Tag: Danah Boyd

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A Prison Dilemma

Saint Foucault

I am currently on holiday. You can tell this because I’m writing, reading and otherwise doing things that I regard as fun. In particular I’ve been catching up on some reading. I’ve been meaning to read Danah Boyd‘s It’s Complicated for some time (and you can see some of my first impressions in the previous post) but I had held off because I wanted to buy a copy.

That may seem a strange statement. Danah makes a copy of the book available on her website as a PDF (under a CC BY-NC license) so I could (and in the end did) just grab a copy from there. But when it comes to books like this I prefer to pay for a copy, particularly where the author gains a proportion of their livelihood from publishing. Now I could buy a hardback or paperback edition but we have enough physical books. I can buy a Kindle edition from Amazon.co.uk but I object violently to paying a price similar to the paperback for something I can only read within Amazon software or hardware, and where Amazon can remove my access at any time.

In the end I gave up – I downloaded the PDF and read that. As I read it I found a quote that interested me. The quote was from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, a study of the development of the modern prison system – the quote if anyone is interested was about people’s response to being observed and was interesting in the context of research assessment.

Once I’d embarrassed myself by asking a colleague who knows about this stuff whether Foucault was someone you read, or just skimmed the summary version, I set out again to find myself a copy. Foucault died in 1984 so I’m less concerned about paying for a copy but would have been happy to buy a reasonably priced and well formatted ebook. But again the only source was Amazon. In this case its worse than for Boyd’s book. You can only buy the eBook from the US Amazon store, which requires a US credit card. Even if I was happy with the Amazon DRM and someone was willing to buy the copy for me I would be technically violating territorial rights in obtaining that copy.

It was ironic that all this happened the same week that the European Commission released its report on submissions to the Public Consultation on EU Copyright Rules. The report quickly develops a pattern. Representatives on public groups, users and research users describe a problem with the current way that copyright works. Publishers and media organisations say there is no problem. This goes on and on for virtually every question asked:

In the print sector, book publishers generally consider that territoriality is not a factor in their business, as authors normally provide a worldwide exclusive licence to the publishers for a certain language. Book publishers state that only in the very nascent eBooks markets some licences are being territorially restricted.

As a customer I have to say its a factor for me. I can’t get the content in the form I want. I can’t get it with the rights I want, which means I can’t get the functionality I want. And I often can’t get it in the place I want. Maybe my problem isn’t important enough or there aren’t enough people like me for publishers to care. But with traditional scholarly monograph publishing apparently in a death spiral it seems ironic that these markets aren’t being actively sought out. When books only sell a few hundred copies every additional sale should matter. When books like Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons aren’t easily available then significant revenue opportunities are being lost.

Increasingly it is exactly the relevant specialist works in social sciences and humanities that I’m interested in getting my hands on. I don’t have access to an academic library, the nearest I might get access to is a University focussed on science and technology and in any case the chance of any specific scholarly monograph being in a given academic library is actually quite low. Inter-library loans are brilliant but I can’t wait a week to check something.

I spent nearly half a day trying to find a copy of Foucault’s book that was in the form I wanted with the rights I wanted. I’ve spent hours trying to find a copy of Ostrom’s as well. In both cases it is trivial to find a copy online – took me around 30 seconds. In both cases its relatively easy to find a second hand print copy. I guess for traditional publishers its easy to dismiss me as part of a small market, one that’s hard to reach and not worth the effort. After all, what would I know, I’m just the customer.

 

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Researcher as Teenager: Parsing Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated

I have a distinct tendency to see everything through the lens of what it means for research communities. I have just finally read Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated a book that focuses on how and why U.S. teenagers interact with and through social media. The book is well worth reading for the study itself, but I would argue it is more worth reading for the way it challenges many of the assumptions we make about how social interactions online and how they are mediated by technology.

The main thrust of Boyd’s argument is that the teenagers she studied are engaged in a process of figuring out what their place is amongst various publics and communities. Alongside this she diagnoses a long standing trend of reducing the availability of the unstructured social interactions through which teens explore and find their place.

A consistent theme is that teens go online not to escape the real world, or because of some attraction to the technology but because it is the place where they can interact with their communities, test boundaries and act out in spaces where they feel in control of the process. She makes the point that through these interactions teens are learning how to be public and also how to be in public.

So the interactions and the needs they surface are not new, but the fact that they occur in online spaces where those interactions are more persistent, visible, spreadable and searchable changes the way in which adults view and interact with them. The activities going on are the same as in the past: negotiating social status, sharing resources, seeking to understand what sharing grants status, pushing the boundaries, claiming precedence and seeking control of their situation.

Boyd is talking about U.S. teenagers but I was consistently struck by the parallels with the research community and its online and offline behavior. The wide prevalence of imposter syndrome amongst researchers is becoming better known – showing how strongly the navigation and understanding of your place in the research community effects even senior researchers. Prestige in the research community arises from two places, existing connections (where you came from, who you know) and the sharing of resources (primarily research papers). Negotiating status, whether offline or on, remains at the core of researcher behavior throughout careers. In a very real sense we never grow up.

People generally believe that social media tools are designed to connect people in new ways. In practice, Boyd points out, mainstream tools effectively strengthen existing connections. My view has been that “Facebooks for Science” fail because researchers have no desire to be social as researchers in the same way the do as people – but that they socialize through research objects. What Boyd’s book leads me to wonder is whether in fact the issue is more that the existing tools do little to help researchers negotiate the “networked publics” of research.

Teens are learning and navigating forms of power, prestige and control that are highly visible. The often do this through sharing objects that are easily intepretable, text and images (although see the chapter on privacy for how this can be manipulated). The research community buries those issues because we would like to think we are a transparent meritocracy.

Where systems have attempted to surface prestige or reputation in a research context through point systems they have never really succeeded. Partly this is because those points are not fungible – they don’t apply in the “real” world (StackExchange wins in part precisely because those points did cross over rapidly into real world prestige). Is it perhaps precisely our pretence that this sense-making and assignment of power and prestige is supposed to be hidden that makes it difficult to build social technologies for research that actually work?

An Aside: I got a PDF copy of the book from Danah Boyd’s website because a) I don’t need a paper copy and b) I didn’t want to buy the ebook from Amazon. What I’d really like to do is buy a copy from an independent bookstore and have it sent somewhere where it will be read, a public or school library perhaps. Is there an easy way to do that?