IV. Where Would we go From Here?
[INDEX]
00. Bringing the Depth of Academia to Non-Academic Spaces
We can now turn to imagine what a learning platform could look like that includes the distinctions offered by the Hypothesis tool but is more adapted to open and not specifically academic Bildung-spaces.
As we saw, the Hypothesis tool digitizes social practices that have been established for millennia. It makes visible what has already proven itself in social reality and makes it more accessible to all. And while Hypothesis gets the overall direction of making subjectivity more visible and thus inspiring communicative action right, it can still be complemented in several directions.
Hypothesis has been built with academic writing and analysis in mind. And within that context and against that background of academic courses, I think it does its job well. What I would regard as an interesting challenge, though, is to precisely build some of the tacit and taken-for-granted elements of academic practice into the medium itself.
What I have heard from pedagogues who took a look at social media was mostly disbelief and shock. From an academic standpoint, what happens in most exchanges on social media is not coming close to being a discourse or living up to the complexity of the issues involved and discussed. If this were the way their students acted and performed in class, most wouldn’t get to pass the class.
Academic settings are designed to prepare meaningful engagement. They make sure everybody is reading the same text. They make sure everybody devotes enough time to the text. They make sure everybody carries a similar body of pre- understanding to the text. They make sure students follow basic principles of discourse, argument, and self-contextualization.
And all of that, in being an academic tool, Hypothesis assumes. But none of that can we take for granted in the lifeworld. So what if we designed a tool that was built around these tacit principles and made them explicit? So that by virtue of using the tool, one enacts academic rigor and discursive, self-transcending thought?
01. Implicit Subjectivity
If we think outside the academic context, suddenly we find ourselves in a much more difficult situation to elicit learning. Let’s start with the fact that Hypothesis is often “assigned” to students. They have to use it, whether they want to or not, which overcomes the burden of installing a plugin and using it within the browser.
We can’t expect that from learners outside the academic context, i.e., to expect that they would change their established reading practices and workflows. Thus, I would see the need for a tool that is both independent from one’s browser and from the preferred medium through which one assimilates text, i.e., whether you read the paper version of a text or whether you read the PDF version or watch a YouTube video.
For lack of a better name, I will tentatively call our tool “Zettelkasten,” following Niklas Luhmann’s famous collection of notes with the same name. Luhmann used to jot down notes on small cards (“Zettel,” which is both the singular and plural of the word) for every book that he read and collected them in metal boxes (“Kasten”). Using keywords and quotations, Luhmann created anchors and cross-references for what he had read. At the end of his life, his Zettelkasten had more than 50,000 entries.
The number of such units of thought matters, but also the cross-references to other domains and disciplines. The richer our system of differentiations, the more Zettel, and particularly the more vertically integrated it is (i.e., the more different types of Zettel and frames it can bridge), the denser our narrative consciousness. The more narratives we can hold together simultaneously.
Everybody deserves their own private Zettelkasten, independently of whether one does academic research or not. Everybody deserves tools that help us get our thinking as differentiated as Luhmann did. Each of us, individually and as a collective, should be capable of attaining the depth of thought of a Niklas Luhmann. What took him four decades to achieve as an individual, we as a community should attain much faster. The question is how to socialize thinking effectively without dissolving it though.
In the following, we will attempt to digitize and expand on this concept of note-taking while at the same time attempting to make it social.
Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, after all, was his very own. It was not the result of a communal effort. It represented his thinking, his preferences, and selective reading, mostly done alone from his reading chair.
On the other hand, we will make it possible to communally gather Zettel, and we will use the resulting Zettel as hints, teasers for what one might find in a primary text, as anchor points around which people can meet and discuss topics that are dear to their hearts.
Obviously, the reading part itself will still be something we partly do in isolation. Thinking requires that isolation from others, the sense that nobody is watching, and you can experiment freely with ideas. Yet the process of selection that precedes thinking and that follows on such phases of isolation, namely when we get together with others to tell each other what we came up with, we can socialize in meaningful ways.
These Zettel will be representative of the units of thought that make a difference to us, the nodes in our thought system that connect disparate observations. The smallest unit of a Zettel is a keyword or tag, yet a Zettel can also be composed of several sentences. What matters is the unit of thought, not the actual number of sentences involved. What we treat as a unit of thought depends on context, on what we want to know, and on whether we are called upon to act on a unit of thought.
Our units of thought will always vary and be in constant flux, constantly determined by the environment. Yet we will also see patterns emerge. Patterns like units of thought that are foundational for other units of thought. Units of thought that we inadvertently face in certain situations, etc.
02. Designing Spaces for Bildung and Cyclical Engagement
With the more academic setting also comes the realization that Hypothesis is not built with the creation of Bildung-spaces in mind. These spaces already exist in academia, i.e., there is a curriculum, students have already gone through cycles of peer review, intense learning, and the process of selection. They are being assigned texts to study on a daily basis, and it is expected of them to do the reading.
Hypothesis is then used within an already existing learning space; it is not the tool’s responsibility to create such a space in the first place. Designing open Bildung-spaces with the help of digital tools, on the other hand, is a different challenge.
When I think about the learning spaces that I find most rewarding, they usually tend to focus on something from one of three different perspectives. When approaching a new field, I find it most rewarding to group the learning material across three different dividing lines, making it easier for me to assimilate. In order to learn something and for it to remain significant, I need a specific “telos” in relation to which what I learn stands.
Such teloi obviously usually define learning spaces. One dividing line or telos is to think in terms of a story. And here, Hypothesis has us already covered. Here, the telos is to grasp the “unity” of a very specific story. The parts then make sense for and against the overall story. One needs the parts to be able to tell the story. The story unifies them and provides them with purpose. And as trivial as this might be, most interactions on social media as we know them don’t live up to this simple telos of getting the integrity of a story right.
Another dividing line, however, for which Hypothesis has no space, is to think in terms of the oeuvre of an author. Here, the “whole” is not one story but how several stories fit together within the work of an author and how they open up a conceptual space of metaphors and distinctions. Every story here becomes a “part,” an example of how to apply the overall conceptual framework of the author, which is the “whole.”
Yet another dividing line is by topic. Here, the “whole” is the topic in question. The topic unites different stories, which in turn unite different authors. It is very typical that depending on what telos you choose, your understanding will vary significantly. The way ideas are taken out of the oeuvre of an author in relation to a specific topic is often very different from the way the ideas appear when looked at from the perspective of the entire oeuvre of the author.
I heard someone say that Habermas in his thinking supposedly had more of a hermeneutic focus on the “oeuvre” of an author. That’s why in the bibliographies you usually find most of the works by the author referenced by Habermas. Luhmann, on the other hand, supposedly was a more systemic thinker, which also expresses itself in how he quotes, since his bibliographies usually cover topics instead of authors.
Clearly, both teloi are meaningful and uncover different perspectives from which to approach ideas. Without the hermeneutic approach, taking ideas out of context will inadvertently flatten them since they only make sense within a frame of reference. One then flattens them down to the frame of reference of the lifeworld for them to be comprehensible at all, which significantly simplifies them. This often does not do justice to the author at hand, and the referential totality of their worldspace gets totally lost.
On the other hand, if we focus merely on the worldspace of the author, we lose a measure of validity. Everything the author says becomes unquestionable and self-approving.
Now imagine an overview with dozens, hundreds of book covers and titles. Every cover stands for a text, some of which are articles, others books. Some of the books and articles, the ones that someone has claimed responsibility for, have a timer displayed. It shows when the next reading cycle discussing the respective text will begin. Others have an indicator for when the next meeting for an ongoing cycle is about to happen.
But also imagine such covers for topics. For example, there is a cover for the topic “polarization.” Or a cover for the topic “habits.” Every such “cover” represents a Bildung space, very much like academic courses are Bildung spaces. Every cover represents a mini-course. Every cover represents the next cycle of learning. And every such Bildung space has a telos. If the telos is the unity of a text, the Bildung space will be successful if it covers the territory of the text. If the telos is an author, the same applies; the Bildung space will be successful if it covers the author’s work.
This small feature, to announce when the next engagement cycle with a text or topic will occur, already makes a huge difference in how we approach complexity. Imagine if when you stumble upon a text, you could immediately see when this text will be taken in and discussed by a community.
For something to be social, it must have a date and duration. It must have something like a place you can point to. The act of communally reading a text needs an announcement with a specific starting date, duration, and conclusion for it to become much like a place.
Here we already deviate from how Luhmann read. He didn’t announce what he was about to read. To my knowledge, he didn’t set up meetings to discuss what he had just read. All of that happened in the dark.
And if a group of people has decided to read a text, this does not exclude the possibility that another group might start a few months later with the same text. Just as certain topics are discussed again and again at universities, as they are taught from semester to semester, we as small communities can also read texts again and again.
03. Inversion of Control
Before Bildung cycles can happen, a core set of people must have taken specific responsibilities to lead others through a reading cycle. All the book covers without a timer yet need a group of dedicated leaders to organize a reading cycle. For this to be possible, role assignments must be modeled and virtualized, must be part of the tool already, otherwise the participants have to relearn what we already implicitly know for millennia, that learning requires organization and structure.
This is something that is not built into Hypothesis since academic spaces by definition have people who take the role of a navigator and teacher. They have textbooks, curricula, etc. They are even getting paid for playing that role well. In open Bildung-spaces, some of the functions of the role of the teacher must be filled in partly by the participants themselves.
With a curriculum taken for granted, Hypothesis also never had to digitize the process of choice itself. In fact, most students don’t have much of a choice. Most of their courses they have to take, whether they want to or not.
This is not the case with open Bildung-spaces. They require an act of commitment. An active choice to look into something. For that choice to be anything like a real choice and not a coincidence, learners must have some sense of orientation as to what the next step to take should be. So again, the function of the curriculum and the sequence of engagements has to be delegated to the learning community itself, and thus the software solution has to consider this as well.
A group of people decides to read a book together. Before they jump into creating Zettel for their reading experience, they clarify their responsibilities though. Since everyone will be able to participate with different commitment, for the meetings to be rewarding for most, such commitments and expectations need to be externalized and thus communicated first.
For example, someone would have to take up the role of navigator for the reading circle. This person has the responsibility to have read the primary text more in-depth than the others so as to overlook the major possible topics and properly coordinate them. Knowledge and experience matter for this role, and depending on the complexity of the fields involved in the primary literature, this person might best have participated in many other reading cycles or have specialized knowledge about the field already.
Others who are sufficiently interested in the text can have the role of content creators, i.e., by extensively adding Zettel to the original text, with summaries, connections, etc. The role of the content creator is more free than that of the navigator since all their responsibility is to pay attention to the text and the discussion and keep both connected. But it is not their role to make sure the depth of the text is lived up to.
And the final group are those who have the least responsibility, namely the mere observers, those who can barely do the reading but are in it for the experience and mutual exchange. They are neither expected to contribute with content nor to actively participate in the discussions. In the end, it is a perfectly valid role to just be observing something and feel into whether you would want to commit to it in the future.
Differentiating and externalizing these and other roles is helpful because each role requires a very specific mindset and preparation to work well.
The content creators, for example, those who have spent significant time reading and creating content, would most likely have questions that they would want to be addressed by others. With their effort of content creation, they gain the right of e.g. breakout groups being opened, specifically around their efforts and concerns. They thus get attention and time from other members in return for their content creation efforts.
It is up to the respective community to figure out what roles and responsibilities serve their knowledge interests best. The above three roles are just an example of what, from my experience, is necessary to get productive exchanges going. One cannot really do without navigators since otherwise every second discussion gets lost. One also cannot do without the content creators because the navigators usually can’t produce all the content themselves and anticipate the interests of the group. And one also cannot do without the observers because for someone to be a navigator or content creator, one must have been an observer first.
This is where the software can help to set-up the learning-experience, by enforcing to articulate the different roles and maybe also symbolize them with different avatars.
As more groups are going through learning cycles, though, one can see more and more already predefined roles, with their respective avatars and names. And these roles are always cycle and room specific, i.e., such roles are valid within the context of the room of a reading circle but not outside of that and also only for within a cycle of the reading circle. For the next sprint, the roles may switch and others might be the navigators.
04. Channeling
Just as the different roles are not pre-modeled in Hypothesis, so Hypothesis leaves it fully open what and how students annotate. It is up to the teachers to model certain strategies for annotation.
But again, since in open Bildung-spaces, there are no paid teachers to set up and guide the learning, the modeling of proper types of annotations must be delegated to the community. The process of how to meaningfully engage with a text has to be delegated to the entire community and be part of the tool itself.
Just leaving that open will be as catastrophic as skipping the leadership roles. It will result in the pedagogical nightmare we already know from social media. For this not to be chaotic and confusing, the software needs a mechanism of fleshing out trends of possible meaningful interactions.
Prior to meeting in person, all members of the group read the respective chapter and create their own Zettel. Every noteworthy unit of meaning thus gets its own Zettel.
The result is a collection of quotes from the chapter, a collection of remarks and keywords. For example, hovering over the title of the chapter one sees all the Zettel that summarize the entire chapter. Clicking on the chapter, on the other hand, lists all Zettel that were taken from reading it. All quotes and highlights.
Every Zettel allows for a variety of different types of annotations. One Zettel thus might be labeled as the “key idea” of the chapter. Another might be labeled as “brilliant”. Another might be labeled as “important for the line of thought”. Yet another as “incomprehensible”. And yet another as “false”. “Framing error,” etc.
With these different types of annotations, the users signify what the respective Zettel means to them. How they place and value it within the referential totality of their own mind. Going far beyond a “like” vs. “dislike,” these characterizations can range from anything, knowledge emotions to logical fallacies or custom categories used only within and by the very knowledge community that is engaged with the text.
A scientific knowledge community might thus have other characterizations and categories than a group of laypeople. Or a specific individual might use their very own categories to label and characterize the Zettel. These categories themselves become something like channels along which the content is sequenced and ordered. Without such channels at hand we would still be producing more noise than order with all these annotations being made visible.
Similar to the avatars representing different roles every added category could have its own symbol or icon and description. When going through a text, these categories are the lines along which units of thought are sliced. They are the basic forms through which we make something foreign our own and integrate it into our thought. These are usually the nodes which pop into our minds intuitively if someone asks us about a text and we are to speak about it.
But here, these forms are made visible through the entire process of taking something in.
And thus, we see, the users would not only add content in reading a text. They would also add types of characterizations, forms along which to read, and eventually new symbols and metaphors to signify them. In the course of time, by just digitizing the practice of reading, the major lines along which people read texts and are capable of assimilating them would become visible.
One would, for example, see icons for all the major possible logical errors. One would see icons for all the possible knowledge emotions. One would see icons for all the possible types of text, such as summary, synthesis, connection, question. One would see symbols designating the place of an idea within the overall bigger whole, whether e.g. it is a central tenet or periphery.
05. Merit Based Hierarchies
Every reading cycle is its own unit. This means that the process and products in every cycle are specific to that particular cycle. Whatever gets added on top of the primary source has to go through the peer process of the relatively small group of navigators and content creators. This is different from social media in general and more like what we do in classrooms. It is more hierarchical and less democratic.
While the reading cycle is relatively open to the outside world and thus observers, the process of content creation and moderation itself is something the group itself manages and is responsible for. Thus, the goal when sharing your insight within this cycle is not to invite random people from outside the group to support your claim with hearts, but the other way around, to find ways to convince the other members of the group, who are dedicated readers of the text and as experts on it as you, that you are making sense.
Thus, the group itself already serves as a filtering mechanism, it follows the structure of peer-review by design. The group itself can make visible what, in regards to the very community itself, are some of the most salient ideas, some of the most controversial, and so on. And if the group itself lacks either the specialized knowledge and leadership or in-depth knowledge on the issues discussed, it will, as a group, that is, as a cycle of a communicative process, fail.
And that is perfectly fine. Measured by the outcome of produced content, it will then be visible, compared to other cycles, which were more engaging, to have failed in certain regards.
And it is precisely such criteria for failure that social media posts usually lack. But failure that is visible as such is harmless and even valuable. It is something to learn from. While views that absolutize the knowledge space and maintain themselves only because there are no criteria to prove them wrong are not.
The very group dynamics itself, in other words, matters. Group dynamics that can only work if the group itself is small enough so that all members can feel mutually responsible for each other. The moment a group is so big that you don’t know each other’s names anymore, that group dynamics is being lost.
06. The Unknown
We have already covered to a significant degree that for thinking to be a conscious act, the act of committing to a topic must itself become more self-transparent. The build-up to committing to a text or topic or author is significant.
In academia, the degrees of freedom when dealing with the curriculum are very limited, though. Students have to cover a certain learning path. Period. This again is not so with open Bildung-spaces. Here it can be totally okay if one takes but one sentence from a course.
This then means that the “course” structure must significantly differ from what academic courses look like. It must be cyclical but much more adaptable to the interests of the participants, i.e. we need different layers of engagement. Because just as those who take the role of leaders in open Bildung-spaces, so are those who take the role of learners not being “paid”. They are there because they want the social exchange and to learn something. And you can neither force them to do their “homework” nor to stay.
Since Hypothesis is mostly used in classrooms, it has not been built to optimize in this regard. As a student, you don’t have much of a choice about what to read. You are just given texts and it is then up to you to read them. There is no need for a conscious choice and commitment. But in an open learning environment, the learner has to come up with what is relevant to them and signify to others how they want to contribute since others are dependent on these contributions.
For this first choice to be rooted in a meaningful orientation, our Zettelkasten can serve as a guide. By simply having available the previous cycles of learning of other students, the learner can already see what others have taken out of a text. They can see what others have taken out of a topic or author. They thus have a live preview of what currently matters most to others who have already devoted to a topic or text. Which can give the learner a first sense for the unknown.
Very much like hearing a piece of music for the first time long before you can play it, you can get a sense of where you are going with your learning. At this level, one doesn’t yet fully understand but still clearly feels the difference in how one interpretation of a piece of music is much more appealing than another. Just as one might hear certain philosophical ideas for the first time and while one still cannot fully grasp them, one has a very strong feeling that there is something to be understood here that really matters.
And compare how different it feels if you approach music by already having experienced it, by already having a sense for it, a sense that “there is something beautiful there to be uncovered even more”. Most professional musicians have had access to this kind of orientational knowledge without even noticing it. It is in their childhood when being surrounded by musical performances and being able to observe how they come into existence that they already got a sense of the relevance of what is being done there.
Compare how much more motivating it is to endure the process of practicing if one has that intuition of relevance on every step of the way. Practicing then becomes easy to endure. Compare that to just being given a text and being told that it supposedly is important and you have to just study it.
It’s not that the latter can’t be productive. Certainly, it can. But it usually works for only one in a hundred. The other 99 grow to literally detest the content they have been given. And it can be productive only if we compare it to doing nothing. Sure, if the alternative is to just sit there and do nothing, then yes, it is more likely to be productive to be given Bach and be forced to practice his fugues. For one out of a hundred, this will reveal a new world; the remaining 99 will at least be able to play a fugue, which is nice.
But if one is to practice and study anyway, the practice that is guided by an intuition of relevance is way more likely to result in personalized knowledge, in knowledge that truly matters to us. Remember what Keith Jarrett said when asked what to practice. It was something along the lines of practicing the music that speaks to you already. It does so for a reason.
In the same way, our commitment to a Bildung-space can be guided by that intuition of relevance. We are not just thrown into an informational space buzzing with triggering claims. We are choosing to enter a closed space because we have intuited it has something to offer to us as a unit. It has something that is meaningful and not just “true”.
07. Depth
Every Zettel can itself be a starting point for another Zettel added on top of it. And this Zettel, respectively, can have its own layers of Zettel on top of it ad infinitum.
One Zettel might thus be a quote from another text on the same issue as the original. Another might be a pictogram illustrating the point made in the original text. Another might be critical, pointing out that other perspectives are possible. Yet another might be a common keyword describing the phenomenon that the author didn’t know about.
The Zettel themselves, on the other hand, come as embedded within a text, within a topic, or the thought system of a person. Thus, no matter where we begin, which Zettel we start with, we always end up being redirected into the entire network of Zettel, topics, and influential thinkers. Endlessly many Zettel in all these directions begin to form patterns about the texts, topics, and opinion leaders that communities care about.
Endlessly many types of Zettel lead in all directions. Thus, when we click on the chapter of the text that we are reading, we see the Zettel added by individuals, but we also see all the Zettel added by the learning community or all the Zettel added by all users of the platform. Everybody has a voice, just as everybody can add categories or types of annotation.
This so far is only slightly different from what we do on existing social media platforms. The difference matters, though. For one, every Zettel is anchorable in another line of text. Furthermore, every Zettel expresses an explicit relationship, and all Zettel are embedded in cyclical Bildungs spaces. And the commitment level and role of those leaving the Zettel behind in relation to the topic at hand are made transparent.
And these simple additions change the way we process distinctions significantly. Every single distinction is now embedded within a bigger context, be it the Bildung- space or the text it is a part of. And against these larger wholes, the fragments become meaningful. These larger wholes bind chaos and complexity into graspable units. They visualize trends, such as which topics end up being relevant to a community of
learners or possible relationships between units of thought.
It is precisely the visualization of such bigger wholes that traditional media, such as narratives, are not particularly good at. If you can tell the story well, if it is a good grand narrative, then yes, text media can do a good job. But it is not in virtue of the medium itself, but despite the medium itself, that the writer succeeds. On the other hand, we can immediately visualize these bigger wholes with new media.
These simple additions, in other words, build some of the basic features of our academic institutions, which are differentiation, responsibilities, integration into larger wholes, and cyclical social engagement, into the fabric of the medium itself. This allows everyday consciousness to become more academic while, on the other hand, avoiding some of the pathological features of academia itself, like hyper-specialization and compartmentalization.
08. Absolution
And finally, I would like to close off with absolution. Absolution is part of every academic course and thus not something one would need to build into Hypothesis. Outside the academic context, though, we need to think about what absolution could look like.
Given that we are not handing out marks, and furthermore, given that the respective commitment levels were freely chosen and passive commitment is allowed, what absolution could be in our context is a wrapping up, a putting together of all the traces that we left behind in our cycle of engagement. Revisiting our exchanges and putting together an anthology, something like an Open Educational Resource or just an essay grounded in the already published annotations.
Much of the actual learning and articulation would have already occurred. We would have already left behind assessment questions, connections, explorations of a topic. As a final review, though, one could have a spot for personal takeaways. A spot where one brings together all those fragments into one or several stories. Stories that would be visible to other future learning generations to come. Stories that would give a hint as to what happened to the subjectivity of the learner.
We have been doing this in academic circles for ages; it is about time it became common sense.
