Via Weez, a silly meme. Type “yourname needs” into Google, and list the resulting suggestions. (I skipped other people’s compilation of the same phrase, which turned up quite a bit in my results.)
Here’s the same thing run through MSN Search, again discarding the other meme posts:
Only one in common between the two! How ‘bout Yahoo?
Fun. :)
I got an email this morning from a friend who was critical of my recent posts related to Microsoft and Google. The friend said that since starting my sabbatical I’ve seemed to be unfailingly critical of Google and positive about Microsoft in my posts, and that I needed to be more aware of my online voice. There was more, particularly on the issue of whether I was somehow damaging my objectivity as an academic by allowing myself to become so publicly supportive of a company.
Lovely way to start a weekend. But after I got over the hurt feelings, I started thinking about the larger issues underlying my new role as a corporate pawn. (Should my blog have a big caveat at the top that says “I’ve been pwnz0rzed!”?…) While I don’t agree completely with this friend, I can’t dismiss these criticisms out of hand, nor can I assume that view of me isn’t shared by others.
I started out by combing through my blog to find and point out the times when I’ve criticized Microsoft’s products and practices, and acknowledged the ability of companies like Google and Apple to delight consumers in a way that Microsoft consistently fails to do. (In fact, during my keynote speech at Internet Librarian I explicitly told the audience that I thought many—if not most—of Microsoft’s products sucked—and did so while proudly sporting my 17” powerbook.) But that’s not really the point, is it? It’s perception that’s at issue here, and perhaps I need to more be aware of that perception.
There are a lot of great researchers who work for research labs—Microsoft Research and Google Labs and Yahoo Research are full of them, as are the labs at HP and PARC and IBM. Very few of those researchers have blogs, though. Perhaps it’s because it’s so very hard to strike a balance between bias and objectivity when you’re in this in-between world, and talking too much about your day to day life in the belly of the beast exposes more of that tension?
Where I may be erring on the side of transparency, it’s been primarily an attempt to avoid erring on the side of opacity. Once you take a job working for a company—rather than doing grant-funded collaborative research—you change your relationship to that company. Perhaps I was wrong in thinking that I should be up front about my experiences and reactions to working here…but I’d like to think that there’s more good than bad to be gained from my transparency.
My critic felt that my blog posts here undermined my validity as an “objective” academic, but I’m not sure that I agree. If I were presenting my blog as unbiased research, that would be one thing. But research has to stand on its own in terms of methodology and conclusions—and besides that, is there really such thing as an “unbiased” researcher? For me, knowing the biases of the researchers makes the research more credible rather than less, because I don’t feel as though I need to look for hidden motives. Also, my identity as an academic has always been tied up far more in my teaching than in my research (a function of being a professor at a teaching-focused institution)—and I suspect that my students are far more influenced by the Powerbook I carry, my intense dislike for Microsoft products Powerpoint and Windows, and my use of GMail than they are by any blog posts describing how much I like the people I’m working with at Microsoft.
One of my goals for this sabbatical was to give people a sense of what it’s like to be inside a corporation that’s often thought of as “faceless,” and that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The alternative is to be more opaque, to only write about “big ideas,” but that’s never been the way I approached my personal blog.
In terms of my recent negativity about Google—there’s definitely a mix of things going on there. My basic concern about Google’s domination of the search market (particularly in the hearts and minds of kids) predates my employment with Microsoft, and is a concern shared by a number of people in the library profession (as I pointed out in my Internet Librarian notes). In many ways, Google is the new Microsoft—when you get to be the 10,000-pound-gorilla, people start to mistrust your motives. They’re not a scrappy startup anymore, and they shouldn’t continue to be thought of as such. (But even saying that is to acknowledge how negatively Microsoft is perceived, and for good reason—from its market practices to its often-awful products, MS has gotten its bad reputation the old-fashioned way—they’ve earned it.) Google’s not making the same mistakes as Microsoft, but it’s making plenty of its own. Their secrecy surrounding all of their work is to me antithetical to both academic and library approaches. And in the case of book digitization, I though Roy Tennant’s criticisms were spot-on. Microsoft may have made—and be making still—a lot of bad, ham-handed, bad-for-the-consumer moves…but joining the OCA was not one of those, and I would have praised that even if I hadn’t been an employee.
I don’t really want to work someplace that I can’t be passionate about. And I don’t want to pretend that I’m not engaged in and excited about an environment if I’m not. As a researcher, to what extent should the “rules” (oh, geez, i really hate blogging rules) be different for me than they are for a non-research corporate blogger? At the end of the day, however, I do have to wonder if perhaps I’ve been sucked a little too far into the “us against them” mentality that’s so common inside of corporations (universities, of course, suffer from none of that competitiveness [cough, cough]).
The problem for me right now is that I have only two perspectives on this—mine, and the friend who was brave enough to share a critical view with me. That’s not enough to really triangulate with. So…where do you think the balance lies? (I’m going to work really hard to keep from being defensive in the comments, so if you post something and I don’t respond, I assure you it doesn’t mean I didn’t read it; I just want to absorb right now rather than reacting.)
Presented without comment. (See the previous post…) But here’s a lengthy excerpt from an essay that should be required reading for technologists:
My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”
Google is Turing’s cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: “When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?”
Dyson closes with a powerful quote from science fiction writer Simon Ings (can’t find what book this is from; if you know, please leave a comment):
“When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”
I’m posting this as much for myself as for anyone reading the blog. Lately I keep coming across things that really force me to stop and think, and then they slip away and out of my attention radius. When they’re here in the blog, they’re less “out of sight, out of mind.”
Collin Brooke posted a nice piece tonight on “Blogging Practices, and I found his criticisms of academia to be right on target:
I’m constantly struck by how little we seem to understand or even talk about what it takes to publish, what publishing our work accomplishes (and in some cases, how little it can accomplish), what the real costs and rewards for our work are, etc. As I was preparing that talk a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like the height of obviousness to me to describe humanities scholarship as Long Tail work, and yet, I see indications all around me that we don’t want to think of our work in that way: our aversion to collaboration, our inability to aggregate, our obsession with celebrity, etc. Hell, I have to fight every day to keep those things at bay—I love to imagine being paid lots of money to keynote conferences, to have my work read and discussed far and wide, to be semi-famous. But that’s a Head reward system that disguises the more modest (but potentially longer lasting) rewards at the Tail end of things.
So, I’m in a strange place as an academic. I was recently paid money (“lots” is a relative term, I suppose) to keynote a conference. Unlike many academics, I have little aversion to collaboration or aggregation. But I am a tenured associate professor with a lab of my own, and I often feel like a stranger in a strange land no matter where I am.
Early on in my blogging, I wrote about aspects of synchronicity and collaboration in blogging, as well as my frustration with the fact that I seemed unable to produce original thoughts—that my skill was in synthesis rather than creation.
As time has passed (and I’ve gotten tenure, and some modicum of readership—though that’s been dropping lately with my relative paucity of posts), I’ve started to be able to forgive myself for my lack of traditional scholarly output, and to be able to value my role as more of a human aggregator.
I wish academia did a better job of valuing the kinds of skills I’ve got—sifting and sorting, connecting the dots and seeing the big picture, intuiting and forecasting. It’s not that traditional research isn’t valuable—it’s just that it’s not the only way to put education and knowledge to work. RIT is better than most schools in recognizing a diversity of scholarship approaches (basing its recent scholarship policy on Boyer’s reasonably broad definitions. But they’re the exception rather than the rule.
To the extent that I’m part of the “head,” the best thing I think I can do with that visibility is connect up more people in the tail. I don’t want to get stuck in an incestuous echo chamber of digerati blogs and conferences—which is perhaps why I took such pleasure in being at Internet Librarian, where I was learning every bit as much as I was teaching.
(Collin tagged his post with academy2.0, which made me smile.)
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