That's the name of the conference I'm at this weekend. And for a host of reasons, it's been a very different experience than was Watson. About which, more soon. In the meantime, we were asked to post 4-page discussion papers to the assembled folk, and while it's on the conference website, I thought I'd go ahead and stick mine up here--it was written for a panel on "Technological Inventions:"
The 'Intellectual Venture' of Academy 2.0
In the May issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell published "In the Air," a
feature story about former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold, and about invention more
generally. Gladwell argues that we have been too quick to treat all invention as though it were synonymous with artistic creation. Following sociologist Robert Merton, Gladwell
suggests that "our romantic notion of genius," while it may hold true for great works of
art, is less useful when it comes to knowledge in general. Many of the paradigm-shifting
inventions in science and technology have in fact been "multiples;" in other words,
multiple people, otherwise unconnected, "discover" the same idea or "invent" the same
technology at roughly the same time. For Gladwell, these good ideas are "in the air,"
discoverable not only by the solitary genius but by many people in the right place and
time. Myhrvold's ongoing project, a company called Intellectual Ventures, is an attempt
to capitalize on this idea by bringing in leading minds in many different fields to come
together for invention sessions, with the idea that approaching problems from
unconventional directions might lead to solutions. Myhrvold's company, which he
expected might file a hundred patents a year, is currently filing more than 500 a year,
with a backlog of ideas in the thousands ("In the Air").
Merton is neither the only nor even the most recent thinker to tackle the question
of invention, however. Recent work in network studies and organizational theory has
attempted to understand invention as something more tangible than the product of genius
on the one hand, and as something less formulaic or horoscopic than one might find in
the fairly recent genre of corporate self-help manuals. Ronald Burt, for example, has been
working for years as an organizational sociologist, studying the ways that organizations
are formed around what he calls brokerage and closure, the primary strategies by which
members of organizations form social capital. In any social network above a certain size,
people tend to form stronger ties among the members of their immediate sub-networks.
We know our departmental colleagues, by and large, better than we know the average
member of another department. We are more likely to spend time at academic
conferences with friends than with strangers. One positive effect of this closure is the
trust, respect, and affinity that members of this smaller network feel for one another--this
is one form of social capital. But when a larger network separates out into many smaller
ones, communication gaps emerge among those smaller networks; Burt describes these as "structural holes." And at the same time that we benefit from them, the danger is that
these relatively closed networks will trend towards groupthink, becoming echo-chambers.
For Burt, then, brokerage names the opposite tendency, the ability of members of
multiple networks to bridge the structural holes that separate them. Brokerage and closure are, respectively, centrifugal (trending outward) and centripetal (trending inward) forces operating within a network. Both are necessary components of any network. But good ideas, Burt writes, occur with more frequency when there are opportunities for brokerage, when people are encouraged to range beyond their comfort zones and/or echo chambers and to export their own ideas and import others.
It is worth thinking about insights like Burt's when we consider the knowledge
production and circulation in academic disciplines. As Andrew Abbott observes,
disciplines are prone to spread as widely as possible, but within the network formed by
the discipline, the reward system encourages closure rather than brokerage. That is, it
encourages us to specialize such that, even as the discipline's "turf" expands, the
structural holes among specialties and subdisciplines multiply as well. As disciplines
grow, the amount of work one must do to comprehend even a portion of one's own
discipline likewise grows, and thus we focus our attention in our specialties. David
Smit's observations about the fragmentation of rhetoric and composition provide one
recent account of this. As the field has increased in population and importance, its
members have cast their research nets further and further afield in order to locate subjects of study. It is not unusual to read essays in CCC, for example, whose bibliographies are comprised mostly, if not entirely, of texts that would be largely unfamiliar to the majority of that journal's subscribers. And this is to say nothing of the structural holes that separate composition and communication. Despite recent attempts at brokerage by the ARS and others, most of us remain largely ignorant of developments in fields that are closely related to our own. The specialization that would once have occurred at the point in our careers where our work had matured has slowly crept earlier and earlier in the educational process, to the point where our students feel pressured to specialize before they've even taken a PhD seminar. They are taught that the sooner they specialize the better, because otherwise they will struggle to present and to publish, as they now must do before they've earned the degree.
One of the classic accounts for accomplishing these goals comes from John
Swales, whose discussions of academic writing yields the important step of "creating a
research space" (CARS), although the C is sometimes related as "clearing" or "carving
out" a space for one's work. Structural holes, in other words, are often portrayed in our
field not as opportunities for brokerage but as opportunities for the replication of closure.
In rhetoric and composition, where most faculty still serve in literature departments, too
often "originality" is conferred on research by the obscurity of the object of study rather
than method, approach, or ability to engage with the field more broadly. Research spaces
are perceived, for better or worse, not as carefully constructed engagements with the
discipline (and certainly not among multiple disciplines), but as unspoiled territory that
can be claimed and populated with articles and books.
As Gladwell's account of Intellectual Ventures makes clear, there is certainly
value to be had in specialization; the expertise of IV's participants is one of the primary
reasons for its success. But each participant also brings the trained incapacities of the
specialist. Myhrvold's project brokers among those specialists, allowing them to pool
their knowledge as a means of approaching intractable problems in one or more of their
fields, allowing one's person incapacity to be met with another's capacity. The
importance and benefits of that kind of collaboration receive little attention in our field,
an unusual omission considering the emphasis that we often place on the virtues of
collaboration and the social nature of language. But we have been slow to practice what
we preach, especially at disciplinary scales. Even sites of potential brokerage, like our
national conventions, are frequently too large for attendees to venture beyond the comfort
of relatively closed social networks and academic specialties. When we come face to face
with the sheer size of a discipline, our tendency is to retreat to more manageable scales;
our disciplines themselves are shaped by this tendency, as Abbott observes in Chaos of
Disciplines, often in self-similar ways.
It is unlikely that any of us possesses the kinds of resources at Myhrvold's
disposal. But with the recent emergence of software platforms gathered under the
umbrella of Web 2.0, those resources aren't necessary. If Web 1.0 was about siloes and
exclusive, owned content (closure), Web 2.0 has seen a boom in participatory culture,
sites whose function is to allow users to share content (brokerage). You can find pools of
photos at Flickr, bookmarks and tags at Delicious, books and reviews at LibraryThing,
and so on. When I want to follow up on a book I've read, particularly if it's outside of my
field, I'm more likely to visit Amazon than I am any academic site or siloed publisher
search engine. In the past five years, the tools available for us to broker our structural
holes, to explore beyond our closures, have increased exponentially, such that it's less a
matter of resources now and more a matter of commitment to something beyond staking
our individual claims on shrinking patches of disciplinary turf.
But professional inertia works against any such commitment. We still hold to the
artistic model of invention, both in our attitudes towards intellectual property and in the
institutional structures that reward what we do. If Gladwell and others are right, these
attitudes may actually work against us; we may spend so much time clearing our research
spaces that we miss out on what's "in the air." It's not a question of choosing one or the
other; as Burt explains in his work, both are valid forms of accruing social capital, and
each provides us with value that the other cannot. The question instead is one of balance,
and that balance is difficult to strike in an institutional culture that, for all of its talk of
interdisciplinarity, still privileges closure over brokerage when it comes to rewarding the
making of knowledge. That attitude trickles down into our attitudes towards the new
media available to us. I've lost count of the number of colleagues I've seen speak and
write dismissively of weblogs, wikis, Facebook, et al. Those of us who blog as academics
are frequently charged with "wasting" our time on such sites when, presumably, we
should be using it to generate another article or two. From the perspective of a closure-
inflected system, it can be difficult to see the ways that social media transform the ways
we read, write, think, and communicate.
It's a lot less difficult to simply treat these media as tools that make our scholarly
lives more convenient. If we're looking for a particular essay, we can locate it faster
online than we would walking to the campus library, for example. Our hard drives can
slowly take the place of file cabinets, as we convert our libraries to PDFs. Our computers
can give us more access, faster, to more of the field than ever before, certainly, but we
have the opportunity now to rethink the structures underlying that access. We have a
chance to rethink our institutions, our cultures, and even our disciplines in important
ways. Much like Myhrvold's project does for its participants, new media offer us
unprecedented opportunities for brokerage, if we can develop the collective attitude
necessary to "waste" a little time on invention.
***
Whatever the virtues of this little ditty, in addition to the unintended irony of talking about resources in our current financial climate (i wrote it in early Sept), among them you would not count "similarity to the other conference papers." Seriously. Sore-Thumbsville. Check em out yourself if you're tempted to attribute any false modesty to me on this.
I'll have a little more to say, but I've got some sleep and more than a little driving to do first. So for tonight, that's all.
