C. Making Social Webs Visible
[INDEX]
01. Syndication
Without syndication, none of the described above could be implemented. We need to syndicate our expressions of opinion for them to be potentially sociable.
Syndication is the separation of content from its place of articulation. To use a metaphor, when content is syndicated, there is basically one original copy of it, and you don’t create copies of that one original copy, but you basically embed that copy in different contexts. Me making a comment on your blog and someone else making a comment on social media are both recognized as comments on the same ‘thing’, namely that original post.
The way this can be solved technically is, for example, how some annotation software does. When you annotate a PDF, the PDF has a universal identifier. And while you might have a different copy of that PDF than I do, the universal identifier is the same, and the software thus knows that we are basically commenting on the same text. There are entire research projects working on the problem of how to deal with content that doesn’t have such universal identifiers and is text-only. How do you syndicate such content?
Without syndication, two people pasting and sharing the same text are technically sharing different ‘things’. Syndication, on the other hand, takes a unit of knowledge, attaches meta-information to it such as when it was created, by whom, where it has been published, and sends it on its way.
Here lies the yet-to-be-realized potential of syndication. It can actually be used to attach further information to the unit of knowledge, which goes beyond a mere technical description of the text or audio itself. The additional information can be relations to other units of knowledge. The additional information can be the reactions of those consuming it. The additional information can even be the link to a second version of the original.
This is what annotation software builds on. It attempts to syndicate texts and videos into the smallest meaningful units of knowledge. For every text or video selection that you, as a reader, make, a range selection is created, something like a unique identifier for just that sentence or clip. The sentence itself, in other words, has been syndicated, has its own identifier, and is separated from the place of its articulation.
This is basically everybody seeing everybody else’s copy and their remarks on a text they read. This is a way to make the units of knowledge themselves ‘eternally available’ and to bind them to their reactions. Which would allow for many ways to get, with the help of a communal reading experience and with the help of algorithms, what you need out of a text.
02. Context of Discovery
Our established way of developing ideas is that in a first phase, the so-called ‘context of discovery’, you erratically move around, gathering ideas and ‘feeling’ into possible solutions to a problem. This phase is not governed by strictly ‘scientific’ principles. What problem you pick out and what solution you offer are both basically up to your intuitions. Novelty itself is not something that is determined by any scientific method.
Once you think you are onto something, you switch into a more properly ‘scientific’ mode of testing your idea. This is where science can really shine. The very process of evaluating how valid an idea is, given certain knowledge interests, has been figured out quite well by science. It is the so-called ‘context of justification’. In this phase, it is up to you to contextualize whatever finding you have and be as rigorous as possible about why others should believe what you believe. The idea is that a valid belief is only one that can be properly justified.
While the second step of scientific discovery largely happens in the open through articles and peer review, the first step mostly occurs in private and personal discussions on campus floors or in conference discussions. It would actually be additional work for scholars if they were expected to articulate the first step of knowledge acquisition as well. It would result in more text, and many believe it would create more ‘noise’.
But this is where new media can ‘shine’. New media allow for the unification of the research and publishing process into one. By reading a paper and highlighting the relevant passages, new media allow you to simultaneously publish these selections to others. The same goes for comments that you add to a paper you read. It is important that this doesn’t require additional effort from you as a researcher. You do what you do anyway, and the software simply makes public the aspects of it that you deem relevant.
Social research is only possible when all steps of the knowledge acquisition process are made public because only thus, at any step of the process, others might provide valuable feedback. This applies to figuring out the relevant literature on a topic, as well as idea validation and pointing out inconsistencies.
03. Digital Divide
The digital should make the real transparent instead of being its own ‘second reality’. It should reflect what already happens in our institutions and within our minds and make it visible to all asynchronously. However, what the digital currently does is create a separate world owned by a few actors who are adept at playing by the rules of the digital.
As of now, the digital exists as its own separate world, owned by actors who have invested their time and energy into it. However, this comes at a cost. The dominant voices in the digital world are often social outsiders who lack a deep understanding of society from within, including actual engagement with its institutions and being respected figures within those institutions.
And mostly for pragmatic reasons. I think it was Habermas who said, that one has to chose in which world to engage in. If one choses it to be the academic world one simply pragmatically doesn’t have the time to additionally do the work and expound one’s position within the digital world. Thus not those who are academically best prepared to answer a question win in the digital world but those with the most time at their fingertips to feed their audience do.
If we don’t reverse this divide, society will further fragment into silos. If you are successful at an academic institution, your digital presence should demonstrate why you are successful. It should showcase the ideas that have influenced others, your level of study and contribution, and your engagement in discourse with others.
The digital should not be like a second life that you construct for yourself based on imagination and reputation that is only valid within this second life. Instead, the digital representation, such as a memex, should reflect your actual mind and how it connects with others.
Now, obviously, just like in any game, it is possible to learn how to play this game, push propaganda, and pretend that the digital represents where you are at when it does not.
However, manipulation will become more difficult because you will have to simulate entire institutions, the history of someone’s engagement and learning, and learning paths. One would have to simulate the history of an entire life and its learning.
04. Merit Based Hierarchies
Hierarchies are something we might never be able to eliminate. Any field that demands competence and skilled action to avoid failure will necessitate guidance from those who are most competent to oversee the overall process. This is the essence of science. Without a distinction between knowing and not knowing, between truth and falsehood, anyone could steer the boat. However, science is normatively oriented toward truth and knowledge, and thus those who can embody it.
One of the main functions of institutions is to select for competence. Various mechanisms are in place to ensure that those who deserve attention actually receive it. In most cases, the majority does not determine who is considered an authority on a topic. Most institutions are not democratic, and other factors than the popular vote determine who counts as an expert.
However, as with any determined system, once you understand the mechanisms that guide the results, you can learn to manipulate them. Not in the sense of cheating, but rather in the way that teaching to the test inherently teaches you to find strategies that lead to successful completion of the test.
In this regard, I have always found that one crucially relevant metric for assessing someone’s competence is not available to us. We know how many publications academics have, how many sources they cite, and how influential their work has been on others. But we cannot closely examine their actual research process because it is conducted in private.
When someone claims to have read Kant, we do not actually know how much time they have spent on his works. Is it a week, a month, a year? We are unaware of which passages they skimmed and which passages they paid close attention to. We do not know which passages they struggled to make sense of or which passages they clearly misunderstood.
As a rule-of-thumb, a professor once told us students who were hopeless about ever writing a thesis containing hundreds of references, that things are not as they appear on the outside. He told us that a master’s thesis containing several hundred references usually boils down to having thoroughly read three books, cover-to-cover, which serve as major sources of inspiration and a foundation of our argument, while the rest is simply “filling the gaps” with citations that fit the argument.
In other words, things are not as they appear, there is a difference between the reality of something and the way it presents itself to the world. Judging competence based solely on the bibliography of a source would likely be an unreliable measure of how deeply someone has engaged with a subject.
However, competence is not rocket science. It is not that difficult to determine it. Ultimately, what you need is the ability to see what someone claiming competence sees and judge for yourself. You need to see how much research they have actually conducted on a topic, how much they have struggled to understand things, their interactions with others, and the alternative models they could have used but felt uncertain about. And most importantly, you need to easily be able to enact their intentional content, what Husserl called the cogitatum, that matter-at-hand as it presents itself to them.
All these measures, combined with the selection mechanisms of our institutions, are more helpful in judging someone’s competence than mere academic degrees and publications alone. Incidentally, this information also holds immense pedagogical value because it would make visible the path someone took to arrive at their results. It would reveal the routes they missed.
With such transparency, we could approach merit-based hierarchies more closely. Those who have covered the most ground would receive the most attention, rather than those who are merely the most charismatic or disagreeable.
05. All Roads Lead to Rome
There are numerous entry points to a source. Sometimes it can be a friend sharing a favorite quote that serves as an icebreaker. Other times, the overall argument presented in a keyword list might catch your interest. It could be a podcast discussion that raises your curiosity. Alternatively, a controversial claim might awaken your interest in reading a source.
The more of these “hooks” exist and are made available on the memex, the greater the likelihood that people will find their own way into the source. Having multiple perspectives aiming at the same thing does not diminish the value of that thing. These additional layers provide new potential entry points into the source, offering different interpretations as well as diverse styles of thought and temperament.
Such a plurality of perspectives attached to every unit of meaning enables us to see the world as it truly is — a genuine plurality of perspectives. There is no single version of an article anymore. There is my interpretation of that article and there is your interpretation of the same article. However, within the variety of perspectives, there are also certain universal elements. For example, framing fallacies remain framing fallacies, and the absence of evidence is still the absence of evidence.
Multi-perspectivity encompasses both, different approaches to understanding a unit of meaning and shared standards such as comprehensiveness and validity.
06. The Right People at the Right Time
Opening up an article within the memex shows you many interactions that others have had before you with the text. This is an opportunity to get in touch with people who share a similar background as you. A comment attached to a specific passage of a primary source oftentimes can say more about whether you will have something to say to each other than spending an entire day talking without a restricting frame or goal to strangers.
By making visible people’s thinking, social annotation provides us with the opportunity to actually see which minds are surrounding us instead of faces. Social annotation provides the opportunity for students who are in the same course to learn about each other’s thoughts and engage in meaningful interactions. But it can also serve to create connections across departments, disciplines, and institutions.
Thus, younger learners can reach out to more experienced individuals and approach them with questions. They would know whom to ask and address simply because the memex provides you with a strong hint as to whether they will have something meaningful to say given a certain context. Seeing that someone has studied an author for years will be a strong hint that they might have something to tell you about them.
The memex could also facilitate interesting encounters with those who are close to you. Not only close to your mind and style of thinking, but literally in the neighborhood. Imagine the possibility of seeing who in the neighborhood is reading the same text as you right now. The memex thus provides us with new ways to encounter foreigners, encounters that are based on a shared reading experience, shared ideas, and concerns.
07. Focused Constructive Interactions
Most of our daily interactions are not focused on a collective goal. We socialize with people for the sake of socializing. We don’t walk into a social experience with the expectation for it to be productive; in other words, with the expectation for it to teach us something or solve a problem. Quite the opposite, our interactions might never become relevant from the perspective of collective intentionality. They might never reach a productive mutual engagement. Even after a thousand years of talking over coffee, no real visible collective action or achievement might be the result.
In certain contexts, however, productive collective intentionality is key, as in war. Here, you don’t get together to just enjoy the presence of others, but the focus is on that engagement being productive. It involves bringing different worldviews together, different ideas, to accumulate knowledge and experience or solve an actual given problem.
Such focused constructive interactions are very difficult to properly foster and prepare. You can have an interesting and enjoyable encounter with strangers, but it is very difficult, if not impossible, to have a productive, focused, constructive interaction with people you don’t know. For such focused constructive interactions to be possible, your knowledge interests must be aligned, but also the free time both of you have available, you must have similar commitment levels, and also similar background understanding and sometimes values.
This is why focused interactions are usually prepared within institutions over significant periods of time. People are being prepared for actual social engagements over years. Institutions make sure they have an income and can devote themselves to a problem. The problem is discussed over years and not raised sporadically. Socialization into the overall discourse also takes years. You work with people on a constant basis over years. After years of preparation, this preparation might lead to a constructive focused interaction solving a problem or taking the discourse one step further.
Such focused constructive interactions can arise from a random talk over coffee, but in any case, they are not trivial. They are more likely not to happen rather than to occur.
The memex can increase the likelihood of such interactions occurring by simply syncing minds with similar backgrounds, commitment, and concerns. The memex, in other words, is built to simulate what universities already do, namely synchronizing people and preparing them for constructive interactions out of the box.
08. Fluid Encounters Around Shared Concerns
Anonymous cooperation might be something difficult to imagine. A mere century ago, our worldview was mostly defined by immediate significant others and a few dozen books. The people who were given to us, the people we spent our daily routine with, were also the people who defined our worldspace and informed us on what is real and what is not, how to make money, and how to educate our children.
Even a mere twenty years ago, when we didn’t have open courseware and lectures available to learn from, we didn’t have a choice but to listen to our professors and teachers. We were stuck with them just as we were stuck with our family. And just as family is great but you wouldn’t want to be forced to listen to their stories all day, the same goes for education. It’s not a matter of bad intentions, but when it comes to education, some minds just don’t click with each other.
Not so in the age of social media. Today, you have the choice to pick out those who truly speak to you on a specific subject and get you fired up. And being fired up is one important element of learning in all domains. Only a very few are lucky to have experienced it. Social media allows for fluid encounters with new minds. Hundreds of minds can thus be part of your process of enculturation. Hundreds of minds can inform your overall version of reality.
Obviously, learning also takes discipline and not getting what you want immediately, but still, I couldn’t name anyone particularly successful in a field who experienced nothing but gratification crises and frustration while learning because they never felt they had people to learn from whom they resonated with. I am reminded of Keith Jarrett’s suggestion not to practice blindly, but what you love, since your emotional response matters and is an important feedback. So is our emotional response to our teachers.
But how could social media help you meet the right minds at the right time? Think about encounters on social media. Embodied encounters usually go from the outside- in. The first thing you see about a person is their bodily presence. It gives you hints as to whether you’d want to engage with that person. Interestingly, social media can turn encounters upside-down. The first thing you might encounter with a person might be their favorite poem or their favorite piece of music.
It is a basic principle of hermeneutics that you have to start your learning process where you are. Now imagine if you were able to immediately spot others with the help of social media who were at the very same starting point. By this, I mean people who find similar ideas appealing, similar articles, similar sentences in those articles and similar problems. This is the yet-to-be-realized potential of social media, to make encounters fluid and about shared concerns.
09. Mentorship
One of the most limiting aspects of our educational system is the attempt to push everything into distinct age groups. While this is adequate in certain areas, in others it is not. We have seen children capable of making outstanding contributions within professions. If we had made these children wait for their peers to catch up in their development, they might have lost interest in pursuing their interests.
A telling characteristic of children who are capable of picking up and developing their talents is mentorship, though. In very rare cases, they are capable of managing the field alone. Often, having one person guide their progress is enough to help them navigate the most difficult territory, provided they come with the right motivation.
Unfortunately, this form of mentorship is currently available only to a very lucky few. Finding the right approach for a mind is a delicate matter. Small misalignments in temperament and approach can lead to giving up. However, we should work towards making as much of this orientational material available to all age groups as possible.
I would not be surprised if in 2050 we see a boom of young ‘geniuses’ — young people who have found the right support and mentorship for their talents. This is a central aspect to determine whether a societal model is successful, namely, whether it has found ways to help individuals develop their talents. If we all end up as universal dilettantes speaking about things we have no true understanding of, society at large has taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way.
10. Reach
Looking at how we engage in sense-making today, I perceive significant differences compared to just a few years ago. Back in the day when I studied philosophy, there were untouchable opinion leaders who guided the field. It was nearly unthinkable to have a personal conversation with them. All we could do was passively consume their content and admire them as students. Even those who made it into the profession had minimal chances of asking meaningful questions or receiving useful feedback.
This felt very distinct from what is happening in the circles around figures like Daniel Schmachtenberger or John Vervaeke. Even when I worked as a truck driver, I felt connected to the ongoing discourse. Despite having one of the least-reputable jobs, I still felt like a fully engaged member of society, like a citizen, because I had a window into what I considered to be the cutting edge of a discourse that mattered to me.
Moreover, I felt that these discourse leaders were just two steps away from me. Quite literally. I happened to know someone who knew someone who knew them personally. If I wanted to pitch an idea or get in touch with them to share my thoughts, I could do so. Try doing that with Habermas.
With a memex in place, opinion leaders would be even more accessible. Instead of relying on the connections of friends who could vouch for me, I could place my ideas directly in the margins and vouch for myself. I could attach my thoughts in the margins of the relevant passages where they belong.
Reading comment sections can often be tedious and unrewarding. Many opinion leaders likely don’t bother with reading comments. However, if the comments were in the margins, one could search with much more precision for meaningful feedback.
