[RRE]notes and recommendations

From: Phil Agre (pagreat_private)
Date: Sun Oct 07 2001 - 18:54:23 PDT

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    As part of my program of not letting terrorists run my life, I have
    written some notes on wireless design, transparency, the post-Napster
    universe, and the concept of an institution.  I hope they're useful.
    
    **
    
    Blow up your cell phone.
    
    In the United States, much has been said about the dot-com meltdown.
    In Europe, however, the salient meltdown is in wireless.  Government
    regulators auctioned off spectrum for broadband wireless services,
    and a combination of clever auction design and speculative mania drove
    prices to insane levels.  Now large parts of the European wireless
    industry is imploding.  The Japanese industry is doing better; at
    least they, unlike the Europeans, have some proven applications for
    their current-generation wireless services.  But the assumption that
    people will dive into broadband wireless just because it's there is
    not proving true.  Time and again, industry seems surprised by how
    long it takes to establish critical mass for a new standard in the
    market.  The Internet was misleading in this regard; its sudden growth
    resulted partly from pent-up demand during the period of "acceptable
    use" policies.  The point, in any case, is that the wireless industry
    is driving off a cliff.
    
    At the most basic level, the cell phone industry has lost the simplest
    driver of innovation: reducing the size of the handset.  Cell phones
    are now so small that, barring sharp turns in human evolution, they'd
    be useless any smaller.  They can be made cheaper, of course, and
    from different materials, but we are rapidly heading to a world where
    cell phones as such are no more exciting an industry than calculators.
    So where should cell phone design head next?  Part of the problem is
    simply industry habit: except in Japan, whose experience does not seem
    to generalize, cell phones have been used almost exclusively for two
    applications, voice communications and text messaging, and the latter
    application isn't even widely used in the United States.  The market
    has been unified by a few standards and a lot of price competition.
    
    The future will be different.  I'd like to see the whole concept of
    a "cell phone" blow up.  A "cell phone" as we know it now is a bundle
    of functionalities: microphone, speaker, buttons, display, internal
    software, and various elements of the communications protocol between
    the handset and the base station, among others.  Location-finding
    functionality is on the way.  One direction of future development
    already seems clear: instead of wiring the communications protocols
    into the hardware, generalizing both the software and the protocols
    with "software-defined radio" that can be changed dynamically.  But
    another direction has had less attention: unbundling the functionality
    of the cell phone and then embedding various subsets and supersets
    of that functionality into a world of other devices.  Taken together,
    these approaches -- software definition and unbundling-and-embedding
    -- can lead to a vast new design space.
    
    Here are some possibilities.  In Japan, I am told, radio stations give
    out radios that consist of nothing but a credit-card-sized piece of
    plastic with embedded electronics and a headphone jack.  The radio is
    tuned permanently to the station that gave it out, so it doesn't need
    a dial or display, and it's only meant to be used with the headphones,
    so it doesn't need a speaker.  The same thing could be done with cell
    phones.  Imagine a small object with a headphone jack and a single
    button on it.  When you push the button, it "dials" a pre-programmed
    number, such as a service that provides movie times.  If interaction
    is needed then the button could be used, or else speech recognition.
    If you add a microphone to the device then parents could buy it,
    program it with their own number, and give it to their children.  It
    would be like a specialized calling card, except that it would include
    much of the functionality of the phone as well.
    
    Unbundled cell phone functionality can also be embedded in personal
    technologies.  If we imagine that we will all become cyborgs, carrying
    around a mess of suitably streamlined gear, all of whose components
    talk to one another, then the "cell phone" will surely need to talk
    to personal sensors, databases, display screens, and so on.  These
    personal technologies could communicate with other services over
    the network.  This sort of thing has been explored by the wearable
    commputing people.  What has been less explored is the main good
    purpose for such services: maintaining awareness of the many people
    and institutions with which we have ongoing relations: the kids at day
    care, the public personae of our professional acquaintances, the ball
    scores, the bus we hope to board, the discussion groups we monitor,
    and so on.  (Traditional HCI research has drawn some lessons about
    maintaining real-time awareness of work collaborators that presumably
    carry over to wearable services.)
    
    Another assumption of the industry has been that cell phones are for
    mobility.  But from an unbundling-and-embedding perspective this need
    not be true.  Imagine a historical battlefield.  At each point where
    something important happened, the rangers have installed a green post
    with a button and a speaker, and maybe a video display or other more
    imaginative kinds of interactive devices.  The green post now has a
    cell phone embedded in it, or certain functionalities of a cell phone.
    The rangers use it to manage the interpretive "content" at a distance,
    for example updating it when new scholarship becomes available or else
    extending it with special features for significant historical dates,
    material in other languages, and so on.  The posts could also include
    public-address capabilities ("the park closes in half an hour") or
    emergency call functions, etc.  In this case, the "phone" sits still,
    being tied to a significant place, even as the people move around.
    The posts could also interact with "augmented reality" gear that is
    carried by the park visitors, for example by projecting diagrams or
    animation onto the landscape.
    
    The "cell phone" functionality could also be embedded in objects.
    Warehouses already have a world of tracking technologies, such as
    RFID tags embedded in the boxes, for keeping track of where particular
    items are stored. (This is a serious problem for warehouse people, and
    large objects get lost in warehouses all the time.)  With time, the
    object tracking devices could converge with the unbundled-and-embedded
    cell phone.  It would then be possible to pose much more general
    queries to the objects, for example embedding sensors in the contents
    of the boxes to assure their environmental conditions, run periodic
    tests on stored electronics, etc.  Of course, when an object "phones
    home" across an institutional boundary, for example between a consumer
    who owns a washing machine and the manufacturer that sold it, the
    relationship across that boundary becomes more complicated.  It will
    be necessary to design the relationship along with the technology.
    
    It is evident, I hope, that the design space of the the unbundled-and-
    embedded cell phone is quite large.  It should be possible to look at
    a particular application area and brainstorm a spectrum of possible
    applications, each requiring different subsets or supersets of cell
    phone functionalities.  That very diversity will pose a significant
    challenge to the cell phone industry.  Look at the experience so far
    with WAP.  WAP may well succeed -- its poor showing so far may simply
    be another manifestation of industry's tendency to underestimate how
    long it will take to establish a new standard in the market.  But WAP
    itself and the WAP coalition display every warning sign.  Not enough
    attention was paid to interface design, and the wireless industry did
    not understand how to build the alliances needed to make the various
    WAP applications really work as businesses.  They had lots of demos,
    lots of start-ups, but little serious market acceptance.
    
    What was needed, and missing, is a robust feedback loop between
    applications experience and the basic design of the standards.
    Useability problems became critical late in the day, rather than being
    at the core of the design process.  Unlike the traditional cell phone
    applications of voice and text messaging, a platform like WAP succeeds
    only if it achieves economies of scale twice over: first in each of
    a large number of applications domains, so as to make each of the
    applications viable, and then in the applications taken as a whole, to
    make WAP services viable in general, for example generating demand for
    WAP-enabled handsets.
    
    The unbundle-and-embed design paradigm makes the situation both easier
    and harder.  On the one hand, if it really is possible to disassemble
    the existing cell phone architecture and embed some of the components
    into other systems, then that can only help the existing architecture
    redouble its current economies of scale.  On the other hand, if that
    unbundling-and-embedding strategy becomes economically central to the
    industry, then it will surely place signficant pressures on the future
    development of the architecture: the same problem as WAP, only worse.
    
    As the trend toward embedded services unfolds, the design process
    will have to change.  History suggests why.  The initial telephones
    were fixed in place, either fastened to phone booths or tethered by
    wires.  For many years one could speak of a person as "waiting by the
    telephone" because the telephone was a place.  Cell phones changed
    that, as phones become attached to people.  But the functionality
    of the phone remained much the same, and the designer didn't need to
    know much about the phone user's way of life.  As cell phones acquire
    more features, more knowledge about users becomes necessary, and as
    cell phone functionalities are unbundled and embedded, the resulting
    services will become intertwined with the patterns of their users'
    lives.  This, it seems to me, is the main line of development in the
    history of communications services: a progressive intertwining between
    communications services and the lives of the people who use them.
    
    It follows that the design process of the future will require a
    more sophisticated understanding of the user community.  This starts
    with anthropological fieldwork, and it includes participatory design
    processes, mock-ups and prototypes, and systematic mapping-out of
    the whole universe of potential applications niches.  A good place
    to start, as I've mentioned in the context of wearable devices,
    is with relationships.  Think of the unbundled-and-disembedded
    cell phone functionalities not as devices for making phone calls,
    but as infrastructures for maintaining relationships.  What is the
    informational architecture of a user's ongoing relationship with a
    family member, a school, a doctor, a video game company, and so on,
    and what could those architectures become?  What issues, privacy for
    example, are at stake in the design and ongoing renegotiation of that
    architecture?  How can the design process be part-and-parcel of the
    large-scale cultural process by which people reimagine their lives and
    choose once again the relationships that make them up?
    
    **
    
    What changes and what stays the same.
    
    A reporter called once to ask my opinion about a controversy that was
    taking place near Los Angeles.  A company, it seemed, had set up a
    Web site where high school students could post rumors.  Rumors were
    posted, consequences had followed, and things had apparently gotten
    bad by the time the school administrators heard about it.  Students
    were posting anonymous libels, some of them severe, and students who
    were preparing for football games would post messages effectively
    challenging the students from the opposing teams to gang fights.
    Students were allegedly near suicide.  The question was, what is
    new in this?  Well, I answered, all of the elements you describe
    are ancient.  High school students have always spread rumors about
    one another, including evil ones that cause people to feel as though
    their lives had ended.  Students from neighboring towns have always
    challenged one another to fights.  The Internet, it seemed to me, had
    not introduced anything qualitatively new.  Instead, it had amplified
    existing forces and made them more visible to the outside world.
    The reporter was unhappy with this analysis.  The reporter's job was
    to produce news, and I was effectively asserting that nothing in this
    situation was new.  We went back and forth a few times, but in the end
    I wasn't able to help.
    
    It strikes me that the conventions of news reporting introduce a bias
    into our understanding of new technologies and their place in society.
    And it's not just news reporting: scholars who want to get tenure are
    asked whether they have discovered something, and the easiest way to
    discover something in the social world is to declare that something is
    new: for example, that we have entered an "information age", a concept
    that has been renamed many times.  (James Beniger's book, "The Control
    Revolution", includes a huge table of these names, and it's already
    fifteen years old.  Nowadays the table would probably extend to book
    length all by itself.)  If you can't declare a vast world-historical
    discontinuity then you have to go to the trouble of analyzing the
    same old world more deeply than others have, and that's a lot of work.
    
    The hardest work, it seems to me, is analyzing just how the existing
    forces of society are transposed in a world of pervasive information
    and communication technologies.  Just to say that the existing forces
    have been "amplified" is a huge improvement over the discontinuity
    theory, since the language of amplification makes clear that the
    force behind any changes in the world comes from the institutions that
    organize people's lives -- including the ways that people take hold
    of new technologies.  But still it's limited.  "Amplification" is a
    metaphor.  It's vivid to say that the world's knobs are being turned
    up to 11, but every metaphor has its limits.  What are the limits of
    the amplification metaphor?
    
    To start with, amplification draws a sharp distinction between
    the "signal" -- whatever it is that's getting amplified -- and the
    "amplitude" -- the factor by which the signal is getting multiplied.
    The idea is that you can change the amplitude of a signal without
    changing any other aspect of it.  But as every audiophile knows,
    that's not quite true, especially when you turn the volume up.
    Amplifiers clip, and then they fail altogether.  Just as importantly,
    increasing amplitude eventually calls other factors into play.
    Your mother tells you to turn the music down, the people upstairs
    crank up their own amplifiers to compete, you get a reputation as
    a noisy neighbor, and so on.  That sort of thing certainly happened
    with the high school rumor site, which called into play all manner
    of administrators, psychologists, parents, newspaper reporters,
    college professors who got called on the phone for comments, and so
    on.  The key point remains: what fuels the phenomena and determines
    their shape is not the new technology as such but the existing
    array of social forces.  But then sometimes, as old accommodations
    break down, the forces reconfigure themselves in a way that the
    metaphor can't explain.
    
    I want to focus, though, on the one element of the story that did seem
    to me largely new: the Web's ability to make the existing dynamics of
    high school rumor mills visible to other parties.  This is a common
    pattern with the Web.  Because traditional rumor-mongering happens
    mostly in private conversation among trusted friends, is invisible to
    the outside world.  When the rumor mill moves onto the Web, however,
    a new layer of functionality gets inserted between the social dynamics
    and the individuals who participate in them.  The new functionality
    amplifies the spread of rumors by allowing people to spread rumors
    outside their private groups, but it also bursts the confines of those
    groups, both by providing mechanisms to spread a rumor outside the
    confines of a private group and by giving everyone, even teachers and
    parents, access to the same mechanisms.  Of course, the Internet also
    amplifies rumor-mongering in other ways, for example in rumors that
    are spread by private e-mails, or within closed mailing lists that
    more closely replicate the private conversations among trusted friends
    than does the open rumor-posting board.  But those mechanisms require
    greater technical overhead (e.g., authenticating users), and they
    are not capable of spreading rumors nearly as fast as the more public
    boards.
    
    So while the Internet amplifies many things, it only makes some of
    them more transparent, and it's interesting to study the conditions
    under which the Internet promotes transparency.  For some futurists,
    technology as such promotes open information, their prototype being
    music-sharing with Napster.  The intuition is roughly that computer
    networks are proliferating so rapidly that it's impossible to keep
    all the information under control, and that society will consequently
    become perfectly transparent.  In my view, the innately transparent
    Internet belongs on the same shelf as the flat earth and the black
    helicopters.  The very idea flouts basic facts about computing.  IBM,
    for example, makes its money by keeping corporate data under control.
    Computer networks may proliferate wildly, but it does not follow that
    data proliferates wildly.  To the contrary, a computer network is a
    platform on which many architectures can be built.  The way you design
    a computer architecture is that you talk, and then you convert your
    talk into code.  If you talk in a thoughtful way about controlling
    data, then architectures that control data are what you get.  So
    transparency is by no means an automatic consequence of computer
    networks.  Computer networks do sometimes promote transparency, but
    the conditions under which they do so are complicated.
    
    As a broad generalization, Internet-based activities are more likely
    to be transparent if their participants are more numerous and less
    powerful.  A large company, for example, can wire its intranet to its
    personnel database, thereby restricting access to its own employees.
    IBM, for example, recently held a real-time chat session with many
    thousands of its employees, just to see what would happen.  Members of
    a small group can simply send mail to the other members individually.
    But if IBM employees wanted to set up a just-for-employees discussion
    board outside the control of the company, they would have to check
    members against the company phone book by hand, and they would have
    no way to exclude impostors.  In the case of the high school rumor
    board, all of these modes were going on simultaneously: communications
    within the school's own computing systems, which they presumably
    authenticated with some kind of login mechanism; private e-mails
    among small groups of friends; and a public rumor board that anybody
    could look at.  Because the public board was trying to do the
    hardest job, it was least able to authenticate people.  That's what
    made it powerful, in both positive and negative senses, and that's
    also what made it transparent.  In the online context, the original
    rumor-spreading dynamic split into several parts, but only one of
    those parts became visible to parents, principals, and reporters.
    
    (Note that these dynamics don't change much with the addition of a
    standard user-identification mechanism such as Passport.  The dynamics
    depend not on the identities of individuals but on their attributes,
    such as whether they work for IBM or attend a certain school, or
    whether they can authenticate themselves privately and informally
    to one another.  It's true that Passport might require postings to
    have names on them, but nothing says that the names have to be real.)
    
    In the long run, then, the Internet takes something important about
    society and leaves it just the same: it's easier for the few and the
    powerful to organize themselves out of public view than for the many
    and powerless.  Whether the Internet really changes things depends
    on how you set your measuring instruments, and on what you measure.
    At the end of the day, words like "amplification" are just heuristic
    tools.  They call things to your attention and help prevent you
    from making stupid mistakes.  But eventually you have to get down to
    analysis of the specifics.  History is made on the ground, and the
    mosh pit of social forces that contend in any given setting is just
    as complicated as it ever was.
    
    **
    
    Competing with the past.
    
    Napster made everyone feel cool.  It was fun, wasn't it?  The fact
    is, though, that stealing musicians' work isn't cool.  It doesn't
    matter that you're also stealing from the nasty record companies.
    It's still wrong.  I recognize that the intellectual property laws
    that the record companies pushed through Congress are unreasonable.
    But "trading" music instead of paying for it is unreasonable too. 
    And I know that trading music with your friends is a fair use.  But
    some random person who rips their CD's onto a Napster server isn't
    your friend.  Fair use is important, and the infamous laws trample
    on it.  But in defending fair use, we shouldn't also get trapped into
    defending theft.  Napster was a false alarm, and I'm glad it's gone.
    
    Still, the problem remains: the record industry is a snakepit and the
    radio industry is worse.  So what to do?  The long-term solution, if
    one exists, involves new institutions that connect musicians and fans
    without the dysfunctions of the institutions that we have now.  Let's
    admit that we need such institutions, and that we have no idea what
    they would be like.  In sending URL's to my list over the last year,
    I have tried to suggest bits and pieces of the solution.
    
    On one hand, you have the old-traditional methods by which bands build
    audiences: touring, mailing lists, opening for established bands, and
    doing their own distribution.  The Internet helps with all of these
    things, and that is good.  Maybe the bands who are looking to record
    companies to make them into stars overnight just need to learn how to
    build a career.
    
    On the other hand, you have new developments that extend the reach of
    existing institutions: global media conglomerates that can use the Web
    to cross-promote their music acts with their TV shows and films etc,
    Web-casting that allows independent DJ's to build global audiences,
    magazine sites that archive their critics' reviews, customer reviews
    on Amazon, and so on.  Maybe we should just wait for these mechanisms
    to take hold.
    
    Or maybe not.  The truth is, we don't have a clue.  To figure out
    what an alternative system might be like, we need to return to basics.
    Some of the basics, as we know, seem promising.  Cheap production
    technology means that more bands can have their own studios.  They
    can produce their own CD's, and if they distribute free samples of
    their music on the Internet.  A centralized site where bands can sell
    their self-produced CD's would be good too, and it seems to me that a
    company could prosper by marketing a bundle of online tools to bands
    pursuing DIY careers.  (MP3.com does not count.)  Still, enormous
    problems remain in the area of publicity.  The mass media persuaded
    us that you could form an instant relationship with millions of
    people through the grace of an appropriate gatekeeper, and it eroded
    that part of our imagination in which audiences are built one person
    at a time.  One irony of the Internet is that, despite its ubiquity,
    it reconnects us with this one-to-one kind of organizing.  That,
    in a deep sense, is the real business that record companies are
    in: building a kind of social organization, an infrastructure in the
    broad sense of that overused word, that connects fans to bands -- and
    not just to the bands' music but to their tours, images, merchandise,
    other fans, and so on.  Radio networks are an infrastructure, too, in
    this broad social sense: not just equipment, but relationships.
    
    Before we can understand how to use the Internet in replacing those
    existing infrastructures, however, we need to understand them better.
    How is it that they really function now?  What exactly is it that
    we are trying to replace?  To that end, I want to focus on a single
    issue that I cannot recall being discussed elsewhere: the sense in
    which musicians, like the producers of any information product, are
    competing with the past.  Information products have the distinctive
    property that you can use them without using them up, and so much of
    the information that has ever been stored in a permanent medium is
    still out there.  (I realize that no medium is permanent, and that
    lots of good people are dealing with the impermanence of old media.
    But allow me to idealize that issue away for the moment.)  To be
    heard, then, a musician must compete for listeners' attention not only
    with other musicians who are currently playing, but with the whole
    history of recorded music.  Novelists, scientists, and many others are
    in the same position.
    
    Who has it worst?  The problem is probably worst for musicians, in
    that music retains its value better than most kinds of information.
    Software goes bad because the hardware it runs on becomes obsolete,
    and because the other software packages with which it becomes
    compatible.  Still, Microsoft is very aware that its new products
    compete with its old products, and Microsoft's survival increasingly
    depends on its ability to compel people to switch from reasonably
    functional existing products to excessively functional new ones.  The
    Y2K debacle also reminded us of the unexpected longevity of business
    software, especially custom applications.  The costs of switching
    to new business software are so great that even very sophisticated
    new enterprise systems often fail to compete with old COBOL programs.
    Scientific works have a very short lifetime, and the institutions
    of science are extremely effective at ensuring the obsolescence
    of their products.  Scientific works are not very substitutable: if
    you study worm genetics then a paper on butterfly migration doesn't
    help you.  This is one reason why the prices of scientific works are
    so inelastic, and why scientific journals are therefore so expensive.
    Books about current politics (as opposed to political philosophy)
    are notoriously short-lived, and used bookstore owners refuse to
    buy them.  Works of fiction ought to compete with the past much more
    than they do.  Because they are hard to judge by browsing, however,
    they are extremely dependent on publicity campaigns whose details are
    soon forgotten.  If readers could somehow be magically connected to
    the single work of fiction among all works of fiction ever published
    that they should most be reading right now, then new fiction would
    probably cease to be economically viable.
    
    That leaves music as the form of information that competes most with
    the past.  The amount of recorded music in circulation has increased
    almost infinitely in the past thirty years, and even though 99% of
    it is deservedly forgotten, the remaining 1% is still more music than
    anyone could listen to.  Whole industries make money from old music,
    and many (if not most) radio stations and dance clubs define their
    formats in terms of decades or genres gone by.  Many pieces of music
    produce revenue (whether captured by their copyright owners or by
    someone else) for decades on end.  Large quantities of music are
    forgotten and then rediscovered, for example by enthusiast labels like
    Yazoo or Rhino that are operated more for love than for profit.  But
    in dollar terms, what makes those long-lived songs most valuable is
    their familiarity: they have become standards, and they occupy a niche
    in the heads of a certain segment of the population, some of whom find
    them welcome when they come around again.  They are known quantities.
    
    It follows that musicians face serious obstacles in making a living
    from newly issued music.  They can make music that is stylistically
    derivative, but it can only compete with the old, familiar music if
    audiences care about things besides the music, such as identifying
    with the musician as a celebrity.  In the old days a musician could
    become established by playing new renditions of standards, but that
    stops working as music moves away from melody toward unique "sounds"
    produced in the studio.  Even listeners who are strongly interested
    in novelty have large piles of old CD's that they listen to, and music
    that departs from established formulas is generally an acquired taste.
    That is why record companies must expend such huge sums of money
    "breaking" new artists.  The money they invest promoting a new act,
    however, turns into concepts in people's heads, and those concepts are
    durable.  In a sense, the real "property" that is owned by a record
    company is not so much the copyrights (or other kinds of contractual
    control) over the songs, but the reservoir of familiarity with those
    songs -- their "brand identity" -- that lives in the minds of the
    audience.  It's that mental stuff that the industry makes its money
    from over the long haul, and a wise record company will manage that
    resource using whatever strategies best maintain its discounted
    presented value.  The sheer amount of song-familiarity in circulation
    at any given time, however, is limited: people can only listen to so
    much music, and only so much revenue can be extracted from them as
    they do so.  Familiarity with standards is capital, and there's no
    room in the market for new capital until the old capital decays.  Of
    course, the power of record companies to preserve the value of their
    capital is not infinite.  Fashions change.  People did eventually
    tire to some degree of rock and roll.  But the recalcitrance of music-
    capital is considerable.
    
    Most people will find this analysis distasteful.  But it seems to me
    that many bands have little clue about the real nature of the record
    business.  They resemble the shop-floor employee who has no clue about
    the value added by the entrepreneurial effort of the capitalist.  Of
    course, one can certainly question whether the market in each case is
    structured to allocate rewards fairly between between the line worker
    and the entrepreneur, and there can be no doubt that the notorious
    terms of record companies' form contracts reflect a dysfunction in the
    economics of the record industry.  Even so, alternative institutions
    will not arise to replace the record industry until the entrepreneurial,
    capital-creating work of record companies is comprehended and rethought.
    That is what bands do when they build their own audiences: touring
    in bad clubs, building mailing lists, and all of the other mechanisms
    that I mentioned at the outset.  If a band is working basically as a
    hobby then the economics are not very important: they can tour in bad
    clubs while it's still fun, or maybe they can build a small audience
    that keeps them minimally fed.  But if they want careers, then they
    have to move their business operation to another level.
    
    And that, presumably, is where the Internet comes in.  It's too
    bad that, amid all the stories that have been written about Napster,
    so few stories have been written about bands that have succeeded
    in building careers through a combination of old and new means.
    Why aren't business professors writing best practice studies for the
    small businesses known as bands?  I know -- don't tell me.  They are
    writing best-practice studies about the kinds of businesses that offer
    lucrative consulting gigs to business professors.  Still, I do have
    to wonder if 10% of the effort that goes into defending Napster could
    go instead into something more constructive.
    
    **
    
    Three ways of looking at institutions.
    
    Information plays many roles in our lives, and so radical improvements
    in information technology are certain to changes our lives in more
    ways that we can easily think about.  One useful tool for thinking
    about those changes is the concept of an institution.  Institutions
    provoke ambivalence, and reasonably so.  Institutions such as the
    electoral system, the medical system, the university, the market,
    the church, the theater, and commercial air travel all enable people
    to do things that they want to do, but at the same time they also
    constrain people in many ways.  That is the ambivalence: institutions
    both enable and constrain, and they enable *by* constraining.
    
    Institutions are not inherently good or bad, although particular
    institutions can be either.  When we think of institutions, normally
    we think of static, oppressive structures that run our lives from
    afar.  But that's not right.  Institutions are more like grammars
    of social life: rules that we are socialized into, and that we enact
    every day without realizing half the complexity of what we are doing.
    Institutions are distributed, in that they happen through the loosely
    coordinated actions of numerous people, and they are dispersed, in
    that they persist through numerous mechanisms of language, habit,
    expectation, law, incentive, and design.  The distributed and
    dispersed nature of institutions is counterintuitive.  To help make
    it more intuitive, I want to present three ways of thinking about
    institutions: as inscription, as a framework for careers, and as a
    reservoir of skill.  None of these perspectives on institutions is
    sufficient on its own, and many other perspectives would be required
    to present a full picture.  But perhaps some of the usefulness of the
    concept will become clear.
    
    1. The institution as inscribed discourse
    
    Let us consider an analogy among three things: software, law, and
    architecture (i.e., the built environment).  All three arise in the
    same way: you start with some vernacular language, you formalize that
    language by processing it to recover its underlying structure, and
    then you embody the resulting formalism in a combination of artefacts
    and ideas that regulate people's lives.  In software this process
    is called systems analysis, which really does start with informal
    language about what the system is supposed to do; it then cleans up
    the ambiguities, inconsistencies, and redundancies of that language
    until the result can be converted into code.  In law the process
    happens in several ways, such as the writing of legislation or the
    rational reconstruction of popular intuitions in the form of common
    law.  In architecture, the "program" of a building's functions is
    drawn largely from the users' own language for naming and describing
    the activities that will take place in the building.  A building
    might have an entrance, a coatroom, offices for secretaries leading to
    offices for executives, public areas and back offices, and so on, each
    mapping a function from the program onto an architectural category.
    (See Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in
    the Origin of Modern Building Types, Routledge, 1993.)  In each case,
    the product is not simply the artefact (running code, printed law,
    built structure) but the combination of the artefact and the language.
    The artefact doesn't operate without the language, and the language
    is grounded and stabilized to an extent in the recalcitrance of the
    artefact.
    
    The language that gets inscribed into software, law, and architecture
    is not at all arbitrary.  In the case of law and architecture, the
    language invariably reflects some human institution.  In law it is
    often an informal institution that has stabilized in social practice
    and is now being codified in law.  In architecture it is the language
    with which an institution's participants name the institution's roles,
    relationships, and activities.  In a hospital, for example, patients
    go in some places, doctors in others, nurses in others, administrators
    in others, visitors in others, and so on.  The social structure maps
    onto the building, and individuals cannot "use" the building unless
    they have mastered their respective social roles and thus, literally,
    know their place.  Software has greater latitude: some software is
    written about galaxies or fantasy worlds that are institutions only
    in an extended sense.  Most software, however, inscribes paradigmatic
    cases of institutions: running a business, publishing a book, keeping
    track of money, flying aircraft in accordance with rules, and so on.
    
    It is well-known by now that software can be viewed as a kind of law.
    But it's important to generalize the point.  Institutions operate on
    several levels, and one reason why they are so stable historically
    is precisely that they are inscribed simultaneously in software,
    law, architecture, language, bodily habits, conversational patterns,
    and much else.  This is partly what it means for institutions to
    be dispersed: the same structures are inscribed in several media at
    once, each of which tends to reinforce the others.  When software
    is written, each of the other levels (law, architecture, etc) pushes
    the institutions of software-writing to write code that is aligned
    with themselves.  When law is written, interest groups push to encode
    their established practices into the legislation that governs them.
    Not that institutions lack controversy; to the contrary, the operating
    rules of an institution are well-understood as frozen accommodations
    among contending interests.  (See Jack Knight, Institutions and Social
    Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 1992.)  These accommodations are
    always being tested at the margins, and any social disruption -- from
    technology to culture to the relative prices of economic inputs --
    can reopen old issues to negotiation once again.  Whenever a building
    is built, likewise, different visions will always contend to shape
    it.  The possibilities for shaping are always limited by institutional
    constraints on other levels, but some room for shaping does always
    exist.  Buildings can be made more or less flexible, thus settling
    controversies or else leaving them open to some degree.  Likewise with
    software and law.
    
    2. The institution as a framework for careers
    
    We are familiar with the concept of a career from a few institutions,
    especially business.  But politicians also have careers, as do
    ministers and soldiers.  In each case, we understand a career as
    a sequence of jobs.  The term tends to imply that the arc of one's
    career is upward, that something is accomplished and accumulated
    along the way, and yet that the path from each job to the next is
    largely routinized, for example in a ladder of promotions.  Athletes
    are something of an exception: when we speak of an athletic career,
    we usually don't imply that the athlete has moved from one position
    to another, only that the player has racked up so many points,
    broken certain records, been awarded certain honors, and so on.
    If the player goes on to be a coach or announcer, we speak of that
    as something they did after their career was over.  In this latter
    sense athletes' careers are like everyone else's: if someone changes
    professions several times, we don't usually talk about a career, or
    we say that the person had several careers.
    
    That is the usual notion of a career, and it cuts across a number of
    institutions in an irregular way.  But I want us to define the concept
    of career more generally.  Every institution, as I have said, defines
    (among other things) a set of roles and relationships.  Everyone who
    is involved in the institution is assigned to one or more of those
    roles, and is entered into a standardized map of relationships.  In
    that sense, everyone has a career in every institution that affects
    them in any way.  The fans in the sports stadium have careers, for
    example as they move from the bleachers to the boxes.  Nearly everyone
    has a financial career, and starting in the 1970s those careers became
    much more complex as ordinary individuals moved their money out of
    banks and into money market accounts and then mutual funds and other
    complex investments.  (See Joseph Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How
    the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, Simon and Schuster, 1994.)
    People invest great effort in their financial careers, strategizing
    both to maximize their college and retirement savings and to build
    their credit record.  Churches also define careers for their members,
    for example in the rituals that mark life transitions.  Drivers have
    careers that involve roles in many institutions: law, insurance, the
    auto industry, and so on.  In some cases the term "career" sounds odd
    because the institution does not inspire the sense of striving that
    the term implies in the domain of paid work.  Sports fans may politick
    for Super Bowl tickets, but for the most part they are not climbing
    up the hierarchy of fanhood.  That's fine.  A career is a trajectory
    through an institution, whether it is important or trivial, deliberate
    or accidental, strategized or improvised, formalized or casual.
    
    People's careers in different institutions interact.  This is clear
    when we consider the role of social networks.  Networking is a central
    mechanism of career-building in most institutions.  It's not entirely
    who you know, and "knowing" someone can be a complex thing, but the
    fashioning of networks is part of advancement in many institutional
    careers, information-gathering in many more, and institution-changing
    now and again in all of them.  And networks built in one context are
    often useful in others.  Small business people such as carpenters and
    accountants have a great incentive to go to church, aside from the
    spiritual incentives, because church is a place to build the trusting
    relationships that lead to jobs.  People enter politics partly to
    build networks that will be useful in business, and they attend
    universities partly to build networks that will be useful in their
    professions.  When communication and transportation are poorly
    developed, the networks created within different institutions will
    overlap heavily, simply because it is hard to maintain networks
    far from home.  Thus, lodges such as the Elks were once important
    institutions for no reason other than maintaining social networks,
    and in some areas they are still a backbone (for better or worse) of
    local social orders.  Networking is more complex now that technology
    and globalization have made far-flung networks increasingly possible
    and necessary in many institutions, and the much-discussed decline
    of social capital may reflect a decreased tendency for the social
    networks created within different institutions to overlap with one
    another.
    
    The role-trajectory and social-network understandings of careers are
    closely related.  People often gain access to new institutional roles
    because of the social networks they have built, and they often take
    advantages of their new roles to build new networks.  Careers have
    other aspects as well, but this brief discussion of roles and networks
    may indicate something of the complexity of institutional careers.
    
    3. The institution as a reservoir of skill
    
    One of the oldest conceptions of the institution is as a reservoir
    of skill.  Thorstein Veblen wanted the world to be run by engineers,
    and he saw the progress of industry as the accumulation of technical
    knowledge in the engineering profession.  Knowledge for Veblen was
    not the property of the individual engineer or company, but of the
    engineering profession as a whole.  When engineers work on concrete
    technical problems, they accumulate knowledge; when they work
    together, they pool their knowledge; when they change jobs, they take
    their knowledge with them; and they advance in their careers largely
    by contributing new knowledge to the commons.  Veblen was writing in
    the context of a vast movement of profession-building that started in
    the railroads in the mid-19th century and then spread to hundreds of
    other areas of society in the Progressive era.  Whereas the railroad
    associations were largely spontaneous -- and could be, given the ease
    of transportation on the rails and communication on the telegraph --
    the engineering associations were controlled much more by employers,
    a fact that David Noble has documented in detail but that Veblen wasn't
    much interested in, given his agenda of taking social control away
    from the financiers and giving it to the people who, in his mind, did
    the real work.
    
    Later in the 20th century, organizational theorists elaborated on
    (without always acknowledging) Veblen's insight.  They observed that
    the crucial type of knowledge is not technical knowledge in a narrow
    sense, but business knowledge -- that is, how to use the technologies
    in a business context.  A crucial discovery in the chemical industry,
    for example, later came to be called economies of scope: manufacturing
    modular building blocks from which numerous products could be
    assembled, and developing all of the markets for those products so
    as to ensure that the fixed costs of producing the building blocks
    are fully recovered.  (For more on this topic, see the introduction
    to Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Franco Amatori, and Takashi Hikino,
    eds, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (Cambridge University
    Press, 1997).)  Partly because Veblen's contribution was not fully
    remembered, the people who told this later story tended to locate
    the phenomena of collective memory in the individual firm (the
    organization) and not in the industry (the institution).  They were
    professors of business management, and their job was to tell managers
    how to make their particular businesses succeed.  The circulation of
    knowledge through job-changing was not central to their story, which
    lost some of its analytical power as a result.
    
    Another version of the story, from quite a different direction, is
    found in Stephen Toulmin's two-volume opus "Human Understanding: The
    Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts" (Princeton University Press,
    1972).  Toulmin is a philosopher of science, a topic that Western
    philosophy considers important because it promises to explain how
    objective knowledge is possible, and he observes that science happens
    in communities.  Scientists are socialized into their communities,
    which instill in them all manner of intuitive and practical
    knowledge, and shape and regulate their practices in numerous ways.
    The knowledge that science produces is collective property, at
    least in some crucial sense, and this discovery is good news, given 
    how difficult it has proven to justify knowledge on the basis of
    individual experience.
    
    A later version is the concept of community of practice, which began
    with work by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger at a Xerox PARC spinoff,
    the Institute for Research on Learning, in the 1980s.  Etienne later
    wrote a book called Communities of Practice (Cambridge University
    Press, 1998).  A community of practice is a group of people with
    its own culture, which uses its rituals to pool knowledge among
    its members.  New members are acculturated by participating at
    the edges of the activity, for example through apprenticeship, and
    then by moving to successively more central roles in the community.
    The community of practice framework does not provide hard-and-fast
    generalizations about the workings of the communities, but rather
    a set of concepts that have proven useful in analyzing the workings
    of many particular cases.  In a series of papers and a recent book,
    The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000),
    John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid have developed the community of
    practice framework in making suggestions about the future of several
    institutions, such as politics and the university.  The key in each
    case is to amplify (and certainly not to destroy) the conditions that
    make communities of practice possible.  A university, for example,
    should be viewed (at least from one perspective) as a mechanism for
    introducing an individual into the community of practice in which they
    will spend their career.
    
    Even though the concept of the institution as a reservoir of skill
    has developed mainly in the context of occupational communities, the
    concept also applies to all of the communities that are created by any
    institution.  This is a deep point: every institution defines a set
    of social roles, and all of the occupants of those roles constitute a
    community.  Now, it will be objected that the term "community" should
    be reserved for special cases: groups of people that share an identity
    and autonomous communications forums.  Some people feel strongly
    about this: by watering down the word, they argue, we water down the
    reality.  My own view is that we ought to analyze all of the diverse
    mechanisms by which institutional communities pool their skills.  Some
    of these mechanisms resemble the communitarian ideal, as for example
    in well-developed professional associations.  Others, however, are
    more spontaneous, organized more by shared ideology and culture than
    by formal organizations.  Formal assocations, moreover, increasingly
    fail to encompass the full range of informal skill-pooling mechanisms
    that become possible as technology allows individual community members
    to maintain ongoing relationships.  The term "community" in its more
    traditional, honorific sense is an analytical straitjacket.  That term
    has certainly been connected with positive values, such as autonomy,
    that should often be encouraged.  But those values should receive
    precise and specific names of their own, rather than riding on the
    hopelessly overburdened term "community".
    
    In any event, the consequences of viewing every institution as a
    reservoir of skill are profound.  Every modern society consists of
    hundreds of institutions, each of which generates several reservoirs
    of skill among its participants.  Once these reservoirs of skill
    have become analytically "visible", it becomes possible to study
    the conditions under which they arise, and the conditions under which
    they are reproduced or transformed.  Many societies, for example,
    are said to lack functioning institutions.  The solution to that
    problem depends on one's understanding of the nature of institutions.
    If institutions could be made functional simply by passing laws or
    chartering associations, then the problem would be easy.  In practice,
    though, the hardest part of building an institution is to spread the
    institution's knowledge throughout the relevant part of the populace.
    The institution of banking, for example, exists only when the skills
    of banking are widespread.  Those skills include the mechanics of
    opening an account, but they also include the personal financial
    strategies that make banks worthwhile.  The institutions of private
    property, likewise, do not function correctly unless the society's
    members know how to use them.  Otherwise one has simply created the
    legal rationalization for state actions to take people's property away
    from them, for example when someone else manages to create a legal
    title or when the property is used as collateral for an ill-advised
    loan.
    
    4. The institution as all of the above
    
    Those, then, are three ways of looking at institutions.  Institutions
    provide a framework for individual and collective action, and people
    run their lives within them.  Institutions allow people to pursue
    strategies, share knowledge, form relationships, and much else.
    Institutions provide people with discourses that organize their
    conceptions of themselves and others, and for the most part people
    follow the well-trodden paths that have been mapped by others before
    them.  Those paths are precisely the institution's reservoir of
    skill.  In this way, the concept of an institution promises to resolve
    the ancient tension between determinism and free will: institutions
    provide extensive enablements and constraints for people's dealings
    with one another; they instill many layers of self-conception, skill,
    and habit; and people experience all of that stuff as the landscape
    upon which they pursue their life strategies, most of which are drawn
    from the collective repertoires of their institutions.  People are
    partially aware of the institutions that organize their lives, and
    they also partially embody those institutions in a prereflective way.
    
    The three aspects of institutions that I have sketched provide some
    sense of institutions' distributed, dispersed nature.  Institutional
    discourses are dispersed across the programs, laws, and buildings
    into which they are inscribed, and then they are distributed among the
    many individuals who learn to use them.  Institutions operate largely
    in a distributed fashion through the incentives that motivate their
    participants to pursue careers within them, and the unfolding career
    strategies they adopt.  These strategies pervade the activities that
    an institution organizes, and few activities can be well-understood
    except by taking their participants' career strategies into account.
    Each institution's reservoir of skills, likewise, is distributed
    throughout the population that participates in it, and is also
    dispersed throughout the various mechanisms (observation, textbooks,
    maxims, career strategies, war stories, rules of thumb, and so on)
    that spread those skills around.
    
    That said, it is worth noting that the each aspect of institutions
    has its own emphases.  The concept of inscription emphasizes the
    categorical structure of institutions: the way they distinguish among
    roles, define relationships and activities, and so on.  The concept
    of career emphasizes strategy and networks, and pays little attention
    to the day-to-day activities that an institution organizes.  And
    the concept of collective skill is more akin to the anthropologist's
    organic vision of culture than to the hard-edged formalism of the
    other two concepts.  It follows that each concept helps deepen the
    others.  The formal structure that is inscribed in software, laws,
    and architecture provides a stable framework for the activities of
    knowledge-sharing and the strategies of careers.  Knowledge-sharing
    is driven largely by incentives to build careers.  Careers are built
    using methods derived from observing the successes of others.  And so
    on.
    
    Of course, these are all rough generalizations.  Nothing is definite
    until we bring the concepts to a particular case study and determine
    which ones apply and how.  The advertisement I offer for the concept
    of institution is not that it dictates any generalizable laws of
    social order; such laws do not exist.  Rather, the concept of an
    institution provides an elaborate conceptual framework that has proven
    useful in analyzing diverse situations.  Using the same framework to
    analyze many situations is particularly important, because the shared
    concepts allow us to compare and contrast different cases.  Phenomena
    that may be notorious in one situation may be obscure or forgotten
    in other situations, and we can use the shared conceptual framework
    to build analogies between them.  Each situation thereby becomes a
    means of defamiliarizing the others.  This is the essence of social
    analysis: each of us takes a set of analytical concepts out into
    a particular situation, sees what phenomena the concepts draw our
    attention to in that particular setting, sees what else we have been
    led to notice in that setting as a result, coins a new concept to
    name the previously unnamed thing we have seen, and contributes that
    concept to the shared supply of concepts that others can bring to
    their own situations.
    
    The measure of social analysis, then, is not the strength of the
    generalizations we can draw, but the depth with which we are able
    to see what is going on in particular situations.  Every one of us
    is likely to notice some things more than others, for example because
    of our social background, but by putting names on things and telling
    stories that make the names memorable, we make it possible for other
    people to analyze the world more completely.  These analytical skills
    are always important, but they are especially important now that the
    world is changing in deep and uncanny ways.  We should be impatient
    with simple generalizations about an "information age" that can be
    characterized with a few slogans.  The reality is not simple, and
    it's never going to be simple.  We will never sum it up, and we should
    never try.  What we can do, though, is help equip one another to see
    ever more clearly the institutional settings that we know and care
    about, so that we can talk sense on the day when the people around
    us finally see the changes happening, become alarmed, and ask us what
    to do.
    
    end
    



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