stimulant

The various seedlings of DIY science that you can find (e.g. Citizen Science, DIYbio) all sell themselves short.

There is a significant opportunity for hackers and makers to capitalize on their community’s relative agility and flexibility to make a series of tools and platforms that scientists don’t even know they need. Rather than playing the credibility and credential game on the terms of standing institutions, there is a lot of ground to be gained by making and using tools that the mainstream community wants [and needs].

For instance, scientific equipment (particularly in the life sciences) is tremendously overpriced. The primary institutional customers are universities and corporations with research and development departments. The fact that time is more of a concern to these institutions than one-time equipment costs means that equipment costs are inflated.

Scientific equipment is rife with proprietary interfaces and software that create friction in the data collection and processing workflow. As science relies on ever larger datasets and ever more computationally intensive analysis, it will become increasingly necessary to streamline the connections between equipment, between labs, and across experiments.

Scientists don’t realize that they need a platform, and the DIY skills that are blossoming first (electronics, software) are exactly those needed. Science is not considered an open, cultural activity. I can work as a waiter during the day, jam with friends at night, and call myself a musician. I can paint in my spare time and call myself an artist. I can’t¹ do science in my spare time and call myself a scientist, not only because the equipment isn’t available, but because there is no infrastructure to support a community like that. What if the process of making science available as a cultural activity entailed engineering tools the scientific community at large wants a part of? Can tools be the bridge between two communities? Are there any precedents in other domains?

The prospect of having scientific labs as analogues to hacker spaces is a pretty exciting vision. Soon to be concrete via NUBlabs!²

1. Well, people don’t. [↩]
2. More on this, later [↩]

As people have pointed out, I’ve been derelict in living up to the “weekly” name in addressing a question. And I’ve found that I’ve made the silly mistake of delaying writing about other things because I want to get out “this week’s weekly” first. So, I’m suspending them. Which doesn’t mean I’m actually suspending them, just the named practice. I’ll continue to ask and answer questions, but I think getting off a schedule is a good thing, particularly because I’m not going to be thinking wholly about that question each week. In fact, my activities are pretty far removed from the questions I’ve asked so far.

Let me know if there are any problems or irregularities.

Several weeks ago, Charlie DeTar at the MIT Media Lab emailed out some notes (see the end of this post for a transcript) from a casual gathering of affiliates of the Center for Future Civic Media. There are lots of ideas in the email; however, I’m curious about where one in particular leads:

Manuel Castellas — place of space, place of flows. Balkanization - information silos. Is hyper-localization just going to encourage balkanization? We focus politics in this country specifically on the level of 300,000,000. What about the level of 6,000,000,000? How do we strengthen local politics, while at the same time working at the world level? At the mass level of media, people commonly play lowest common denominator, and people usually watch what they already agree with. People seek validation, and seek out what they like. There’s too much media - it would take 10 times real speed to watch everything that is being produced. _Something_ is filtering what you see. How to build a better filter?

So, the question for this week:¹ to what extent is affecting the flow of information relevant to changing people’s minds? What about changing their information diet: what type and quality of information people expect to consume? When it comes to the filters that govern people’s information access, where do they come from? How many are implicit?

My interest in these questions comes down to the following: in the context of education, where should I push to make information available? What media are most useful for changing the right people’s minds?

Original email

Hi all, I took some sketchy notes during the Civic Media Bull Session last night. It would be overly charitable to describe them as “minutes”, but perhaps they can help trigger further discussion of some of the issues we raised. Here goes: —  — Civic media bull 2008-06-27 Youtube: what’s it for? Is it for diversion, or subtle discussion? “I’m Voting Republican”, “It’s Raining McCain”, “McCunt” vs. rational discussion of issues straw man, comedy, maybe not real (but maybe?) youtube [sic] is for publishing. People don’t go to the front page to find videos, they get links from friends/family. But is this good for engaging real discussion? Hubert Chang: “I helped invent google [sic]”. True, interesting, but not viral. Video production not so good. Should there be instructions, tutorials for making a good YouTube video? Templates for proper video format to get big and viral? Is it a good goal to have radical decentralization? No band should sell more than 10,000 records; no band should sell just 1. Decentralized communities forming around local interests. Lots of porn stars are very local. “Cam girl” phenomenon. Each has a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers, working in dorm rooms, etc. The big budget porn movie is basically gone. The same thing is happening with bands on MySpace, where the relationship is personal. People talk directly to the bands. On the other hand, there are news and images that are so important that as many people as possible should see them. Expert systems, reflexive democracy — Jurgen Habermas, U. Beck. Consider the different types of risks, and experts, who do you listen to? Do you listen to the people warning about global warming, or the people talking about economic danger? U. Beck talks about going for hyper-local, reflexive democracy which allows a local community to create power structures locally. You have to at the same time pay attention to the global voices and the local voices, pay attention to the majority and the minority. Manuel Castellas — place of space, place of flows. Balkanization - information silos. Is hyper-localization just going to encourage balkanization? We focus politics in this country specifically on the level of 300,000,000. What about the level of 6,000,000,000? How do we strengthen local politics, while at the same time working at the world level? At the mass level of media, people commonly play lowest common denominator, and people usually watch what they already agree with. People seek validation, and seek out what they like. There’s too much media - it would take 10 times real speed to watch everything that is being produced. _Something_ is filtering what you see. How to build a better filter? How do you create discourse, dialog, critical thought? The mississippi [sic] right now, some communities build large levees which flood other communities, and there is no communication. Lots of quiltwork. Would like to generate dialog that engenders understanding rather than derision. Is “I’m Voting Republican” the wrong way? A balance between talking to your communities, and not watering down the upset, emotion, reactionary things. You need to be able to express that stuff. Are republicans/democrats a community? Is voting for a president enough for a community? A shared space, What defines community? A set of people affected by a common thing? Communities seem to cut at many levels, on macro and micro scales. The Boston Public Transportation system is a community; you should talk to it on that level. An email from a women’s technology group in Sweden, “she-geeks”, which has an awful connotation among CS students in Switzerland. Since “geek” has a positive connotation everywhere else, should they change their name? Noone has a problem with the name except for a small community of local, backwards CS students. Should they cater to those interests by changing their name? The OLPC has an app called “hippy” which can be offensive in some spanish dialects, and they had to change the Application name. There are times to stand up for a particular word, and other times when the word isn’t that important. A catalyst in engaging a dialog may be humor. Sarcasm (such as “I’m a Republican”), presenting the facts (such as the Daily Show)… Paul Otlet — the web, 1934. Tried to catalog all the books in the world, but “invented the internet”, but conceiving of a network of telephones/monitors that allow you to call up any book. “The Treatise on Documentation”. Emmanual Goldberg, an engineer/scientist, worked for Zeiss Icon in Dresden, Germany, and invented the first system to use electronics to access documentation. Used microfilm, with a pattern of opaque dots and lights, like punch cards, to access microfilm. Vannebar [sic] Bush — 1945, “memex”. What matters about this? Why have we never heard about this guy? What’s important? Is it that this guy was the “first”, or far before the others? But why is it that Wikipedia one [sic], and not the others — or Edison, instead of the others? There are certain social moments… American journalism is very different from journalism elsewhere in the world. America seems to make news items out of what is really advertising or marketing. Conspiracy: Bohemian Grove. Onion News Network: Deibold releases presidential election results early. Enka: a Japanese middle-aged musical style, done by a guy from Pittsburgh (Jero). Lame for young people, but done by a stereotypically urban young guy. Two very local communities communicating. How do you navigate popularity to create community dialog? PORN!!! If you want to engender discussions that bridge conservative/local dialogs, you have to use humor, or other apolitical ways to generate interest.

1. As some people have pointed out, I flaked on keeping my thinking about last week’s question open. But, I think I’ve arrived at answer, nonetheless (about which I will write, shortly) [↩]

I feel more empowered by the thought that, for my ambitions, work and talent are interchangeable, than by the knowledge that I am capable of acquiring any talent.