Designing the Situation: social display and social control

If you're one of the two or three people familiar with this blog, you might've noticed my preoccupation with the idea that we're often guided by social display considerations when using social functionality. Now, I'm not saying that we interact with each other only when there's social gain available. Our motivational schedule is incredibly complex and has yet to be adequately deciphered. Rather, the suggestion is that social perception considerations both motivate and constrain our actions to some extent. Basically, the fact that we care what people think when they can see what we do and how we do it impacts our behavior. That's obvious. The interesting question is what this means for design: what do the factors impacting social display – visibility of behavior; presumed "quality" of audience; knowledge of principles of evaluation; and knowledge of appropriate behaviors – mean for social functionality design?

Goffman and social display

Erving Goffman's classic takes on "defining the situation" and "face" more or less provide the popular understanding of social display. When interacting with others, we often negotiate the framing of the situation and the appropriate roles within that frame, hoping to settle on one that's somehow beneficial or preferred. We also strive to maintain beneficial and consistent roles across interactions, presenting a singular, valuable "face". So, from this simplified "Goffmanian" angle, we can say social display is about negotiating and maintaining preferred or valuable definitions and roles in interaction situations.

But a recognized limitation of Goffman's take is that it downplays the "macro" factors impacting interaction, i.e. imposed institutions, norms, etc. That is, it explicitly focuses on individual choice, leaving the factors constraining the choice of definition and role largely implicit or absent. But clearly we don't negotiate from scratch. We negotiate available or appropriate definitions, our choice set limited by imposed institutions, social conventions, and even the larger-scale normative frames embedding this specific negotiation.

Thus, insofar as display is about defining and maintaining a somehow beneficial social image but the means of doing so are bounded by the social/institutional/normative context, "design" of this context of interaction is important. When discussing social functionality, it's essential.

Social Control

Our deep desire for social display – i.e. "defining the situation" and maintaining "face" in Goffman's popular terminology – provides plenty of opportunities for designers. As it relates to social functionality design, display has two parts: expression and feedback. "Expression" names the tools, conventions and mechanisms by which the user acts, while "feedback" identifies the tools others use to express evaluation of the action, impose sanctions, etc. Here we're interested in how feedback constrains or impacts expression, how the expression behavior in social display is impacted by the afforded feedback behavior.

Institutional design is the branch of political science that studies how different sets of constraints and incentives structure and guide behavior in social interactions. These incentives and constraints often result in what we can call social control, the behavioral control arising from social obligations, expectations, norms, and positive/negative social sanctions. Whether we realize it or not, there's an element of "institutional design" in social functionality design: when we design for social interaction, we implicitly or explicitly impose obligations, incentives, sanctions, and many other means of social control. For example, we impose roles (e.g. sender/receiver); prime or engage norms (e.g. reciprocation via "likes"); and often provide sanctioning mechanisms (e.g. voting up / down, liking, commenting, etc.).

You can't design for social display without at least implicitly designing in social control. They're wickedly interdependent; use of expression mechanisms is fundamentally shaped by the behavior afforded by feedback mechanisms. Understanding that they're related and how they interact is key to designing good social functionality. "Operationalizing" these ideas for design, however, requires a good bit of fudging. Adapting (no doubt to their dismay) Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit's work on the "economy of esteem", we can say that there are four major factors impacting social control through display.

Probability of visibility or publicity
The fact that somebody could see what you do, say, post, etc. significantly impacts your behavior. Whether you want to admit it or not, the potential for public scrutiny often changes your behavior, and, up to a limit, the more scrutiny the greater the change in behavior.

"Quality" of observers
Who happens to be the likely observer also impacts behavior. What you're willing to share with your friends on Facebook is often different from what you're willing to share with your colleagues on LinkedIn. Our behavior tends to shift across intended audiences, often depending on more or less informal social categorization schemes, e.g. friends, colleagues, fellow numismatists, etc.

Knowledge of "values" or principles of evaluation
We tend to tailor our behavior to fit presumed standards against which we'll be judged. The criteria of appropriate or estimable behavior varies between your professional blog and your pro-ana support group. Knowledge of the values "held" by the different groups gives you a more or less standard measures of your behavior.

Knowledge of appropriate behaviors
But understanding the principles against which our behavior is judged won't help much if you're new or otherwise clueless. In that case, you just need to know the appropriate behaviors, the actual behavioral norms in line with which you should act. Presumably, these will be reinforced by and consistent with the values. Most value systems, however, are "behaviorally degenerate", that is any number of actual behavioral patterns could "instantiate" the principles. So, knowing the actual behavioral ground rules is important to garnering the esteem (or avoiding the disesteem) promised by the principles, at least until the values undergirding the behavioral norms are somehow understood.

Clearly, designers have an impact on these factors. Design affects the potential visibility of every action, both through feature-level decisions (are user contributions by default publicly viewable or restricted to confirmed contacts?) and through strategic product decisions (is it about broadcast or narrowcast?). Similarly, design impacts audience "quality" insofar as the product may afford topic-based group formation; be focused on a narrow pursuit or interest; or provide light means of contact categorization. Similarly, the product can be "framed" more or less suggestively, automatically bringing to bear salient norms, roles, and corresponding values. Finally, we can design to make appropriate and inappropriate behavior more or less obvious, salient, valuable, and visible via various moderation and promotion mechanisms.

Social control = structural and normative control

So we have four big factors impacting design for social control. But they don't all seem to be the same sort of thing. That is, it seems like we have two different types of factors in our list. The first two – visibility of behavior and "quality" of observers – are pretty straightforwardly about the structure of the interaction space. They're primarily about how widely behavior is seen and by whom. The other two – principles of evaluation and behavioral norms – are fuzzier, properly "normative" factors. They're about what ought to get done or what's appropriate. Thus, I'll call the first two structural control factors and the last two normative control factors.

The relation between them is up for debate, but I prefer to see it as below.


Visibility and quality aren't opposites or poles on a continuum. You can have high membership and absolute visibility of behavior – meaning enormous publicity, which assumes all actions can be seen – yet still allow some sort of audience-quality control – users can expressly target a subgroup as intended audience. So I'll take visibility and quality to define a structural control design space within which you can plot the product. The focus may be on exclusivity – small audience / limited visibility but very high audience quality – or wide-open, general socialization – large audience / high visibility and little audience-quality control – or any combination of the two (although a low-quality, low-visibility product seems really hard to imagine).

But where your product falls in the structural control space suggests different available approaches to normative control. That is, the sort of structural control you want to design for suggests the sort of normative control focus you should pursue. High visibility / large audience but low audience-quality focus (northwest of the center diagonal in the image) suggests you should skew your normative control focus toward the behavioral: e.g. incentives, sanctions, and various invasive moderation techniques. At the other extreme, low visibility / small audience but high audience-quality focus (southeast of the center diagonal) suggests your normative control design should focus on shared principles or already existing "value systems": e.g. domain exclusivity, framing effects, and structural "assortativity" (for example, allowing users to select subgroups as intended audiences). Between these poles lies a tunable design space, the focus in the middle being equal between behavioral and principle-based control.

So… what now?

Too often in my business (UX design) we focus on whatever happens to work without trying to make sense of why it works or how it all might fit together. This model tries to address the important but often neglected fact that behavior is strongly motivated by social display and that the context of interaction impacts the means and quality of social display. If harnessed, the drive for social display can be great for your product, but it can also tear a social space apart if it isn't understood, channeled, ordered, or allowed to mature organically in a space providing the means for bottom-up norm negotiation. This model tries to articulate a way of thinking about design for social display: from where your product plots in the structural control design space, you can figure out the best means of normative control, mapped to more or less well understood patterns and mechanisms. In future posts I may return to this model, provide some case studies and provide more concrete suggestions.

Quora, Norms, and Motivation

"I have managed to find a few interesting discussions on Quora lately, but WOW some people sure know how to spew business bullshit and buzzwords. The ego stroking, ‘look how smart I can write’ is one of the things that ends up turning me off to the network."
Jonathan More's 1/10/11 comment on the post "The Answer to this Quora? No." by Saneel Radia.

For a while now, from afar, I've been watching Quora, the much-discussed, newish Q&A platform. In addition to a mountain of press and glowing endorsements from some fancy people, it has also garnered some strikingly negative reviews. That's to be expected. The hype and bile cycle cranks up every time the next "next big thing" rounds the corner. Many gripes are of the "Google does it better" or "What am I supposed to do with this?" stripe. But seemingly petty reactions like the comment above point to a trickier issue, one about product framing, user motivations, and norms. In a nutshell, Quora is shackled to a norm-embedding "frame", i.e. it's a "Q&A platform". But it's also a social product, so it must provide an implicit dual value proposition – one creator facing and one consumer facing – to generate content consumers may want. Yet, because of the norms embedded in the Q&A frame proscribing self-promotion or overt display, the only legitimate, communicable value proposition is the consumer facing one. Confusing? Let me elaborate. Throughout, I'll use reader comments associated with Saneel Radia's critical post as discussion fodder.

Frames as Norm-embedding Structures

"I keep trying to find some utility but it seems like a place where people either just post questions that are utterly ridiculous or they post questions to demonstrate their “expertise” (i.e. they answer them)… It doesn’t seem to be supporting collaboration or interaction…"
Sara' 1/11/11 comment on Saneel's post

"You hit the nail on the head, Sara. Quora is for the creator, not the consumer."
Saneel's response to Sara's comment

Quora self-describes as "A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it." Basically, it's billed as an evolving, ever improving Q&A platform in which the best and brightest – initially, but now including the worst and dullest, like me – can ask questions, follow questions, answer questions, and then endorse or promote the answers. Of course, there are also a bunch o' "community" features integrated (and integral) throughout, but that's it in a nutshell.

Sounds simple and it's actually pretty nicely designed, quickly getting you up to speed as regards "official" interactions, functions, and entities. Of course, part of what makes the site's structures, functions and interactions so easy to grasp is the familiarity of the product's framing concept, Questions and Answers. You say "it's a Q&A site, created edited and organized by users" and, as the primary frame is a very conventional interaction structure, we know more or less what to expect.

Framing, in this dumbed down sense of the big, abstract interaction type that structures the product, is an incredibly useful tool that can do a lot of work for you. If properly deployed frames can guide expectations and define roles entering into interactions; constrain or lead actions through processes and flows; and often determine the bounds of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Relying on familiar, conventional, relatively unambiguous frames offloads a lot of the high level, strategic discovery and design work to the frame itself.

But relying on a frame can lead to problems if you don't understand how they do what they do. Often, frames embed norms, the informal, behavior-guiding rules and simple conventions that we rely on to coordinate and smooth our daily activities and interactions. Norms – mostly social norms but sometimes conventions as well – can be not only descriptive, indicate what most people happen to do, but also prescriptive, indicate what people should do. We humans slip easily, almost inevitably, from the descriptive to the prescriptive – from the fact-based to the evaluative – often feeling that how something happens to be done is how it should be done. Furthermore, norms aren't prescriptive at just the behavioral level, indicating what you should do. They're also often prescriptive at the procedural or motivational level. It's not just what you do that's prescribed and judged, it's also how or why you do it.

Display and the Problem of Motivation

Motivation is a hot topic in our circles, particularly now that everyone is high on that most pernicious and faddish of sub-fields "persuasive design". How do you get folks, for example, to invest time and effort asking and answering questions on your site? How do you softly enforce quality/behavior standards yet open the gates to the largest number of users? How do you trick somebody into signing up for your damn newsletter? Etc….

There are two much discussed types of motivation.

Internal Motivation
Motivation arising out of inherent or intrinsic desires, values, drives, etc.

External Motivation
Motivation arising out of extrinsic considerations or inducements.

Research on these issues is pretty muddled, but seems to indicate that the internal sort is best for, say, learning and maintaining desired behaviors and habits, while the external becomes self-defeating and can crowd out internal motivation in the long run. Other research, however, seems to suggest that, in the real world, the truth is actually a lot more complicated and a motivational cocktail of both types is actually the most effective.

Whatever the case regarding actual motivational efficacy, moralizing the distinction is almost inescapable. We're all pretty biased in our evaluations of perceived motivation, just assuming internal motivation to be somehow better or nobler than external motivation. Consider the case of social interaction. Folks apparently acting from internal dispositions are lauded as "genuine" or "authentic", while those clearly interested in appearances and the esteem of others are branded "fake" or "inauthentic". Maybe this is a normative corollary of social psychology's well documented Fundamental Attribution Bias, the finding that our perceptions of the causes of peoples behavior are significantly biased toward assuming internal as opposed to external (structural or situational) causes.

Anyway, we designers realize (or at least we should if we want to be successful) that a significant real world motivator and quality-driver is Display. We can acquire and accrue social goods – esteem, reputation, and status – from estimable acts (judged by some norm-determined standard) performed in a public context. Display considerations fundamentally impact the quantity and quality of our contributions to social products. And Display is far less about internal than external motivational factors, like how the content, quantity, and quality of your input changes depending on who's likely consuming it and the possible esteem or reputational benefit their consumption might provide. If you were purely internally motivated, it wouldn't matter who was watching, how you'd like them to react/judge you, or what standard they were applying. Your input would always be the same.

Because of our normative bias for the internal, on those rare occasions we do talk about Display it's in passing and with embarrassment. In my opinion, we should drop our proudly naive, exclusive public preference for internal, "authentic" motivations (which is probably an artifact of biases, heuristics, and norms rather than a reflection of true motivational schedules) and embrace the external as a vital tool in our designer's toolbox. But, I certainly don't think that Display is the only motivator here. Rather, as I've written before, there are at least three big, abstract reasons people use social functionality: Connection, Knowledge, and Display.

Explicit Position vs. Afforded Position vs. Enforced Position

"…as much as i dislike it, i can’t fault the strategy: let SV folks self-adulate through display of knowledge, whether real or fake…"
adam on 1/11/11

"The thing that turns me off about Quora is that there seems to be no personality allowed. I answered with a few tongue-in-cheek responses, and found a few of that ilk that I liked, and they were all voted down."
Tinu on 1/11/11

You can think of our three big reasons for engaging with social functionality – Connection, Knowledge, and Display – as the poles of a three-dimensional continuum. Then, if you're really geeky, you can plot (very unscientifically) where items of social functionality fall on the continuum – both functional elements and whole products. Considering the norms embedded in Quora's Q&A frame along with their more or less explicit positioning and teaser line, I'd plot them as below.


Basically, this is the mix of motivators and reasons for engaging with the platform that Quora "explicitly" or officially appeals to. The big circle around the plot indicates that the official message and frame-embedded norms determine more of a range than a coordinate; there's leeway, particularly since product-specific norms are just now arising. They're very skewed toward the Knowledge pole, but with a significant Connection (in this case the explicitly "community" elements) leaning. Their official position is very light on the Display component, although it's implicit in the social aspect. Still, a little bit of Display is allowable so long as the clear point of the activity is Knowledge.

But as some of the quoted comments suggest, perusing Quora you definitely get the sense that a lot of activity is driven either solely or largely by Display. Many people are using Quora as a means of advertising their expertise, interests, sense of humor, and abilities. That's no surprise. The platform clearly "affords" that, and a lot of activity probably depends on it. But, this afforded use case is proscribed by the "official" position and norms. It's clearly the case that a lot of people wouldn't answer at all, except that they can flash their smarts. However, when we think of a Q&A platform, we feel that it should be about Knowledge first and foremost. Display should fall naturally out of quality performance or at least not appear to drive the performance. In this strongly Knowledge-first context, performances perceived to be selfishly Display-focused can make us really uncomfortable or mad (a typical reaction to broken prescriptive norms), even if the content is high quality.

To counter this natural and predictable issue, Quora provides voting up and voting down functionality as well as monitors to actually remove "self-serving" content. This is a good way to guide content quality and pro-sociality, particularly if you're designing within a strong frame. But, it looks like the discomfort of the transgressed no-Display norm associated with the frame is generating a powerful backlash against those perceived to be too Display motivated. Several comments mentioned the strictness and harshness with which some humorous or snarky answers were squashed. The enforcement norms that seem to be emerging appear to be even more anti-Display than the official Quora positioning warrants. Plotting the "afforded" position and the "enforced" position on our continuum gives us something like this.


Clearly, there's a problem here. The product affords activities that the framing and position explicitly proscribe. This happens with every social product, but in this case, the frame is so normatively well defined and understood that transgressions against its accepted norms are glaring and galling. Also, the platform is relatively new and, though there are robust means of sanctioning (vote up and down) and clear identification of high performance, the content is just now reaching the volume where product-specific norms of appropriate presentation form and solidify. The users have yet to coordinate on acceptable means and practices of Display within the normative bounds of the platform. Until these norms become widespread and a "generation" of users have accumulated the norms as product-specific "Cultural Capital" there will still be a largish proportion of brazen self-promoters ticking everyone else off. But, as the norms solidify and spread, they will most likely learn them and cooperate.

Why Redesigns are So Damn Hard

Redesigning social functionality – that is, re-doing a social product already in use by some sort of entrenched audience – is sometimes tougher than designing from scratch. Very often you're fighting against organizational and institutional inertia; legacy issues that determine what's actually possible; entrenched user expectations; nervous stakeholders demanding guarantees; and a little understood, fickle market always on the verge of catastrophic "creative destruction".

But what interests me here, is that in my experience the difficulty of redesigning a product – both the subjective experience of effort and the objective expenditure of time and attention in completing a redesign, start to finish – seems to vary with the product's success, but not in a particularly straightforward manner. That is, how successful the product to be redesigned currently is affects the difficulty of the process in a complex, non-intuitive way. Why?

Well, first of all there are at least three big classes of factors impacting the difficulty of redesigning a site. Some of these are important in designing the site from scratch, too, but the way they interact with the current success of the product when embarking on a redesign is what interests me. The three factors are Market Information, User Entrenchment, and The Organization.

Market Information
When redesigning, we look to the market for clues, approach our users for tests, and effectively try to tease out guidance from the field. Ultimately, we're looking for the formula for design success. But this stuff is incredibly complicated, including such things as the design conventions determining current user expectations; the competitive landscape identifying areas of relevant differentiation; trend dynamics suggesting potential "innovations"; etc. But the most subtly difficult factors are the complex social dynamics of product acceptance. I've written about these before: the hard to discern workings of network effects, informational cascades, and the resultant path dependencies cause enormous confusion among stakeholders, greatly increasing the difficulty of redesigning social functionality. In our misguided search for a simple formula for redesign success, these factors, which decrease the role of product qualities (the stuff of design) in predicting product success, can really lead you astray.

In a nutshell, the externalities inherent in the social web (i.e. we initially evaluate a product based on others' actions and then get the most value from the products that everyone else uses) make predicting success from product qualities almost impossible. Success is usually a matter of context, timing and accidents of the product's acceptance history rather than objective design quality. So, beyond a set of user expectation-defining standards – the competitive baseline, which you should have already identified in the initial design round – market analysis and user research won't help you identify a redesign guaranteed to succeed.

Even worse, up to a certain point, the more relative success you have, the murkier the information derivable from testing users and combing the market becomes. Your variance from the competitive baseline tends to be smaller the more successful you are, and the true drivers of success are rarely clear cut product design issues beyond this competitive baseline. Very few stakeholders understand these subtle dynamics and insist that more market research, testing and "innovation" will crack the "guaranteed success" design code. As a result, redesigns of moderately successful products tend to bog down in obsessive, inconclusive research, the results of which are infinitely and inconsistently interpretable (especially if testing is public). Research is necessary, but will never provide a guarantee.

User Entrenchment
Perceived usability – as opposed to laboratory usability – is more about familiarity than objective human factors metrics. Users invest their time and attention in your product, amassing a sort of practical capital of product-specific know-how. When you start changing things, they view this as effectively theft of a precious resource: their investment in practical capital has been thrown out the window without their explicit blessing.

As anyone who has ever redesigned anything knows, users get angry when they feel they've wasted time and attention; they must reinvest to get back to the same level of practical capital. So, up to the point where nearly everybody's using your product and there's no real alternative (i.e. where the network effect is so strong and the average user's "sunk cost" so great they overcome practically all anger over perceived losses associated with change), redesigns get dicier the greater the success of the product. One consequence of this is that testing redesigns with current users will significantly skew your results toward the negative, regardless of "actual" quality. If these tests are public, you've just created a significant political battle and, thus, headaches.

The Organization
There are two related but distinct sources of organizational inertia. First, people within the organization simply get used to doing things one way and – being human – are reluctant to change. If the product's relatively successful, that felt reluctance can be rationalized by arguing that any redesign is a dangerous and unneeded rocking of the boat that endangers continuing success. Slowdowns, endless discussion, and frequent miscommunications are usually the result.

Next, as much as I hate calling simple regularities or covariances "laws" for comic effect (Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, etc.), Conway's Law, or something like it, seems to be pretty prevalent. In 1968, Melvin Conway observed that organizations produce products that mirror their structure or at least their internal communication patterns. He was referring specifically to the development of intercommunicating software systems produced by different design teams existing in some sort of institutional, social or communication structure. His claim is that this structure will manifest itself in the design of the interfaces between the systems.

Conway thought this was inevitable, which is way too strong by my lights. But stretching the idea a bit, some products, particularly websites, often mirror the structures of the organizations that created them. Furthermore, it seems to go the other way as well. Sometimes the organization and product have co-evolved in such a way that they're truly intermingled or even identified in many stakeholder's minds. Stakeholders view the product as a direct manifestation of the organization, and any change to the former necessarily impacts the latter.

Whatever the underlying mechanisms that generate this feeling, the upshot is that redesigning a product often has organizational implications, at least in terms of many stakeholders' perceptions of the project. Tampering with the product is often perceived as tampering with roles, responsibilities, and the delicately negotiated distribution of power within the organization. Understandably, this can lead to a significant amount of internal resistance, particularly when the product has been relatively successful and actual power and prestige have accumulated. The resulting inertia and sometimes downright sabotage can lead to massive struggles and delays.

These factors interact with the current success of the product (and with each other) to impact the difficulty of redesigning the product. Drawing from my highly subjective experience designing, redesigning, and "researching" social functionality, the situation seems to look something like this:


On the x axis is increasing success and on the y axis, increasing difficulty of redesigning the product. Some of the more interesting areas have been called out with letters. I'll discuss them briefly.

Why is a more difficult than b? After all, nobody's using the product, so redesign should be really easy. At this level of market failure, if you're asked to do a redesign, you should consider it carefully: this product should be completely abandoned and a different product built. But if you have to do a redesign, the whole organization probably understands and embraces the need to change and analyzing the market may help you identify appropriate conventions, standards and design directions. However, you are re-starting from a hole with little prospect of success (remember the importance of network externalities). Your potential users have already invested somewhere else (this a redesign… you had an initial chance and blew it. At this point your users have invested elsewhere and people burned earlier won't come back.). Finally, you have absolutely no user data on which to base your redesign recommendations and no prospect of launching then optimizing, bootstrapping your way to a successful design. After all, there's not enough activity to get a picture of where it's failing or succeeding; analyzing the market will suggest directions, but you can't really put it out there and optimize on the fly as no one's using your product.

As success modestly improves to b, the ease of redesign increases dramatically. At this point, your stakeholders are still ready for change. Analyzing the market could probably still help with design standards, conventions and trends. But now you have some data on what might work and what definitely won't. You have real users that you can gently test against, but not so many that changes will be met with a loud protest. You also have at least a foothold, which, with luck could be turned into something more by doing everything you can to generate an informational cascade through targeted design differentiation and smart positioning/marketing.

But things get progressively tougher from b to c. You're probably nearing the conventional designs as you're at least competitive at this level of success, so analyzing the market too much could lead to frustration and confusion among your stakeholders. Selling designs internally becomes more difficult as the product's modest success has been enough to spread a bit of influence and power throughout the organization. But, there are enough users to make switching costs to another product at least non-negligible to many users. However, the User Entrenchment process begins to become an issue at this point, as you've enough success for your users to have begun internalizing the system.

From c the difficulty quickly rises with success, slowing to a peak at d. This is the zone of incredible difficulty for a redesign; throughout this region all of the factors are potentially against you. Unless you're just adding hot new functionality pioneered by a competitor, culling the market for tips will be largely fruitless. You're most likely conventional – if not the leader – at this level of success, so most of the factors determining further success are those frustrating, inconsistently interpretable, and highly contingent social dynamics. Thus prolonged research and analysis in this situation actually pays little – and often costs much in terms of focus, morale and transactions. But most organizations in this range still get hung up searching the field and bugging their users in an obsessive search for a magic design formula when they should just be looking for suggestive trends to fuel experimentation. But you have to remember, users in this range become ever more entrenched, so the "right" changes are both difficult to identify and nearly impossible to justify through testing or interviews. Users want what they know now, not what they will want later, so at high levels of entrenchment asking them to evaluate a change (as opposed to just testing lab usability) often confuses the issue or leads to the agonizing death of bold new designs. Finally, organizationally, great success can make people scared to change for fear of losing it (people are, after all, far more risk averse than gain hungry). The organization has "rigidified." Success has pumped prestige and power into it's structure, creating significant vested interests in maintaining status quo. Projects in this range can quickly become nightmares.

At d, however, things turn around a little. Though it's never as easy as it is when you've poor to moderate success, the network effect is so strong, that the specter of losing position is largely mooted. That effectively removes the rationalization for status quo from within the organization and greatly mitigates the sting of negative test results from entrenched users. Also, at this point, you lead the market and most of the tips you're looking for are in terms of competitive and trend analysis, not the elusive success guaranteeing design formula. You largely co-determine the conventions defining the completive baseline along with other highly successful players. Thus, redesign at this point becomes slightly easier, but there's still there's a lot of reluctance from those who might fear loss of position and entrenched users will definitely make a lot of noise, which is never pleasant.

Redesigns are necessary to stay competitive. But along with the excitement and product / organizational rejuvenation they generate, they can also be headaches for the designers involved. Hopefully I've managed to shed some light on why and how. As I said, all of this stems form my subjective observation that redesign difficulty seems somehow oddly related to product success. Whether or not your experience of the relation between the two mirrors mine, I hope you'll at least agree that there's some relationship and that it's impacted by the factors I've suggested.

The Hippies vs. The Straights: Information/Knowledge, Internalism/Externalism

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Samuel Johnson

A few years ago there was a heated folksonomy vs. taxonomy debate between the vague, jargon-spewing web 2.0-ers and the scared, curmudgeonly old-guard Information Architects. Then there was a mess of talk and some patrician lamentation about the death of the expert (e.g. encyclopedias) at the hands of wise crowds (e.g. Wikipedia). And we’re still chattering about the imminent shuttering of hoary old knowledge-disseminating institutions like newspapers and magazines driven to the brink by upstart “open knowledge” aggregators like Twitter and the blogosphere.

Let’s call the two camps in these debates the Hippies – the folksonomizing Tweeters – and the Straights – the taxonomizing encyclopedists. Sort of by definition of “debate” they take opposing sides. But the problem is, they’re usually talking past each other for ideological reasons, which means we’ll never really get any satisfactory answers about the issues. So, though there are legitimate points of difference between these two groups, I’d rather look at a distinction and a faux dichotomy at the heart of the debates they keep having in hopes of getting clear on foundational issues as opposed to the positions taken. The first is the distinction between information and knowledge, the second is the apparent dichotomy between an internalist viewpoint and an externalist one.

• Information vs. Knowledge: Let’s say that information is data potentially pertinent to your projects or interests (as opposed to noise, which is wholly superfluous). Knowledge is something more than information. It’s information that you believe in some sense; it actually is true or genuinely appropriate or morally/ethically reasonable, etc.; and it arrives via reliable channels. So, knowledge necessarily incorporates our beliefs, desires and projects. But it necessarily includes something else as well. We evaluate items items we've solid reason to believe as knowledge – as opposed to just information – against some appropriate "disinterested" measure or guarantor. Information’s being knowledge isn’t just up to you, your beliefs and your interests; it’s up to something about the way the world is, whether physically, socially or culturally.
• Internalism vs. Externalism: Internalists (or individualists) hold the traditional view that cognition, knowledge, meaning, perception, etc. are necessarily the result of internal, valid, inferences and calculations on some representations wholly inside the head of the thinker, knower, speaker/hearer, perceiver, etc. Externalists generally believe that cognition, knowledge, meaning, perception, etc. extend outside of the head and into the environment (physical, social, cultural, etc.) of the thinker, knower, speaker/hearer, perceiver, etc. Basically the dichotomy comes down to the following question: are the cognitive and epistemic abilities that make us the creatures we are “all in the head” or are they somehow extended “out there” into the social and cultural world?

A lot of the sturm und drang surrounding debates on the effects of the web on intelligence, democracy, culture, etc. comes down to differing intuitions and flat out misunderstandings about these foundational issues. Furthermore, entertaining rhetoric aside, we won’t get satisfying answers to the issues being debated until the Hippies and the Straights stop allowing ideological commitments to drag them to opposite poles of the distinction or rigidify the actually soft "dichotomy."

Informational Markets

Let’s start by stating the obvious: Many of our actions are based on what we take to be knowledge. And when asked to justify our actions, if we have a choice between justificatory facts – being pieces of true information that we’re in a position to know – or unsubstantiated justificatory hearsay, we use the former because the latter lacks any real foundation. The former is knowledge: information that we’re justified in believing, meaning that it’s come to us via a reliable channel, and is true or appropriate or reasonable, etc. Knowledge, as distinct from plain old information, is obviously incredibly important.

But unfortunately, it’s also an ideal that doesn’t weather the constraints of reality all that well. As Russell Hardin notes in his new book (which, though not too informative and wrong in equating belief and knowledge, presents an interesting thesis), there’s an economy of constraints on knowledge search: we’ve limited resources of time and attention and our incentives to attain knowledge are determined almost exclusively by our current instrumental needs or desires and our many non-knowledge based prior beliefs. That is, we tend to stop looking for knowledge when we find information that’s just good enough. And we usually find this information through inexpert, simply familiar or comfortable, i.e. not necessarily reliable, channels. What’s more, we really don’t make much of an effort to determine truth or falsity or optimality provided the new information fits with our past presumed knowledge. Why should we, after all? We’re busy, limited beings and if our non-knowledge works well enough or helps us get by, the only incentive to push further seems purely academic.

But this means that in real life we practice little or no epistemic hygiene; most of what we call knowledge is most often just information even though it’s the basis of our actions (including search and recognition criteria for future knowledge) and often serves as public and private “justification”.

Now, the key to the Hippies’ position – for example that the blogosphere could be a viable news source – is that “epistemic hygiene” is best left to market forces. Knowledge will automatically win in an open informational marketplace. Knowledge – the best, the truth – necessarily survives the winnowing effects of the market for information; if there’s a market for knowledge and it’s out there, the best way to ensure that it gets where it’s needed is to let the demand draw it from competing providers. When there’s a robustly discriminatory market for knowledge as distinct from just information, providers are thereby incentivized to provide it.

But the problem is, considering the economics of informational consumption, there’s not much of a market for knowledge as opposed to just information. That is, due to the economically constrained drives of real world infovores, people’s discernment isn’t such that they’ll seek out only knowledge. Thus they probably won’t provide enough pressure to drive the virtuous, knowledge-elevating market forces in the short term. But over the long term, the faintest of discriminating behavior will probably lead to knowledge boosting institutions. That is, it’s unclear if we have strong enough demand for knowledge, as opposed to just information, to ensure epistemic virtuousness right now.

At this point, the Straights swoop in claiming that epistemic virtuousness must be ensured from on high through the time honored institutions we’ve already got. But, of course, it’s clearly the case that placing all control in the hands of a small group of “deciders”, anointed moral shepherds to the riffraff, is simply ridiculous. Similarly, the institutions we have weren’t hatched fully formed with all of their knowledge preserving norms in place and operational. Indeed, all societies and cultures are, ultimately, bottom-up phenomena. Their seeming self-evidence notwithstanding, knowledge institutions (e.g. journalism and it’s vaunted social norm of objectivity) are the highly historically contingent result of blind, non-intentional coordination over the long term. Dissolution of the old institutions doesn’t mean that new, possibly better ones can’t be coordinated upon. The risk, if the search for new ones veers off an “equilibrium path,” is a period of turmoil as new institutions are coordinated upon. The real issue thus seems to be the cost, depth and length of the possible period of turmoil.

So, the Hippies don’t pay enough attention to the distinction between knowledge and information, particularly as it relates to the attentional economy of knowledge seekers. That is, they think that an open information market will necessarily result in an increase in knowledge. The Straights, on the other hand, misunderstand knowledge as something sacrosanct, existing only because of the (actually contingent) structures through which it currently flows. Thus those structures need to be shielded at all costs. In one direction lies possibly indefinite knowledge-mitigating turmoil but the potential for improved institutions, while in the other lies comfortable stability at the price of repressive stagnation.

Inside Out or Outside In?

The internalism/externalism distinction is at the heart of debates over whether, for example, Google makes us smarter or Facebook actually expands our social abilities. For the internalist, this is just a dumb question. Cognition is in the head and thus Google is simply a tool or resource the use of which must be weighed like any other. It possibly allows us to do things we couldn’t have before, but it doesn’t make us any smarter or dumber than a hammer does.

Externalists, on the other hand, view technologies like Google as more cognitive prostheses than simply tools. They extend our cognitive powers. In this sense, the same sense in which an amputee's artificial arm becomes his or her arm, Google is part of our cognitive apparatus. Just as the ability to do long division doesn’t mean the ability to do it exclusively in the head, without the aid of such external technologies as pencil, paper and the arabic numeral system, so our knowledge of, say, philosophy may actually be increased if we acquire the skill to find it at will. So Google, in a real sense, makes us smarter insofar as it’s a prosthetic memory bank.

People often balk at the metaphysical implications of saying our minds are somehow extended into the world. So to avoid that quagmire, let’s just say that culture actually augments cognition, that culture impacts, maybe even defines, our characteristically human minds. We, unlike most other critters, can actually use and build on what others have done and then in turn pass it along in detail for others to use and build on. This is similar to psychologist Michael Tomasello’s “Ratcheting,” the idea that humanity’s great cognitive distinctiveness is as much the result of cultural as physical evolution. Fudging a lot, we actually become smarter through the lateral (i.e. within a generation) transmission of skills, abilities and ultimately material artifacts. The stuff of culture, material and conceptual, expands our cognitive abilities.

If we grant just this cultural ratcheting instead of the full blown extended mind thesis, then we can see how one could say that Google, for example, could make us smarter. Ratcheting works on exposure and imitation. Google lays bare the world’s information to a certain extent. The internalist on the other hand, says it makes us lazy – we should learn and store all of this info in our heads if we want to call it knowledge – and thus, as we know where to find it but never really try to, dumber or at least somehow culpable. Plus, there’s no guaranteeing that Google is “epistemically virtuous.”

Frankly, the first internalist argument doesn’t hold water. Whatever intelligence is, it’s clearly not a matter of facts stored in the head. If their gripe is that Google doesn’t force us to develop the strategies of inquiry and action that may actually impact intelligence, then they may have a point. But, at this historical moment, Google is a viable strategy.

Anyway, though externalism seems to make sense, the issue of epistemic virtuousness still remains. That is, cultural artifacts like Google seem to impact our cognitive abilities, but that doesn’t mean that the impact is automatically for the best. The mechanism or artifact we’re “extending our minds” with may be defective in that it doesn’t necessarily deliver an appreciable amount of knowledge per unit of information. So we’re back to knowledge, but with a significant twist. If technologies like Google actually are cognitive prostheses and it’s possible for us to impact the ratio of knowledge to non-knowledge, then we’ve a significant moral obligation to guarantee that it’s epistemically virtuous. So, the Hippies’ hope for a brighter tomorrow through a cognitively expanded humanity rests on the epistemic virtuousness of the technologies through which we’re expanding our minds and abilities. The Straights, on the other hand, are doubtful about the whole expanded mind thing (it encroaches on their cherished romantic individualism) and are certain we’re not up for the ethical obligations incurred if it is true.

The Empty Middle Ground

The Hippies and the Straights both present arguments that turn on the issues central to these distinctions. But the problem is, their commitments seem to drive them to take one side to the exclusion of the other. The Hippies trip out on the Information and Externalism side while the Straights hole up in the library of Knowledge and Internalism, pouting. And just clarifying the nature of the distinctions doesn’t give us the answer either.

There is, however, a methodological lesson to be learned in picking apart the issues. As we’ve seen, both groups use arguments drawn from these divisions, but both seem to only get half of the story. The criticisms they throw at each other often have value. But the object of critique usually does as well. What this suggests is that just because there’s a distinction or apparent dichotomy, you don’t have to choose one pole and fight against the other. You need to consider the issue as a whole and let that inform you, rather than working from an ideological place that forces your hand and thus opens you to attacks you could have foreseen otherwise.

For example, the Hippies – at least the ones who even countenance the distinction – have too rosy a view of our individual desire for knowledge. They assume we actively seek knowledge and actively discriminate against “non-knowledge” instead of just muddling through with good enough information. The Straights, on the other hand, are sticklers for knowledge and really pessimistic about our ability to find it unguided. The problem is, they’re too pessimistic and take too narrow a view of institutional history. They arbitrarily limit the prospects and vehicles for knowledge to institutions and structures that already exist, closing off potentially valuable new ones.

Similarly, the Straights are often, but not always, internalist. They think that the question of, say, Facebook expanding our real social ability is just silly hyperbole or metaphor madness. Facebook is just a tool that we engage with under the direction of our hermetically sealed, inviolable cognitive apparati. It doesn’t extend or expand that apparati. True, Hippies and Straights aren’t necessarily divided on the internalism/extenalism issue. For example when it comes to the “Google makes us smarter” debate, many Hippies say “yes” and Straights usually says “no”, but they can both be somewhat externalist. It’s just that the Hippies think that Google is epistemically virtuous, while the Straights don’t. Anyway, Straights tends to be traditional internalists or individualists. This means they’re a little reluctant to buy the pie in the sky visions of the Hippies, who seem to want externalism to be true out of a progressivist cyborg fantasy of human perfectibility, without considering or shouldering the ethical obligations that would come with its truth.

So what’s the answer? Chances are, the truth is being triangulated by the critiques hurled from either side. Blind faith in market forces isn’t too wise, but neither is stodgy old paternalism. If externalism is true, then we really should be concerned about the epistemic virtuousness of our cognitive prostheses right now. The lesson is that we shouldn’t be forced into taking sides out of ideological considerations, either utopianist or conservative. Instead we need to stop dreaming of panacea or suspecting decline and start looking at the mechanisms and policies by which we can both allow freedom and ensure knowledge in the short and long run.

Being-on-the-web: Weinberger's "infrastructure of meaning"

Writing about the web is increasingly “post-utopianist” meaning that it doesn’t expressly argue for the essential goodness of the web; doesn’t assume we’ve no real responsibilities as designers and consumers; and doesn’t assume that people are always nice or positively prosocial in their behavior online. Writers like Cass Sunnstein and Clay Shirky are at least trying to get past the breathlessness of the early days of communitarian-turned-capitalist web boosterism to a more realistic – but still hopeful – place. This is great and it’s exactly what was needed.

Dystopianism – the view that the web is essentially for the worse – is clearly the wrong reaction to utopianism. But if you can get past the panicky, paternalist fist-shaking and general curmudgeonliness of a lot of the dystopianist writing, their arguments tend to be of two types: appeals to popular, romantically conservative conceptions of individuality, creativity and culture or arguments showing that the boosters’ optimism is actually misplaced and the web doesn’t work the way they claim. The latter arguments are actually helpful, just showing that, if you’re attempting to draw evaluative conclusions from theoretical arguments, you can’t simply rely on your assumptions about what we all consider positive. For example, you can’t just assume that removing barriers to “publication” is good in and of itself, regardless of whether or not this is an increase in overall “freedom.” Some might not like the idea that there’s no longer a practically imposed institutional filter on publication because it results in enormous choice and verity problems. In addition, we’ve no real proof – plus a lot of theoretical objections and some disconfirming experimental data – that the web’s structural “solutions” to the problems of choice and truth actually work.

The other dystopian “arguments,” however, tend to be limited to dismayed hand wringing and unkind caricature about the state of culture, creativity and taste. So ultimately, the dystopianist/utopianist battle boils down to competing intuitions about what we should value and what we’re giving up or gaining by embracing this new and powerful medium. David Wienberger, a brilliant and proud utopianist, casts this battle in political terms as conservative dystopianists versus liberal utopianists. Of course, analogizing to a dichotomy in another domain doesn’t really clear things up. It’s a rhetorical move trying to get you to cast your lot either with the progressive forces of liberalism (yay!) or with the regressive deadweight of conservativism (boo!). But along the way he throws a third type into the mix, realists. He defines realists as the pragmatists in the middle, rational, level-headed and myopically obsessed with facts, data and history, i.e. boring. Supposedly, the realists feel that the web isn’t that different from other media, that the rhetoric on either side is hysterical and needlessly sensational. We just need to step back and think rationally about this new medium.

Weinberger thinks that the realists are valuable but essentially wrong about the web. That is, they’re wrong about the essence of the web, which is totally different and wholly revolutionary. Realists’ calmly rational judgment of its potential and possibilities will only blind us to its true innovative potential in the long run. For example, thinking of, judging or predicting the web’s impact and future in terms of past media may keep us locked in old patterns and thus foreclose potentially valuable new paths. So realists are valuable advisors and functionaries, but they shouldn’t be allowed to steer the ship or even navigate. After all, you’ll never discover new worlds by reading old maps... or something like that.

Anyway, if we define the realist as somebody who feels that the rhetoric on either side is overheated, that the whole debate needs a dose of reality and that the web isn’t really all that different or revolutionary, then I’m clearly not a realist. The web is indeed different in many respects, mainly in its decentralized structure, wickedly low entry cost and sudden ubiquity. I do think we need a dose of reality, but not in the way Weinberger’s realist thinks. Sure, reality is about facts, a claim most utopianists belittle via scare quotes, but these are facts about mechanisms – what structures foster and propagate knowledge, truth and quality and what we can expect from interacting agents, etc. – and not necessarily facts about history, which really are subject to biased “framing narratives.”

Finally, both utopianists and dystopianists agree that the web is revolutionary, but the former consider it a positive revolution, while the latter consider it negative. The realists, in contrast, don’t think it’s revolutionary at all, but rather more of the same only louder. Unlike Weinberger’s realists, I think the the web is revolutionary, but I use this word advisedly and without the attached evaluation, good or bad. Normatively evaluating a fact is clearly a case of interpretation, it’s identifying a fact as good or bad according to some evaluative scheme. It’s the interpretation that makes the difference. So what’s Weinberger’s interpretation?

Like Shirky, Weinberger analogizes the web revolution to the socio-cultural impact of the printing press or rather moveable type. Just as the printing press led not only to affordable books but also the dissolution of old social/labor orders and the growth of a literate, educated public, so too the web is leading to a boom in bottom-up social organization, individual creation and the general overthrow of old-guard cultural gatekeepers and entrenched hierarchies.

Now, Weinberger and Shirky, never tell us how to define institutions (or norms, conventions, etc.) – the socio-cultural structures overthrown by these revolutions – but to me they’re just self-reinforcing patterns of conditioned preferences and expectations structuring our repeated interactions. They aren’t etched in stone or handed down from on high. Rather they are slowly coordinated upon by generations of locally interacting humans. Thus, they’re contingently coordinated upon interaction and preference structures suited to the circumstances in which they developed. Change the situation or circumstances, and there will be pressure to change the institutions, norms, etc. If the situation changes radically, they will crumble and chaos will ensue, lasting just until new institutions and norms are either coordinated upon or imposed. This is a revolution.

But Weinberger in particular – echoing Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong and my old teacher Greg Ulmer among others – likes to point out that media transform our ways of thinking, thus a revolutionary medium will radically change us. I agree, but only insofar as new media destroy old and foster new norms, conventions and institutions of creation and consumption. It’s the old and new norms and institutions that structure our interactions, inform our preferences and cement our expectations. So we agree on a lot, but notice, we’ve yet to see anything in this revolution that would lead us to evaluate it positively, i.e. as a utopian revolution (conservative old dystopianists, on the other hand, started frowning the second institutions felt pressure). Disruption, difference and impact don’t necessarily equal good. So how does Weinberger get from revolution to positive evolution?

Well, I can’t definitively say, but there are hints throughout his writing. Take this passage:

...Access to printed books gave many more people access to knowledge, changed the economics of knowledge, undermined institutions that were premised on knowledge being scarce and difficult to find, altered the nature and role of expertise, and established the idea that knowledge is capable of being chunked into stable topics. These in turn affected our ideas about what it means to be a human and to be human together. But these are exactly the domains within which the Web is bringing change. Indeed, it is altering not just the content of knowledge but our sense of how ideas go together, for the Web is first and foremost about connections.

And in what way is it altering “our sense of how ideas go together?” In his wickedly clever Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger claims that the web is an “infrastructure of meaning” as opposed to just stodgy old knowledge. He trots out the philosopher, Nazi and all around dour grump Martin Heidegger to explain his notion of meaning. Basically, it comes down to the humanly grounded, intricately woven, real-world web of warm significance that we actually live in daily as opposed to the cold, objectified, brutally subdivided grid of "official" knowledge. Just as printing initiated a revolution that separated knowledge from the lived world and brought us the evils of categorization, specialization and scientism, so the web – with its personalizing “tags” and ability to instantly pair even the most unlikely contents regardless of official taxonomies – is initiating a sort of counter-revolution in which content and knowledge are re-imbued with subtle, non-taxonomic human significance. Thus, the web – particularly the user-enhanced, user-responsive (if jargony) “Web 2.0” – is an “infrastructure of meaning” insofar as the thickening accretion of human metadata on boundlessly linkable content makes it implicitly available for officially unintended but humanly significant purposes.

So, the foundation of his normative claim that the web is essentially for the best seems to be the idea that it’s instituting a new, souped-up version of the old pre-printing press, pre-Enlightenment notion of situated and subtle human – as opposed to "rational" or scientific – knowledge. The web reclaims knowledge from the alienating pretensions of science, reason and “rationality.”

Versions of this idea have been around for a while. As Weinberger mentions, McLuhan argued for the human impact of media, as did the Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong. Ong’s book Orality and Literacy was expressly devoted to the cognitive, epistemic and human impact of media types. You could interpret Michel Foucault’s claim that knowledge structures are imposed power structures as a version as well. I even agree with part of Weinberger’s application of it to the web: the web really is revolutionary in the extent to which it puts knowledge at people’s fingertips and allows them to find, add to, connect and forward it at will. And this is a far more human – essentially human – way of interacting with and handling knowledge.

I just don’t agree that the “human” way is necessarily good. It could be great, leading to broader minds and deeper understanding of the world and ourselves. Or it could lead to increasing factionalization, self-absorption and distrust. After all, research suggests that, left to our own devices, people – humans – only seek out and retain confirmation of previously held opinions. So much so that we often ignore the true in favor of the convenient or comfortable. We’re also significantly biased toward things we’re already familiar with. It’s also unfortunately true that our moderate views tend to become more extreme in the sorts of echo-chambers the previous phenomena set up: seeking out confirmation from like-minded people and sources and the discomfort at differing opinions (justified and reinforced by the ready agreement of our like-minded contacts) tends to make our views ever more entrenched, absolute and resilient against contradictory fact.

Just because people can connect content in wickedly exciting but subtle new ways and access highly specialized information in seconds, that doesn’t mean they will be exposed to a breadth of opinion or even – sadly – the truth. The web, because of its native responsiveness to our individual desires, allows each of us to create a cozy cocoon of confirmation and reinforcement.

But maybe this isn’t all bad by Weinberger’s lights. Weinbereger adores Heidegger’s philosophy. Central to Heidegger’s understanding of meaning is the concept of Being-in-the-world: basically, the idea that all encounters with the world are already infected with our intentions, moods, cultural connotations, etc. and that there is no sense to the traditional notion of a pure object or subject. So meaning is pretty much an inescapable consequence of any encounter with the world. But this also suggests that context – physical, social, cultural and historical – is not only inescapable, but necessary for meaning. Objectivity becomes, literally, the view from nowhere, not just impossible, but unintelligible.

Maybe these cocoons of confirmation – these little webs of shared connotations and self-reinforced absolutist understandings, which I claim are negative aspects of a naturally biased humanity – are really what Heidegger’s beleaguered teacher Edmund Husserl called “lifeworlds:” the necessary and inescapable social, cultural and historical contexts within and through which we experience the world. Maybe so, but the problem is, these life worlds are hermetically sealed wholes of historical and cultural prejudice, incommensurable and unassailable. As Heidegger’s most influential student Hans-Georg Gadamer formulated it, prejudice – the historical, social and cultural “situatedness” we’re born into – is essential to Being-in-the-world. Outside of your lifeworld, your cocoon of prejudice, you simply aren’t... in the big metaphysical sense. Thus primordial prejudice – our cocoon of reinforcing ideas ever ready to disregard inconvenient or inconsistent “facts” – is the foundation of meaning in this Heideggerian sense.

Obviously Heidegger had nothing but disdain for the Enlightenment notions of reason, rationality and truth. It’s easy to see why. By his lights, there’s nothing over top of “Being-in-the-world” or “the lifeworld,” no outside facts to adjudicate between the “meanings” grounded in the various prejudice-composed contexts. The “lifeworld” or “Being-in-the-world” is the only ground of significance. Rationality, reason and science, on the other hand, are about seeking a global foundation (possibly in the real world) for the “intersubjectivity” that Heidegger seems to have thought only inheres in shared cultural, social and historical prejudices or contexts.

So maybe we who are stuck on the old-fashioned liberal hope of finding some common, testable ground of meaning, knowledge and intergroup understanding have it terribly, inhumanly wrong. We shouldn’t think of people’s natural drive to willful ignorance and reinforced, non-verifiable absolutism as an unfortunate legacy of our evolutionary past. They aren’t something that we as designers working in a world that desperately needs people to stop embracing local superstition, prejudice and dangerously out of sync norms have a responsibility to mitigate for the good of humanity. Rather we should just realize that these prejudices are the only foundation of truly human meaning and not pretend that there’s anything outside of them. Maybe this is the way Weinberger intends his “infrastructure of meaning” to be interpreted.

So, back to Weinberger’s utopianism. Remember that utopianism is the idea that the web is essentially good or for the best. Specifically that it’s native capacity to allow users to add metadata to content and make subtle, personal connections and relations is fundamentally and wholly positive. I’ve suggested that certain biases in humans – we only like what we know, we only want to be agreed with, agreement makes our prejudices even stronger and we’ll ignore the truth if it violates either of the first two – mitigate the positive prospects. In other words, because of the way we are, the web alone isn’t going to lead us to the promise land. That said, Weinberger’s rosy optimism seems to make sense only if you choose one of the following two options:

• Ignore the unfortunate facts about humans’ tendency to avoid disconfirmation and neglect what some would call the truth for cognitive comfort and personal consistency.
• Or, as his preferred philosophical tradition might recommend, embrace these tendencies as a prerequisite of authentic, human meaning. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

You do either one of those and I could see how Weinberger’s web utopianism might work. Personally, I find neither particularly appealing.

Of course, I’ve fudged along the way. Heidegger wrote extensively about “authenticity” as a refusal to unreflectively live the conventional life your peers demand etc. Also, “Being-in-the-world,” “lifeworlds” and even Gadamer’s prejudice soaked “horizons” aren’t exactly like the little cocoons of auto-agreement people tend to create around themselves and which the web makes ever easier and more complete. But fudging aside, this doesn’t alter the basic thrust of this popular philosophical tradition’s radical perspectivism. I just wanted to investigate whether this could be what Weinberger has in mind given that he probably knows people aren’t as reasonable as we could hope. Finally, it could be that Weinberger is just trying to say that the web provides wicked cool new ways of getting people to content. Which it does. But I think he’s going for something more.

Ha-ha, Ah-ha and Oh-yeah: cultural irony and rediscovery

A lot of the cultural items we consume or partake of – hairstyles, shoes, tv shows, slang, professed values, bands, etc. – can be thought of as socially instrumental. That is, they can have a “symbolic value” over and above their use value, entertainment value or whatever. We often consume them not only because of what they do, but because of what we hope they add to our social identity in the eyes of those we esteem and those we despise, to our in-group and our out-group.

A while ago, I wrote a post illustrating part of this (intuitive? clichéd?) idea. I tried to show how the mutual interactions and reactions of three distinct cultural subgroups – trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes – can drive cultural items through their life cycle. This idea has occurred to a lot of us: many social groups’ preferences (for shoes, bands, styles, slang, etc.) respond – positively or negatively – to other groups’ preferences. Slang and cadence, for example, are often valuable signals and affirmations of group affiliation, so preferences for specific slang terms change rapidly with diffusion outside the group. We illustrated this as interwoven curves along the path from few partaking (o) to most everybody doing it (n).


But so far we haven’t really discussed the later part of a cultural item’s life cycle, the point after c in the graph. Frequently, cultural items just go away and are never heard from again. But sometimes they come back around. In this post I want to look at some late stage possibilities for trends, particularly cultural irony – imbuing cultural items with a different, more "self-aware" symbolic value than they originally had – and rediscovery – rehabilitating older cultural items for current use.

Irony and Rediscovery

First of all, some items never really go through the creep from fringe to mainstream. Agreed. The idea here isn’t to model the essential, inviolable profile of a trend. Rather, it’s just that in most collections of people presented with a cultural choice you can roughly define different subgroups by how their preferences change relative to others’ preferences. For example, within the regular joes there are likely to be different constituencies analogous to trendsetters and hipsters. That is, some regular joes will be a lot like hipsters in their preferences – ready to partake of items not quite fully mainstream. If we restrict n to regular joes, the preference profiles of the different types within this group might look something like our graph.

Anyway, cultural items that never go through the full cycle at the highest, all sub-groups cultural level – that take off in or are specific to one sub-group only – become particularly interesting when we consider irony.

Ironic embrace is cultural consumption that’s generally very aware of the consumed item’s cultural history. This awareness often becomes an explicit part of its new symbolic value. Consider the recent ironic rehabilitation of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rick Astley and ‘90s pop (Bell, Biv, DeVoe is suddenly on every hipster playlist). Faint nostalgia notwithstanding, most of the consumption of this stuff (like 70s and 80s ironic embrace before it) seems to be ironic.

Grossly simplifying, there are two big possibilities for ironic embrace. The first is when one sub-group appropriates a cultural item from another group after the latter has already abandoned it.

When this happens, we often get what I call ha-ha irony. An example – also illustrating my advanced age – might help. At a “noise” show back in the very early ‘90s (noise became fleetingly cool when “alternative” was mainstreamed by bands like Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction) the headliner’s lead screamer wore a New Kids On The Block t-shirt. At this point, NKOTB’s popularity had dried up even among their teen target. The contrast between a defunct teeny-bop group and the aggressive, self-consciously oppositional posturing of noise music was obviously the ironic point. This is a case of ha-ha irony. It’s just a broad joke or gag and in no way even remotely critical. In fact it even has the prototypical joke structure: an unexpected shift in reference or clash of expectations results in humor.

Obviously, this isn’t a full-blown new trend arising out of an old one. Rather it’s a cultural item that typifies the prefab pop trend previously popular among the mainstream appropriated for new symbolic purposes by a self-consciously opposed sub-group. Bearing this in mind, it could be graphed something like this:


This time we start at c, the point on the original graph where the item peaks for the regular joes, and proceed to n. After n the item starts to become a cultural liability for regular joes and the total population partaking plummets to m, which is much less than n. Now the trendsetters can claim the cultural item for ha-ha ironic purposes. The trendsetters, of course, will start to abandon if the hipsters pick it up at a’, that is, when the hipsters come to see it as a codified ironic strategy (see). But this case probably wouldn’t get past a’. (Although, an ironic mini-trend did occur in the early ‘90s when noise acts started appropriating the insipid graphics of those new-agey “Smooth Sounds” whale-song albums.)

The NKOTB case involves an item that never went through the full cycle from trendsetters to regular joes. Or rather, it’s an item that the hipsters at the noise show most likely never invested in. NKOTB more or less started out with the regular joes. My guess is that this is often the case with ha-ha irony: the items that get ironically rehabilitated by one sub-group tend to be yanked off the junk heap of another subgroup. In this case, it was the hipsters using teeny-bop detritus to highlight their aggressively oppositional stance to pop music. It was a joke that everybody – even the regular joes once into NKOTB– would get. As a sort of rule, we could say the greater the item’s one time value to a subgroup, the greater its potential to be used in a ha-ha ironic way by members of a self-consciously oppositional group.

The second possibility for ironic embrace is when one group ironically appropriates a cultural item from another while the latter group is still into it.

Not surprisingly, we usually get ha-ha irony here, too. Consider some clever hip-kids’ “love” of geeky sci-fi/fantasy conventions, like Dragoncon in Atlanta, Georgia where middle-aged IT professionals (that’s actually unfair... young IT pros dig it too) party all night in DIY Klingon armor. These fringe affairs are really, really popular among die-hard fans and represent for them a market for a very specific sort of symbolic capital. For the hip-kids, on the other hand, it’s a lark, a gag, a chance to ogle the arcane rituals of nerd-communion in their proper environs. The hip-kids’ intended audience – the group from whom they seek recognition of the value of attendance – is their buddies, not the group actually attending the convention. Also, the hip-kids' symbolic value comes from a completely different cultural and symbolic arena than it does for the earnest fan-boys.

It’s sort of like cultural poaching for laughs. Once a few ironic trendsetters start doing it, the very next year will see hipsters joining in. We can graph this second ironic configuration like this:



Under certain circumstances, this sort of value relationship can result in what I call ah-ha irony (as opposed to jokey ha-ha irony). We can illustrate ah-ha irony with a slight alteration of the noise band example. Suppose it had been a Nirvana shirt instead of NKOTB. At the time, Nirvana was wickedly popular and symbolized the mainstreaming tendency that allowed noise bands to arise as an oppositional alternative in the cultural marketplace. Nirvana had gone through the full cycle from trendsetter popularity on the periphery to mainstream pop adoration among the regular joes. Wearing a Nirvana shirt – the incarnation of the new ‘90s pop which many hipster fans viewed as a sort of personal cultural theft – would have been a really critical, really exclusionary (in the sense of in-group/out-group defining) statement that few would have gotten. After all, most of the kids at the show had been – or still were – into Nirvana. That ambiguity of intention is sort of the calling card of “good” or at least powerful irony: it should be sneaky or at least not intelligible to all and have some sort of critical quality.

What seems to distinguish these cases of ha-ha and ah-ha irony is closeness to the cultural item. In the ha-ha irony cases, the kids who were being ironic probably hadn’t been part of any of the groups involved in the item’s trend cycle. They were outsiders who could objectify the cultural item. However, in the ah-ha case, it’s trendsetters using something that most hipsters (and they themselves) had recently invested in as an ironic prop.

It’s probably not anything like a rule, but this specific example of ah-ha irony looks something like this:


The item went through the whole curve; the trendsetters and hipsters had been committed to it at one time. Needless to say, ah-ha irony is really rare (or maybe not and I just don’t get it). It’s usually used solely by fine artists, motivated by chronic self-awareness and cultural inferiority complexes, which drive them to theoretical, unaesthetic excesses. I know because I was one... probably still am.

Let’s look finally at “rediscovery,” earnest and ironic. Sometimes cultural items come back from the dead. Sometimes the folks doing the reviving are earnest (the Nick Drake revival about 12 years ago and the garage rock revival about 4-5 years ago). Sometimes they’re ironic (disco’s many revivals and Enoch Light). But most of the time, it’s a mix of both (the ‘80s synth-pop sound, particularly in contemporary French and West Coast alterna-pop) and it’s always with different intentions than when the item was actually culturally current.


This graph, like the irony graphs, starts at c and goes through the crash at n. After n there’s a period of cultural hibernation while all of the groups assume their original relative positions. At some point, the item gets picked up by the self-conscious cultural adventurers (earnest indie rockers for Nick Drake, the gay community for at least a couple of the disco revivals) and the cycle starts again.

So why is rediscovery sometimes earnest and sometimes ironic? Well, I think part of it might have to do with uptake among past cultural groups and the perceived genealogy of contemporary cultural groups. Contemporary groups that understand themselves as having “descended” somehow from traditionally oppositional subcultures often approach items from these “related” subcultures earnestly and items from “unrelated” or mainstream culture ironically. Regular joes, since they’re not quite as culturally sensitized or obsessively self-aware as trendsetters and hipsters, generally shoot for ha-ha irony unless the item has already gotten past b’. In that case, it’s no longer really “rediscovery”: the item has been “contemporized” or brought back into currency. (Regular joes that still dig the music they loved in high school – “it’s not about new or old...Aerosmith just made quality rock, man!” – aren’t rediscovering anything... they’re just frozen in a particular cultural period.)

A Last Note

But this whole graph-y, representational thing I have going skirts one obvious and over-talked point about contemporary culture: it seems to be moving faster. The trend circuit from hip to passé to rediscovery is getting quicker and quicker. So much quicker that the whole concept of rediscovery makes less and less sense every day. Something similar is happening to the idea of mainstream; it doesn’t really seem to have the old, easy to poke at stodginess it used to. Actually, it’s pretty hard to even locate in the first place. Why is this happening?

Just speculating here, but pervasive media probably helps. Modern user-tailored, user-driven media like the web is really good at getting stuff from the fringe to the center, from “hip” to “mainstream,” overnight. Stuff that used to take years to bubble to the surface through old media channels now zips up almost instantly in a process of accelerated mainstreaming that calls into question the whole idea of fringe and center, counterculture and mainstream.

But in the west at least we still seem to highly value the idea of oppositional individualism and the autonomy of our choices, of trendsetters, “mavericks” and nonconformists, out there marching to the beat of a different, etc. A significant number of folks in the west – most I’d say – have internalized this cultural value or ideal. Trendsetters and hipsters probably wouldn’t be our culture’s marketing holy grail otherwise.

You put these together – media that rapidly drains oppositional cultural positions of their “outsider,” “in the know” status and an internalized cultural admiration of the “individualist” or the “nonconformist” – and you get accelerating trend cycles. After all, if cultural items come larded with a symbolic value that is partially determined by the item’s prevalence, and modern media provide a fat but highly user-responsive channel to spread the word, then you’ll have to act quickly to stay relevant. In this environment, uptake and abandonment of trends is going to speed up.

Adding to the mix cultural industries like film and fashion, that, to a certain extent, have institutionalized in their marketing and business models ideas of constant opposition, innovation or nonconformity, and things really get moving. Taking just one example, the fashion industry is built on the idea of annual overthrow, of mainstreaming (i.e. making passé) last year’s line so this year’s can supplant it. It’s a business model founded on the idea of the incessantly new. Fashion marketing hinges on – and thus amplifies – the desire to be slightly ahead of the curve, to break with the currently mainstream fashion, to be more distinct and “original” (in acceptably fashionable ways) than your peers. In the present media context of almost instant diffusion and accelerated mainstreaming, their business model of providing “the new” and their marketing model of codifying, amplifying and creating a “need” for “the latest,” results in accelerating demand that outstrips their creative capacity. The result: unrepentant cultural recycling at a faster and faster pace.

Of Market Analogies and Ultimatum Games: the myth of web utopianism

Web utopianism is the idea that the web is somehow fundamentally or essentially a positive force. It’s not just that the web is more important, socially “impactful” or different than other media. Rather, it’s the claim that the web is, by its nature, for the greater good. Many futurists and web pundits seem to push utopianism as the web’s “brand,” effectively the set of concepts, assumptions, implications and preferences making up its popular conception. But if we buy into this brand, this idea that the web is in some way essentially good, we greatly reduce our responsibilities as designers and users. Once we take the web to be simply good in itself, we no longer really have to consider the potentially bad consequences of our creations or actions, by whatever standard.

Often utopianists frame the web as the ultimate market, where great ideas, unique voices, vital information and compelling products rise to meet the true and internally generated needs and desires of fully autonomous, choice-empowered, creative consumers. From this freedom of access and choice and the ease with which we can create, share and elevate content, they draw positive democratic and communitarian conclusions. As the story goes, the web is about cultural disintermediation on a grand scale: anybody can create the next video craze through YouYube or help build a surprisingly accurate reference work like Wikipedia. Powerful cultural gatekeepers, who for years perpetuated pernicious and self-serving social and informational hierarchies, are suddenly irrelevant. What’s more, nobody will miss them. As it turns out, claim the utopianists, markets are essentially better at arriving at truth, quality and beauty than experts ever could be. And markets coordinate on these desirable ends through the individual, undirected, autonomous choices of consumer-creators. Thus, the utopianists conclude, the web is a technically aided manifestation of Democratic ideals. And this is obviously good.

Perfect Markets Meet Imperfect Web

Unfortunately, this view is wrong in the same way superstitions are wrong: its evaluations and claims are based on shaky assumptions about mechanisms. I want to avoid the cultural politics of the issue and look at some of the utopianists assumptions. First of all, the positive evaluation of the web as a market seems to follow only by analogy to a specific sort of competitive market, what’s called a perfectly competitive market. This is an idealization of the conditions under which the price arrived at by interacting consumers and suppliers will match the “true value” of a commodity. The idealized conditions are pretty stringent and numerous. For example, you must have a large number of suppliers; no barriers to entry; everyone gets the same complete information; no one turns a profit; no one advertises or markets; each supplier’s output is pretty much individually negligible to the ultimate price; and each supplier’s output is intersubstitutable for any other’s. If these conditions are met, then prices will reflect the “true” value of the product.

The utopianists’ idea seems to be that the web is like a perfectly competitive market because it appears to meet somewhat analogous conditions.

• Anyone can contribute and huge numbers actually do.
• Consumers can access any information at will.
• They can find exactly what they want regardless of how niche it might be and can costlessly choose between options.
• They can state their opinions, create whatever they want or share their knowledge truthfully or “authentically” without the biasing influence of social pressure.
• There are few recognizable extrinsic incentives to contribute, which avoids the skewing of contributions associated with profits.
• Finally, any one contribution is as good as any other and doesn’t really affect the final information. In other words, no one opinion can skew the final collective result because there are so many and there’s always someone willing to refute anyone.

Obviously, it’s a strained analogy. Prices and evaluations are "true" in very different and hard to express ways. Settling true evaluations from masses of tastes and opinions isn’t much like setting prices from masses of tastes and desires. Still, something very close to this analogy is a pretty implicit assumption among many web utopianists (and almost explicit in Wikipedia’s “Jimbo” Wales’s public veneration of F.A. Hayek, father of modern equilibrium theory). To many utopianists, the web is simply structurally conducive to settling on true information or elevating true quality in much the same way perfectly competitive markets are conducive to settling on “true” prices.

But the web just doesn’t work this way. Perfectly competitive conditions don’t hold together on the web. There are many reasons the web's not a perfect market, but I’ll just look at one big one: the false assumption that people online aren’t subject to social pressure or influence that might skew the collective result. It’s based on the idea that people’s visible actions aren’t informational signals themselves; that people’s choices follow an ideal of narrowly rational, autonomous reflection. Duncan Watts’s much discussed recent research shows that social influence in cultural markets, e.g. an opinion market like a movie review site, actually leads to radically unpredictable (i.e. quality doesn’t predict success), highly unequal (i.e. huge difference between very famous and slightly famous) distributions for cultural items. In a nutshell, famous things get more famous and this is a contingent, path-dependent process which has very limited correlation with actual quality. In other words, the same items might show very different success or evaluation patterns depending on chance uptake events at earlier stages of the process.

Clearly, this suggests that the conditions for perfect competition aren’t met in markets with significant signaling, like the web. Markets like this won’t necessarily result in the “best” or "truest" rising to the top automatically because the assumption of autonomous decisions just doesn’t hold. As Clay Shirky has noted, the web makes socialization, communication and coordinated activity "ridiculously easy." I'd say it's more than easy, it's pervasive and inescapable. Stretching the economic metaphor a bit, whenever coordination and communication are cheap, information "cartels" form reflexively and not just when people are positively motivated to alter the competitive landscape to their advantage. People pool and align their opinions (and thus productions) whenever communication is possible, skewing the market. They look to others' actions – not just to their own fact based judgments of quality – to help them make decisions. If something starts to take off, this is “social proof” of value, an assumed signal of quality, and others follow suit. Seeing what does well, more of the same is produced. The social web is all about such signaling – sharing your actions and choices – and thus it's rife with social influence. It really can’t be a perfectly competitive market. (This effect is similar to, but distinct from, so called herd behavior and informational cascades, which also make perfect competition difficult.)

Also, the “Democratic ideal” utopianists claim the web promises is the political analog of the perfectly competitive market: the “best” or “truest” result arises when no special interests have undue influence, when tastes, knowledge and needs can aggregate, free from the distorting interests of profit, influence and pooled power. Utopianists point to knowledge aggregators like Wikipedia as prime practical examples of this idea. But Wikipedia is clearly not a perfectly competitive knowledge market or democracy. Rather it’s an oligopoly, or its political analog an oligarchy. A core group of contributors, the editors, has considerably more power and wields considerably more social influence (i.e. their actions are neither negligible nor intersubstitutable) than all other contributors. “Jimbo” Wales’s admiration of Hayek notwithstanding, Wikipedia is not a pure democracy. It’s an oligarchy. And oligarchies do not structurally result in the “truth” the way democracies or perfect markets supposedly do. Wikipedia is successful (to the degree that it is) not because of the nature of wikis or the web, but rather because of the oligarchy’s ability to manage the negative effects of social influence, informational cascades and bad behavior. And this is arguably the result of social influence used for positive ends, not just the structurally positive force of a perfect "knowledge market" or informational democracy (added April 8: the importance of "community" to the success of wikis is made very clearly by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody and by Cass Sunnstein in Infotopia).

Ultimatum Games and Two Types of Prosociality

Well, the utopianists respond, the relative success of Wikipedia’s oligopoly/-garchy suggests that maybe the web isn’t structurally good in the sense that truth, originality or the “best” stuff succeeds solely in virtue of the implementation. Maybe the web just helps people’s native goodness, prosociality and urge for reciprocal interaction to flourish. The web makes it easier for folks to coordinate, create and realize their intrinsic desire to be, not just social, but prosocial. So the necessary goodness of the web is its ability to amplify and enable user's intrinsic prosocial motivations.

However, this weakened, indirect argument – if used for utopianist ends – founders on something like social influence just as the stronger perfect competition argument does. When people are susceptible to social influence – informational cascades, herd behavior, Watts’s social signaling and conformity or esteem effects – bad behavior or lock-in of less than optimal norms often results. After all, there are two distinct ways to understand “prosociality”: as a desire to share, strive and be nice or as a desire to simply do as others expect you to do. Both ways are about deference to your social group. But only the former is automatically positive in the way web utopianists seem to assume. On the latter, if all of your friends are jerks, you think they expect jerkiness of their peers, and you want them to like and esteem you, then you’ll probably be jerky, too. You’re deferring to what you take to be the expectations of those you hang out with.

Against this less than estimable version of “prosociality” the utopianists often claim that research shows we’ve a hard-wired preference for good prosociality, that we're intrinsically motivated to be prosocial in the positive sense. In particular, they often point to results from Ultimatum games, which purport to show we’ve an evolved preference for flat fairness, what the behavioral economist Herbert Gintis calls “strong reciprocity.” Ultimatum games have two players, Proposer and Responder, and a set sum of “money,” say, $4. The Proposer can offer any sum to the Responder. If the Responder accepts, they both get their cuts, but if he rejects, neither get anything. Research indicates that Responders often reject what we would consider unfair offers and Proposers often start with close to a 50-50 split. In other words, Responders are willing to sacrifice potential gain if the Proposer is unfair and many Proposers seem to immediately offer the fair split. Supposedly this shows that people have a simple preference for fairness, which they argue is a hard-wired, positive-prosocial drive.

Obviously, we’re social animals and thus have an evolved knack for some sort of prosociality. But we have to be clear what’s actually exhibited by the Ultimatum game. Relying on a literature review and critique by Cristina Bicchieri and some ideas of Ken Binmore, some Ultimatum game experiments suggest that these results may be more an effect of the perception of the situation or context than a simple preference for fairness. People are conditionally fair depending on their expectation of other’s expectations and often on what they think others will accept given these expectations. It’s not a matter of fairness, per se, as much as it's a matter of what others expect and thus what you can get away with.

For instance, cross-cultural studies [pdf] of Ultimatum games suggest that people’s rejection rate is culturally determined. In some societies, rejection is very rare regardless of the offer. This suggests that people have a preference for meeting situationally relevant expectations rather than a preference for simple fairness. It's the norms in play that matter rather than some absolute or hard-wired standard of fairness, and this influences both what Proposers expect to be acceptable and what Responders expect to be offered. Similarly, Ultimatum games with asymmetric information suggest that Proposers are generally more interested in appearing to meet salient fairness norms – thus decreasing likelihood of rejection – than actually being fair. Consider the case in which the Proposer knows that the chips used in the experiment are worth 3 times more to him than to the Responder and he knows that the Responder doesn’t know this. If we all simply preferred being fair, as opposed to appearing fair to hedge our bets going into interactions, the Proposer should most often offer 75% of the money. That’s the fair value split. As it is, Proposers in this scenario offer slightly less than 50% of the chips on average. Obviously, we don’t necessarily just prefer fairness for its own sake, which is what’s assumed by the positive-prosiciality idea. Rather we prefer to follow whatever norms we take to be expected by others – the less than estimable prosociality.

So if it’s the case that we’re not so much driven by simple, positive prosociality as we are by the desire to do as our peers expect of us – as the situation-relevant norms suggest we should act – then the prospects for this weakened form of web utopianism aren’t all that great either. That is, if the utopianists argument is that the web is essentially good because it allows the intrinsically positive-prosocial motivations of agents to flourish unhindered by the overhead of real world socialization, then it’s founded on a mistake. Our prosociality isn’t as normatively rosy as they assume. It’s a desire to do as we think others expect of us, which is not necessarily good in the way utopianists need it to be for their argument to work.

No ‘Topias

In this post, though we avoided the political versions of web utopianism, we’ve discussed two of the most interesting non-political strains. They clearly don’t hold water. The web isn’t the wholly positive boon to humanity the utopianists want it to be. But neither is it the great destroyer of culture the panicky, proudly paternalist web dystopianists take it to be (aside: avoid Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that actually deserves to be called a rant or a screed. It’s like the web insulted his mother or something). The web is just a massively influential tool – or fact – with impossible to predict social and cultural impact. Some of the impact will be positive, some negative and some both on different time scales. We just don’t know. But utopianism of the sorts considered above assume that the web just is positive. Taken seriously, this assumption mitigates our responsibility as designers, creators, sponsors and consumers of content and experiences on the web. In reality, we don’t know what the real social and cultural results of our actions will be. But we need to act as if they could be negative so that we feel compelled to strive for – not just expect – the positive in the long term. Doing anything else is irresponsible no matter how nice or progressive it would be to believe the web a simply positive force.