First of all this month, I ask a favor. Last week, the website for a professional doctorate in information studies at Syracuse University went live. I direct that program, and we are looking for 10-12 mid-career leaders in information industries to join us in writing a thesis in information issues, broadly defined: enterprise architectures, misinformation/disinformation, the future of work, privacy/security, and data and analytics are all in play. The program teaches no content courses from the existing catalog: the members of the cohort will be sufficiently diverse and accomplished that finding common ground would be impossible. Rather, we focus on the writing of a 5-chapter thesis, with each chapter a common semester deliverable in semesters 4-8. Methods courses and topic selection precede those semesters, and semester 9 is devoted to thesis defenses. The course is mostly synchronous on-line, with 12 of 51 credits being earned in 2 1-week residencies per year. These residencies will offer topical seminars of broad interest: those of you who attended my Center for Digital Transformation meetings at Penn State will have had a taste of these. Cost is on par with an executive MBA or many DBAs, about $100k; no financial aid is available through the program.
The ask: because we had to wait nearly a year for state of New York approval of the program design, we are on a very short runway to fill this year’s class that will begin with a May 24 residency. Applications are due March 15 for preferred consideration, but we will look at later candidates if the class doesn’t fill. We have 5 applications already submitted, from fascinating people of substantial accomplishment: the cohort will be 3 years of the best conversation you’ve ever had, I predict. 40 more people have already registered for information sessions this week: Wed March 3 for the general population and Thursday the 4th for military and veterans. Here are the links: please forward them to anyone you know who might be interested, or let them know to email me directly to set up a call. Thank you for the assist.
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Let me start by enumerating a few themes, which I’ll then try to tie together.
As I watched the World Wide Web emerge early in my professional career, I shared the hopeful positivism (or, more accurately, positivist hopefulness) of Tim Berners-Lee and his intellectual kin. Having recently finished a doctoral dissertation in which I learned to construct Boolean queries inside expensive CD-ROM data sets, I was ecstatic to find in Google plus the Web the biggest research library ever conceived, much less built. Some readers may know that in ancient libraries, including Alexandria, books were chained to the shelves: print knowledge was that valuable. Now (circa 1996), I didn’t know if information actually wanted to be free, but a whole lot suddenly became so. From access to such wealth, it was a short hop to the belief that people could operate under less uncertainty and make better, fact-based choices and decisions.
People wiser than I knew better. As I discovered while researching my new book on YouTube and TikTok (coming next year from MIT Press, it looks like!), James Katz at Rutgers saw in 1998 the cost of removing gatekeepers to content dissemination. If everybody could publish an opinion, the Yeatsean center could not hold:
Let me start by enumerating a few themes, which I’ll then try to tie together.
As I watched the World Wide Web emerge early in my professional career, I shared the hopeful positivism (or, more accurately, positivist hopefulness) of Tim Berners-Lee and his intellectual kin. Having recently finished a doctoral dissertation in which I learned to construct Boolean queries inside expensive CD-ROM data sets, I was ecstatic to find in Google plus the Web the biggest research library ever conceived, much less built. Some readers may know that in ancient libraries, including Alexandria, books were chained to the shelves: print knowledge was that valuable. Now (circa 1996), I didn’t know if information actually wanted to be free, but a whole lot suddenly became so. From access to such wealth, it was a short hop to the belief that people could operate under less uncertainty and make better, fact-based choices and decisions.
People wiser than I knew better. As I discovered while researching my new book on YouTube and TikTok (coming next year from MIT Press, it looks like!), James Katz at Rutgers saw in 1998 the cost of removing gatekeepers to content dissemination. If everybody could publish an opinion, the Yeatsean center could not hold:
The
Internet and the Web allow for the quick dissemination of information, both
false and true; unlike newspapers and other media outlets, there are often no
quality control mechanisms on Web sites that would permit users to know what
information is generally recognized fact and what is spurious
Years later, when DARPA ran the geospatial intel challenge of having ad hoc teams coordinate via social media to find 10 red weather balloons, I failed to grasp the importance of the counterintelligence efforts that slowed the winning team (out of MIT’s Media Lab) by spoofing IP addresses and GPS coordinates. Rewatching the 2010 video a couple weeks ago was another realization that the information universe does not only, or probably primarily, operate under logical assumptions. Rather, PT Barnum, Joseph Goebbels, and George Orwell seem to set much of the tone.
A second theme relates to the contention (by Scott Galloway among others) that COVID-19 was an accelerant more than a disruptor. The pandemic, and our responses to it, made socio-technical developments happen far faster than predicted: telemedicine visits, remote work, grocery/meal delivery, and Zoom schooling are all a permanent part of the cultural landscape only months after the initial lockdown. All of these new practices stress the existing infrastructure, whether it’s laptops for 5-year-olds, rural broadband, a sustainable economic model for car-share drivers, privacy practices for connected video cameras, or the simple but often impossible task of checking up with vulnerable neighbors and family members. This need to invest in 21st-century infrastructure — cultural, economic, and physical alike — was highlighted by The Economist in a recent article on mass transit. If buses and subways are not perceived to be safe from pandemic spread, people will turn to cars, with dire consequences for densely populated urban areas. New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Mexico City cannot absorb all the migration headed their way with a car-based transport model. Gridlock, of every type, is not sustainable. At the same time, infrastructure is slow to rebuild, tough to expand, and expensive to maintain. Tax revenues are down everywhere, making the barriers to mass transit investment that much higher. And subways are far from the only economic priority.
A second theme relates to the contention (by Scott Galloway among others) that COVID-19 was an accelerant more than a disruptor. The pandemic, and our responses to it, made socio-technical developments happen far faster than predicted: telemedicine visits, remote work, grocery/meal delivery, and Zoom schooling are all a permanent part of the cultural landscape only months after the initial lockdown. All of these new practices stress the existing infrastructure, whether it’s laptops for 5-year-olds, rural broadband, a sustainable economic model for car-share drivers, privacy practices for connected video cameras, or the simple but often impossible task of checking up with vulnerable neighbors and family members. This need to invest in 21st-century infrastructure — cultural, economic, and physical alike — was highlighted by The Economist in a recent article on mass transit. If buses and subways are not perceived to be safe from pandemic spread, people will turn to cars, with dire consequences for densely populated urban areas. New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Mexico City cannot absorb all the migration headed their way with a car-based transport model. Gridlock, of every type, is not sustainable. At the same time, infrastructure is slow to rebuild, tough to expand, and expensive to maintain. Tax revenues are down everywhere, making the barriers to mass transit investment that much higher. And subways are far from the only economic priority.
Finally, it’s depressing to look at what the US tech sector has become. I’ve touched on this before, so won’t belabor the point. With the emergence of ad-revenue-powered software development, it’s hard to see tech innovation on the scale of the web browser, the search engine, the original online retail model, or the smartphone. Silicon Valley + Seattle have turned a lot of energy to scaling the aforementioned innovations, and many important developments have emerged, to be sure: mega-scale cloud computing, computational photography, and chipset design each exhibit true breakthroughs. For all of these upbeat notes, we must confront the failures of privacy protection, behavioral manipulation, energy consumption (with Bitcoin’s massive inefficiency exhibit A), and the industry’s contributions to economic inequality. Many business continue to run on Excel and email, again, tools that do not scale.
These three themes — access to knowledge fueled misinformation rather than enlightenment, the need to rejuvenate infrastructure, and Silicon Valley’s turn toward meal delivery and social media rather that worthier challenges — were floating around in my thinking as I read a short blog post by the tech journalist Om Malik (with a hat tip to Jan Chipchase for the pointer).
Malik posits that a precondition for getting anything done in a group is sharing an understanding of reality. He says it better than I could, and quotes the likes of psychologist Jerome Bruner:
"Our culturally adapted way of life depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and depends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating differences in meaning and interpretation,” the late psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote in The Acts of Meaning. “By following a set of rules governing interpersonal communication, people inadvertently modify their private, idiosyncratic conception of a state of affairs and reach a common understanding of that situation. As noted, these shared representations constitute the contents of a culture.”
Given that Facebook is actively trying to build as many systems of meaning as there are ad market segments, and Google is imposing its own clustering algorithms on our ads, our emails, and our YouTube viewing, what counts as foundational bedrock in US (or any other) culture? Concepts (that carry critically important commitments) as essential as voting, epidemiology, and tolerance are no longer assumed. Millions of people are convinced that the US election outcome was fake, that the coronavirus is fake and/or a foreign plot, and that white supremacy is the core tenet of major political parties. Taken together, these beliefs undermine the foundations of western democracy. When people of different colors are successfully demonized as cover to extreme rent-seeking by white wealthy one percenters, and the blockage of economic mobility by the latter is blamed on the former, the consequences are truly life altering. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton make the case in their book Deaths of Despair, life expectancy, economic mobility, and personal wellbeing are all casualties of the past 40 years of health care, tax, and environmental legislation being written by industry lobbyists, many of them former legislators or aides, for the benefit of the already-wealthy.
A foundation holds a building up from the bottom. Good ones last centuries or millennia. Scaffolding is far more visible, but it is temporary and not typically structural. The belief that all people are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is foundational and served the United States well for 200+ years. The frequent fights of outsiders to be let in to that promise attest both to the power of the promise and to the benefits to some groups of denying it to others. Now, as Malik laments, there appear to be fewer and fewer shared realities. Reality TV, the utter antithesis of its name, made the Kardashian family a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Fake news has done the same for Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, political parties of all persuasions are torn by internal fights over the shared reality in which players on the same team operate. Religions from Anglicans to Catholics are seeing disillusioned and emboldened members either defect or stay and sow dissent within the ranks: there are currently 19 different Baptist subdivisions, according to Baylor University’s research center devoted to the denomination. Epidemiologists and public health official acknowledge that they have done a poor job navigating nuance and clarity at a time when faith in science has been tested by both external political headwinds and internal narrowing of disciplinary foci.
The core question is both simple and troubling: without something common to believe in, groups of people splinter. Religion, science, government, and economics are all torn by divisions over both what is real and what matters. Sport can bring groups together, often temporarily, and even here, ESPN had to shut down comments on the website because flame wars were instant and usually vicious. The moderator of a historical outreach website -- not what one would expect to be a snakepit -- had to quit as the site's comments became a “cesspool.”
The tools that Berners-Lee and others invented have spread both knowledge and, maybe primarily if we are honest, divisiveness. One possibility is that people have been this divided for decades: white supremicists are as old as this nation. Now that they and everyone else have a public voice, maybe we are seeing a long-term lack of commonality that newspapers, TV stations, and book publishers covered over with their gatekeeping function. Alternatively, the collapse of Enlightenment epistemology took far longer than the history of the Internet, and it’s possible social media hastened the rise of pluralistic voices that could appeal to personal prejudice rather than shared norms of moral clarity, evidence-based argument, or peer review (none of which were as robust as its adherents claimed ).
In any event, as the world enters post-COVID-19 reality, which voices will gain the most adherents? Which institutions -- the press, government, academia, civil or spiritual religions -- can be either born or reborn as adequate to the moment? Which core beliefs can be reinvigorated — the US Declaration of Independence is acknowledged in foundation documents of roughly half the 192 countries at the United Nations — and which ones need to be invented in a post-newspaper, post-industrial, post-fact world? What ephemeral trends, scaffolding if you will, can draw adherents temporarily yet visibly and effectively? (The US Democratic Party struggled to counter the lies and insults Donald Trump consistent employed in 2016 and again in 2020: he successfully rewrote the rules of engagement, with help from the aforementioned Fox News and Facebook.) Without a foundation, preferably one in empirical reality, humanity is going to endure social chaos. My hunch is that we are seeing a race to master one of these new media channels with a compelling narrative: form and content will synch better than they do now, with substantial rewards for the entities that get there first.
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