Participation Literacy

What skin am I talking about? The skin belongs to the concept Web 2.0. It also belongs to me as a researcher, and it certainly belongs to technology and society as a whole. I do not know about you, but I am quite tired of the word Web 2.0 by now. I guess you also might be a bit tired if you read the text above. For me it is a sign of health to get tired of a concept after a period of enthusiasm – which you perhaps did not share. The knowledge I have created in the research process has in a way unveiled the concept. Knowledge is power. I do not think it is possible to crawl under anyone’s or anything’s skin without knowledge about the nature of the skin.

In the last century and a half, scientific development has been breathtaking, but the understanding of this progress has dramatically changed. It is characterized by the transition from the culture of “science” to the culture of “research.” Science is certainty; research is uncertainty. Science is supposed to be cold, straight, and detached; research is warm, involving, and risky. Science puts an end to the vagaries of human disputes; research creates controversies. Science produces objectivity by escaping as much as possible from the shackles of ideology, passions, and emotions; research feeds on all of those to render objects of inquiry familiar. (Latour, 1998)

You have just concluded reading (or browsing through, or skipping it completely) Part II of my Licentiate Thesis. Some of you probably have many questions on your mind. One of these might be: Is this really science? My answer must be: no, this is not science, if you by science mean revealing objective, universal truth in a context of discovery. Part II above is a part of my Licentiate Thesis and could be referred to as a piece of research. As Bruno Latour writes in the quote above there is a difference between Science and Research. The major difference lies in the attitude to your activity. I do not perform science since I know with certainty I cannot be objective and detached. This is also one of the few things I know with certainty. This certainty is of course situated, which means it might not be truth from another situated perspective. I cannot escape the net of knowledge I am integrated in. My knowledge is true and accountable, because it is situated (Haraway, 1991). It is not unlimited or general. For me, my knowledge is fun and exciting and deadly serious. My time on this earth is very dear to me, thus I would not waste it by blabbering about things with no importance. This importance is of course also situated and the further you come from its source, the more faded it becomes.

One thing Bruno Latour is not explicit about in the quote above is irony. Irony is the energy in (my) life and a very important part of research. Irony shows that language is not as clear and detached as you might think or wish. The spotlight of irony illuminates the complex nature of language. Irony is like a layer of quicksand between the signifier and the signified.

The figure to the left illustrates a modification of Saussure’s classic model of the sign (without the irony, form and concept parts, which are my additions). The signifier represents the form and the signified represents concept. If I use this model for the Web 2.0 concept, the letters forming the word are the signifier and everything it points to, as discussed in Part II, is the signified. Irony could be described as an uncertainty area between the form and the concept.

It is my belief that a large part of the researchosphere could have a broader relation to conceptual thinking. If I write “many researchers are too much politicians”, then I probably would get critique such as “What do you mean by politicians? Define and specify!”, “What do you mean with many?”, or “All research is politics, how could it not be?”. You could say all these questions are more than valid, their purpose is a clarification. But you could also say these questions are examples of an impossible need for control. These questioners throw themselves on the break when they can not control the meaning of the utterance. They have to have more input to make themselves try to interpret my message. For me though (in this situation), my utterance was an example of fairly light weight ironic communication. I just wanted the sentence to root in the other persons mind. I wanted the portions of shared meaning in the message explode in their own experience, and that all persons included would make their own knowledge connections from that. There is a huge amount of collectiveness when a group of people share a complex or ambiguous meaning. Everyone has an understanding, rooted in their knowledge and experience, but has scant control over the others’ understanding. There is an intersection where the participants’ understanding coincide and that intersection is connected to a network of deeper understanding. There is a collective intelligence immanent in that network of knowledge. This collective intelligence is implicit and borders on fiction. If we could make the statement “many researchers are too much politicians” transparent and see through it into the minds of the persons sharing the understanding of that statement, we would be speechless by the enormous amount of meaning rooted in these minds and connected to the statement. One day the Web 2.0 sense of collective intelligence might be able to harness the meaning constructed in these networks of silent knowledge.

I hope you did not get hooked up by the sentence “many researchers are too much politicians”. Of course, all reseach is very much about politics. Politics is integrated in research. Politics is much of the good and the bad in research. Research is politics (Tham, 1995).

One of my dear colleagues once exclaimed “Collective Intelligence, what a disgusting word”! I did not ask about the deeper meaning in that exclamation. Since I had quite a good deal of contextual knowledge in the matter, my head started to spin and I made several conclusions. Most of these conclusions were implicit and difficult to use in the construction of “rational” knowledge (In this context, rational knowledge means “common sense” and not rational knowledge in Descartes sense). I felt strongly that if I had asked my colleague to enlighten me, I would have been served an attempt of clarification. This clarification would land within what Habermas called “communicative action” - we must be able to take issue with or argue with a speech act for it to be communicative action (Habermas, 1987). I did not want to ask for a clarification since I felt it would narrow the understanding I constructed from the situation. For me, irony is the base for poetry in my daily life. This does not mean a nihilistic view of communicative meaning. You can not communicate with only irony. Irony is contextual. Without context, irony is worthless, or rather; the nature of irony includes a context. Without a context, irony is just empty signs. An ironic speech act must have a skeleton of clarification.

I am sorry to say that the Web 2.0 mindset is widening the gap between those who are inside and those who are outside. Web 2.0 is a cultural approach, just like phenomenology or golf. All reseach I have done has in some sense buried me deep into the knowledge web of this line of thinking. My hope is that this text will help to bring me closer again; both by helping other persons getting inside, and for me to get a clearer view of the outside. It is important to understand, though, that Web 2.0 is also an ideology and not just a technology. It is a promise of another kind of life and not just a new set of tools – which are not even altogether new.

Where is this is leading? It is leading right into the heart of the cyborg figure.