Who Reacted and How

Last night the Security section of CNET News ran the following report of a breach by Edward Moyer:

Epsilon, which manages e-mail communications for TiVo, JP Morgan Chase, Capital One Financial, US Bank, the Kroger grocery chain, and other clients, said this week that it suffered a security breach that revealed data on some of its clients' customers.

Epsilon, which says it sends 40 billion e-mails annually, released a statement yesterday saying that on March 30 it detected an "unauthroized entry" [sic] into its system that exposed customer names and e-mail addresses. The company said "no other personal identifiable information associated with those names was at risk."

Bloomberg reported that an Epsilon representative would not say how many other clients might be affected, citing an ongoing investigation.

While this is clearly interesting on its own merits, my attention was drawn to Moyer’s account of how some of these businesses reacted when they were informed of the situation by Epsilon.  Kroger’s strategy was to use electronic mail to deliver a short message:

Kroger wants to remind you not to open e-mails from senders you do not know.  Also, Kroger would never ask you to e-mail personal information such as credit card numbers or social security numbers. If you receive such a request, it did not come from Kroger and should be deleted.

While this does not say anything that readers should not know, it provides a useful reminder through the very channel that had been placed at risk.  This amounts of a vote of confidence in Epsilon’s statement and their approach to managing electronic mail.  It is also likely to be seen by those who matter the most.

This strikes me as a far better understanding of “customer relationship management” than the actions of Chase and Capital One, each of which simply posted the information on their respective Web sites.  Chase did a relatively poor job of directing attention.  The notice is on the home page in the form:  “Please read important message to all Chase customers  LEARN MORE.”  Most critical is that this summary should have been more informative.  Many (probably myself included) would view this with suspicion as being just another pitch to sell something.  In my case, though, I would never see the message, since, as a Chase customer, I tend to go directly to the My Accounts page.  Not only is there no notice of the problem on that page, but also there is not a message in the internal Secure Message Center alerting me that a problem may exist.  Capital One, however, turned out to be even worse, since they do not even provide a pointer to their message on their home page.

It seems to me that the main conclusion to draw from this comparison is that Kroger gave more thought to communicating with their customers than either Chase or Capital One did.  One reason may be that Kroger has to deal with its customers as grocery shoppers on a week-by-week basis, if not with greater frequency.  The financial sector, on the other hand, does not think about engaging with customers with such frequency.  As a corollary this means that businesses in the financial sector “understand” (scare quotes intended) their customers by analyzing databases, while Kroger’s may actually try to establish understanding through engagement on the floor of their outlets.  I would further suggest that Capital One, in particular, seems to feel that it is important to invest its resources in advertising to bring in more customers than in engaging in any meaningful way with the customers it already has (perhaps because they think of engagement in terms of selling more stuff rather than providing the services associated with that stuff).  This may be yet another lens through which we can examine the state of our current economic problems and our prospects for recovery.

Is Reading Supposed to be Comfortable?

I rather like the amount of background provided by the BBC News report of the controversial new edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.  For those yet to feel the repercussions of this story, it concerns the editorial decisions of Alan Gribben, Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama;  and, as of this morning, I would guess that the level of controversy over his editing of Twain will be matched only by the reaction to the BBC describing him as a “Twain scholar.”  From my point of view, that phrase is not only an inaccurate description of Gribben but also an insult to Twain.

What has created such a stir has been primarily Gribben’s decision to replace all instances of that notorious N-word with “slave.”  Similar reasoning apparently prompted him also to replace all occurrences of “injun” with “Indian.”  The BBC account reports Gribben as saying that he has given many public readings of Twain, from which he observed that “when he replaced the [N-] word with ‘slave’, audiences were more comfortable.”

The BBC editors were rather clever in setting the light under which this remark would be read.  They preceded it with a quote given by Cindy Lovell, Executive Director of The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, to Reuters:

He wrote to make us squirm and to poke us with a sharp stick.  That was the purpose.

Not only do I heartily endorse Lovell, but also I wish to be bold enough to suggest that her remark applies to just about any author worth reading.  There is something infantile about reading only for the comfort of experiencing what we already know.  Reading matter that lacks any sign of that “sharp stick” is probably not worth the effort of reading.

This brings to mind not only what publishers are doing these days in the name of market share but also the recent advertising campaign for the iPad.  I am referring to all those billboards that show an iPad comfortably settled into a lap at the near end of a pair of outstretched legs, suggesting that the best place for your iPad is in the hammock in your back yard (even if your yard lacks a hammock or your home lacks a yard).  This may be an appropriate setting for a text that makes only marginal effort to engage with the mind (leading me to suggest that this explains why Decision Points has been such a popular Kindle gift);  but it has little to do with reading, at least in the ways that I hope our schools try to approach that activity.  From this point of view, my argument amounts to an extended elaboration on how The Times of London chose to describe Gribben’s edition:  They called it “a well-intentioned act of cultural vandalism and obscurantism that constricts rather than expands the life of the mind.”  I wish I could have said it that well.

Not Worth the Paper?

This morning Caroline McCarthy used her CNET News column, The Social, to run through the best seller numbers from Amazon.  The item that interested me the most was the following:

The most-gifted Kindle book on Amazon was "Decision Points," the memoirs of former President George W. Bush.

My interest in this particular result was probably primed by a remark I had quoted from Lisa Jardine on the subject of reading a book through an electronic device:

For everyday purposes I now find my electronic reader allows me to pursue a book I am enjoying wherever I go. I have to confess that I am reading Tony Blair's autobiography, purchased from my favourite online bookseller, on my iPad. Having spent much of the past week in airports and on planes, there is little doubt in my mind that this is far and away the most convenient way to read.

My reaction to this observation is worth reproducing:

Very little of my reading is a matter of starting on the first page and chugging my way through until the pages have been exhausted. I am always bouncing around the text I am reading. I suspect that Jardine approaches much of her reading the same way, in which case she dropped a subtle review of Blair's book on us. Whenever I read a biography, I often find myself looking back in the text to see if some event in childhood or youth had an impact on another event at a more advanced age. I wonder whether or not Jardine decided that it was not worth taking the time to look for such connections while reading Blair's memoirs!

This raises another point, which is about why we read in the first place. I suspect that many of those who read in airports and on planes do so as an antidote for idleness. However, one does not have to commit to full-out Derrida-style engagement to keep idleness at bay. Thus, I suspect that the print version of the magazine in which Jardine's columns appear (not to mention Blair's memoir) is probably far more suited to holding off idleness on a long flight than any text by Derrida could be (although I cannot avoid confessing that I made quite a lot of progress in Speech and Phenomena on one such flight)!

I recently read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s review of Blair’s memoir in the last (December 23) issue of The New York Review of Books;  and I am now reading Joseph Lelyveld’s take on Decision Points in the current (January 13) issue.  I currently have so much to read that I have to confess that neither article has encouraged me to take on the text itself in any setting.  Indeed, the best part of Wheatcroft’s piece was the title (which I hope was his own selection), “NO Prime Minister!”

Nevertheless, I found myself thinking about Jardine’s approach to reading Blair, which, without intending to cast any aspersions on Jardine, I would probably call “context-free reading.”  From this point of view, I can see how well suited Decision Points would be to an electronic reader.  If there is any theme that unifies the narrative about Bush, it is his character trait as a man so guided by faith that he only had to consult his own heart about matters of right and wrong, regardless of any complexities of context surrounding the decision he had to make (particularly, as Lelyveld was quick to observe, complexities having to do with consequences).  From this point of view, a context-free approach would probably provide the most sympathetic setting for reading Bush:  If he never let context get in the way of his own heart, why should the reader?

This then raises my other point as to whether or not I would turn to Decision Points as an “antidote for idleness.”  While I am willing to grant that I have an any-port-in-a-storm attitude when my reading matter is limited, I try to stave off that attitude with advance preparation, particularly if I have to face the tedium of both airports and airplanes.  (I suspect this is one reason why I wear jackets with pockets large enough to accommodate The New York Review of Books.)  However, where long-distance travel is concerned, the last thing I want is reading matter likely to aggravate me, since I am trying to avoid being reminded of just how uncomfortable such travel can be;  and I suspect that aggravation would be my primary reaction to being exposed, once again, to an account by this former President of why he not only did what he did but continues (for the most part) to stand by the decisions he made.  Deciphering Derrida will always be challenging;  but it engages my mind with positive thoughts, which is far more than I can say about President Obama’s predecessor!

Books and Reading

I enjoyed Lisa Jardine's latest Point of View column, even if the way it was introduced on the BBC News Web site made me a bit skeptical:

Books are a pleasure on so many different levels, but is how we consume them changing, asks Lisa Jardine in her A Point of View column.

It was that verb "consume" that set me to worrying. Was this going to be yet another market-oriented piece that reduced books to consumable products in the same category as laundry detergent?

Fortunately, there was no mention of detergent; but there was a fair amount of attention given to Oprah Winfrey and her Book Club. Furthermore, that attention was, for the most part, concentrated on the way a popular television program got its viewers interested in reading, beginning with one novel and gradually branching out into a project that may have fallen short of Mortimer Adler's Great Books of the Western World ambitions but was far from trivial. Jardine emphasized the substance of the matter with the example of one broadcast consisting of an "extended seminar" with Toni Morrison and members of the television audience (chosen by ballot) when the Book Club selection was Paradise.

This success of the Book Club led to an unexpected consequence that made it clear that a book was definitely something other than laundry detergent. Here is how Jardine described that consequence:

In the course of Oprah's animated dialogue on - and off - screen with her audience, as she promoted the reading of serious and challenging books by those who were not accustomed to reading for pleasure at all, she discovered that they not only wanted to own the books they read, they wanted to keep them, and sometimes to pass them to others as treasured gifts.

And if books were to take pride of place in their living room, they really wanted them to be properly bound, in good-looking hard covers.

One of the early titles she recommended, from the back list of a well-known author, was only available in paperback. Oprah expressed the view strongly on her show that the work ought to be made available in an inexpensive hardback, since that was what her audience wanted - a book to keep.

The publisher responded with an entire new hardback printing, at an affordable, heavily subsidised cover price (by then it was clear that here was a guaranteed sale of millions of copies).

This led to another unanticipated personal consequence for Jardine herself, regarding her relationship to electronic book technology:

At the beginning of this year I expressed the view here that I would always consider an electronic book a poor substitute for the real thing. Handling a book, enjoying the design, the binding and the illustrations, perhaps annotating its pages with my own responses to what I am reading, are, for me, and always will be, I said, a crucial part of the enjoyment of a good book.

Well, as so often in my life, I have had to reconsider. For everyday purposes I now find my electronic reader allows me to pursue a book I am enjoying wherever I go. I have to confess that I am reading Tony Blair's autobiography, purchased from my favourite online bookseller, on my iPad. Having spent much of the past week in airports and on planes, there is little doubt in my mind that this is far and away the most convenient way to read.

And even now that I am settled back at home after my wanderings, I won't, I am afraid, be purchasing a conventional copy, even though I know that in addition to there being no glossy cover, my copy is missing the accompanying, never seen before, Blair family photographs (as I noted when I looked over the shoulder of my neighbour, reading more conventionally, on a plane from Berlin to Rome).

I won't even be tempted by a special copy, in a red cloth slip cover, with handsome gold lettering, signed by the author.

Unfortunately, this is where her column ends; but my own feeling is that, where matters of books and reading are concerned, the discussion is only beginning.

Specifically, the conversational style of her column allows Jardine to migrate freely between matters of books and practices of reading, both of which involve some form of "consumption." What is lost, however, is that "consumption through reading" should not be confused with matters of consumption concerned with the book-as-product (either physical or digital). Yet it is precisely that confusion that tends to cloud most discussions concerned with the recent spate of technologies for reading digital texts.

What is missing from those discussions is the recognition that reading is an activity and, more specifically, that the activity is based on a motivated commitment to engage with a text. The nature of that engagement is highly text-dependent; and, unless we recognize that different texts require different types of engagement (without even worrying about whether or not those types can be rank-ordered by complexity), we shall fall into the trap of assuming that an electronic book must be a one-size-fits-all "technology solution." I suppose we have Jacques Derrida to thank for his insights into this engagement-based point of view. However, those of us who have read (or tried to read) his texts on this matter have discovered that he deliberately poses his own (often intimidating) challenges of engagement to readers wishing to learn what he has to say about engagement! (This is the school of thought that you have to experience the subject matter in order to understand it.) Rather than diving into the deep end of Derrida, however, let me offer a few examples of my own decisions concerning what I read digitally or physically.

First of all, I read Jardine's column "on the screen." It was part of my "morning news ritual," when I review the RSS feeds that Google Reader has harvested for me. It made for good digital reading because it was short. However, because it made a variety of points, I found that my own reading involved a fair amount of scrolling through the text itself, as I went about building my own "mental model" of what she had to say. Thus, by "short" I do not mean "read quickly;" I mean that it was on a scale that made that kind of scrolling feasible.

This is a major point that has been overlooked by just about every "electronic book" I have encountered. Very little of my reading is a matter of starting on the first page and chugging my way through until the pages have been exhausted. I am always bouncing around the text I am reading. I suspect that Jardine approaches much of her reading the same way, in which case she dropped a subtle review of Blair's book on us. Whenever I read a biography, I often find myself looking back in the text to see if some event in childhood or youth had an impact on another event at a more advanced age. I wonder whether or not Jardine decided that it was not worth taking the time to look for such connections while reading Blair's memoirs!

This raises another point, which is about why we read in the first place. I suspect that many of those who read in airports and on planes do so as an antidote for idleness. However, one does not have to commit to full-out Derrida-style engagement to keep idleness at bay. Thus, I suspect that the print version of the magazine in which Jardine's columns appear (not to mention Blair's memoir) is probably far more suited to holding off idleness on a long flight than any text by Derrida could be (although I cannot avoid confessing that I made quite a lot of progress in Speech and Phenomena on one such flight)!

So, having provided a case of a text that I did read from a screen, let me now offer an example of one I printed to have available for "physical" reading. I feel this is a useful example because I encountered it through that same morning routine of reviewing RSS feeds. The piece is an extended article from the latest issue of The New York Review of Books by Nicholas Lemann examining the recent HBO television series Treme. That adjective "extended" was intended as contrast with the adjective "short" applied to Jardine's piece. Lemann is very much in Jardine's league when it comes to thoughtful writing; but he was taking on several hours of television dealing with many different dimensions of post-Katrina New Orleans. This required far more than an exposition on Jardine's column-length scale. Most likely I shall not get through it in one sitting. More important, however, is that, again, I expect that my reading will be non-linear, refreshing my memory of earlier parts of the text as Lemann develops his argument. The Web site for this piece spreads it across three Web pages, which makes seeking out what you have already read even more difficult. There is also a single-page version; but that imposes its own problems of getting lost while scrolling.

I am willing to grant that this whole issue of engagement may have been "beyond the scope" of Jardine's column. However, I think it is important to recognize that engagement is not some arcane abstraction suitable only for those still interested in reading Derrida. Every member of Oprah's Book Club is as committed to engaging with text as I am when I read Derrida, Lemann, or Jardine. I would even venture to guess that not every Club member engages with a given text in the same way, which is why discussions about what one has read can be so fruitful. Thus, it is not the book that is threatened by electronic technology but the richness of the reading experience. Both Jardine and Book Club members appreciate that richness; but when will it be honored by those reading devices that have become the latest fad as "objects for consumption?"

Carrots and Sticks

Given the way events are unfolding in Israel, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva might want to give serious consideration to holding a "lessons learned" meeting with former President Jimmy Carter and our current envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell. Both of these men clearly understand the value of the reputation of an "honest broker;" and both appreciate the difficulty of both establishing and maintaining that reputation. Lula is currently in Israel on a trip described in a BBC News report as follows:

Mr Lula described his visit to Israel as "a mission of peace" that he hoped would help his country emerge as a bigger player in foreign affairs.

Lula seems to subscribe to many of the precepts outlined by Dennis Ross (who took his own hard knocks in the Middle East) in his Statecraft book, particularly those that apply to the judicious management of both carrots and sticks. Thanks to the blinders imposed by our own media, most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that Brazil has any carrots to bring to the table. This is why we need to turn to a source like the BBC to enhance our "sense of reality," at least where global matters are concerned:

He [Lula] informed Israeli President Shimon Peres that Israel had been accepted as the first non-South American partner in the free trade group, Mercosur.

Brazil is Israel's largest trading partner in Latin America, and trade between Brazil and Iran has also grown by 40% during Mr Lula's presidency.

So how does the Foreign Minister of Israel react to a world leader who gives equal priority to both world peace and effective trade relations? Here is how the BBC reported the answer:

Israeli and Brazilian media said Avigdor Lieberman declined to attend meetings with the visiting head of state and his address to parliament.

Mr Lieberman was reportedly upset that Mr Lula refused to visit the grave of the founder of the Zionist movement.

Mr Lula also opposes sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

Had anyone else (even Israeli) done this, I would be thinking about giving an early Chutzpah of the Week award; but I have come to accept that such behavior is business as usual for Lieberman, apparently with the approval of his boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Apparently, now that the United States has grown out of the faith-based policy making of the Bush Administration, Israel is determined to fill in the gap, persisting in the metaphor of hauling the Ark of the Covenant into battle. Let us hope that Lula can keep a cool head in the face of such silliness and persist in his efforts.

Republican Opposition (again)

We can now take it for granted that, whatever action the current Administration takes on any issue, the Republicans will speak out against it. Thus, while it appeared that the Republican's had ceded Sunday morning television to the Democrats, particularly David Axelrod's representation of President Barack Obama's disapproval of recent Israeli actions in the strongest of language, all in the interest of restoring the reputation of the United States as an "honest broker" in support of George Mitchell's ongoing efforts to negotiate a Middle East peace, we knew it would not take long for the Republicans to find cause for complaint. It was only a question of what the complaint would be and who would be doing the complaining.

The "who" turned out to be an interesting choice, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who happens to be the only Jewish Republican in the House; and, according to an Agence France-Presse story that just appeared on Yahoo! News, he held a breakfast with reporters to say his piece (otherwise known as the Republican Party's latest salvo on the White House). As I see it, the critical sentence from his statement is the following:

Peace is what we are about in this country and we're about trying to facilitate that, but it should be peace on Israel's terms.

In other words his attack against the recent highly critical rhetoric from Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Axelrod-speaking-for-Obama is basically an attack on their combined efforts to recover that "honest broker" position, without which Mitchell will never be able to accomplish very much.

This reminds me a bit of that joke that reductively trivializes the difference between Democrats and Republicans:

Democrats think Republicans are stupid.
Republicans think Democrats are wrong.

Whether or not he realized it, Cantor reduced the whole question of Middle East negotiations to the premise that Israel's policies and actions are "right;" and, as a corollary, any opposition to those policies and actions, whether from Israel's neighbors, the United States, or the European Union (which has now decided to stand with Obama's position), is "wrong." This is the same Manichaeism under which former President George W. Bush saw foreign policy as a battlefield for the ultimate conflict between good and evil. It is the sure way to kill any possibility of communication between opposing points of view, either face-to-face or through a mediating agent like Mitchell. In the face of such reasoning, Cantor (or the Republicans who helped him prepare his remarks) failed to appreciate that "peace on Israel's terms" can only be the one-sided pax Romana that comes about when a conqueror totally subdues the conquered. The problem is that, like democracy (to reflect on an observation made by Mohammad Khatami about the political situation in Iraq), peace cannot be imposed; it must be cultivated in its own environment and allowed to grow of its own accord. (Also like democracy, as Gordon Wood observed in his latest book, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, what actually grows is not necessarily what those who planted the seeds expected!) The failure of the Bush Administration to appreciate this precept had a devastating effect on our standing in the world community, and the Obama Administration has done much to restore that standing. It is, to say the least, regrettable that, in their obsessive drive to recover political control, the Republicans now seem so determined to dismantle that recovery.

Neither Sticks nor Stones

As could have been guessed, the rhetorical assault over Israel's latest settlement development move has had no effect. We could have seen it coming. We already knew that the full extent of regret on the part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to do with the bad timing of the announcement, rather than the substance of the Ramat Shlomo plan itself. This was confirmed by the latest report on Al Jazeera English:

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has rejected calls from the US to halt settlement plans in occupied East Jerusalem, saying plans for building new homes would go ahead.

In a speech to Israel's parliament on Monday, Netanyahu said construction "will continue in Jerusalem as this has been the case for the past 42 years" in reference to the 1967 occupation of the mainly Arab territory.

Yesterday I reported that we had heard little from Israel's defenders in this country to respond to the level of indignation expressed by Vice President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Chief of Staff David Axelrod (presumably speaking on behalf of President Barack Obama). Yesterday AIPAC finally released a statement, which at best can be described as muted:

AIPAC calls on the administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State.

Nevertheless, it is clearly a reaction against American indignation, even it is it not a blatant endorsement of Israeli arrogance. If it assumes that defusing the tension is strictly an American responsibility, rather than a joint effort of both the United States and Israel, then the statement is unlikely to improve the reception it is likely to get "in the lobbies of the Congressional buildings," as I put it yesterday. There is no guarantee, of course, that the lobbying power of AIPAC will fall from its currently lofty height. However, if, as is likely, AIPAC is one of the major impediments to our being perceived as an "honest broker" (which would justify why a country like Brazil should now be considering entering as a mediator), then a radical diminishing (if not elimination) of AIPAC influence will be prerequisite to rebuilding our credibility in the Middle East.

Vindicating Carter

I have always felt that the one American who has seriously and persistently pursued the premise that peace can only come to the Middle East by honoring the principles that mean the most to both Israelis and Palestinians has been former President Jimmy Carter. He may keep changing his tactical recommendations. However, he keeps his eye on the prize; and his premise still provides the foundation for his strategic point of view. Thus, for him the greatest threats arise when that premise is violated.

This week we saw the Obama Administration take steps towards embracing the same premise. Israeli settlement development has become a blatant dishonoring of Palestinian principles, and it was beginning to seem as if the Obama Administration would apply the same benign neglect as preceding administrations, probably because Israel puts as much force behind its lobbying guns as it does behind its armaments. Unfortunately, Israel seems to have deteriorated to a condition in which they put as much faith in lobbying as they used to put in the Ark of the Covenant; and, as was the case with the latter, they suffered a major setback for their arrogance (which their own Scripture describes as Divine punishment). Fortunately, this time around the setback may lead to a serious rethinking of the settlement policy, as a result of a move that may have undermined the usual lobbying forces.

That move, of course, was the announcement of settlement plans for Ramat Shlomo, located in East Jerusalem, that coincided with the state visit by Vice President Joseph Biden. Biden refused to take this arrogance in stride in the interest of diplomacy. Instead, he used every opportunity to deliver the message that the United States would not tolerate such counterproductive measures; and that included delivering that message while on the same stage as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Ultimately, this squeezed a few apologetic remarks from Netanyahu but no sign that the policy was going to change. Meanwhile, after Biden had concluded his visit, his position was reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and this morning David Axelrod was dispatched to the NBC division of the "Sabbath Day Gasbags" circuit (otherwise known as Meet the Press). To make it clear that neither Biden nor Clinton were having second thoughts about pulling any punches, Axelrod took the same position in his own remarks about the Israeli actions:

This was an affront, it was an insult but most importantly it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region.

We have just started proximity talks, that is shuttle diplomacy, between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and for this announcement to come at that time was very destructive.

The strength of this unity of voices can be appreciated by the fact that we have heard little hue and cry from Israel's defenders to the effect that this Administration position is yet another act of latent anti-Semitism. That dog is just not going to hunt this time, just as the Ark of the Covenant could not be counted on the lead the Israelites to military victory.

One incident, of course, does not redeem the reputation of the United States as an "honest broker." However, it is still a step in the right direction. If it has created a situation in which organizations such as AIPAC will be less welcome in the lobbies of the Congressional buildings, that could well further serious moves towards peace in the Middle East. The window of opportunity may be narrow, but it can still be wide enough to reverse a status quo that has impeded that elusive goal thus far. We should watch this coming week to see whether or not this opportunity is taken seriously.

Bringing the Hamas Question into the Spotlight

Once again, we must turn to Al Jazeera English to satisfy our need for a context-based account of our alleged "vigorous engagement" towards peace in the Middle East, particularly as regards whether or not Hamas will be allowed to participate in that engagement. The basis for their latest report began with the morning papers:

Several ex-senior officials in the US government have written to Barack Obama, the president, urging him to seek dialogue with the Palestinian Hamas movement, a newspaper report says.

The Boston Globe on Sunday reported that the group has called on the White House to hold talks with Hamas leaders to persuade the Palestinian group to lay down arms and join the rival Fatah in a unity government.

Specific names cited in the Al Jazeera account include Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Paul Volcker, hardly the sort of names one would associated with the accusations of Chamberlain-like appeasement that the Bush Administration was so quick to flourish. Just as surprising as the signatories, however, was the amount of time it took for this story to surface:

The letter was handed to Obama just days before he took office in January, the newspaper reported.

Where Al Jazeera could go beyond the Boston Globe was in seeking out a source who could address both sides of this Hamas question and its potential for impeding any serious engagement. They found such a source in Marl Lynch, Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University:

I think that there is a group of people who think that it is necessary. Hamas controls Gaza, you can't get aid into Gaza without working with Hamas and they represent a large portion of the Palestinian people.

On the other side you have a lot of people who say that the international community has a series of conditions. They haven't met those conditions, they have blood on their hands and there are a lot of people who have deep qualms about talking to Hamas.

Al Jazeera also provided a European perspective in the form of Clare Short, a former British Labour Minister, who just led a delegation of six European politicians to Damascus to meet with Hamas officials:

The Europeans seem, at least to my eye, more open to the possibility of working with Hamas towards meeting those conditions rather than having them as preconditions.

I found this a discreet way to address the current American position. Neither the Al Jazeera staff nor their sources would come out and say that there was one factor in the United States with which European politicians would not have to contend, that factor being the significant lobbying power of AIPAC. We need to remember that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were courting AIPAC energetically at the organization's last convention; and we know that all-too-many decisions in Washington are biased by "deals that dare not speak their name." Recall that Obama's AIPAC speech was, to put it politely, conciliatory, while my reaction to the review of Clinton's Secretary of State nomination by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee described AIPAC as "the greatest threat to Clinton's effectiveness" as an "honest broker." It may be that, if Europe is making progress towards being such an "honest broker," then the wisest thing the United States might do is to withdraw from the negotiations, recognizing the suspicion with which our country continues to be viewed by all Middle East countries except for Israel. The Bush Administration would never have considered such a possibility. Would Obama be audacious to entertain it as a means to an end that is as important to us as it is to the European Community?

"Skilled" Labor?

Last January I accused Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, of "telling a story" at the Davos World Economic Forum in order to convince himself "of propositions without bothering over whether or not they are true." Last night Reuters filed a report of the latest story Stephenson is telling:

The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

What are the propositions in this case, and how likely are they to be true?

Perhaps the most important concerns the "skill set" (scare quotes intended) for those customer service jobs. It is hardly a secret that most customer service engagements are handled by a representative who does little more than read from a script through a process that is usually enabled by current CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology. Thus the necessary skills come down to using the technology to find the right script and then following it by delivering the lines in a clear voice that the customer understands. Not only is this not a very demanding skill set; but also it almost seems to be designed to anticipate a time when voice-recognition and speech-synthesis technologies have improved to the point that humans will no longer be necessary to do the job.

Having established, then, that "skilled" may be a euphemistic adjective, we come to the more important proposition behind Stephenson's story:

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T's repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

These propositions may well be true, and they certainly demand examination. My guess is that candidates for those customer service jobs are tested for both script selection and script delivery. If they are failing on the minimal comprehension required to identify a script and on reading text in a clear voice, then this may be some of the most painful evidence we have of how pathetic our education system is. On the other hand, if we are also celebrating the skills with which high school students now communicate through the Internet, then something is out of whack, because these two observations are inconsistent.

The inconsistency may have to do with that euphemistic use of the adjective "skilled." Internet-savvy high school graduates are, indeed, highly skilled and thus may be too skilled for what AT&T expects for a customer service job, which is more of a "McJob" (to invoke that entry in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that so offended McDonald's). The question then becomes one of how AT&T is recruiting its candidates and how it screens the recruits. Perhaps they should own up to their euphemism, set a lower bar, and then select candidates who can be trained in script selection of clear reading. They probably would not even need high school graduates to make such a strategy work. This would not solve the education problem; but it might solve a broader problem, which is the risk of so many young people in this country going to waste as such young ages. This might then serve to realign our "sense of reality" about the institution of education; and, informed by that sense of reality, we might be better informed to do something about the underlying problems.

Knowledge of the Social World Considered Strategic

At the end of August, I wrote a post entitled "Knowledge of the Social World Considered Dangerous," which had grown out of a series of posts concerned with the dangers of enterprise software ignoring (or, worse yet, misunderstanding) the social world. The primary danger I was exploring had to do with being careful what you wished for; or, to invoke one of my favorite concepts, thinking about the consequences before figuring out how to make your wishes come true. Today David Rohde filed a story for The New York Times from the Shabak Valley in Afghanistan, which throws an interesting light on this whole matter of wishes and consequences; and, if one comes away from this story without any sense of a resolved conclusion, then at least one has learned how complex the issue is. (Those familiar with Plato may recognize that this is the lesson of his "Theaetetus" dialogue, which begins with the quest for a definition of knowledge and ends with Socrates' reassuring Theaetetus that, even if they could not find a satisfactory definition, their time was far from wasted.)

Let's start with the wish, which probably can be traced back at least as far as the Vietnam War, if not further. As the discontent with our involvement in Vietnam grew, it was fueled by the voices of social theorists (most of which were speaking from their metaphorical armchairs) grousing about out blatant ignorance of the social context in Vietnam and therefore our failure to understand just who the "actors" were, let alone the nature of their motivated interpersonal actions. This armchair theorizing is arising once again; and this time the theorists have two contexts to fuel their grousing: Afghanistan and Iraq. For a while in Iraq, it seemed as if General David Petraeus was taking some of this theorizing to heart and trying to develop strategy around his own anthropological understanding, which, while it may have been amateur, was not without merit. Afghanistan, however, has received less attention, at least while we were able to sustain the "mission accomplished" myth that we had eliminated the Taliban and would soon be able to do with same with bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Then the word began to leak out that, for all of their extremism, the Taliban was winning more hearts and minds than the "legitimate" government was, probably because so much of the population was perceiving that government as hopelessly corrupt (and may have been right in their perceptions).

This brings us to today's Times report, based on the following background paragraph:

In September, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates authorized a $40 million expansion of the program, which will assign teams of anthropologists and social scientists to each of the 26 American combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since early September, five new teams have been deployed in the Baghdad area, bringing the total to six.

In other words the Department of Defense has decided that it is looking for a few (or more) good social theorists who are willing to get up out of their armchairs and see how well their theories stand up to practice under fire (literally, not metaphorically). Since the Times story was filed from Afghanistan, it concentrates on the impact of this new strategy in dealing with the Taliban problem:

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population.

“We’re looking at this from a human perspective, from a social scientist’s perspective,” he said. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people.”

On the surface this seems to be good news. Social theory really can stand up to practice. However, some of theorists who are still in their armchairs disagree:

Yet criticism is emerging in academia. Citing the past misuse of social sciences in counterinsurgency campaigns, including in Vietnam and Latin America, some denounce the program as “mercenary anthropology” that exploits social science for political gain. Opponents fear that, whatever their intention, the scholars who work with the military could inadvertently cause all anthropologists to be viewed as intelligence gatherers for the American military.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, and 10 other anthropologists are circulating an online pledge calling for anthropologists to boycott the teams, particularly in Iraq.

“While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world,” the pledge says, “at base, it contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.”

This is where the story turns to that problematic confrontation between wishes and consequences. To invoke an Asian metaphor, Professor Gusterson sees this as a camel's nose getting under the tent; and the rest of the camel just not have the sorts of humane values that Colonel Schweitzer is currently extolling. Here is an even more critical voice:

Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University, called participants in the program naïve and unethical. He said that the military and the Central Intelligence Agency had consistently misused anthropology in counterinsurgency and propaganda campaigns and that military contractors were now hiring anthropologists for their local expertise as well.

“Those serving the short-term interests of military and intelligence agencies and contractors,” he wrote in the June issue of Anthropology Today, an academic journal, “will end up harming the entire discipline in the long run.”

What does all this mean and to whom does the meaning signify? While Professor González is right to raise a red flag over activities that serve short-term interests, I feel that the exploration of new strategies for our interpersonal relations, both in war and in peace and particularly on an international scale, is just as important for the long-term needs of living in a peaceful world as it is for the short-term objective of getting us out of the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq. I also believe that both these short-term and long-term goals are more important than whether or not the discipline of anthropology will be "harmed." Is Professor González worried that theory will change as a result of bumping into practice? If so, then I fear he has a potentially dangerous fundamentalist view of theory. His concern about abuse is more to the point. However, abuse of any knowledge is always a problem, whether in anthropology or physics; but whether or not that abuse harms the discipline is ultimately determined by those who study and practice that discipline.

As a result, I would say that the argument will involve the opposition of two positions. On the one hand we have those who flat-out distrust anything that our current Administration does; and, given its track record, they have every right to be suspicious. On the other hand there are those who see this as a step towards making the world a better place and feel that giving this new approach a try is better than wallowing in our current messes. I tend to side with the latter camp but with the proviso that, as I have previously discussed, there is a fundamental "tragic flaw" in utopian thinking. The truth is that we are always going to be in some mess or another, just because life is like that. This is not the boulder rolling back on us when we finally get it to the top of the hill. It is that we have the capacity to solve problems and there is no reason to assume that such a capacity will ever become as vestigial as our appendices. So I would like to applaud the efforts of the Department of Defense to find value in social theory, recognizing that I am a member of neither our armed forces nor any academic department in the social sciences!

Another Facebook Reality Check

I have a friend (whom I would prefer not to identify) who once asked me (I'm still not quite sure why) if Second Life was where middle-aged men went to get laid. Given the ongoing interest in whether or not Facebook (or something like it) should be considered part of an enterprise software suite, this question, however sarcastic it may sound, should not be ignored; and it appears, at least according to a recent post on The Blotter, that the New York Office of the Attorney General is of a similar opinion:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said his office is launching a full investigation into the social networking site Facebook and its safeguards against sexual predators.

"My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe Web site is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints," Cuomo said of the investigation.

In recent weeks, AG investigators posing as underage Facebook users were "repeatedly solicited by adult sexual predators" and granted unrestricted access to "a wide range of pornographic images and videos," including such groups as "*For girls that love to share naked pics*" and "Porn Star Trials," according to Cuomo's letter to Facebook.

The review also found that Facebook failed to respond or was slow to respond to complaints filed by investigators posing as the parents of the solicited underage users.

This investigation may end up killing two birds (that are not particularly close to each other) with one stone. From the enterprise software point of view, it reopens the question of whether or not time on Facebook is "wasted," while, at the same time, it also addresses the hypothesis that I claim HBO is investigating in Tell Me You Love Me, which is that sex is all we talk about and that we do so in extremely impoverished ways. The one way in which these "birds" may be closer than we think is in how they reveal our communication practices, whether for business or pleasure, and the danger they expose that all of those conversations are depressingly hollow!

An Anti-Chutzpah (but Audacious) Republican

Anyone who did the math in yesterday's Chutzpah of the Week award post should know by now that there were, in fact, six Republican senators who support Jim Webb's time-off measure. The BBC article I cited actually quoted one of the, Chuck Hagel. That quote deserves consideration:

We cannot continue to look at war and the people who fight and die in wars as abstractions, as pawns, as objects.

This is a very noble piece of rhetoric, and I wish it had swayed four more Republicans to get the vote count up to the required level of 60. Nevertheless, it also opens up a philosophical can of worms; and we would do better to take a long hard look at the contents rather than quickly shut it up again.

Regular readers know that I share Senator Hagel's disgust for the practice of what I have called "objectifying the subject," whether it is in the interest of commerce or the rationalization of some hopelessly misconceived government policy. However, such readers also know that I get very nervous with the casual use of words that we have never bothered to understand very well. Because of my continuing interest in "social software," one of the words that really bothers me is "community," particularly when it is invoked as a shibboleth by some blathering technology evangelist. However, exactly a week ago I was confronted with the prospect that we were being just as abusive of the noun "humanity" and that this particular abuse seemed to be worming its way into the general global Zeitgeist. Now Senator Hagel did not explicitly use the word "humanity;" but the concept behind that word is the underlying subject matter of the quoted sentence. From this point of view, Senator Hagel has made an assertion about war that is either very ignorant or very revolutionary. I really have no idea which he intended it to be, let alone which I would like it to be; so let me try to pursue the issue.

The verb "continue" implies the extension of something. In this case I take that "something" to be what Giddens would call the "regular social practices" of military operations. What we must first recognize about those practices is that they are trained, which is (as should be obvious) the objective of "Basic Training." The regularity of those practices is important, because it endows them with a property of predictability without which the entire procedural concept of a chain of command would not be able to function. Having been spared my own experience of Basic Training, my understanding of it comes only from conversations with friends and colleagues. Back in my student days I had a friend who enlisted in the Coast Guard. When I saw him after he had completed his Basic Training, he told me, with some amusement, that he was not allowed to keep a copy of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" essay; but he then added that, in retrospect, this was entirely consistent with the objective of Basic Training. He recognized that Basic Training was, to a rather high degree, objectifying him, basically for the sake of the quality of his performance once training had been completed. It would appear that, on the basis of the above quotation, Senator Hagel does not want this practice to continue.

If that is really true, then his assertion about war should be taken as very revolutionary; and I think that is the way I would like to read it. Military historians can probably come up with better examples than I can, but I suspect that the overarching narrative of military history has a lot to do with one side understanding the regular social practices of its opposition, identifying the vulnerabilities in those practices, and exploiting them. We have even turned a literary construct from Greek mythology into a metaphor for this process: Achilles' heel. Now we are faced with strident ideologues who want to play fast and loose with the concept of war, itself, enjoining us all to support America's "War on Terror." Such rhetoric is never toned down by suggestions that the speakers are playing dangerously with words and concepts they do not understand; if anything such challenges only escalate the stridency.

Senator Hagel has now taken a different approach. He has been bold enough to suggest that the regular social practices of our Department of Defense (not to mention the Department of State and possibly the entire National Security Council) may be the source of vulnerabilities that have been (and could readily continue to be) exploited by new strategies of terrorism, such as those practiced by al-Qaeda. This is an act of audacity far beyond any of the denotations or connotations that Barack Obama has dared to suggest. Indeed, it would probably be dismissed as impossible (and probably insane) by just about anyone in our "ruling class," possibly while invoking another famous metaphor, which is the problem of getting a battleship to change course. Perhaps Hagel has decided to retire because he really does not want to fight this battle. I would understand this decision and sympathize with it. On the other hand I hope that this remark will inspire at least one reputable journalist to challenge every aspirant to the White House with the assertion that Hagel made: Are we looking at war in a way that can only make us vulnerable to the primary threats of attack that we now face?

Let's Talk about Sex

Having put in a good word for the new HBO documentary Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, I feel I should also offer some reflections on their new series, Tell Me You Love Me. On the surface this is described as a "drama about three couples and the therapist they share;" but, as is almost always the case, it is "about" many things on many different levels. Let me start with the most obvious and then work into the more subtle.

Just about all of the buzz that preceded the premiere of this series had to do with promoting it as "the new sex show" (without, of course, using such blatant language). Given the beating that HBO seems to have taken (at least according to The New York Times), over John From Cincinnati (not to mention the Times referring to The Sopranos as "HBO's greatest performer"), it is hard to view Tell Me You Love Me as anything other than an effort by HBO to "get back on top" (with apologies for a metaphor consistent with the subject matter). That being the case, those who select HBO for their Sunday night viewing in search of frank-and-open explicit sex scenes will not be disappointed. However, if that is all they want, then there are probably cheaper ways to invest their entertainment dollars.

So let us, instead, consider a few other surface features less obvious than the sex scenes. Let us start with the almost total absence of the use of names by the characters in this drama. They all have names, of course, all of which are explicitly spelled out on the home page for this series; but I am not sure I heard anyone addressed by either a first or last name in the course of the first episode. This is related to at least one other surface feature, which is the considerable time devoted to conversations that take place over cell phones. In the world of Caller ID, you no longer have to identify yourself when the person you are calling says "Hello." Indeed, because that person knows who you are, he or she rarely says "Hello" any more, because the call is treated as the continuation of an ongoing conversation. Thus, to a great extent, this is a drama that demonstrates to us what the epistolary novel has evolved into in the 21st century. This takes us into deeper levels.

Before delving there, however, consider another surface feature. The first conversation we observe the therapist having is which her husband (probably) about the fact that the book she is writing is in its final stages. From my point of view, this sets a somewhat clinical tone for the whole drama. Now we can probably assume to believe that the three couples are all new cases. (As a matter of fact, we see only one couple in a session and another session that involves only the wife. The third couple is not yet married and have yet to enter the therapist's office.) This makes for an interesting frame. We can probably assume that the way in which the therapist does her job is informed by the content of this yet-to-be-completed book; but we have no reason to believe that, as the drama unfolds, she will be doing her job particularly effectively. (Look at the journey that Dr. Melfi ended up taking over the extended narrative of The Sopranos.) It may turn out that these new patients do not fit the patterns of the therapist's past practices very well. They may not even fit at all; and she may end up chucking the entire manuscript (if not the confidence to write a book at all), as a result of her experiences with these new patients.

This is where I want to dig deeper. I am less interested in whether this series has been inspired by the epistolary novel than I am on whether the debt it owes is to those nineteenth century masters who were so good at documenting the "human comedy," such as Balzac (who provided me with the quoted phrase) or Trollope. This is a series that may end up telling us more about what we have become in the world we are now situated than just about our sex lives. If this is the case, then the first episode is looking at us all through a rather jaundiced eye. Not only are the conversations hollow, but they seem to be about little other than sex. Even the act of reading a bedtime story has a detached (and, for one brief moment, distorted) abstraction to it. If we think about this in terms of that old get-a-life cliché, these are characters who are really not that far from the zombies I feared we would become if our capacity for communication just died.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this. Perhaps I am just enjoying seeing the work of someone who has managed to use narrative to say what I keep struggling to say though exposition. Whatever the case may be, I believe that the first episode of Tell Me You Love Me has set us up for a good old-fashioned cautionary tale. I only fear that those who most need the message to be cautious about how one lives in this world are the ones most likely to ignore it.

The Hollow Conversation

Putting aside my penchant for trying to take on the Cluetrain Manifesto with either polemic or brash tomfoolery, let me now try to address the issue by framing it in a historical context. The basis for the frame is the concept of "conversation;" and, while I have already tried to frame conversation without the broader concept of the "interaction ritual," in this case I would like to take a more business-oriented approach and frame it in terms of "organizational communication." In order to do this, however, I must first recognize that those "terms" of organizational communication have evolved considerable over the roughly fifty years that both the practical world of business and the academic world of the professional literature have recognized it as a valid and significant topic. Therefore, I would like to offer a quick historical sketch of how the semantics of the phrase "organizational communication" has changed, based on the subjects of publications in that professional literature. These are the "phases of evolution" I would like to propose:

1. Propaganda: This had both an external side (public relations) and an internal one (if anyone remembers the "home organ").
2. Effective electronic mail usage: This initially concentrated on internal communication but gradually branched out to the external, starting with suppliers and distributors and eventually extending to customers (always getting the short end of the stick).
3. Decision support through groupware: These tended to be studies of how Lotus was being used and how much impact (positive or negative) that usage had.
4. Communication network theory: This had to do with how social networks formed, developed, and dissolved, with particularly attention to the role played by technologies, whether electronic mail or more sophisticated groupware. These studies were to first to take a more integrated view of the internal and the external. However, they were mostly descriptive (meaning that managers are still not sure what to do with the results).

This brings us to the present day, when Marx and Engels have been vindicated for their observation that the conduct of business is, above all else, a matter of "internal and external intercourse." (No, this is not from The Communist Manifesto; it is from The German Ideology!) On the surface that Marx-Engels phrase would appear to be just Cluetrain-speak. However, aside from my contention that the Cluetrain folks have only the most superficial conception of what a "conversation" really is, what is most important is that the "intercourse" itself is about more than just markets. What is missing from the picture, whether it is painted by the Cluetrain theses or by the evangelists for social software, is that, while technology keeps throwing out more and more ways to enable all that intercourse, the people empowered by the technology are still very much at sea when it comes to the content of the intercourse.

One of the popular protest mottos during the Vietnam War was, "What if they gave a war, and nobody came?" Today we seem to be addressing an analogous question, "What if we all gathered in conversation, and nobody had anything to say?" We all know this kind of situation. We have encountered it at countless parties. Our usual reaction is, to return to Goffman's terminology, to let ritual trump interaction and babble away on a sort of "automatic pilot." In many ways this would be the worst-case scenario behind that old Xerox marketing injunction to "keep the conversation going" (at the same time, giving the raspberry to Richard Rorty who coined the phrase in the context that "keeping the conversation going" was fundamental to the practice of philosophy).

There is an old joke about behaviorism that goes back to the days of Skinner. One behaviorist says to his colleague, "Boy, I am really impressed with operant conditioning. I have now trained my five-year-old to do anything I want!" He then pauses a bit and says, "So what do I want him to do?" So it is with the current state of that "internal and external intercourse." We have more "power of conversation" than we have ever had before. What we lack is the power to figure out what to talk about; so our conversations, if we hold them at all, turn out to be as hollow as that "automatic pilot babble" that takes place at so many social gatherings!

From Wasting Time to Paying for It

The latest discussion at confused of calcutta (just in time for Labor Day on this side of the pond) involves JP Rangaswami taking issue with a recent Financial Times article:

In today’s print edition of the Financial Times, David Bolchover averred that The self-employed are too busy to go surfing; commenting on the TUC criticism of blocking access to social networking sites, he meanders through the graveyard of worker apathy and ends with the assertion that “you will not find the self-employed immersed on Facebook for hours. The perception of working is irrelevant to them. They are paid for being productive, not for turning up”.

I think he’s managed to miss the point, spectacularly, while coming very close to it.

I found that discussion particularly interesting, because it requires revisiting a topic that both JP and I have explored, which is the question of what constitutes “wasted” time when one is "on the job." JP's approach to this issue is to stress the need for an "outcomes-base view" of what one does "on the job," in which case it really does not matter whether or not one is self-employed. I acknowledge his point; but, as any of my regular readers should know by now, when you start talking about “outcomes,” you are basically anchoring the discussion in the world of nouns, which, as we both well know, is not the world of verbs. Where this is most important is in the service sector, where maintaining an ongoing engagement is as important as any of the “outcomes” of that engagement (if not more so). To some extent “turning up” (when the time is right, i.e. when needed) is the primary obligation of the service provider!

Thus, there is a deeper problem that arises from this whole shift from a production economy to a service economy. It is not so much a question of wasting time. It may not even be a question of “productivity,” if “production” is not the primary goal of the work. Rather, it is the need for a new model of compensation that is commensurate with both how services are rendered and with what service providers do during their “down time” in order to be better at rendering those services. Are the corporate bean-counters ready to get their heads around that question?

Semiotic Ignorance

Once again I see that JP Rangaswami, over at confused of calcutta, is waxing poetic over the Cluetrain motto that "markets are conversations. This time has argument is motivated by the Bengal Renaissance, which brought about a veritable explosion in creative writing. ("Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.") This has led to an interesting exchange of comments over whether or not the virtual conversations enabled by the Internet are raising or lowering "the social intelligence of our species." I have to react to this with an overwhelming need to vent, because, while I approve of debates that take place through the comments submitted to a blog post, I feel strongly that exchanges impeded by tunnel vision hardly count as debates.

Let me try to provide some context for my aggravation. On March 1, 2006 I was invited to give a seminar talk at the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory. This was at a time when the IBM effort in "services science" was charging forward with great vigor; so I saw this as an opportunity to exercise some sound argumentation on the basis of a contentious position. That position was that interpretation was a critical skill in providing effective service. There was nothing new about this, since Karl Weick had been saying the same thing for several decades; but I then argued that the capacity of a service provider for interpretation was impeded by a lack of understanding in five fundamental disciplines. Those disciplines (which will not be found in the department names of any university catalog) were phenomenology, semiotics, hermeneutics, narratology, and emotive valuation. This is my lengthy (Wagnerian?) prelude to the assertion that the confused of calcutta discussion about "the social intelligence of our species" is being impeded by a failure to grasp one of the most fundamental principles of semiotics.

That principle is the idea that any sign has a dual nature, whose two aspects are the signifier and the signified. Everything that was said about conversations in the confused of calcutta discussion, whether it involved printed matter in Bengal or an enumeration of the many things we see on our computer screens, was about signifiers. Those signifiers are the artifacts without which conversation would be impossible, but the conversation itself resides entirely under the aspect of the signified. Each of us relies on our capacities for interpretation to make sure that we are conversing about signifieds, rather than quibbling over signifiers.

This is why it is pointless to argue about whether or not the signifiers of virtual engagement (not just conversations) raise or lower "the social intelligence of our species." Such an approach is a distraction from "where the action really is." One has to take a broader view of the acts of interpretation (yes, I'm talking about verb-based thinking again) in order to grapple with a concept like social intelligence. (Indeed, one also needs that point of view to address the question of whether the crowd is wiser or madder than any individual member.) This is no easy matter; but, if we do not confront it, we are no better than the drunk looking for his keys where the light is better, regardless of where he dropped them.

To provide an example, let me try an exercise in examining the context in which interpretative actions take place. JP's description of Calcutta in the middle of the nineteenth century invokes memories of similar descriptions of coffee-house Vienna at the end of that same century (both heavily seasoned with caffeine and nicotine). This was not just a scene of conversations; it was also (in Chomskian language) the "surface structure" of a "deep structure" of cultural ferment. The "fermentation" would eventually burst out of the vessel that contained it, Europe would be consumed by a "war to end all wars," and the conversations of the coffee houses would be forever silenced. I am not interested in what is happening on the "surface" of the Internet, because I am too worried about what kind of brew is now fermenting!

The Capacity of Evil to Blunder

Yesterday I finally had a chance to watch the VTR recording I made of Lawrence Wright on Book TV, talking about his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. One of the points that came out very clearly in the interview reinforced an observation from Publishers Weekly (quoted on the Amzon.com page) that "planning terror is a sloppy business." Put another way, the "road to 9/11" was not the steady and methodical advance through the steps of the plan of an evil genius. All of the "players" in al-Qaeda were as all-too-human as were the "players" in the FBI, CIA, and NSA; and each side was as capable of blundering as was the other.

I feel this is important to bear in mind in examining the Al Jazeera English report of the latest video to be posted on the Internet by Ayman al-Zawahri, generally regarded as the number two man in al-Qaeda (even if al-Qaeda's greatest strategic strength lies in its loosely distributed organization). In the video of Osama bin Laden that came to light immediately after 9/11, what may have been most striking was that he seemed almost bemused that things turned out as catastrophic as they did. He was sort of like the engineer who was silently thankful that, for once, he had escaped the clutches of Murphy's Law. The al-Zawahri video, in contrast, positively reeks of the sort of pride that, in a dramatic setting, would presage a fall from a great height; and, indeed, his deliberate efforts to taunt Bush may very well blow up in his own face, literally as well as metaphorically.

Consider the following excerpt from the Al Jazeera account of this video in which he talks about the congressional bill that tied funding for the US effort in Iraq to a timetable for troops to withdraw:

"This bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap," al-Zawahri said, adding the bill was evidence of American "failure and frustration".

He did not mention the vetoing of the bill last Thursday by Bush.

Perhaps al-Zawahri made this tape before Bush had imposed his veto. Perhaps he had received news of the veto but did not appreciate its significance. Perhaps he did not realize that this kind of taunting would probably only strengthen Bush's resolve to keep "surging" (probably with increased forces), just as past resistance forces have drawn strength from Bush's arrogant taunts. At the very least those remarks are liable to sway the American public to be more sympathetic to Bush's persistence, which may well sandbag any hopes for substantive dialog between the Congress and the White House.

It seems to me that all paths towards reading this particular text lead to a strategic blunder. Whether or not it will turn out to be an Aristotelian "tragic flaw" for al-Qaeda in Iraq (if not for al-Qaeda's overall reputation) remains to be seen. From a dramatistic point of view, however, the fact that General David Petraeus seems to be figuring out how to do things right at the same time that al-Zawahri has made this media blunder may make for an interesting plot twist! Fortunately, things tend to move slowly in the Congress; so their natural pace should afford them the luxury to cool it long enough to see how Bush will respond to being taunted both here and in Iraq.

Socratic Dialogue and Drama

I started following Andrew Keen's Great Seduction blog with at least a mild amount of interest. So when he threw down a gauntlet that was right up my alley (an interesting mix of metaphors, no doubt), I took it as an excuse to get into his comment space. However, since much of what I wrote there bears heavily on much of what I write here, I figure I ought to provide an edited replay at this site.

The question that had been placed on Andrew's table was why there was no Socratic dialogue on the Internet. Andrew made some interesting points, even if he got off to a glib start:

It's because Socrates doesn't have a blog. And it's also because the Internet is particularly ill suited to Socratic dialogue. Socrates loathed print media. God knows what he would think of the anonymity of the blogosphere. The reason why Socrates' dialogues work is that, in his circle, everyone knew everyone else. It was, in Web 2.0 speak, "full disclosure." Thus the most memorable dialogues -- Socrates' intensely polemical encounter with Thrasymachus in The Republic, for example -- come with the full weight of two lives led in perpetual intellectual disagreement. Could Socrates' conversation with Thrasymachus be replayed on the anonymous blogosphere? I doubt it.

Needless to say, the best way to respond to someone who has actually read Plato is by drawing upon your own readings of Plato. Here is the heart of my comment (slightly edited):

I would like to argue that Socratic dialog cannot be found because, like it or not, it is a literary artifact! Plato was not some glorified court stenographer, following after Socrates and his coterie, scrupulously committing every word to recorded text. He was an author with a keen sense of dramatism, and you find it in all stages of his work. My personal favorite is the framework that surrounds Socrates' dialog with Theaetetus over the nature of knowledge, which begins with Theaetetus' bloody corpse being brought back from battle and ends with the memory that the dialog took place just before Socrates' went off to his trial. So much for what we learned about knowledge in that conversation!

In all fairness I have to admit that I was influenced in this idea of viewing Plato as being as much a dramatist as he was a philosopher. Back when I was living in Los Angeles, there was a small theater group that did a word-for-word staging of the "Symposium;" and, to this day, I regret missing any of the performances! However, having adopted this perspective, I think it is also important to note that the narrative element can also be found in Plato's letters, particularly the wish-I-had-a-wonderful-time letter he wrote to the "friends and companions of Dion" after he managed to get out of Syracuse with his skin intact!