ICTs and the ethics of creativity

The philosophical commitments to dialogue, the acknowledgement of the creative contribution to the other, the expectation of creativity happening in the spaces in-between, and open disagreement seeking consensus discussed in the last couple of posts find remarkable parallels in the community of participants in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and especially web 2.0. These ethical commitments are being embodied every day in the lives of a whole bunch of software engineers and programmers.

There are three ways I reckon these commitments are embodied in ICTs that I’m going to write about here:

• Open Source;
• Hyperlinking; and
• Perpetual Beta.

I wrote previously about what open-source means and how I think this blog is my anthropological source-code. By way of illustration, have a read of this abridged list of guidelines for creating good open source software from Eric Raymond’s important essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” – replace software with ‘project’ and developer with ‘researcher’ and see how much it sounds like collaborative research:

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

One of the most potent forces in social media is the hyperlink. If you are writing a blog post – or even a facebook update or tweet – and you refer to someone else (or someone else’s work) it’s good manners to link to them. On a blog, this will sometimes come in the form of “The Hat Tip” – at the bottom of a post, you’ll see h/t and a link to a person/blog. There’s an expectation in the online community that people ought to be recognised for their contribution – for the knowledge they contribute.

The final correlation between collaborative methods and web 2.0 I want to talk to you about is the idea of ‘Perpetual Beta’. Beta is the term given to software that’s in ‘testing phase’. It belongs to a model of production that creates a prototype, tests it and then releases a final – static – product into the market. Perpetual beta is the idea that a program is never finished. It’s constantly in a state up being updated, refined, in a state of process. It’s dialogue if ever I saw it.

There’s more to collaboration than correcting colonial power imbalances

For Luke Lassiter, collaboration is an attempt to redress (typically colonial) power imbalances between the researcher and the researched. He asks:

“When does anthropology serve the very relationships created and maintained by anthropological practice? How can anthropology become relevant for our consultants?”
(p19)

Collaborative approaches view the people we work with not as subjects, but consultants, collaborators, co-creators.

Collaboration is not a new idea to anthropology. At some level all ethnography is collaborative. But Lassiter suggests that what is new is the move to push collaboration from its “taken-for-granted background and put it at centre stage” (p16) and “that establishes as a main goal the writing of ethnography with local community consultants as active collaborators in that process” (p17).

But I think there’s more to it than that. There is other philosophical precedent.

I understand collaborative research to be grounded in a commitment to dialogue and a responsibility to the other. I’ve tried reading some Levinas, and mostly it washes over me, but I am persuaded by his call for a responsibility to the Other merely in light of coming face-to-face with them as another being. The other places ethical demands on us, lays claim to us. For Levinas an ethics of responsibility precedes any objective searching after truth. That is, the people we work with are more important than the work we do.

My commitment to collaborative research also comes from an expectation that I won’t be able to understand the other in a perfect sense. That my reading and translation of another’s experience – their culture – will be enriched by engaging in dialogue with them about my interpretations. Collaboration isn’t only about redressing power imbalance. It’s also about achieving deeper “co-interpretations” (Lassiter p12).

The Psychiatrist RD Laing puts it this way:

“I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour. You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of me.”
(p15)

I wouldn’t be here, though, if I thought this doomed any social science that attempts to interpret the experience of someone else to utter failure. I think Laing would suggest that it is always limited, but that as we experience one another experiencing – as we respond to one another – we get closer to sharing something of each other’s experience. He says:

“Since your and their experience is invisible to me as mine is to you and them, I seek to make evident to the others, through their experience of my behaviour, what I infer of your experience, through my experience of your behaviour”.
(p17)

My commitment to collaboration, therefore, is both ethical (I owe it to the people I work with to collaborate with them) and epistemological (I think it’s a better method for getting good information about how others experience the world).

Lassiter, L (2005), The Chicago guide to collaborative ethnography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Laing, R (1967) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

For the full text of my presentation on blogging as open source research, go HERE.

Open-source research

Do you know what is meant when someone calls a piece of software “open source”? Because I think the metaphor of open source is exactly what I’m trying to do on this blog with anthropological research.

“Open source” describes software which is both free and for which the source code is freely available.

If that’s goobledegook — imagine software is a cake. Traditionally, you’ve gone to the shops and bought a cake. You’ve been able to use it for the purpose it was made (eating). Now imagine you can go to the shop and they give you a cake for free! That’s what we call freeware – software that’s given away for free. Open source, then, is like going to the shop getting a free cake and being given the recipe. It gives you the opportunity to make and modify the cake for yourself. In fact, lots of open source projects could be described as inviting you into the kitchen and allowing you to comment publicly on ways you’d make the recipe better. It’s about honesty, dialogue, and iterative improvement.

I’m using a blog in an attempt to honestly reveal my anthropological process and working. This is my anthropological source-code.

I talked about this the other week at the University of Melbourne Ethnography Forum. Over the course of this week, I’ll share with you why I think working collaboratively is worthwhile and how I hope to mimic the ethical movements in the Information Technology world toward open-source, collaborative creativity in my anthropological research. You can read the whole transcript HERE, or stay just stay tuned to the blog to get bite-sized portions.

Inputs vs Outputs

Reflections on Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet edited by Christine Hine, published by Berg, NY, 2005.

I’ve just finished reading the introduction to this book, which seems like it will be a most helpful volume! Hine is concerned with reducing some of the anxiety researchers may feel about trying to research social relationships and activities that go on on-line. And so, I have been promised that the chapters of this book will provide some precedents about how to research on-line networks, identities, and activities. This sounds useful but also curiously onesided.

You see, it considers ‘computer mediated communications’ (I think this means pretty much any form of electronic communication) as a new form of input into the research process. It is something new that you can study. And the suggestion is we may need new methods to study these new social practices. I may not end up doing any of this type of research.

Alternatively, information and communication technologies can be seen as a tool; for recruiting participants, conducting interviews and discussion groups. I will probably use the Internet in this way to some extent.

But what Hine hasn’t (yet) explored are the ways in which the Internet creates new possibilities for research output; for releasing information, providing access to the inner workings of a project, and imagining new ways to organise and display research results. For Johnson et al, this was a big part of the appeal of information and communication technologies. And this is exactly what I hope to harness in this project – and in this blog.