As we can see in Figs. 20 and 21. it is now the older samples
that exhibit the steeper slope: Messages in 1997 typically survive over
a larger number of subsequent messages than messages in 1993 or 1988. So
the decreasing lifespan in calendar time is not just due to the faster
occlusion of old messages by the increasing mailflow. The variation in
how long it takes for 90% of the messages to expire in the four batches
from the 1997 sample is rather suggestive of the opposite: it takes 31,
21, 40 and 74 succeeding messages for the batches to be reduced to 10%
of their initial size, which corresponds quite well to what the result
of a standard four-day span of collective attention would yield under the
varying mailflow conditions prevailing in these four batches. The two batches
from 1988 are very similar both over days and over intervening messages.
It takes 20 or 21 subsequent postings (or 10 days) for the batches to be
reduced to 10% of their initial size. In 1993 it takes 31 and 25 subsequent
messages respectively (9 and 8 days) for 90% of the messages in a batch
to expire.
Four episodes of joint paper reading: Lotman, Wells, Bateson and Engeström
After the structural exploration of the patterns of spontaneous emergence
and decay of multilogical clusters on the Xlists and the presentation of
some quantitative indications to the presence of self-organizing criticality
in the mailinglist ecology, I would like to return to the problem of harnessing
the multilogical spontaneity of a scholarly mailinglist. The Xlists have
certainly provided a conducive space for the learning of individual participants,
and contributed to the renewal of the community of practicioners of CHAT
approaches. The forum has also served as a channel for crossfertilization
of diverse discourses, brought to the virtual setting by participants from
different disciplinary fields. Arguably the Xlist discussions have also
been enriched by research collaborations between list participants here
I am thinking particularly of the international project on Acting in Culture,
proposed in 1992. However, a scholarly mailinglist is more suitable as
a setting for learning than as an setting for actual collaborative research,
the list community being too loosely structured to serve as a channel for
collaborative production of a definite result (Lewenstein, 1995). As far
as I know the few attempts at collective writing over the Xlists have foundered.
This is the flip side of mailinglist self-organization in several senses
of the term: socially, technically and as an emergent process.
Nevertheless, the concerns for cumulativity and development on
the collective level have prompted core participants to explore a variety
of ways of inserting more organized activities into the Xlist setting:
exchanges between local seminar groups, Xlist channeling of communication
between similar courses run at separate locations, setting up of special-purpose
subconferences, joint readings of papers or entire books etc. there has
been some kind of attempt at more organized activity at least once a year.
Here I have chosen to briefly examine four episodes of joint reading of
paper-size publications, all highly relevant to recurring concerns in the
repertory of Xlist multilogues.
-
The reading of Lotman (1988) in the autumn of 1990
-
The reading of two pre-publication papers by Wells (Wells, 1993 and Wells
& Chang, 1997) from a methodological perspective in the autumn of 1992
-
The reading of Bateson (1972) in the winter quarter of 1993
-
The reading of Engeström (1996) in the autumn of 1996
The paper selected for a joint reading in the autumn of 1990, Yuri Lotman's,
"Text within Text" (Lotman, 1988) deals with theorizing the relation of
stability and change, closure and open-endedness in language and in text.The
paper is theoretically relevant to many recurring Xlist issues about intersubjectivity,
communication, and relations between text and context. Lotman argues that
text has the dual functions in a cultural system of on the one hand conveying
meanings adequately and on the other hand creating new meanings. There
is an irreducible tension between the univocal, transmissive function of
text and its dialogical function as a "thinking device". The paper is aptly
brought in as a target for joint reading in the context of a discussion
of communication and miscommunication a multilogue taking place in the
second week of September 1990. However, the coordination of the event turns
out to take much more time and effort than was anticipated in the initial
suggestion. The journal is not easy to get hold of, and a distribution
of photocopies has to be arranged, so that instead of beginning within
a week, it takes five weeks before a summary of the first part of the article
is posted as a signal for the event to begin. By then the collective enthusiasm
for written conversation has moved on to other objects issues about literacy,
cross-cultural research, microgenetic studies, and, eventually, the ethics
of videotaping as a method of collecting data. A few participants contribute
to keeping Lotman in the mailflow, but the exchange is very sparse: there
are all in all 13 Lotmanian discussion postings spread out over 36 days
and with relatively few links between them. On the other hand, the event
is one of the rare episodes that does have a beginning and an end the
paper is summarized in three sections, and there is a final posting providing
uptake and rounding off after the last summary. And there is evidence in
the archives that the event made a mark in the community: there is at least
one of the longterm Xlist participants who comes back to this paper more
than once, and after months and years after having been among those who
initially asked for the paper in public because of access problems. The
Lotman episode provides an example of how the spontaneous flow of multilogue
does not sustain the collective patience to hold a topic in suspension
for weeks, while collective action is taken to provide it with coordinated
grounding in the virtually simultaneous reading of external material.
The two pre-publication papers by Wells (Wells, 1993 and Wells
& Chang, 1997) chosen for a joint reading in the autumn of 1992 both
deal with the co-construction of meaning through discourse in the classroom,
and the implications of classroom discourse for learning and development.
These are educationally central questions that Xlist multilogues return
to over and over again. However, in the case of this particular event of
joint reading, the papers were not chosen as a target with the purpose
of discussing the educational implications of their results, but for the
purpose of providing a common ground for a suggested discussion of methodological
issues of Activity Theory and data gathering methods like classroom observation.
Issues of methodology and of ideological influence on research have been
around in the mailstream throughout October 1992, when one contributor
posts a request for literature on the topic of research methodology, and
also suggests a number of questions for discussion on the mailinglist.
There are (naturally) a number of bibliographic references given over the
next few days, and there are also a few postings that take up the issue
of methodology in response to the questions. Then it is suggested that
it would be a good idea to ground the discussion in particulars by using
some research paper, preferably one with extended excerpts from classroom
discourse so that the process of analysis can be made visible. The Wells
papers are nominated (and agreement obtained from the authors), and there
is an exchange of postings about how the event should be organized. It
is decided that the discussion is to be channeled into the XCLASS, and
the papers be distributed electronically for the asking. The initial questioner
volunteers to serve as facilitator of the discussion. Like in the Lotman
reading, this episode results in very little discussion of the intended
nature after the putative start of the reading event the first week in
November there are 11 postings that recognizably belong to this thread,
7 in the first week and another small batch of 4 postings after a gap of
two weeks, when one contributor asks when the discussion is supposed to
start. In this episode there are three times as many messages of an administrative
character: discussion of the organization of the event, requests for the
papers and for being subscribed to the XCLASS subconference. Of course
there is no knowing how much of a multilogue on methodology there would
have been without the reconstruction of the event into a joint reading,
but the delay caused by having a paper distributed and perhaps the very
process of organizing the event over the mailinglist channel, may have
diverted the collectively available time. Limited time for reading the
paper carefully enough to have opinions on its methodology will also have
had its effect.
The essay by Bateson, "Form, Substance, and Difference", included in
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), was chosen for a joint reading in the
winter quarter of 1993. Bateson argues for the theorizing of the simplest
unit of mind as an elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit,
where the transform of a difference traveling in the circuit is the elementary
unit of ideas. This paper contains two illustrative examples of such systemic
circuits mind extending outside the boundary of the skin that have
been recurring objects for Xlist discussion: the blind man with his stick
and the man cutting down a tree with an axe. It is one of these Batesonian
occasions that prompts the suggestion for a joint reading: Bateson has
been invoked several times in the Xlist mailstream of December 1992, when
a joint reading of this particular paper is suggested. The suggestion is
taken up by other participants, but the matter of organization is quickly
channeled outside the public forum, directly to the contributor who initiated
the topic, and who has volunteered to facilitate the discussion. The second
week of January 1993 this participant announces that the Bateson reading
will start on February first, with the first pages of the essay but it
is not until a few days later that he starts the discussion by forwarding
a commentary on the essay from an external contributor, who soon thereafter
joins the list. After a delay of almost a week, a multilogue does get off
the ground: an initial round of roughly a week, with several participants
and quick responses, followed by a three-week "panel" discussion in slow
but steady pace between three skilled and knowledgeable contributors, posting
long and reflective messages, which often meticulously respond not to the
latest message, but to the last issue left dangling. A file of the accumulated
text from this multilogue has been circulated on the Xlists on at least
one later occasion where Batesonian questions were in the mailstream. One
week into March the facilitator opens the discussion of the final part
of the essay, expressing hopes that the content of this section will appeal
to a wider range of contributors. The next posting praises this invitation,
but also turns out to be the final posting in the episode the Bateson
reading is alluded to as unfinished business a month afterwards. Nevertheless,
in this episode of joint reading there is not just a larger number of discussion
postings than in the two previous ones (28 in all), but these postings
also form an interconnected multilogical cluster, which cannot be said
about the two events described previously. The successful character of
the Bateson episode is presumably formed by the concise planning of the
event, the ample time given for preparatory reading (or re-reading) of
a classical and easily available essay, and the presence of a "special
guest contributor".
In the fourth case, the Engeström paper, "Development as breaking
away and opening up" (Engeström, 1996), chosen for joint reading in the
autumn of 1996, the initial phases of the joint reading event develop more
rapidly than in any of the other cases: the episode passes from proposal
to discussion in four days. The paper is selected for joint reading just
a little over a week after being presented at the Second Conference for
Sociocultural Research, held in Geneva, September 11-15, 1996. Some of
the Xlist participants who were not going to the Geneva had expressed their
interest in post-conference discussion on the list even before the conference,
and the intention was to take up other papers after the first one had been
treated. Engeström's paper argues against theories of development that
look only to the peaceful and stepwise individual progress along a universal,
pre-established developmental path. It suggests that individual transformation
may depend on collective transformation, that development may be viewed
as partially destructive rejection of the old, rather than simply as benign
achievement of mastery, and that instead of just being a movement across
vertical levels, development may also involve movement across horizontal
borders. The theoretical arguments of the paper are illustrated by means
of examples from Peter Høeg's novel "The Borderliners" (1994), and its
re-formulations of the Vygotskian Zone of Proximal Development are well
in line with Xlist debates over the years. When the paper is first suggested
for joint reading there is briefly some organisational discussion: other
papers are mentioned, the author posts his agreement, and, following a
suggestion that it would be a good idea to make the target paper available
over the MCA Website, there is discussion about the best procedures for
putting papers on the Web. However, on the third day after the initial
suggestion an electronic copy of the paper is sent over the list, and the
next day there are already responses from contributors who have read it.
This event is different from the earlier occasions of joint reading in
being a lot less pre-planned and in having no explicit facilitator. The
discussion part of it contains a larger number of contributions than any
of the other three joint reading episodes 53 postings in the course of
three weeks and there are many crossreferences between strands, although
late in the episode an independent cluster on the use of fiction as data
develops, which is related to the paper, but not to the other strands of
the multilogue. When the multlogue is far into its phase of decay there
is an announcement that the paper is now available through the Web page.
One of the two last postings in the multilogical clusters that arrive after
this point is an attempt to bring together some of the issues brought up
and formulate new questions. There is,however, no uptake to this. The only
difference between this episode of joint reading and a spontaneously emerging
multilogue is the fact that the discussion takes off from the reading of
the Engeström paper and keeps returning to it. Evidently the strategy of
broadcasting the paper on very short notice worked well as a way of riding
the waves of a self-organizing system. On the other hand, as with other
attempts at initiating a new multilogue by introducing external material,
this strategy is a gamble although probably less so when the paper is
requested by list participants than when it is first offered up by the
author. (There are many instances of this in the Xlist archives, and, especially
in the early years, paper-length texts sent over the list were likely to
be taken as insults by at least some subscribers, and responded to accordingly.
However, with increasing Internet access, the floating of bulky material
is less commonly seen as an offense.)
The two cases of successfully carried out joint reading shared
the characteristic lack of closure with spontaneously emerging multilogues.
Trying to rekindle a topic that has started to decay may be no more feasible
than leaving the popcorn in the microwave until every single corn has popped.
When the pops get few and far between, the late contributor might win the
day by rhetorically tying up loose ends it would seem as if the wily
writer could produce a fair simulacrum of consensus with no great risk
of being gainsaid. Perhaps the Xlist custom of leaving always some questions
in the air is to be preferred, even to the price of the frustration that
may arise from the lack of closure.
Concluding remarks: tuning in to mailinglist dynamics
The voluntary nature of participation on a scholarly mailinglist, the distributed
character of both the subscriber pool and the technical facilities coordinating
their communicative activity, and not least the nature of the activity
as a semiotic process all merit the description of mailinglist activity
as a self-organizing system. This paper has explored a number of avenues
towards conceptualizing and analyzing the ways in which the scholarly mailinglist
can also be modelled as self-organizing in a mathematical sense, pointing,
among other things, to some aspects which exhibit the inverse power law
relationships that indicate a probabilistic system in a state of self-organizing
criticality. The work of generating a viable conceptual approach has involved
a repeated movement back and forth between the experience of active participation
on a scholarly mailinglist, and the external perspective mediated by representations
of the mailinglist ecology that serve to maintain distance and provide
overviews of parts or aspects of the mailinglist activity system and its
products.
Graphical link maps of intermessage references were introduced as a
tool and used for making the temporal structure of multilogical events
and the relations between messages visible. Three fairly large samples
chosen because of containing interesting multilogical episodes were presented,
and graphically represented by link maps, bridging between the perceptions
of subscribers participating in multilogical activity in its expanding
and dissipating phases and an analytical perspective on the events. The
perception of accelerating intensity in the written conversation that characterizes
the emergence of a multilogical cluster corresponds to an expansion of
the system-internal temporality when the discussion gets hot the mailinglist
takes more reading and writing time from its active participants each time
they visit the virtual setting and at the same time there is an increasing
density of interlinkage between postings. However, the expansion contains
the seed of its own dissolution, as with an increasing number of active
messages in the system (relevant postings, old and new) the collective
capacity of participants to hold together the whole semiotic complexity
of the multilogue will reach its limit. The perception of thematic chaining
and dissolution into unrelated branches of conversation correspond to a
spatial drifting apart and loss of connections in the link map. What has
been presented here from this conceptually generative phase of research
naturally demands further testing of its viability.
However, my observations of the several ways in which the activity on
a scholarly mailinglist can be said to be self-organizing warrant some
concluding remarks in the direction of application. For those of us who
wish to capture the learning potential of written conversation in the mailinglist
medium it is important to be well aware of the self-organizing nature of
scholarly mailinglists, in all senses of the word. If nothing else it may
spare us from some disappointments: a self-organizing system is not really
amenable to control or planned change but it is, nevertheless, possible
to get in tune with the internal dynamics of a mailinglist, and learn to
recognize the moments when small interventions have a fair chance of triggering
noticeable effects. The four case studies of more or less planned and successful
events of joint reading on the Xlists illustrate both how plans may go
wrong in this distributed and loosely coordinated medium, and how organized
episodes may be carried through, with the right timing in relation to the
current dynamics in the activity system. The success of a scholarly mailinglist
as a multilogical activity system, then, depends on the apt performance
of semiotic self-regulation in the subscriber community, involving for
each and every responsible participant a coordination of the moments of
centered participation with a certain amount of de-centering towards a
view of the emergent states of the mailinglist ecology. On the Xlists these
kinds of facilitation skills have always been regarded as a collective
responsibility for maintenance of the cultural practices of multilogical
discussion (Ekeblad, in preparation b). The combination of the centered,
participatory appropriation of these practices with occasional de-centered
knowledge-building about the emergent nature of mailinglist dynamics at
a systemic level would seem to me a promising road towards maintaining
practices of mailinglist re-centering.
This work was supported by The Swedish Council for Research
in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSFR).
Opinions are those of the author and are not necessarily
those of the Council.
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Endnotes
1 The first appearence of the term multilogue in the Xlist
archives is in a message by Arne Raeithel from 1989, where it appears in
a paper abstract (Title: Figurations and Communicative Activity: How Collective
Subjects Form Themselves) for the 1990 conference on Activity Theory in
Lahti, Finland:
Starting with central insights from the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias
(TCS 1987) the paper will present and extend the theory of collective re-centering
(Raeithel 1983). The most important new element in this conceptual endeavor will be
the use of the notion of a "multi-logue of different voices" (Bakhtin 1981, Wertsch
1985) to develop a model of the mediational means of re-centered reflection.
(89-12-22: Two abstracts and a Happy New Year from Arne)
Going to the source - Wertsch writing about Baktin in 1985 - we find that
while the concept was certainly there, the word "multilogue" wasn't. Wertsch
(1985) wrote instead "multivoicedness" and was referring to Bakhtin's concept
of "heteroglossia".
Back
2 This has been internally used as a nickname of this
cyber-settlement, especially in the years from 1989 to 1995, when discussions
were channeled over a number of separate but closely related lists, an
experimental phase which was abandoned in 1995 when discussions were re-channeled
over a single address. Ffor historical and witty reasons there has always
been a signature X in the successive names of the forum and in the names
of all parallel branches. The first appearance of the collective nickname
Xlists in the archives is, again, in a message by Arne Raeithel:
Date: 91-04-17 10:00:31 MEZ
From: PO61170%DHHUNI4.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Mail loss: 12 messages down the drain
To: xact@ucsd.edu
Dear friends, if you sent me a note directly, it may have been lost this morning
when 12 messages somehow disappeared from my mail box. Most of them might have been
from an Xlist, though. Please resend any message of yours from yesterday (Tue 17 Apr)
or today until 8 hours GMT.
Arne.
P.S. Please do not re-send over Xlists on my behalf, this would be a bother to everybody else...
Back
3 The quoted idioms are among those employed by mailinglist
contributors, going about their business of producing coherent written
conversation.
Back
4 What was referred to as a "fast and furious" pace
in 1988 was a mailflow averaging 1,7 msgs/day over two weeks. The same
phrase was recently used in a context where the preceding week had an average
of 9,7 msgs/day - the average of the first half of 1999 being 8,3 msgs/day
Back
5 On mailinglists that are moderated in the sense that
each message is approved by a person with special rights and responsibilities
the typical lag may be even longer (moderators have to sleep!), but unmoderated
lists are usually faster than the Xlists.
Back
6 Contributors occasionally orient to these possibilities
by apologizing in advance.
Back
7 This is not to say that it is only the scholarly
multilogue on a list that generates self-organizing clusters of postings:
items from the activity systems of channel maintenance and community building
(Ekeblad, 1998) may also provide objects coordinating the actions of list
participants in the same fashion. So, for example, the Big Xlist Brownout
of November 1998 was an event of channel failure that triggered an avalanche
of troubleshooting, which in its turn spawned an outburst of community-building
self-presentations. My preference for investigating specimen of scholarly
multilogue stems from my educational research interest.
Back
8 Slopes for the first and most nearly linear part
of the plots range from -0,9 to -1,2 for the older samples and from - 1,8
to -2,2 for the 1997 sample
Back
Eva Ekeblad 1999 |
