Credibility in Socio-Technical Discourse – Not.

[From the communications director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO), the organization my academic department is affiliated with]

Since the CSPO E-News went out with information about subscribing to Soapbox, our number of subscribers has tripled.  However, XXXXXX is the only CSPO-ite who is subscribed.  It would be great if each of you would consider subscribing to Soapbox so that you get a simple e-mail notification when there is a new post; this way, you won’t miss a post by your colleagues and friends.  Here’s a simple way to subscribe:

Click here and fill in your name and e-mail address, then click the “Subscribe me” button.  Easy peasy…..

When I got the original email about subscribing, I went right to the site, eager to add the CSPO Soapbox to my Google Reader aggregator. I found… no RSS feed. The “subscription” was to request an email notification of new posts. I winced, closed the tab and put the matter aside.

But, on receiving today’s email, I felt I had to be the one to point out a problem.

[Communications Director], and colleagues:

If there were an RSS feed, the universal standard for blog subscriptions, I’d absolutely add the Soapbox. I currently subscribe to 124 blogs through Google Reader: they’re in one place, and I can read and sort them all at my convenience.

By comparison, another email is an unwanted distraction, a ping on my BlackBerry, and likely to get composted below items necessitating a response or action.

CSPO’s mission statement reads:

The potential for rapid advances in science and technology – such as information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology – to transform society in a very short time challenges our ability to understand and shape our common destiny. There is an urgent need for open discourse and creative thinking to avoid the reaction, backlash and disruption that can compromise both technological promise and civil society.

Credibility in claiming an understanding of those rapid advancements can only begin with demonstration of basic technological competence and literacy in reading and writing in technologically-mediated spaces. Proudly advertising the new adoption of a 1995 tool in a 2009 discourse can be read as seriously damaging to that credibility.

Simply, one can’t pose as offering a leading role in a discourse without even being present in the spaces where that discourse is already taking place, in a mature and robust fashion. And if an email mailing list is the trumpeted standard for creative ideas, all credibility has been lost.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s reasons for not requesting an email subscripion, but mine were its misfit with my information-processing regime, and deep embarrassment at the socio-technical gaffe.

My apologies for the harshness, but I think someone has to be the one to point out the spinach hanging from CSPO’s teeth on this one.

With tough love,

John Carter McKnight, MIA, JD
PhD Student,
Human & Social Dimensions of Science & Technology
Arizona State University

And, yes, I do spend most of my time these days hanging out with my games-studies comrades…

Seriously, I didn’t reply to be bitchy, but to point out a serious problem in academia: you can’t offer solutions unless you live the context to the problems.

I think games and online communities have an immense amount to offer for engaging with technology and social change, for understanding how we live in cultures mediated simultaneously by custom, technological affordances, corporate rules and whims, and formal laws and regulations.  But I haven’t entered the discourse by tossing out pronouncements, but rather by years of immersion.

I spent nearly every evening for a couple years in SL.  I’m in WoW nearly every night. I play old games and new ones, to learn the vocabulary and tool kit. I read those 124 blogs daily, ranging from public policy to paladin tanking. I blog, but I’m up front about my questions being naive, my hypotheses tentative.

I’ve been daring to be a n00b.

CSPO, fellow academics: if you are a n00b, look on it as an opportunity – to learn, to bring a fresh perspective into a community discourse that’s been going along just fine without you. But be real in acknowledging your n00bishness, because, gods know, everyone else will.