will make us happy. I think the thing that offended the reviewers on Amazon was that this book provided rules to make yourself more powerful without asking if you wanted to be powerful, how much power you really wanted or whether you wanted to pursue power as an end in itself.

We actually know a fair amount about how to achieve power, wealth and fame. The problem is that most people are unwilling to do what it takes to achieve them. Why is that? I think the problem is that these are not end goals in themselves. They are sub goals in the pursuit of happiness. If we have to do something that makes us unhappy in the pursuit of happiness then we have defeated our attempts. But, let us say for the sake of argument that we can pursue these goals without doing anything unpleasant. Is there still a problem?

Yes, there is. The problem is conversion. Money itselfs does not make one happy. It is the things one can do with money that increases happiness. Power does not make one happy. Again it is the things one can do with power that may increase their happiness. If one acquires a large amount of money, power or fame and has not figured out how to convert them into happiness then the whole exercise has been pointless. There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of power, wealth or fame as long as it is done in the context of a meaningful and satisfying life.

Ah, 2010

2010-01-04T04:58:00.000-08:00

The New Year is officially underway. Two thousand and ten. Or, I suppose, Twenty Ten. I am not sure who gets to decide what the proper way to say it is. But no matter. It is upon us and I think it is going to be a great year. There has been much talk about the past decade and how is was the decade from Hell. I have to admit that it was a rough decade and I do think things will get better in the next decade.

It is nice having these cyclical patterns to time - weeks, months, years, decades. They give us a way to structure our time and have built in points of reflection and improvement. I have resolutions for the New Year as I do every year. I am a big fan of reflecting on a time cycle; seeing what when right and what went wrong; and having a shot at improving it next time around. In an earlier post I mentioned how I do this each semester.

Over break, I made substantial revisions to the two classes that I will be teaching in the Spring. I also made some further progress on a book that I am writing entitled Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. I have decided that when I have the first draft of the book completed, I will make it available on my website for free. I think more academics should do this. The whole publishing business has gone so far off track that it can only be justified as an alternative to nothing. However, making things available for free on the Internet is probably a lot closer to the original ideas of freely sharing scientific and scholarly knowledge. So, I will give it a shot and see how it goes.

I am looking forward to 2010 how ever you pronounce it and will come back at the end of the year and reflect on whether or not it met my expectations.

Ah, Break!!

2009-12-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

I am finished with my grading and have submitted my grades electronically. So the Fall 2009 semester is officially over for me and I am officially on break. Normal people who have real jobs sometimes look at academics who get three or four weeks off for winter break and think "what a chushy job!!" And, I have to admit, the job does have its cushy aspects. But, it isn't as though I have three or four weeks to lay on the couch and watch daytime TV. I have work to do.

Each semester break I go over my classes for the next semester to revise and improve them. Sometimes this is fairly easy and sometimes it is a huge amount of work. You would think that once you have delivered a class, the work is done. But that is not true. In some classes the technology changes. In other classes you look over what you did the prior semester and try to fix pieces that didn't work very well. Not only does the material change, the students continually change as well. So, you are often organizing one moving target for delivery to another moving target.

In other classes you just add new material to keep the class interesting to teach. For example, in my class Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology, I am thinking about introducing a collaborative writing assignment using a Wiki. So, I have to come up to speed on Wiki technology and work out the mechanical aspects of grading a collaborative project.

If you have been following my posts, you know that I have been carrying on recently about a new age of mass collaboration. This very large idea translates into a very concrete idea in this collaborative assignment. And this is the way things are supposed to be. You think big thoughts and then explore them in little ways. So break is not just time off. It is time to reflect, revise and hopefully improve.

The GNU World Order

2009-12-15T04:58:00.000-08:00

The more I think about it, the more I believe that there is something to this idea of mass collaboration. Much of the progress that we saw in the 20th century can be traced back to two simple but very powerful ideas. Francis Bacon's empirical view of science allowed us to produce huge quantities of reliable scientific knowledge. And Adam Smith's Pin Factory allowed us to produce huge quantities of reliable technology. (To those who always say, "Oh, the world is much more complicated than that.", point taken. I am simplifying things to make a point here.)

Now we take two very simple new ideas. First, people work best when exploiting their strengths. And, second, self organizing collaborative systems allow each person to most effectively achieve their maximum productivity. Taken together, these two ideas comprise The GNU World Order.

I should explain, for the uninitiated, that GNU (pronounced Nu, the G is silent) is a recursive acronym "Gnu's Not Unix". It is the name given to a line of open source software developed by the Free Software Foundation. This is, to my knowledge, the first major example of mass collaboration. So, I though it appropriate to name the new age of mass collaboration the GNU World Order, also playing off "the New World Order" of the enlightenment.

I can honestly say that I don't know where all this is going. But my intuition says that it is definitely going somewhere and is worth keeping an eye on.

Wikinomics: A Possible Soution

2009-12-07T04:47:00.000-08:00

I love serendipity. Last week I was rambling on about how difficult it would be to manage in a strengths based environment. At the time, I did not see a clear path to the future. However, I just happened to be in the local public library later that day and just happened to pick up a book on CD that looked interesting. Then Whammo! the whole thing came together.

The book I picked up was Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The premise of the book is that we are seeing a shift away from traditional hierarchical business models to more collaborative business models. I cannot say much more than that without diminishing the impressive ideas put forth in this book. I would highly recommend it and, for my purposes here, will leave it off by saying that this book jogged my thinking in this area.

In the future you can expect to see more outsourcing of work to individuals. Instead of retaining talent in a sort of corporate studio system, corporations will increasingly acquire the talent they need, when they need it, from the global pool of talent that is available throught the World Wide Web. Professionals will bid for jobs and be paid for the things that they produce rather than being paid for just showing up. Over time people will gravitate to the things they are best at as that will maximize their productivity and their revenue. And businesses will adjust compensation so as to attract the best person for the job at the best price. This will lead to economic efficiency and maximized productivity. And people will work according to their strengths as that will produce the maximum revenue for the least effort.

I don't want to push this idea too far as the future tends to scare people. However, it is easy to see a day, within out lifetimes, where notions such as "going to work" or "working for a company" are simply antiquated. Will we ever get nostalgic and look fondly back on the days when we used to sit in traffic for a hour in the morning and in the evening so we could hang out all day with people we didn't like just so we could go to pointless meetings and engage in any number of pointless repetitive rituals? Perhaps not. Maybe this is a good thing.

The Challenge of Exploiting Strengths

2009-11-30T05:12:00.000-08:00

It seems so obvious that organizations would perform better if people could exploit their strengths rather than attempting to mitigate their weaknesses. However, implementing this as a management strategy is not without its challenges. Consider an analogous situation in the realm of politics and economics.

In democratic societies, people pursue their self interests rather than the interests dictated by a monarch. The benefit of this is that people are far more productive doing what they want than they are doing what they are told. The down side is that you have to deal with all their opinions and a concerted focused effort on any one specific thing is virtually impossible. The upside, of course, is that you have higher levels of productivity, advances in knowledge, creative ideas, cultural advances, advances in technology and so on. However, if you were to, some how, take a picture of today's democracies back to a medieval despot, it is unlikely that they would want to have any part of it. It all looks very chaotic and the benefits, to someone who has not experienced them, are unclear. In fact, if the first vote of a new democratic society was to decide on whether or not to be democratic, it is certainly not a foregone conclusion that it would become one.

New social systems require two things: visionaries and huge successes. And the same thing is true with new management systems. I doubt that rank and file organizations will all start cutting over to strengths based management. What is more likely is that organizations will toy with strength based ideas. By doing things this way we will begin to see the benefits and will learn how to deal with the problems that it creates. Over time we will learn more about how to manage this way. Then, at some point, a visionary will coalesce our experiences in a cohesive treatise on managing strength. Some one will try the new vision, hit a home run out of the park, and others will follow.

This is one of the most promising ideas I have seen in a long time. But, don't expect a revolution. A slow and cautious punctuated evolution is probably the best approach and that is, indeed, how I see it happening.

My Strengths: Strategic, Futuristic, Learning, Analytic, and Intellection

2009-11-23T04:20:00.000-08:00

My top five strengths, according to the StrengthsFinders test are: strategic, futuristic, learning, analytic, and intellection. Briefly, here is what they mean.

Strategic means that I can see patterns in things and the implications of those patterns. This is not only true, it is one of my defining characteristics. I see patterns and implications everywhere. When I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind where the guy saw patterns everywhere due to schizophrenia I actually began to worry that I might be schizophrenic because I see patterns everywhere as well.

My second strength, futuristic, is also a defining characteristic. I read the future just like most people read the morning paper. I don't always get it right just as most people do not fully understand what they read in the paper. But, I am far more likely to see the future implications of a situation than the present ones.

Third, I am a learner. I love learning about new things. I am always taking on new things just so I have something new to learn about. I cannot drink a beer without learning how beer is made, who makes it, what the different kinds are and so on. I cannot watch a movie without know what other movies the director has made, what other movies the actors have been in, what other things the screenplay author has written, and what other movies may be similar or remakes.

Fourth, I am analytic. I like to see things as they are, how they work, why they work the way they do, and how they relate to other things and the way those other things work, why and so on.

Finally, my fifth strength is intellection. I enjoy intellectual activity. I have always been drawn to philosophy and pursuit of intellectual questions.

I suspect that anyone who knows me will be simply nodding as they read these. They are my defining characteristics. And they didn't come as much of a surprise to me. What did come as a surprise was that these were not things that others are necessarily good at. I thought other people were just being lazy when they did not keep up with me in these areas. I did not realize that they may have different strengths.

Now, Discover Your Strengths

2009-11-16T04:55:00.000-08:00

Last week I carried on a bit about a motivational management book I had listened too which suggested that the best way to manage people was to develop their strengths rather than to have them work on their weaknesses. As I listened to this book, I was stunned that something so obvious would take so long for us to figure out. Upon reflection it occured to me that this emphasis on shoring up weaknesses is probably an anomaly. In fact, the values of conformity and measuring up are both industrial age values. And now that we are moving beyond the industrial age, we are also coming to our senses about a few things as well. I don't mean to bash the industrial age. A lot of good came out of it. But, as with any good thing it is easy to get carried away. And in many ways we did.

But, back to the topic at hand. I listened to their second book entitled Now, Discover Your Strenths. This second book reported on a vast amount of research conducted by Gallup to identify categories of strengths. They came up with 34 areas which people seem to have some sort of 'natural' ability. That means that you do things in your area of strength with little effort. You might be good at connecting with people, or working a crowd, or seeing implications, or figuring out how things work. There are things that you are better at than other things. There are things that your are better at than other people. There are things that other people are better at than you. And it only makes sense that you do the things that you are good at and spend your time getting better at them.

Unfortunately, in today's world, we tend to down play our strengths. If we are good at something we tend to dismiss it as unimportant. It is easy for us so we don't value it. And other people resent our strengths. In a world that values conformity, standing out implies that others fall short some how. This all reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story where anyone with a talent was penalized somehow in order to insure that nobody made anyone else feel inadequate. This is funny in a short story, but sad in real life.

If this idea has any appeal to you, I would encourage you to visit the Strengths Finder website. They list the 34 categories and, if you are so motivated they, provide a test that will tell you your strengths. Next time I will discuss my strengths and their implications.

First, Break all the Rules

2009-11-09T03:51:00.000-08:00

I listen to a lot of recorded books and lectures. Most of the time it is fairly serious stuff, but occasionally I like to lighten up with a motivational talk. While the quality of motivational talks can vary greatly, I find that the good ones usually give me something worthwhile to think about. And that is exactly what just happened. I went to the library and checked out four or five motivational talks, one of which was a management talk called First, Break All the Rules. This talk caught my attention with the claim that if you want a high performance organization you should focus on your employee's strengths rather than their weaknesses. This was exactly what I was looking for - something to think about.

According to the authors, the most common employee development process in use today will review the employee on an annual basis, identify their areas of weakness and have them work on those weaknesses over the next year. This, again according to the authors, produces mediocre employees who are frustrated and struggling to be good at things they are not naturally good at. Instead it make more sense to have them identify their strengths and work at being better at things that they are naturally good at. This is so obvious, I thought, why did it take so long for someone to figure this out?

I am going to insert my own analogy in here to crystallize the clarity and importance of this idea. Imagine a professional football team where the players spent their time working on their weaknesses. The quarterback would practice blocking. The running back would practice tackles. The tackles would run reception patterns. The kicker would develop his social skills, and so on. How well would this team perform in competition? Probably not very well. In fact, their only hope would be that other teams also practiced using a similarly dysfunctional development strategy. And that is exactly what happens in business, industry and government today.

But, you may ask, how do you know what your strengths are? How do you discover them? How do you develop them? How do you employ them to get better at doing you job? Well, stay tuned, there is more to come.

No Safety in Numbers

2009-11-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

In the last post, I discussed how going along with the crowd in your research may be risky in that you may not get as much credit (or even any) for the work you have done. People who have developed recognizable names in research have usually done so by going off on their own and discovering something new and novel. People who plod along shoulder to shoulder with other researchers may gain recognition from the other plodders, but it is rare that they gain recognition beyond that. However, plodding along is not the only risk associated with being part of the crowd.

I used the analogy last week of a beach full of beachcombers with metal detectors. The other risk of being part of the crowd is that the crowd may simply be on the wrong beach. The frequency of this occurrence probably varies quite a bit from one field to the next. However, no field of research is exempt. A promising new vein of research is discovered. Researchers flock to it. And, for a while, it is easy to get papers published in this new area. There may be special issues of journals dedicated to it. There may even be whole new journals dedicated to the emerging area. But then, time passes without much progress. A new and different area excites everyone. Before you know it, you cannot get an editor to even consider a paper in the old new vein. And then, one day, you find the beach deserted except for a few diehards who refuse to give up.

There are probably people who have invested heavily in this area. Many have probably gotten tenure based on their publications. And now they have so much invested in this area that they are unwilling to look for a new beach. So, the chances are that they give up doing research and along with that any dreams of being recognized for their contributions. The beach that no one cares about can be a lonely and disappointing place.

Timidity Does Not Pay Either

2009-10-26T03:55:00.000-07:00

In the last post, I talked about the risk one takes when they venture out on their own, following their own curiosity, in their research. Not going along with the crowd is a high risk, high reward situation. It is high risk because you might find that you have just wasted your time. It is high reward, because, if you are successful, you may get your name associated with something. This may sound like I am recommending that one go along with the pack. I am not. There are risks there as well.

If one follows the path of well defined research, there are risks and rewards as there are with anything. The reward may be that you are the one to find the thing that everyone is looking for. But, that reward may not be so great and the risks are not trivial. Consider the following analogy. Let's say that pirates buried treasure somewhere along a stretch of beach several miles long. If enough people scour the beach with metal detectors, somebody will be he person lucky enough to find it. What will that person get credit for? They will get credit for being the lucky one. That's it, and they may not even be able to keep the treasure.

How different is this from someone who studied old maps, read old ship logs and then determined where the treasure would likely be. And then, before actually looking for the treasure, they acquired salvage rights. The risk with this approach is that after all that work they may not find anything. But, if they do, they get prestige, recognition and mostly likely can keep the treasure. This is analogous to the situation I described last week. But let us return to the beach full of beachcombers with metal detectors.

The person who finds the treasure with a metal detector is not likely to gain the prestige and respect that the person who predicted its location would. The beachcomber would be seen as a technician who was merely applying their technique and got lucky. So, one of the risks associated with going along with the pack is that you may be seen merely as a technician. One of the hallmarks of lack luster research is that it is technically solid, means little and contributes less.

This disdain for the technician goes a long way back in the history of science. In fact, that is where the word 'science' came from. Prior to the mid 1800's what we currently call science was known as natural philosophy. As more and more people began to focus on data collection and less on the larger problems to be solved, natural philosophers began to chafe at the idea of having these people included in their ranks. So, around mid century William Whewell suggested the term 'scientist' (from the Latin word for knowledge) to refer to these technicians of knowledge acquisition who did not live up to the full meaning of natural philosopher. Today, of course, the term scientist is used as a term of respect rather than disdain. But it reflects the prevailing view that technicians somehow fall short of the mark.

If one is too far embedded in the current paradigm they risk being considered as little more than a technician. And, like the beachcomber who got lucky, they are unlikely to get full credit for whatever they discover. Is being a technician the only risk associated with going along with the crowd. No, not at all. It may be that the whole crowd is looking on the wrong beach. And that we will consider next.

Retroactive Blessings

2009-10-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, an intellectual pursuit become research retroactively. It receives what amounts to a retroactive blessing. Let's say that a scholar pursues an avenue of inquiry that appears to all his or her colleagues as being somewhat fanciful. By fanciful we mean that it does not follow any of the commonly accepted methodologies; it is not attempting to answer any of the current questions; and it does not appear to be yielding anything of obvious value. This scholar's colleagues may dismiss this activity as not being research. They may call it an intellectual pursuit. They may even call it a legitimate intellectual pursuit. But, they would probably stop short of calling it research.

Then over time, let's say five or ten years, it begin to bear fruit. Since this is a hypothetical, we can push it a bit. So, let's say it bears fruit in a big way. It popularizes a new methodological technique, it helps answer an unanswered question, or it opens up a whole new vein of productive research. Would we consider the work done for the past five or ten years to be research? I think the answer is that there is no question. It would be viewed as research.

Now let's consider what would happen if it did not bear fruit. Everything else was the same. There were five or ten years of investigation. But they came up empty. Would it then be considered research? Probably not. So the very same activity becomes research if it pays off and is not research if it doesn't.

Scholars like to say that research does not have to pay off in order to be research. But when they say that, they are talking about some fairly narrowly defined activities within the bounds of convention. So, if I set up and experiment, for example, to test a principle then it would probably be considered research regardless of the outcome as long as the experimental design was solid and the principle being tested was viewed as non trivial. However, if I just follow my curiosity, where ever it takes me, it would have to pay off eventually to not be considered folly.

Why do we do this? Well, overwhelmingly when people just drift off on their own the results are not productive. So, we allow scholars to take a fair amount of personal risk in their endeavors. If their interests do pay off eventually, then they are acknowledged retroactively. If they do not, then they just have to face the fact that they wasted their time. So, is it better for researchs to stay close to the conventional? Maybe not. That approach has its risks as well.

But, Is It Research?

2009-10-12T06:25:00.000-07:00

I am embarking on a development effort to create quest based learning tasks in Second Life. This is a part of the vein of work that I have been pursuing with virtual worlds and video games. A question that faculty often have to deal with when pursuing their interests is - Well, that all sounds very interesting, but, is it research?

Business schools have an inferiority complex when it comes to research (and rightly so) leading the faculty to question such pursuits with regard to their validity as research endeavors. This is an incredibly important topic for business school faculty, so I thought I would digress a bit on this issue of research.

Business school research is, at best, a poorly defined concept, with definitions and criteria varying widely from school to school and among faculty members within a school. Under the most lax definitions, everything is research and under the most stringent, nothing is research. So clearly the concepts needs a little clarifying.

Wernher von Braun is credited with the oft cited observation "research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing". The original quote included the modifier "basic" which changes the meaning slightly. However, this is the version that you see cited most often.

If not knowing what you are doing is the criteria for research then business faculty across this great nation and around the world are doing a great deal more research than they are getting credit for. And their is some justification for this claim. Research is the process by which we create new knowledge. And if we already know what we are doing, then we are not creating anything new.

Plato struggled with this same problem. He wondered how you could recognize truth unless you already knew it was truth. This, in turn, led to his observation that you never really learn anything new, you just remember things you already knew. This is actually an astute observation on Plato's part. But, I will just make him look silly if I try to explain it.

Putting aside the philosophical subtlties regarding truth and knowledge, I think it is fair to say that when people do not know what they are doing, we should take it at face value. That is, it is not research. They simply do not know what they are doing. At the same time we do not want to completely ignore the fact that in order to do research you must step away from the things you know and discover things that you don't know. Just exactly how that is done can be very tricky at times.

Why Study Games?

2009-10-05T04:12:00.000-07:00

The past few posts have been about video games and this naturally leads to the question - why study video games? I would like to break this down into two questions: 1) why study games?; and 2) why study video games? These are really two quite different questions and need to be addressed separately. In this post I will take on the first one.

In his book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia Bernard Suits points out that in a utopian world, where work was not required for survival, most people would busy themselves with games. There is something fundamentally satisfying about games and it is one of the few activities that people pursue for its own sake. That is, we work so we can play. But we play because we like to play.

There is an important message in that observation. If work were more like play then we would want to work for its own sake. Or, if work were more like a game, then it would be more inherently satisfying. Same thing goes for education. If school were more like play we would want to go to school for its own sake. And if school were more like a game, it would be more inherently satisfying.

Unfortunately, people like to think that work and school should be hard. They should be unpleasant. So any attempts to make them more like play or more like games would only diminish their value. But, I believe, that this perspective is merely a rationalization. It is an attempt to make the best of or deal with a bad situation. Believing that work is supposed to be unpleasant allows us to accept our fate if we are doing work that we find as unpleasant. However, history does not support this view.

Work in the industrial age was far more unpleasant than it is today. In fact, it was not only unpleasant, it was dangerous, tedious, and detrimental to one's health. In the past century and a half great strides have been made in making the workplace safer, more pleasant and more satisfying. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who beleives that work was somehow better in the factories of Victorian England.

Education wasn't much better. At the dawn of the twentieth century most education was some form of recitation. Students would memorize materials, then stand up in class and recite what they had mastered. It wasn't until the mid 20 century that schools began to focus on problem solving skills and greater student engagement. Needless to say, school became much more interesting and today we look back distainfully on those days of 'rote memorization'.

The question is, with all the improvements that we have seen in the workplace and in education, is this as good as it gets? I don't think so. As we gain more and more insight into the nature of games and why they are so inherently satisfying, we can apply that understanding to the workplace and to schooling. Imagine what would happen to the economy if people preferred to lean new skills and apply them than anything else. If all those unproductive hours spent in front the the boob tube could be put to productive use, we might see another major improvement in quality of life.

Some History

2009-09-28T04:48:00.000-07:00

I just reviewed another article for ACM Computing Reviews; this time on the History of Pong. It reminded me of how much misinformation there is floating around about the history of video games. People who remember Pong and many who don't, recall it as the first home video game and see it as the first step in a technology that went on to provide home gaming consoles such as Ninetendo, Sony Play Station and Xbox. This perception is inaccurate and I thought I would take a few mintes to set the record straight.

First, Pong was not developed using computer technology. It was developed using television technology. There were games being developed on computers, at the time, in university computer labs. However, this was before the microcomputer was developed and computers were way too expensive for home use. Television technology was used to keep the price down.

Second, Pong was not developed for home use. The earliest video games were developed for arcades as a more advanced form of pin ball machine. So, the earliest versions of Pong were coin fed arcade machines. Home use did not come until much later. Yes, video games initially grew out of the pinball arcade business, not the computer industry.

Third, as disparagingly as many people like to view video games today, their image used to be much worse. Although they were advertized as 'games of skill' many viewed them as a form of gambling. And going into a pinball arcade to play them was viewed as a shady activity. Nolan Bushnell, inventor of Pong and developer of many of the early games, tried to increase their respectability buy creating a line of family restaurants where the kids could play video games while the parents waited for their food to be prepared. This was the origin of Chuck E. Cheese and many people who would not go into a pin ball arcade found Chuck E. Cheese to be perfectly acceptable.

Video games have come a long way and it is easy to forget where it all started. To learn more about the history of video games, I would recommend The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World.

Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games

2009-09-21T04:42:00.000-07:00

Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, really need a better name. But, for now, we will just have to go with the acronym. They are a unique genre of video game with special features that lead to some very interesting emergent properties.

First consider "Massively Multi-Player". When you play a first person shooter game or a game of skill, it is you against the game. Any people or monsters you encounter are game objects. In a multi-player game, at least some of the other people or monsters are actually the characters of other players. So, instead of playing against the game (known as PvE or Player vs. Environment) you are playing against other players (known as PvP or Player versus Player).

Typically you will encounter only a few other players. However, the potential exists to encounter dozens or even hundreds of other players, which is why it is refered to as Massively Multi-Player. The fact that you are interacting with so many other players gives rise to group dynamics, a social environment, a rudimentary culture, and a real economy.

Online means that you are interacting with other players in real time although it is hard to imagine such a phenomenon not being online.

Role playing means that players are acting out roles which gives the environment a fantasy quality. This, in turn, gives rises to some interesting psychological and sociological aspects.

Some academics have studied World of Warcraft (the largest MMORPG) as a cultural artifact in the same way you would study film or novels. Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg edited a book of readings called Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader which analyses the symbolism and values portrayed in World of Warcraft.

The point here is that there is a richness to Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games that is only just beginning to be tapped. I reviewed Corneliussen and Rettberg's book for ACM Computing Reviews back in September of 2008.

I began that review with the observation that when Thomas Edison made the first three second movie of a guy sneezing, nobody could have possibly anticipated the impact of film and television on our culture. In the same same way, when people saw the first video game, Pong, they could not possibly have anticipated the impact of video games on our culture. Today we are just beginning to see that impact and are still a long way from understanding it.

World Building Video Games

2009-09-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

World Building Video Games are not technically games although the lines are quite blurry in some cases. Spore, for example, is a world building environment in that you create your own creatures. But it is a game in that you try to have those creatures defeat other creatures and take over the universe. Second Life, on the other hand, is a world building environment which is not a game at all. You can create games in Second Life because it is a world building environment. But the platform itself is not a game. This is a source of endless confusion and frustration to those new to Second Life who come asking "how does this game work?" and "what do you do here?"

Second Life can be viewed as many things, but, in order to understand it, it is best to think of it as a platform for creating three dimensional worlds. These three dimensional worlds can serve any number of purposes. They can be for entertainment, social interaction, education, public relations, information dissemination and so on. My interest in Second Life lies in their potential for business applications.

What does the ability to create three dimensional worlds have to do with business applications? The answer is simple. Three dimensional worlds are likely to be the next major change in computer interfaces. If you are old enough, you may remember that we used to interact with computers through what was called a command line interface. In fact, in the late 1980's and early 1990's as graphical user interfaces began to gain some traction, there was considerable debate over which interface (command line or graphical user interface) was superior. Of course, graphical user interfaces won and today we look back on the command line interface as primative and barbaric.

Each year that passes adds more people to that generational pool who grew up playing video games and interacted with the computers through three dimensional virtual world interfaces. They look at the two dimensional point and click interface that we are all so used to and wonder how anyone can interact with a computer through an interface that is so primative and barbaric. And when it comes to change, there is nothing more powerful than a new generation.

Video Game Genres

2009-09-07T04:27:00.000-07:00

I should point out that when we use the term 'video game' we are refering to a fairly large collection of software programs that run on a variety of different platforms and provide the user/player with a variety of very different experiences. I should also point out that there is a Wikipedia article on Video Game Genres which does not at all agree with what I am about to say. Nonetheless, I would offer the following categories of video games:

1) Games of Skill: These are simple video games such as card games that provide the user with a challenging diversion.

2) Leveled Games of Skill: There are slightly more complicated video games that not only require skill but allow the player to level up showing progress in the game. Some of the classic video games such as Mario, Link, Pac Man and Tetris are of this variety.

3) Sports Games: Sport video games allow the player to engage in a sport such as football, hockey or baseball without leaving the couch. Perhaps the most famous game of this type is John Madden's Football.

4) Memorabilia Games: We often see blockbuster movies or TV shows add to their revenue by producing t-shirts, lunch pails or action figures. Some times they also produce video games. Examples include Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Most people who play these games are extending their movie going experience.

5) First Person Shooter - In this game the player uses a weapon to fight off the bad guys and the point of view is the shooter's. Much has been written about the violence in these games. Examples inlcude Grand Theft Auto and Fallout.

6) Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) - In other video games, you play against the game and the other characters in the game are controled by the game. In an MMORPG you play against other people. World of Warcraft and nearly all of the early virtual world video games such a Everquest and Ultima Online fall into this category.

7) World Building - This is an interesting niche within virtual world games. In these games, people create their own virtual worlds and then interact with others in those virtual worlds. Second Life is the best example in this genre. But an early and better known example would be Sims Online and its follow-on game called Spore.

8) Serious Games - This is a specialized niche in which video game technology is used for serious ends such as education. A subset of serious games, called persuasive games, uses video game technology to influence behavior.

Although I am interested in games in general (see my blog PerspectivesOnVideoGames for some foundation work), I am primarily interested in MMORPGs. MMORPGs have the added dimensions of a social and economic environment which make them a much more complex and hence interesting phenomenon for study. I am also interested in World Building games such as Second Life because of their potential for business applications.

Video Games

2009-08-31T04:35:00.000-07:00

It seems like I go out of my way to bring trouble on myself. People ask me what I have been doing lately and I say "I've been spending a huge amount of time playing video games." This makes it sound like I am lazy, or loosing my mind, or having a second childhood among many other possibilities, none of which are good. But video games are a serious business.

The video game industry is threatening, if it hasn't already surpassed, other pillars of the entertainment industry such as film and television. People often refer to video games as 'interactive entertainment' to distinguish them from non-interactive entertainment such as television where you just sit there like a slug and do not participate. In a video game you participate in the outcome. This is an emerging phenomenon and is likely to grow in a lot of different directions.

Academics who traditionally study novels and films have begun to study the values, symbolism and messages conveyed by video games. This suggests that those people, at least, see video games as an important emerging cultural phenomenon.

Some researchers are looking at ways in which video game technology can be applied to education. The call it edutainment. Others are looking at how video games can used to persuade people. They call this 'persuasive games'. In fact, the whole area of using video game technology for some thing other than games is called 'serious games' and is a rapidly growing area within the field.

In areas of interest to the Business School specifically, people are looking at video games technology for advertizing, virtual team building, and learning any number of business skills from inventory management to group dynamics.

I have taken on a deeper philosophical analysis of games and the role they play in our lives. If philosophy does not give you a nose bleed you may want to look at my other blog - Perspectives On Video Games. Ask yourself, first, what is a game? Can you come up with a definition that includes all games? Why is it that we play games because we want to while everything else we do because we have to. The simple answer is - because they are fun. But, why are they fun? Wouldn't it be great if both school and work could be as much fun as a video game? They can be and they should be.

At the same time, video games are very diverse. Free Cell, a simple card game, is vastly different from World of Warcraft which includes sophisticated social interactions and an in world economy. Next week I will look at the variety of video game genres and try to sort this all out.

Stealing the Clay

2009-08-25T06:10:00.000-07:00

When I was considerably younger and fretting over what it might take to be professionally successful, I used to have a recurring dream. In this dream, I was a famous world class sculptor. I would make statues and busts out of clay. My fans, in the dream, marveled over the quality of my artistic creations. I was well known, well liked, and well respected. But, there was a secret. In order to make my artistic creations, I had to 'steal' the clay. I couldn't just buy it and nobody could supply it for me. I had to steal it. Not only did I have to steal the clay, but everyone knew it. Nobody would openly endorse or even condone such an activity, even though everyone knew it and was willing to look the other way. The responsibility for this transgression was entirely mine and it was the cost of success.

The point of this dream, I believe, is that you cannot succeed by just doing what you are told or by just doing what you are 'supposed' to be doing. At some point you have to take risks and take responsibility for those risks. To be successful, you have to be good at something and in order to be good at something you have to figure out what you do well and pursue it. This process of individuation makes you better at the things you are good at while differentiating you from those around you. Aristotle would have called this developing your virtues.

But, as we develop our virtues and differentiate ourselves from others we often feel that we are on a lonely path and maybe the wrong path. So, in the twisted logic of a dream, my risks became transgressions.

This summer, I have spent an enormous amount of time playing World of Warcraft. It is the summer of 2009 version of stealing the clay. I think video games are going to become a major force in all aspects of entertainment, education and commerce. But, if I wait until that is obvious to everyone else, it will be way too late. So I have invested my time in learning about this important phenomenon and feeling a little guilty in the process. But, what the heck. I would rather live with the guilt than sit back and wonder how the world managed to pass me by.

Emergent Properties

2009-06-29T03:34:00.000-07:00

One of the things that makes the study of complex systems difficult is the fact that we are almost always studying emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the system that cannot be predicted from or even explained in terms of the properties of the constituent parts. A simple example of emergent properties is water. The properties of water cannot be predicted from or explained in terms of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. When you put these two elements together the combination produces a whole new set of properties.

An example of emergent properties in social science would be the political systems that arise from people living together under certain circumstances requiring organization. But are political systems 'real'. Have they always existed? The answer is no. They are not real and they have not always existed. Over time people noticed these emergent properties and began to group them into categories and give them names. The Romans recognized the emergent properties of people living in organized societies and called these emergent properties 'the thing of the public" or res publika or republic. Now we think of the republic or any political system as a real thing.

Economics came into being much later with Adam Smith identifying a collection of emergent properties based on wealth rather than power. But who is to say that organizing properties based on wealth and power rather than class, location or time is the best way? The point is that these are constructs that we are studying that become real over time by virtue of the fact that they are being studied.

In the same way, computer systems have emergent properties. When people or societies interact with computer systems other emergent properties arise as well. Are these things 'real'? No, they are just constructs that we create to organize our knowledge and give us ways to think about things that we are trying to understand. These things are not 'real'. They are just our best attempts to organize our knowledge and understand our experiences.

It is good to keep this in mind as we talk about virtual worlds, or interactive entertainment or any number of other phenomenon that arise through the interaction of complex human systems with complex computer systems.

Interactive Entertainment

2009-06-22T03:28:00.000-07:00

Over the past decade we have seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of massively multi-player online role playing games also known as the unpronouncable acronym MMORPG's. These have been largely virtual world video games such as World of Warcraft. However, virtual worlds such as Second Life have also provided interesting possibilities for online role playing. Some media pundits see this as the next generation of entertainment also know as interactive entertainment.

To see the difference between traditional home entertainment such as television and interactive entertainment, consider the following scenarios. With traditional home entertainment, you select a show that you want to watch, put the television on the proper channel, plop down on a chair, and veg out while you are being entertained. It is passive and non participatory.

Now, consider online role playing. You select a role or a scenario to participate in. You log into a virtual world. The story unfolds as you interact with the environment. You are thinking, planning and engaging. You might even interact with other role players. Instead of following a rigid script, the scenario evolves in a unique fashion based upon the actions of the player(s).

If you were to go to a automobile dealer to buy a car and there was only one model available, you would find that unacceptable. You would think the world a very dull place if everyone had to drive the same car. If you went to the store to buy a shirt and only one kind of shirt were available, you would find that unacceptable. However, if everyone watches exactly the same television show, we somehow find that perfectly acceptable. And if we watch the same show again, it is still the same show. Why is it that we find that acceptable. The answer, perhaps, is that we have come to expect it. However, online role playing games are likely to change that.

But, are online role playing games just a new form of entertainment? Or is there more to them than that. I think there is quite a bit more and we will turn to the various uses of online role playing games for serious play next.

Social Interaction Technologies

2009-06-15T03:24:00.000-07:00

Social interaction, according to Wikipedia, "is a dynamic, changing sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their actions and reactions according to those of their interaction partner(s). In other words, they are events in which people attach meaning to a situation, interpret what others are meaning, and respond accordingly."

That is to say that social interaction is the mechanism by which people modify their (social) behavior in response to the actions of others. If you lived on an island with no other people, it is unlikely that your behaviors would change much beyond the behaviors necessary to survive. If you lived in a small tribe any changes in your behavior would most like be directed towards survival of the tribe as well. It seems that as the social unit becomes larger and more complex, then the behaviors that you modify as a result of social interaction become more complex and of larger scope as well.

The point that I am reaching for here is to suggest that social interaction technologies have made or will make the social unit extend to the entire planet. So, we will be interacting with each other and modifying our behaviors in ways that affect the entire human race. Some of this will undoubtedly be good. And some will undoubtedly be bad.

The question is - do we just let things unfold and see what happens; or should we take a hand in influencing the future? It is a tough call because most people believe that it is better to not make things worse with your actions than it is to make things worse in an attempt to make things better. But, is this still true? Are we at a point where the impact of future changes is such that not doing anything is a greater evil than doing the wrong thing? I really can't answer that. All I can do is raise the question.

Big History

2009-06-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

I am currently (not at this second, but at this time) listening to a wonderful lecture series from The Teaching Company called Big History. The lecturer is Professor David Christian from San Diego State University. I mention this for three reasons.

First, the lecture series from the Teaching Company are wonderfully interesting lectures on a diverse range of topics and I highly recommend them. I have listened to dozens of these lectures comprising hundreds of hours of informative enjoyment. I listen while in the car or while out walking or hiking. For the enjoyment value alone these lectures are worthwhile. But, that is not all.

Second, exposure to a diverse range of ideas is very important as you never know where important insights may come from. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainly that I have not listened to a single set of lectures that has not provided me with insights well beyond the topics of the lectures. These insights usually apply to things I am currently working on or thinking about and provide me with new ways of looking at problems.

And third, this ties in with what I was saying in my last post. So it is on point to this thread. However, that will take a little explaining. Christian's thesis is that you can unify all of history from the Big Bang to modern times, despite the vast differences in the scale of time and space by looking at history as a process of the creation of great complexity. Further, if we see this complexity as occurring in steps, we can see it line up with our current academic disciplines. Cosmology (Big Bang), Astronomy (Stars and Solar Systems), Geology (Planets), Chemistry (Particles), Biology (Life Forms), Sociology (Societies), and so on. This is a very clever idea and I have not done it justice here, but have sketched out enough to make my point.

Social interaction is the engine by which societies form and evolve. As such, it is on a par with, say Chemical Reactions or Biological Reactions. We have a reasonably good grasp these days on chemical reactions, less on biological reactions, and less yet on social interaction. Tinkering with chemical reactions when you don't understand them puts you at risk for blowing yourself up. Tinkering with biological reactions when you don't understand them puts you at risk for poisoning yourself. Tinkering with social interaction must put you at risk for something. But we don't even understand enough to know what we might be risking. Yet we have these powerful accelerants called social interaction technologies. And we have no idea what the consequences of these technologies might be. So, context may be a little more important than we realize.

Technology versus Context

2009-06-01T04:07:00.000-07:00

Most classes in Information Technology focus on the technology rather than on the context of the technology. For example, if one were to take a class in a programming language, say C# just to use a current example, one would, hopefully, learn how to program in that language. This is a good thing and I don't wish to diminish it. However, I do wish to point out what is lost.

There is a history of programming languages. Over the past fifty years programming languages have changed dramatically. If you were to take someone who learned a programming language at one point and show them programming ten years later, they would probably not recognize it. In fact, today, most programming is the assembling of reusable components in an integrated development environment. That is very, very different from what I learned. In fact, it was an uphill climb for me to get used to this new paradigm.

C# is an example of an imperative programming language. There are also functional and logic languages that were more popular when artificial intelligence was ascendant.

Over the years the monarchy of programming languages has changed considerably. Languages like Cobol, PL1, C++, and Ada were the languages du jour while many current students have never even heard of them. Java is currently the language du jour and it won't be long before it joins the rest of the pack in obscurity.

The problem here is that if you teach a person to program, they learn how to program in that one language. If you teach a person the context, they can learn new languages as they evolve. This is not generally a problem as most students only program in the early part of their careers. By the time their skills have become out of date they have moved on to other things like design, or management or working with clients.

One of Murphy's Laws of Technology states that if builders built buildings the way that programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. We have seen how shortsightedness in the financial industry can create problems. I wonder if we are not being similarly shortsighted in our technological infrastructure. Having programmers write programs that they know they will not have to maintain cannot be a good thing.

But, there is an even larger point here. Programming languages are just one instance of education in Information Technology. Overwhelmingly classes in Information Technology focus on the technology rather than the context. As I think about it, I also wonder if other disciplines don't do the same. Well, I am getting a little far afield here and should probably think about this a little more.

Summer is Underway

2009-05-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

I took a break from this blog for a few weeks as I negotiated the break between semesters. The break between spring and summer is usually the most difficult. There are always a lot of last minute things to do as people panic in the realization that the academic year is almost over. And before you can catch your breath the summer session is underway. The other intersession breaks are usually around a month. In the spring, you only get a couple weeks. It sounds like a lot of time but between residual items from the spring and new work for the summer, it can get hectic. I had grading, meetings, two dissertation defenses, and preparations for my summer class. All of this is now under control so I can return to writing again.

I am offering an exciting class this summer. It is a class in business applications of virtual worlds. It is not a totally new class. It has been on the books for years under the title Web Based Systems Development. I first introduced this class in the early 1990's under the title of Corporate Web Applications. At the time few people believed that the web had much potential use for corporate applications. Now the web is as mainstream as you can get and few people see the potential of virtual worlds for business applications. I see virtual worlds as the 3D web and have updated the course accordingly.

The course is exciting because I have decided to, unapologetically, teach the course the way it would look if virtual worlds were mainstream. In this way I get to begin developing a future course while teaching an existing course. The drawback, of course, it that it takes a leap of faith on the part of the students. You don't see adds in the newspaper saying "virtual world developer needed" whereas you do see adds for php programmers. But, if we taught to the ads in the paper, we would not last long. To teach a proper academic course, you need the perspective that can only be gained by getting on the bandwagon long before anyone realizes there will be a bandwagon and studying it in terms of all the other band wagons you have seen.

This is a professional hazard for academics in practitioner fields like Information Systems. If you stay within your comfort zone, you become out of date and irrelevant. If you wish to stay relevant and vital, you have to take huge risks many of which will not pay off. Further, most of those risks come from our inability to predict the future. I have gotten quit good at is as far as it affects my areas of concern. But, no matter how good you get, the future is still, well, unpredictable.

There is a story, in Greek mythology, about a woman who both pleased and angered a god. In return she was given a blessing and a curse. The blessing was the gift of prophecy. She could see the future. The curse was that nobody would ever believe her. I know the feeling.

Another Semester Comes to a Rolling Stop

2009-04-27T03:36:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about being an academic is that - no matter how many things you screw up and no matter how many things didn't get done - at least twice a year you get an opportunity to start over and try to get it right the next time. With the end of each semester comes an end to the problems, mistakes, and unfulfilled expectations of that semester. And with the start of each new semester comes new opportunities, second chances, and new expectations. It may well be the thing I like best about being an academic.

This semester I have been teaching a class in how to write stories to explore the ethics of technology. It is a bold idea and, as with most bold ideas, a bigger pain in the ass than anyone could possibly imagine. But, the semester is rolling to a stop and next semester I will have another opportunity to get it right. If you have been following the entries in this blog and wondering where it all came from, it was from that class. You would probably agree that it still needs some work.

Over the summer I am going to start writing a book for that class. My plan is to get it partially written over the summer and use it when I teach the class again in the fall. Hopefully, I will have enough to begin submitting it to publishers.

I say that is my plan, but who knows what will happen. This summer I am teaching a class in business applications of virtual worlds. It is also a bold idea and, well, much like the stories class in being a pain. Since the summer is also a semester I will look back at the end of the summer, lament what I did not get accomplished, and, get another fresh start in the fall.

Since I will be devoting my writing time to my book, I will probably not keep this blog quite as diligently. I have fallen into the pattern of writing an entry every Monday morning. That has worked well and I have enjoyed that rhythm. But now, that energy will be going into the book.

Enjoy the summer!!

A Pause for Perspective

2009-04-20T03:26:00.000-07:00

I have been writing this blog now for several months and thought it might be appropriate to step back and think about the blogging process. For me, starting this blog was a running leap into the deep end of the pool. I had no idea what blogs were really for. I had no idea what I would write. And, I had no idea if anyone would read it. Since then I have gotten a much better understanding.

On the first question, what blogs are for, the answer is that blogs are for a lot of things. But, I think the best way to think about a blog is a private journal made public. Then asking what a blog is for is like asking what a private journal is for. A private journal is just a way to record your thoughts and, in doing so, get them in order. Some people may use a private journal to record events of the day. Others may take on deeper topics. In this blog, I have taken on deeper topics, probably too deep for most readers. But, the truth is that my private journals contain exactly the same kind of thing. I use writing to sort out my ideas. And now I am using the blog for the same thing.

On the question of what to write about, I decided, as suggested in the previous paragraph, to write about what I was thinking about. I do not expect people to read this blog as it is written. As I formulate ideas and express them to other people, I am often asked where they can read more about the ideas. Eventually some of these ideas will be sorted out and formalized. They will appear in print usually in academic articles. But there is a long way between and idea and a paper. And many compelling ideas fall off along the way. A blog is a net to catch all those ideas that despite their worthiness fell off along the way. I write about what I am thinking about. And putting it into a blog gives other people access to my private journals.

This brings us to the third question, who will read it. I was initially disturbed that there were no comments on my postings. Then I realized why. I had the settings so that people couldn't comment. However, I think most people are reluctant to comment anyway because the ideas are weighty and intimidating. However, I know people are reading because it comes up in conversation. I will be talking about some thing and somebody will say, yes you mentioned something about that in your blog.

Most blogs are like fresh bread. They have a shelf life of a few days and if not consumed with in those days, they have limited value after that. But, I put a lot of work into my thoughts and into my blogs. I view them has having a much, much longer shelf life. People will often ask me how I came up with a particular idea. Now, I can say go back and look at my blog from x months ago, maybe even x years ago and you can see how the idea evolved.

I know what I am writing is not for everyone and even for those who do like it they can probably only take it in small doses. I am fine with that. I enjoy baking the bread and you can enjoy consuming it when you are hungry and at your leisure.

Truth Claims

2009-04-13T03:32:00.000-07:00

The designation of true or false do not apply to most statements. For example, if someone were to say "there are parallel universes that we will never know about", this statement cannot be shown to be either true or false. The logical construction of this claim makes it impossible to resolve. Other statements, such as "people are basically good" are equally as unresolvable due to the ambiguity of the word good. In order for a statement to be a truth claim, it must be a claim that can, somehow, be refuted. If there is no way for a claim to be refuted, then it is not a truth claim and it can never achieve the status of truth.

The reason for this is that the body of assertions that we refer to as true are all assertions that could have been show not to be true if indeed they were but after repeated attempts at refutation have continued to hold up. This is the thing that all kinds of truth have in common. Whether we are talking about scientific truth, historical truth, journalistic truth or any of the varieties of truth we may encounter, they all follow a similar pattern. A claim is made that can, potentially, be refuted. We then try to refute it. More people jump into the fray attempting to refute it. As the claim continues to hold up after repeated and sincere attempts to refute it, we begin to believe it and the probability that it is a durable claim increases.

So, the key elements in the discovery of truth are: refutable claims, an agreed upon method for challenging them, and repeated attempts at refutation by people whose only concern is the veracity of the claim. This plays out very differently in different fields. Scientists conduct experiments. However, some sciences such as astronomy don't conduct experiments. Astronomers collect data. Journalists gather facts. Historian have to contend with the historical record. Writers of novels have to square with human experience. In each case a claim is made that must square with evidence according to an accepted method. The question, at this point is, can this approach be applied to moral truths or truths about the future?

Truth and Method

2009-04-06T03:38:00.000-07:00

Francis Bacon said that method is more important than genius in discovering knowledge. He compared our pursuit of truth to a runner in pursuit of a destination. Method is the path and genius is the speed of the runner. A runner on the wrong path will get to the wrong place. If he happens to be a fast runner, he will get to the wrong place sooner. A runner on the right path will get to the right place. If he happens to be a slow runner, he will still get there. It will just take a little longer. So, method, according to Bacon will get us to the truth eventually. Genius will just get us to the wrong places faster.

Despite the variety of truth that we discussed a couple posts ago, they all have a similar method by which we arrived at them. Truth begins with a claim of some kind that we then attempt to determine the veracity of. Then we continue to test the veracity. Over time, if the claim continues to hold up as more and more people test the veracity, then we begin to accept the claim as true. This sketch of our method for discovering truth needs a little more fleshing out, but the essence holds up across different domains.

First, the claim cannot just be any willy nilly claim. It has to be a valid claim based on our understanding of the domain and clearly derivable from the things we know.

Second, the attempts to determine the veracity should be skeptical but not cynical. Skeptical means that we are trying to determine the truth rather than re-enforce what we want to believe. Not being cynical means that we have to accept evidence that is not 100% certain.

And, third, the motives of those who do repeated testing on the idea should be to determine the veracity of the idea and not some other agenda such as discrediting it. And, if the claim continues to hold up over time and under repeated challenges, then we accept its durability and accept it as the truth.

The next step is to show how this sketch of method holds up in the variety of areas we already discussed, revealing that scientific truth, literary truth, historical truth, and even moral truths have something in common. And we will see how this apporach applies to the use of stories in the pursuit of moral truth. Finally, just to push things to their limit, I will introduce a notion of truth about the future which I will call imaginary truth. Imaginary truth can and will be held to the same standards of durability as our other notions of truth. And, imaginary truth gives us a headlight into the future that we badly need as the future continues to come at us at an increasingly faster rate.

Truth as a Durability Claim

2009-03-30T04:12:00.000-07:00

We often believe, somewhat naively, that there is a thing out there in the world called 'The Truth'. We not only believe it exists, we also believe if we try hard enough, we can find it. This misconception, I believe, comes, in turn, from two other misconceptions.

The first of these misconceptions is that there is something 'out there': a stable, uniform, consistent reality upon which everyone can agree. I would refer back to my traffic accident example. Something happened, but what it was is up to dispute. Some elements of the traffic accident may be less disputed than others. Who was going north and who was going south might be largely agreed upon. However, which one swerved first or who took their eyes off the road may not be. Similarly, the properties of oxygen in the real world may be largely agreed up, while the properties of road rage may not be.

The second of these misconceptions is that whatever is out there, we can know it directly and objectively. How much of our knowledge comes to us directly by observation rather than through lens, films, books etc. If you hold up an X-ray picture of a broken arm, is that what the arm 'really' looks like? Most of our knowledge is brought to us via instruments. And those instruments are not just physical instruments like a telescope. Many are conceptual instruments like logic and statistics that help us to organize our knowledge. By the time we understand something, it bears little resemblance to the thing we were trying to understand.

So, if there isn't a thing called 'The Truth', what do we mean when we use the word 'Truth'. I think that the best way to look at it is to say that when we say something is 'The Truth' we are making a durability claim. That is we are asserting a low likelihood to the possibility that we no longer believe the claim in the future. What we mean by truth is that as you re-examine the evidence you are likely to come to the same conclusions. As other people re-examine the evidence, they are likely to come to the same conclusions. And as additional people in the future examine the evidence, they will also come to the same conclusions.

It is possible that people 100,000 years from now may see the world entirely differently. They may reject some, most or even all as what we see as the truth. However, we don't really care about that. If we believed in absolute truth, then this would be a serious problem. But when we see truth as a durability claim, it is not. Something is true if we are unlikely to change our minds about it in any time frame that we care about.

The Varieties of Truth

2009-03-23T03:37:00.000-07:00

Once of the problems in attempting to nail down the truth is that there are always a variety of different kinds of truth. Suppose that a huge explosion occurs in he center of a small town in the northeastern United States. And people ask "What happened?" There are many possible answers to this question, all of which has some claim on being 'the truth'.

You could explain the explosion in terms of the chemical reactions that caused the explosion to occur. You might say something like "chemical A in conjunction with chemical B in the presence of a trigger such as heat or shock caused a chemical reaction that expanded too rapidly for the space in which it was contained and the result was an explosion". This, assuming that the facts are correct, could be considered the truth. However, it is hardly satisfying.

A newspaper account might say that there was an explosion due to irresponsible dumping of hazardous chemicals into the sewage system, or perhaps a disgruntled political group was making a statement. Either of these explanations, assuming the facts to be correct, could also claim to be the truth.

Years later a social historian might claim that the explosion was merely an instance of a larger social trend in which corporations showed reckless regard for the environment. The damage done by the explosion, in this case, was part of the cost for that reckless behavior. Again this may very well be true.

Finally, an author might write a novel at some point which shows how human greed in the present often surpassed our concern for the future attempting to reveal some larger truth about the human condition. This, if the story were sufficiently compelling, might also be considered as the truth.

All of these statements have some claim on being 'the truth'. We can quibble about 'kinds' of truth and say the first is scientific truth, the second truth in journalism, the third a historical truth, and the last one a literary truth. But acknolwedging all these kinds of truth flies in the face of the notion that there is something called 'The Truth'. Different people probably have some preference for which variety of truth is the most important. However, these people probably also don't agree with each other, and since there is no way to resolve the dispute there is no way to get to the truth.

However, all is not lost. All of these varieties of truth have two things in common. First, is that claiming something is 'the truth' is a durability claim. And, second, that durability claim is enhanced by arriving at the claim through an agreed upon method. These two ideas will be taken up next.

What is the Truth, Anyway?

2009-03-16T05:21:00.000-07:00

You would think that there is an answer to the question - what is the truth? Unfortunately, this is not the case. Like witnesses reporting the 'facts' of a traffic accident, different observers have very different perspectives.

There is a correspondence theory of truth that says a thing is true if it corresponds to the real world. This sounds pretty good but begins to fall apart when we ask what we mean by "corresponds to the real world". Since we organize our knowledge into categories and structures that certainly don't exist in the real world, this gets a little dicey.

Another view, called the coherence view, suggests that those categories and structures must provide a consistent and coherent view of the world and use coherency as the criterion for truth. That is, it needs to make sense considering other things we know.

While both of these provide useful ways of looking at the truth, they both address truth about the natural world. If we are seeking truth about the social world such as, how do we interpret and explain the human experience, or if we are looking for truths about the moral sphere such as, how should we behave as moral agents, then there is no place to look in the natural world for answers. Hints maybe, but answers - no.

This is to say that despite our reverence for science and despite the great reputation it has for bringing us closer to the truth about the natural world, science does not bring us one iota closer to truth about the social world or the moral sphere. What does bring us closer to truth about interpreting our experience as humans and how we should behave as moral agents? The answer, which I will get around to eventually, is - stories.

Stories and Reality

2009-03-09T04:09:00.000-07:00

In Plato's Republic the poets were ejected because their art compromised the search for truth. Since much of our modern distrust of stories finds its roots in Plato, it is worthwhile to revisit the issue there. Plato believed in absolute truth. A simple example will illustrate this. Consider the mathematical definition of a triangle. It is an abstract mathematical object with three sides. The sum of the internal angles is 180 degrees. That is a pretty good definition. It includes all triangles and excludes everything that is not a triangle. Further, with that precise definition we can deduce further truths about triangles without even having to consult individual triangles. But, this ideal form of a triangle does not exist in the material world. All the triangles we have are imperfect copies. So, where does this ideal triangle exist? Plato posited a World of Forms where all ideal objects reside. This World of Forms is the world of absolute truth. The material world in which we live is merely an imperfect copy. And herein lies the wrinkle with poets.

I am going to switch from using the word 'poets' to using the word 'writers' because our modern understanding of the word 'poet' is different and a little misleading. Writers construct imaginary scenarios from real experiences and through those imaginary scenarios explore questions regarding the meaning of our experiences as humans. So, writers, like philosophers, are concerned with a search for truth. However, from Plato's perspective, the material world in which we have our experiences is an imperfect copy of the ideal world and hence once removed from the truth. The world constructed by writers is an imperfect copy of an imperfect copy moving us, yet, further away from the truth. Due to their sins of imperfection and the dilution of the absolute truth, the poets and writers were banned from the ideal republic. The questions are - did Plato really believe this? and it is true?

First, the question of whether or not Plato actually believed this is unanswerable since Plato has been dead for millennium and we cannot interrogate him. However, looking at his body of philosophical work it would be hard to conclude that he really did believe this. First, his dialogues are all written in a story form. If he really believed that stories took us further away from the truth then why did he use stories to convey the truth. Second, within these stories are numerous mini stories used to illustrate specific points and subtlties. Again, if Plato really believed that stories moved us away from the truth, why did he rely so heavily on them in his pursuit of truth?

Second, the question of whether stories move us toward or away from truth is too big an issue to be taken up at the end. So, I will pick that up next time.

The Role of Stories in the Ethics of Virtual Worlds

2009-03-02T04:59:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I cited Marshall McLuhan's famous, and yet apocryphal quote "looking to the past to understand the future is like driving by looking in the rear view mirror." A rapidly changing technological base creates a path into the future with a lot of twists and turns, in which the future comes at us with increasing rapidity. The question is - how do we get a headlight into the future that will allow us to look forward instead of backwards in order to make decisions about what we need to do. The answer, I believe, is stories. Stories provide a headlight into the future, a way to explore possible worlds and possible outcomes.

My favorite example of this kind of story is Micheal Crichton's Jurassic Park. This cautionary tale is an attempt to explore the ethics of bio technology in a narrative form. Crichton's argument is that if you have unregulated bio tech research and have scientists working primarily for profit or fame, then all hell will break loose and nature will strike back at you. This book is a masterpiece of writing technique and makes a compelling narrative argument. But, it is only one possible narrative argument.

I teach a class in writing stories to explore the ethcis of technology, and, in this class, I have students find a flaw in Crichton's argument and provide a narrative alternative. Consider, for a moment, some of the stories that have swayed public thinking in a major way. These include: The Jungle, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Hard Times and Frankenstein; just to name a few. Each of these stories has presented one single narrative argument, one possible world. What we really need is to have authors take on more sides of the argument and allow us to see a variety of possible worlds.

In the same way that scientific debates lead to a better understanding of what is true, narrative debates can allow us to acheive a better understanding of what is good or what is desirable. And, here we are back to writing again. In Plato's Republic, he dismissed the poets to focus on rationality. Perhaps, now, in the 21st century, we will realise that rationality isn't everything and invite the poets back in.

Virtual Worlds and Possible Consequentialism

2009-02-23T04:15:00.000-08:00

Since more the more traditional character and experience based ethical theories have limited application for virtual worlds, what basis do we have for defining appropriate behavior? One answer is that we can just wait and see what happens. Over time we will develop experience and over time a community will coalesce that can define appropriate behavior. But there are three problems with this approach. First, during that time when we are developing experience, things will be happening in virtual worlds that may not be to our liking. Second, once standards of virtual world behavior evolve and coalesce they may be very difficult to change. So, we may realize how things ought to be, but be unable to make them that way. Third, since the technology continues to evolve, the requisite experience continues to shift. We may not be able to acquire the requisite experiences until the technology stabilizes and that may be a lot longer than we are willing to wait. Having said all that, there is merit in waiting. In the early days of the web, some people would like to have restricted free speech and impose severe penalties for copyright infringement. That debate is still going on and we shouldn't be enforcing standards until we figure out what those standards ought to be. I don't think waiting is a bad idea. I just don't think it is the best idea. What do I think is the best idea?

Several years ago, I wrote a series of papers in computer ethics in which I introduced an ethical theory which I called possible consequentialism. Unlike the more traditional consequentialist theories that set ethical standards based upon the consequences of an act or rule, possible consequentialism considers possible consequences. This seems to be an appropriate basis for making ethical decisions under the conditions of a rapidly evolving technology where the consequences of any given standard may not be known at the time when the standard needs to be developed. That's all well and good, but how do we know the possible consequences? That is what we will turn to next.

Will Experience Based Ethics Work in a Virtual World?

2009-02-16T04:04:00.000-08:00

I don't think there really is such a thing as experience based ethics. What I have done here is to lump together ethical theories that use past behavior and outcomes to determine appropriate ethical behaviors for the future. The most obvious example of this is consequentialist ethics where the ethical quality of an act is determined by the consequences of that act. However, I would also lump deontological ethics into this group as well. Deontological ethics suggest that we have a basic duty as human beings to behave in certain ways. For example, you should always use of people as an end but not a means. This is certainly an important tenat for preserving human dignity. However, I would say, perhpas with a dash of cynicism that this duty is derived from the fact that it has worked well in the past and thus should work well in the future. So, as I said, I lump it together with experience based ethics. And, I do not beleive that experience based ethics can serve as a moral basis for virtual worlds. Why not?

Marshall McLuhan is attributed with the quote that "looking to the past to understand the future is like driving by looking in the rear view mirror". There seems to be contention over whether he said it or not and I'm not even sure if I got the quote exactly right. But the sentiment is clear. We cannot look to the past to understand the future. And if that is the case then experience based ethics are of limited value. So, let us consider the cases when the past is a good guide and when it is not a good guide.

Using the driving analogy, one can see that as long as you don't drive too fast and the road ahead is as straight as the road behind, then one might get away with driving while looking in the rear view mirror. However, if the car picks up speed or if the road is windy then driving by looking in the rear view mirror will not work. Applying this to the future, when the future is coming at us rapidly and when the future is much different from the past, then looking to the past to understand the future will not work. This is the case, I would argue, with virtual worlds. The technological change is coming at us fast and the future will be very different from the past. So looking to the past, which is what experience based ethics does, will not work. Hence, expereince based ethics will not work in a virtual world. Having ruled out both experience based ethics and character based ethics, is there any thing that will work in a virtual world. I think there is. And you will have to stay tuned for the answer.

Will Virtue Ethics Work in a Virtual World?

2009-02-09T03:30:00.000-08:00

Virtue ethics is a character based ethical theory that claims, simply, that morally developed people cannot do immoral things. At first this sounds a little odd because it seems to give license to immoral behavior. But, if you think of it as good people trying their best to do the right thing it makes a little more sense. After all, what other standard do we have for developing morals. I am a big fan of virtue ethics because it requires moral development rather than rule following; and it helps us figure out what to do in cases where the rules aren't clear or don't exist. We just have good people trying their best to figure out the right thing. In the ethics of technology this is particularly appropriate since technology seems to create new problems for which we don't have rules. In fact, many years ago I presented a paper at a conference suggesting virtue ethics as a basis for computer ethics. Having said that, I am not sure that virtue ethics would be an appropriate basis for ethical decision making in a virtual world. Why is that?

Virtue ethics was developed in Ancient Greece where people were born into a community and indoctrinated into the values of the community. Moral development was achieved by the citizens of the community with respect to those values. When the educational process was successful (I am certain it was not always) then citizens internalized community values. If community values changed or if new situations arose they would be discussed and debated by citizens in an attempt to develop or adjust values as needed. The key elements for this to work is that you need to have a fairly homogeneous community with a relatively stable set of values and an educational process by which new members are developed morally consistent with that set of stable values. None of these elements hold for virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds are a global phenomenon. Residents from all of the world, from a wide variety of moral and religious perspectives and traditions interact. Trying to abstract a homogeneous set of values for the residents of virtual worlds would be like trying to establish a global code of ethics.
Even if it were possible to do this, you would still have the problem of moral development. When people come to the virtual world they already have their values in place. You do not get them young enough in a virtual world nor do you have enough control over them to attempt to develop them morally consistent with those values. Finally, since virtual worlds are a new phenomenon, the ethics of virtual worlds are still evolving. We don't really know what constitutes good behavior in virtual worlds. So, we do not have a stable set of values to use for moral development.

The point here is that while virtue ethics has a lot to be said for it, and although it may have worked well in Ancient Greece, it is probably not the best moral basis for virtual worlds. Perhaps some day. But not now.

The Moral Basis for Ethical Decision Making in a Virtual World

2009-02-02T04:02:00.000-08:00

So far, in our exploration of the ethics of virtual worlds, we have addressed avatar attachment, anonymity, and regulation. I don't mean to imply that this covers the full set of issues. I only mean to say that these are the largest issues that occur to me at the moment. The final one of these issues that I promised to address back when I started this threat was the moral basis of ethical decision making in a virtual world. That is to say, which theories of moral behavior provide the best guidance for ethical decisions?

At the risk of having professional ethicists gnashing their their teeth, I am going to dismiss descriptive theories such as ethical relativism and egoism. They claim to tell us how things are and are of limited value in determining how things should be. I am going to focus on prescriptive theories that tell us how things should be. I do this because virtual world technology is currently evolving and we can have great influence on how they evolve. Consequently, we should focus on how things should be.

Again, at the risk of offending the pros, I am going to group prescriptive ethical theories into two groups: character based and experience based. This is not too far from standard treatments and provides an economical scheme for the argument I wish to make here. Over the next few posts, I will argue that both character based moral theories and experience based moral theories have limitations that may inhibit their usefulness in providing a moral basis for ethical decision making in a virtual world. Then, I will wrap up this thread with a moral perspective that, I believe, overcomes these limitations. It will take, as Colridge said "a willing suspension of disbelief" as we journey into the morality of virtual worlds. But, come along with an open mind and I will try to make it worth your while.

Zoning? In a Virtual World?

2009-01-27T04:34:00.000-08:00

The past two posts have sketched out the cases for and against regulation. On one hand we need regulation in virtual worlds to provide the orderly and predictable environments in which commerce and education can be pursued. On the other hand, regulation seriously inhibits the potential of virtual worlds as a medium of self expression and exploration. Can these two conflicting potentials of virtual worlds both be achieved? Or will one have to give way to the other?

I think they can both be achieved via virtual world segmentation or in more common terms zoning. Zoning can be achieved fairly easily. Each simulator or virtual location should have a set of attributes associated with it indicating its regulations. For example, it may require visitors to be over a certain age and may require user authentication. Another simulator may allow anonymity but require visitors to adhere to role playing rules. Anonymity may require some refinement. For example it is one thing to be anonymous to the land owner and another thing to be anonymous to the other visitors.

It may take some time to get a standard set of attributes that simulations will set, but careful zoning takes careful planning. Further, if the zoning attributes are selected carefully it will be possible to group simulators into parallel virtual worlds. These parallel worlds might emphasize commerce, education, tourism, art, socializing, self expression, or any other thematic attributes.

In addition, each avatar would have similar attributes. These may include age, anonymity, credit worthiness, and social or moral restrictions. Again, these attributes would have to be carefully thought out. And just like today where vendors target certain market segments, virtual world developers would target a specific segment of the visitor population.

This attribution would allow a wide range of opportunities for sef expression while preventing someone from inadvertently landing up in an undesirable neighborhood. At the same time it would allow land owners to restrict undesirable visitors. If this all sounds a little too confining, don't forget that you can always have multiple avatars, some well documented and some anonymous. So, it seems to me, that it solves the problem of reguation. Hey, maybe we should start doing this in RL as well.

The Argument Against Regulation

2009-01-23T06:10:00.000-08:00

By far the most impressive feature of Second Life in particular and virtual world technology in general is the capabilities that it provides its users to express their creativity and imagination in a globally accessible public forum. This includes creating a new environment and creating new persona. If you can imagine it, you can create it and experience it. See

http://doctorcosmos.blogspot.com/2009/01/creating-your-second-life-part-2.html

for more details on this idea.

So, if we see virtual worlds as a technological extension of our imaginative capabilities, then regulating virtual worlds would be like regulating your imagination. It would be like saying - no, there are certain things that your are not allowed to imagine. This sounds an awful lot like the thought police of 1984. I should mention that I am referring to the book 1984 by George Orwell. In this world of web pages and short memories, readers might think that I am referring to the year 1984 when the world was ruled by dinosaurs and Roman Legions.

But, if the negative implications of the thought police are not sufficient justification for limiting regulation in virtual worlds, or if 1984 was so long ago that it has no bearing on what we are discussing today, then consider what we might loose in the future by regulating virtual worlds.

We believe in freedom of expression as one of the basic tenets of our modern world. If anyone were to suggest regulating the content of web pages, there would be an out cry of self righteous indignation that could not be contained. Even if a web site says offensive things we believe that free expression benefits society far more than the offensive expression hurt it.

The things people do in a virtual world are no less expression than words on a web page. And while society benefits from a diversity of idea, both society and individuals benefit from the ability to freely explore their imaginations and creativity. You can try things in a virtual world that you cannot easily try in the real world. And you can try these things in an environment where potential damage is minimal. If we regulate virtual worlds we are saying, not only that there are ideas you cannot think, but there are new ideas that you cannot try. This in turn suggests that we already know the answers to all our questions about everything and we know the answers to any future questions that might arise. This is silly on the face of it. And, in turn, regulating virtual worlds is silly on the face of it.

But, in order to make this argument more compelling, we should ask - what are some of those things that we need to explore in virtual worlds that justifies this lack of regulation? And that will be the topic of the next post.

The Argument for Regulation

2009-01-18T13:30:00.000-08:00

In this post and the next I plan to make the arguments for and against regulation of virtual worlds. The argument for regulation is the easiest and the least compelling so I will address it first. The argument for regulation of virtual worlds is basically the same as the argument for regulation in any sphere. People need a predictable environment in which to conduct their businesses and social affairs. Without some sort of regulatory structure short term gains by opportunists will lead to long term losses in the system as a whole. This is not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with short term opportunists. In fact, there is much to be said in favor of them. Them make the system more efficient. But the line between efficient and predatory is often very finely drawn. And a predatory environment cannot flourish over the long term.

To put this into more pragmatic terms, if I cannot trust an environment in which I am operating, I am unlikely to take risks in that environment. If the environment needs people to take risks in order for the environment to flourish, then the people must be able to trust the environment and the environment much meet the expectations of those risk takers.

To put this into even more concrete terms, if I do not trust a virtual world environment I will be unlikely to start a business, sell a product, offer a service, teach a class, hold a meeting, or any of the other activities that the virtual world needs me to do in order to reach its full potential. So, regulation is necessary if a virtual world is going to become a place of commerce, education or socializing.

In the early days of web technologies, people were reluctant to buy products that they could not touch and even more reluctant to give their credit card number to some unknown entity in cyberspace. Companies like Amazon.com offered excellent return policies and promised to protect their customers private information, such as credit card numbers. This was a form of self regulation and, in the case of the web, it was all the regulation that was necessary.

I don't think that this would be enough regulation for a virtual world. On a web site, you don't have people from some other web sites coming to where you are and harassing you. And if you find yourself on some undesirable website, you can merely close your browser. You don't have to worry about leaving your avatar there until you log in again. So, virtual worlds present difficulties that do not exist on web sites.

I would view a virtual world more like a shopping mall, maybe even a town. Even though the individuals in that mall or town may be behaving within the boundaries placed on them as individuals, a few more restrictions are probably necessary so that everyone can get along and prosper. So virtual worlds will require some level of regulation to thrive and the question is - how much? Too much regulation has its down sides as well. And we will get to that next.

Should Virtual Worlds Be Regulated?

2009-01-11T15:23:00.000-08:00

Should virtual worlds be regulated? The simple answer is - yes, of course they should be. This is, as they say, a no brainer. Everything in civilized life is regulated. The important questions are how much and what kind of regulation are appropriate. And that is where it gets tricky. What we strive for in ethics is to find a balance between individual empowerment and social harmony. Virtual worlds provide amazing opportunities for individual empowerment and that should be encouraged. However, empowered individuals can be a major threat to social harmony and that needs to be curtailed.

One way to approach the idea of regulation in a virtual world is to ask which of these two desirable goals (individual empowerment and social harmony) is more fundamental. In the real world we usually take social harmony as more fundamental, allowing individuals to find ways to express their individuality as long as it does not seriously impact social harmony. So, should virtual worlds follow the same priority scheme and balance that we find in the real world? Perhaps, yes. Perhaps, no. And despite indications to the contrary, we are making progress.

If we see virtual worlds as an extension of the real world, then our priorities with regard to the real world should carry into virtual worlds. If we see virtual worlds as a thing apart from the real world then perhaps it may make sense to change the priorities. Let's consider two examples; one in which virtual worlds are an extension of the real world and one in which virtual worlds are a thing apart. Perhaps we can then extrapolate from those to cases and make some progress on this issue. And we will do that. But that will begin with the next entry.

Reflecting on Virtual Worlds

2009-01-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

I got lazy over the holidays and did not post a blog entry last week. I apologize for that. I did, however, spend a fair amount of time reflecting on things as I am accustomed to doing over the winter holidays. One of the things I reflected on was the significance of virtual worlds. And, as the title of this blog is Ranting and Reflecting, I thought a little reflecting might be in order.

It was a little over two years ago that I stopped caring about the real world and started caring about virtual worlds. I know how bizarre this sounds but if you will bear with me over the next few paragraphs I think I can make some sense out of it.

I used to be obsessed with the real world; particularly in the areas of history, geography, literature, philosophy and technology. Over the past twenty or so years I have listened to hundreds and hundreds of recorded books. (I am a slow reader so listening is much easier for me.) I have listened to thousands of hours of recorded lectures. I was an obsessive viewer or documentary cable channels such as History and Discovery. And, in recent years, I had become a news junkie. But, just a little over two years ago, all that changed. I discovered virtual worlds. And now I study virtual worlds with the same passion that I used to apply to the real world. Am I crazy? Or, it there an important underlying logic to this shift in focus?

Galileo is credited with the observation that people studying the natural world should not waste their time with what is actually "out there". Instead, he suggested that we should study idealizations of things in the natural world. Anyone who has had an undergraduate physics class has heard of some of these elementary idealizations such as a frictionless inclined plane, free fall in a vacuum, or an ideal spring. These thing do not exist in the world. They are constructs abstracted from things that exist in the world for the purpose of study. Relativity theory would be largely unexplored if we actually had to observe real world object traveling at the speed of light.

Centuries later Max Weber made a similar suggestion for social science. He observed that things like bureaucracies do not actually exist even in the social world. And yet to study the social world we need "ideal types" - concepts abstracted from the real world for he purpose of study. The real world is a messy, unruly and uncooperative place for study. By abstracting the essense of some phenomenon and studying the essence, we can make much bigger strides in understanding what is out there.

It isn't just scientists that do this. Writers of fiction do something very similar. They abstract the essence of human experience and motivation and call it a plot. They study the plot in the abstract and see how it will unfold. You can learn a great deal about life by reading a good novel. In fact, you will learn a great deal more about life from a novel than you will ever learn by reflecting on your own experiences. It is this process of abstracting the essence and then studying the abstracted essence that gives us such profound intellectual purchase.

In much the same way, virtual worlds are an abstraction or an idealization of the real world. They allow us to abstract the essence of our experience in an idealized environment for the purpose of study. While all those tapes that I listened to on history, philosophy, literature, and science have given me insight into what has happened, the time I spend studying virtual worlds gives me insight into what "can" happen. And in a rapidly changing world there is value in knowing what is coming as well as what has come and gone.

Persona Attatchment

2008-12-24T06:40:00.000-08:00

It is easy enough to say that people who experience life through their avatars really just need to get a real life. This kind of simplistic dismissive thinking is not unusual in complex ethical situations where people would rather avoid having to think about the complexity of the issue by dismissing it as silly. And, to be fair, there are probably a lot of people who experience life through their avatars who really do need to get a life. But, the extreme cases are easy and don't get us anywhere. At the other extreme, someone who does not have any kind of an alter ego, whatsoever, might be colorless and boring. We might say, about that person as well, that they really need to get a life. The hard part is that vast territory between the extremes. So, in order to make avatar attachment seem a little less bizarre, I am going to compare with another similar kind of attachment that we are all comfortable with. That is persona attachment.

Everybody has a persona. It is the version of yourself that you present to the world. You may even have different persona that you present in different situations. You may, for example, have one persona on dates while another persona at work. You may not think you have a persona, but when is the last time you got out of bed and went straight to work? When is the last time you farted, picked your nose, or belched loudly in front of other people? When is the last time you talked to a friend the same way you talk to your cat? Yes, like it not, you have a persona.

Your persona is not real. It is a construct you created through which you interact with the world.... not unlike an avatar. And if somebody injures your persona in some way, you probably take it very seriously. Some public figures have very highly developed persona. For example, celebrities and politicians often have a public presence that may be quite different from their private presence. You often see this dichotomy in behind the scenes stories that attempt to tell what a given person is really like. And if you damage someone's public persona they may be quite hurt or offended. In fact, you may even get sued.

We consider harm to the persona as seriously as we consider harm to the person. In fact, in many cases it is only the persona that is harmed and the person is not really harmed at all. In other cases causing harm to the persona causes harm to the person as well. So, we are comfortable with the idea of having a fantasy construct representing us in the world. And we are comfortable with the fact that, if you attack the construct, the person behind it may very well attack back.

My question is - how is this any different from an avatar? People say that an avatar is just pixels on a screen. And, as some level, that is true. However, pixels on a screen have a more real presence than the persona we present to the world. At lease you can point to or recognize an avatar. A persona has an entirely ethereal existence and yet we are comfortable being attached to a persona while we think avatar attachment is a little weird. Go figure. Maybe we are used to one so it doesn't seem bizarre, while we are not used to the other so it does.

Avatar Attachment

2008-12-17T04:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, people actually do begin to experience life through their avatar. I think most people who have spent any amount of time in a virtual world would agree with this statement without question because it agrees with their own subjective experience. However, for people who have not spent an appreciable amount of time in a virtual world, its sounds bizarre. And yet, by examining a few analogous situations, it becomes much more plausible, if not entirely clear.

First consider compassion. Let's say that something bad happens to somebody you don't even know. You feel badly for this person. Nothing has happened to you. Your world has not changed. You don't even know the person to whom the tragedy occurred. And yet you still feel bad. You are experiencing woe by proxy. So, the idea of feeling 'for' or 'through' another person even when nothing actually happened to you is not an alien concept.

Next consider empathy. A close friend of your has a personal problem of some kind. They hate their boss or just broke up with a significant other. You feel, to some extent, what they feel even though nothing happened to you. You are, once again, feeling by proxy. Now lets say that this personal problem occurred to someone very close to you, say a relative or a child. The feelings can become quite intense. In fact, your empathic feelings may be more intense, in some cases, than if the thing had occurred to you. Just how intense can these feeling by proxy become? They can become quite intense as the next example will show.

I don't want to get too graphic here but a more shocking example is necessary to make a point. Let's say your cat runs out of the door while you are getting the morning paper. It runs into the street and it immediately obliterated by a passing car. You are in shock! The emotional impact on you is incredible. And yet, nothing actually happened to you. You mights say that you are feeling pain for the cat. But the fact is that it all happened so quickly that the poor cat probably did not feel anything. And yet your attachment to your pet causes you great emotional strife.

You may try to counter at this point by saying that a cat is a living being while your avatar is just pixels on the screen. This is true but it is only a temporary respite. Let's say that you just bought a new car. You saved up a long time and got exactly the car you want. It expresses your inner being like no other car could. And as you come out to get in your car one evening you notice that somebody left an ugly door bang on your driver's side door. You are in agony. Even though you can easily have it repaired and the car did not feel any damage, you feel as though you were scratched.

Because people attach to other people, pets, and even property we have endless ethical views on behaviors that affect others through these attachments. So, if people attach to their avatars shouldn't there be ethical positions on how avatars are treated? The answer is probably yes. But that doesn't get us very far. Should avatars be treated the same as the person behind the avatar? Or does the avatar provide a level of buffering that would reduce some of that obligation? Somehow answers to ethical questions just seem to lead to more questions.

Your Avatar and You (Or Your Avatar Is You)

2008-12-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

People come into the virtual world of Second Life by creating an account and selecting a default avatar. The avatar is a little person who represents the user 'in world' just as a nickname or screen name might represent you in a chat room. Initially, the avatar is selected from a set of default avatars, but people begin, quite early, to customize and personalize their avatars. There are a wide variety of ways to do this. There is an Appearance Editor which you can use to change the appearance of your avatar. This is done by changing the shape, skin, hair, eyes and so on. Eventually, most people buy shapes and skins created by professional artists using more sophisticated software than the Appearance Editor. People will choose new cloths, shoes, jewelry, tattoos, and hair styles to further customize their appearance. They will join groups indicating their interests, list favorite places, and write blurbs in their profile further defining their character.

Over time their avatar will begin to develop a personality and now we begin to move into a tricky area of psychology that is not very well understood by most people. Some people will make heroic efforts to have their avatars look and behave in a way that is consistent with who they are; or at least who they think they are. They will say that their avatar looks like them in real life and acts they way they do in real life. Both of these claims are highly questionable. But they are firmly held beliefs by a lot of people.

For other people, their avatar takes on a look and personality quite different from how they are in real life. The avatar may represent who they would like to be. Or it may be an experiment into another life style, personality, or social class. Creating an avatar is a little like 'dressing up'. You get to create a novel impression, on that diverges from the every day you.

And yet others will have a whole cadre of avatars. Each with a different appearance and personality. Having multiple avatars with different personalities is hard for many people to understand until you consider a simple analogy. When a writer write a piece of fiction, they create characters to carry out the story. Each of the characters has it's own look, behaviors and personality. If the story is long or intense, the writer may get to know these characters quite well and say things like "character x would never do that" or "I tried to evolve character y into a new role but just couldn't do it". This is exactly what happens when one creates multiple avatars. They take on a life of their own just as fictional characters tend to do. And the writer/creator's job becomes one of getting to know the character more than it is of defining the character.

As the avatar evolves an even more perplexing psychological phenomenon begins to occur. The person at the keyboard actually begins to experience life through the avatar. This complex and very poorly understood phenomenon is called 'avatar attachment'. It is way to big of a topic to begin in this entry. So, I will leave the description of this phenomenon for the next post.

The Business Cost of Anonymity

2008-12-04T04:31:00.000-08:00

Many people, including myself, have seen the potential of Second Life technology to be the next generation of the web, or the 3D web. At some point in the future we will look back at the two dimensional, point and click, web pages of today and wonder how we ever got buy with them, much as we would look at command line interfaces today and wonder how we ever managed to work with them. But, alas, this dream of the 3D web has been slow to materialize. Numerous vendors have come in to Second Life only to find disappointing results. In fact, there have been numerous news stories about vendors pulling out of Second Life due to disappointing results.

There are numerous reasons for this and I don't want to place too much of the blame on anonymity. But it is a factor both practically and symbolically. From a practical perspective, people who are doing business want to know who they are doing business with. Granted you can buy a product from a store without having to know much about the vendor or the product developer. However, if you wish to hire an application developer, an attorney or a councilor, it make a lot more difference. If you are going to try to get a degree at a virtual university or rent a conference center for an important meeting, you want to know who you are dealing with. And anonymity makes this difficult if not impossible. Dealing with anonymous vendors feels a lot like buying something from a guy on a street corner who has various products hidden in his raincoat. And as long as Second Life chooses to support anonymity, it will not achieve its potential as a 3D web.

However, a large issue is the symbolic implications of anonymity. Is Second Life a shady place where people get to live out there fantasies and do things they would be embarrassed for their friends to know about? Or is Second Life a well lit place where people go to conduct business? This is to say, is it the sleazy side of town where sneak to in order to indulge their secret longings or is it the local family mall?

I should say, in fairness, that I have no problem with people indulging their secret longings. I have no problem with personal expressiveness no matter how strange it may seem to others. I just think there is a time and a place for everything, and having an adult movie store next to a kids ice cream parlor would never fly in real life and doesn't work very well in Second Life either.

Next time we turn to the issue of avatar attachment. If people experience the world through their avatars, do we need to be concerned with how we treat avatars, or do they just need to get a real life?

The Down Side of Anonymity

2008-11-27T06:44:00.000-08:00

If people are anonymous in Second Life, then how do you know who you are dealing with? How do you stop thirteen year old boys from coming on and harassing everyone at a Welcome Area? How do you stop sexual predators from seeking out vulnerable victims? How can you develop a friendship, perhaps even a romantic relationship with someone about whom you know nothing?
In the story of Cyrano de Bergerac a woman falls in love with a man through his letters without regard to his looks. It is a romantic reflection on what really matters in love. It is the character of the person not the person's looks.
Of course, Cyrano's flaw is that he has a big nose. But, what if his flaw was that he was a well spoken sexual predator or a serial killer? Would that matter? Of course it would. And while anonymity protects innocent people from recriminations regarding there personal expressions, it also protect maladjusted, sociopathic people from being discovered.
As hard as it is to believe, there are people who will engage in relationships solely for the purpose of upsetting the other person. It is hard to believe that somebody could be that badly bent. But anonymity protect the bent along with the normal. And often the normal suffer at the hands of the bent.

But, putting personal risks aside, there is a whole other cost to anonymity. And that is the business cost.