"Leo, did you learn anything in chronobiology class?"

Hell yes, I did! Maybe I should be blogging about it. Consider this a resolution to do so... um, very soon.

("Leo, do you read any other books?")

One can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you haven't seen anything yet--an irreversible process. And when we consider what there is of a profoundly artificial nature in the perverted reterritorializations, but also in the psychotic reterritorializations of the hospital, or even the familial neurotic reterritorializations, we cry out, 'More perversion! More artifice!'--to a point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity by itself a new earth.

-- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (p. 321)

Sounds like a project.

In the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption, we have seen how the body without organs was in fact an egg, crisscrossed with axes, banded with zones, localized with areas and fields, measured off by gradients, traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds. In this sense, we believe in a biochemistry of schizophrenia (in conjunction with the biochemistry of drugs) that will be progressively more capable of determining the nature of this egg and the distribution of field-gradient-threshold.

-- Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (p. 84)

Is Knol Retrogressive?

Google thinks I know stuff? It wants me to share?!

Google has finally launched Knol, a pretty direct competitor to Wikipedia. Knol allows authors to write articles singly or in collaboration, and there an be multiple articles about individual topics. Google wants (although this does not seem to be a requirement for posting) to verify your name via credit card or, barbarically, phone call. If you want, you can run AdSense on Knols you write.

If Knol takes off, it won't be simply because of the promise of expert knowledge. Citizendium made a splash last year when it promised a return to the glory days of Nupedia, the collaborative encyclopedia of experts of which Wikipedia was born. Check out Citizendium and Wikipedia's recent change pages: Citizendium displays 500 posts over the course of two days; Wikipedia's last 500 posts come from the past five minutes. That is, Wikipedia has almost 3000 times more activity, despite the fact that content-wise, it has already plateaued. (Scholarpedia does even worse, although Wikipedia seems to consider it the major third competitor.) A year after Citizendium's debut, no one cares. Apparently the experts are too busy to make their own encyclopedia, and the masses are too empowered and impatient to submit all of their edits for expert approval and tinkering.

The author-focused aspect of Knol--the space for multiple perspectives on a single topic--has also already been tried, by Everything2. I would tell you how the edit rate compares to Wikipedia's, but I can't, because Everything2 is horrible and confusing and offers no easily accessible data about usage. This web page looks like it is owned and operated by stoners (the really stereotypical type). The main page's two primary navigation options are the "Cool Archive" and the "Page of Cool," and, um, I'm not going to say much more about the style. I'll just also point out that some academics wrote a paper comparing Wikipedia and Everything2, in which they explained that authorship based on community editing of the same text produces a seriously authoritative and formals style. So, even if there are just as many jokers on Wikipedia as on Everything2, their noise is supressed more quickly and completely.

This brings us to an important fact, a fact that allows us to ask this post's title question without knowing the answer: Wikipedia is not the apotheosis of The Internet, or of free textual production. In fact, despite the general gushing about how Wikipedia is an awesome rhizome (the Wikipedia rhizome is "theory's" own special "cute insulated future"), Wikipedia already represents movement away from the unregulated flux. This was true even before people started getting paranoid about administrators messing with their work. Inherent in the Wikipedian mandate is the move towards formal, homogenized encyclopedic text, because total formalization was the only response (still incomplete, but a response) to the otherwise unresolvable problems of battles over text.

A 2008 book, Originality, Imitation, and Plagarism, name checks Barthes and Foucault in relation to Wikipedia, says that the author is dead, and praises Wikipedia as the evolved form of literature. This praise for the dispersal of author-functions neglects Wikipedia's apparently inexorable centripal forces, which have created its dry style and ultimately its quality-articles plateau. (To paraphrase a Frankfurt school insight that gets mentioned a lot by Žižek:) the disintegration and dispersal of agencies often expresses all the more brutally the underlying forces that held sway all along. In this case, the pomo-utopian splintering of authorship gives rise to texts of unprecedented rigidity, ideologically charged in their formal neutrality.

Don't get me wrong: I like Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia better than Everything2, which comes closer to the "everyone write what they want" romanticization, because Wikipedia has delivered: it has extracted a significant number of hours from a signficant number of people (though fewer than you'd expect!) and produced a whole bunch of easily accessible information. But I think a strategic 'retreat' to authorcentrism can serve useful functions:

One, perspective. Explicit perspective is better than the implicit perspective mandated by Wikipedia's NPOV policy. And, let's be honest, there are all kinds of reasons to avoid pure consensus when it comes to truth.

Two, motivation. It's not just about the money. I predict that plenty of Knol authors will be willing to go without AdSense. People are motivated to contribute to Wikipedia because they got a charge out of making stuff that other people would see; the best contributors on Wikipedia are the ones who stay on one page for a long time, become familiar to each other, and clearly dominate the talk page. Which brings me to

Three, commitment. There aren't enough people on Wikipedia willing to stick with a particular page and see it through to featured article status. Wikipedia is declining despite a huge edit volume because no one is willing to work through already-dense articles; they want to make new articles or introduce minor edits. Tying page production to reputation and possibly to money forces someone upstream to consider the overall experience of a user interacting with a page and trying to learn about something. (One particularly severe instance of this problem is Wikipedia's severe founder effect: the first person to make a page defines relatively arbitrarily the categories that will likely define it forever.) In short, Wikipedia's micro-formalizations cripple macro-structure, and Knol has the potential to fix that.

But! There are risks. A lot of risks. Bids for dominance in popular knol categories could get ugly. There could be cheating. There could be paultardism. Perspectives might not be made so explicit. Knols could be idiotic. Right now, it seems like the only knol topics are medicine and stuff like this and, um, this.

The problem is, knols will rule the Google results no matter what. Yep, knols already turn up higher than you'd expect, and usage is likely to increase exponentially over the next few weeks as people start to see plugs for knol in their inevitable encounters with Google (see above picture for the impetus for this blog post). And I'm pretty sure that in combining the strengths of Everything2 and Citizendium, Knol is likely to be powerful 'on its own.'

"In conclusion," I have no unequivocal answer to the title question... but I am pretty sure that it's important to intervene either way.

ScienceDaily

Science Daily tops itself in overstated headlines with

"Mechanism Behind Mind-body Connection Discovered"

which describes a relatively unspecial study about, wow, cortisol.

Now I'm Writing A Blog Post

Largely just because I can.

I have new accounts, on Swurl and on Twitter, mostly because Lux told me to make them.

If anyone from, you know, my lifeworld, reads this blog, I'd advise you to hop on board. The more people using this sort of thing, the less depressing procrastination on it becomes.

(Undoubtedly, someone else has already [appropriately enough] pointed out that) Twitter fulfills Lacan's prophecy: "The omnipresence of human discourse will perhaps one day be embraced under the open sky of an omnicommunication of its text" (Écrits 220).

Affirm THESE, Dan Luxemburg (?)

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/living-in-many.html

Psychology and the Burroughs Scramble

From William Burroughs' (1970) Electronic Revolution (p. 19):

Research project: to find out to what extent scrambled messages are unscrambled, that is scanned out by experimental subjects. The simplest experiments consists in playing back a scrambled message to subject. Message could contain simple commands. Does the scrambled message have any command value comparable to posthypnotic suggestion? Is the actual content of the message received? What drugs, if any, increase ability to unscramble messages? Do subjects vary widely in this ability? Are scrambled messages in the subject’s own voice more effective than messages in other voices? Are messages scrambled in certain voices more easily unscrambled by specific subjects? Is the message more potent with both word and image scramble on video tape?

Makes you wonder if anyone has done these experiments. Two families of psychology studies come sort of close.

First, there's a group of experiments (like this one) contrasting scrambled sentences to organized narratives. They tend to support to the common-sense belief that a text's macrostructure and attention thereto are necessary for retaining the text's message. A typical test measures the number of "idea units" recalled by the separate test groups.

But the second group of experiments--still not exactly Burroughs' suggestion, but closer--documents the power of subconscious semantic priming. (Here, when scrambling happens, it's a vehicle for the main operation: the human unscrambles a sentence without explicitly processing the meaning.) The messages being transmitted here are both more powerful and more difficult to measure (not that I'm particularly happy with counting 'idea units').

"Old" words make you walk slower; "control" words help you keep your racism in check; washing your hands makes you feel morally cleaner. Like Wikipedia says, one study implies that priming has an effect even on amnesiacs who don't explicitly recall the words at all, let alone 'process' them. Another suggests that encountering words subconsciously facilitates priming better than actually thinking about them.

We confront the question: how complicated a message can the human unconscious unscramble? In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek criticizes contemporary cognitive psychology as "internalized behaviorism" because it attempts to reduce fundamentally symbolic processes in the unconscious to a stimulus-response model that has simply been localized. The question is, and I think some of the Burroughsian experiments could be done here: what are the limits to the size and nonlinearity of messages targeted at the unconscious?

Why not use this helpful machine to start experimenting on yourself?