Writing as Network Enterprise

Manuel Castells' book The Rise of the Network Society continues to inform my understanding of a Connectivist rhetoric, though my reading has been incredibly slow over the past month or two. I've had way too many distractions.

Anyway, Castells' discussion of the emergence of the network enterprise has clarified my understanding of the socio-linguistic ecosystem that informs writing. Castells defines the network enterprise as that specific form of enterprise whose system of means is constituted by the intersection of segments of autonomous systems of goals (187). I understand him to mean that a networked enterprise (he is speaking almost exclusively of business organizations) organizes itself and conducts its business through various segments of autonomous networks that are available to the enterprise but not owned or controlled by the enterprise.

At first glance, this may not seem like much of an insight. Haven't organizations always used autonomous networks such as highways, waterways, airways, mail systems, and so forth to do their business? They have, but something has shifted in the past few decades. The biggest shift is, of course, the emergence of the Internet – the distribution of millions of interconnected computers. The Internet provides a new, highly capable, very flexible, and autonomous substrate that allows organizations of any kind or purpose to organize themselves on most any scale and to interconnect in most any way with markets: researchers, suppliers, producers, transporters, customers, regulators, and information.

The Internet also makes explicit to most everyone exposed to it the networked structure of human interaction. Transportation systems and postal systems were also networked structures, also mostly autonomous of any one business enterprise, but for whatever reason, those networks lacked the visual or emotional impact to knock most people from their focus on the individual, at least in Western culture. We could continue to think of Microsoft as mostly Bill Gates, WalMart as Sam Walton, and the United States as JFK or Ronald Reagan.

This viewpoint is hardly sustainable in a networked enterprise. The Internet makes the network explicit to all because it connects all to all. In the old industrial enterprises, only the top management could see and connect to the entire organization. Only they could see how the whole hierarchy fit together. Most people in the hierarchy, certainly the mass of workers, saw and connected only to a handful of others and only to very little information. Today, even workers connect to others both inside and outside the enterprise, and they are more aware of the scope and reach and intricate network nature of their organizations and their place within that network. Moreover, their place in the enterprise is becoming more fluid. No longer do we all have jobs that are discrete positions on an unchanging organizational chart with static duties. Organizations are more flexible, jobs are more fluid, and this flexible fluidity requires a greater awareness on the part of each person of not only their current position within the organization but also their trajectory through the organization.

Thus, as Castells demonstrates quite thoroughly, the convergence of organizational change with technological change has led to new kinds of enterprises, which he calls networked enterprises. These new enterprises make explicit for everyone from CEOs to janitors the network reality of business. Or government, or religion, or education. My hat is off to businesses for capitalizing on these new structures more quickly than have governments, churches, and schools.

So what does this have to do with rhetoric, writing in particular? Well, writing has always been a network phenomenon, but as with business enterprises, that network has been somewhat obscured by the hierarchical structures within which writing took place and by our own intellectual, social, and emotional biases in favor of the individual. On the most sophisticated level, writing was a hierarchical, industrial process with clearly defined jobs: writer, editor, typographer, typesetter, printer, bookseller, reader/consumer, etc. Even in classes, the job of the student writer was quite distinct from the teacher grader, and seldom were the student and teacher in a real conversation that was meaningful to either of them as a conversation rather than a graded exercise. Even writing a letter home to Mom through the postal system (a network) was obscured by the disconnect between the discrete processes of writing the letter, transporting the letter, and reading the letter. Today, people text each other, and they feel (I don't think most of them think about it) connected to the processes of composing, transporting, reading, and responding. Or a better way to say this is that people now see writing as the coherent, systematic, mostly social interaction between networked nodes that it has always been at heart. We'll explore later how to make this mostly social interaction more academic and intellectual.

By the way, I think this coherence of writing/reading as a unified social transaction is the root reason why people are so attached to texting. When writing connects people to their peeps and to their info, then they come to value writing. This is a value and an energy that schools and teachers have yet to capitalize upon. Shame on us.

Then, writing as a network phenomenon makes use of an autonomous substrate known as language. I use English. I don't own English and I don't control it. If I did, then English would quickly become useless as an environment within which millions of people (network nodes) can connect to other people and information sources (other network nodes) to do the work and play of society. This substrate has rules (grammar), as does the Internet (TCP/IP), that are fairly reliable in the sense that no single person or entity (not Apple or Google or English Teachers) can change them for everyone else but that are flexible in the sense that the group as a whole can modify them if a sufficiently compelling reason emerges. Internal use rather than any standard of external merit or appropriateness determines the rules.

Moreover, the substrate is almost infinitely malleable, so that a particular subgroup (say, lawyers or redheaded, left-handed skateboarders) can create their own localized language to facilitate organizing themselves and conducting their affairs. This is quite similar to how organizations will create their own virtual networks over the substrate of the Internet. Here is the reason for network neutrality. If the Internet does not remain autonomous in the sense described here, then it will cease to be a sufficient substrate for all of us. We should expect various entities – governments, businesses, churches, schools – to try to dominate the Internet (or English) and to dictate what is proper to it and how it can be used, but if any group ever captures control of either the Internet or English, then both will be finished as adequate substrates for cultural evolution and progress. Fortunately, most networks have the ability to identify any nodes that attempt to calcify the network into a rigid, authoritarian, hierarchical structure, and the network can isolate those nodes and flow around them.

Networks as Frames

I'm always thinking about writing as complex, network phenomena—to the point that I can hardly think of writing any other way. It doesn't seem to matter what level or scale I use to think about writing—the neuronal through the writing process of a single person to a book to the socio-historical movement of languages and genres—it's networks all the way down and up and across. Rhizomes, really. I do think Deleuze and Guattari have a most useful understanding of the structure of reality that they capture graphically in the term rhizome, but that term is a bit foreign to most, almost quirky, while network has a better exchange rate. Network, then, is for me one of those large concepts that frames and informs my other concepts.

And it seems useful to know how one is framing ones reality. Perhaps the biggest lesson, though, is to realize that one is, in fact, framing reality. Actually, that is not quite right. I am not framing reality, though I am absolutely necessary for reality's frames. Rather, I am part of the dialog that frames reality. This is an important aspect of rhizomatic thinking: any frame for reality emerges out of the interactions of nodes—the dialog of nodes—within that reality. Thus, the frame itself is an emergent, and temporary, part of the reality it frames. I see everything as networks because that kind of dialog and frame explains so many things to me. Things that were unclear are now clear. Things that were incoherent are now coherent.

Apparently, others find network structures useful for understanding their favorite slice of reality. In his book Networks of the Brain (2010), about which I have already written much in this blog, Olaf Sporns frames cognition and consciousness in terms of networks on multiple scales, from a chain of neurons, to the interactions of brain regions, and onward to the connections of brains to other brains and to human artifacts. As Sporns says plainly: "cognition is a network phenomenon" (181). In his book Interaction Ritual Chains (2005), Randall Collins frames microsociology in terms of networks at the micro and macro levels of human interaction. Collins says plainly that "the center of microsociological explanation is not the individual but the situation" (3). This situation is for Collins much like what I mean by networks: the interaction and retro-interactions of nodes within a system, across that system, and with other systems. Manuel Castells' book The Rise of the Network Society (2010), frames macrosociology in terms of networks, showing how the interactions of large social groups is a complex, network phenomenon.

Network ideas are certainly common in conversations about rhetoric and education. James Berlin says in his book Rhetoric and Reality that "Transactional rhetoric is based on an epistemology that sees truth as arising out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements—subject, object, audience, and language—operating simultaneously" (15). Other rhetoricians and academicians accept this way of structuring reality as a dynamic, complex network.

I find this idea that meaning, or reality, is an emergent property of communal dialog implicit and explicit in much that I've been reading about rhetoric, or the skillful use of language, especially in education. In his 1970 classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire refers to the "banking concept of education" that turns students "into containers, into receptacles to be filled by the teacher. The more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor." This communal way of speaking about education, of course, frames what can be said and thought about education and what can be done in education. And the frame is so convincing that it feels as if Nature itself is structured this way. Of course students know next to nothing, and of course teachers know next to everything, and of course the teachers must deposit that knowledge into the students. What else could education be but this?

Freire spends much of his book poking holes in this language, but for me his salient point is that the reality of our educational system is an emergent property of the interactions among the constituent nodes within that system. Those interactions involve, of course, language and rhetoric as one, but not the only, type of meaning-creating interaction. Freire identifies the dominant language with the politically dominant group, and in this, I think he is mostly correct, and the heart of his message is that revolution depends in some part in over-turning this language. If we shift the meaning-creating interactions among ourselves and our artefacts, then we can shift our reality. This shift is accomplished partly, sometimes in large part, through a shift in language.

Like Freire, Nedra Reynolds also explores how community dialog can frame reality. In her 1998 essay Composition's Imagined Geographies: The Politics of Space in the Frontier, City, and Cyberspace, she shows how something as apparently concrete as geography is itself a product of communal dialog, especially when that language is applied to a specific discipline such as English Composition. "Spatial metaphors have long dominated our written discourse in this field ('field' being one of the first spatial references we can name) because, first, writing itself is spatial, or we cannot very well conceive of writing in ways other than spatial." Again, for me, the salient point is that the reality of English Composition emerges in large part from the dialog of the community that discusses it, lives it, and interacts within it.

This view of meaning and reality as emergent properties of a dialogic community seems to me to be at the heart of a connectivist rhetoric. I think such a frame brings some amazing explanatory power and a pleasing, aesthetically beautiful coherence to a swelter of confusing aspects of today's reality. I could easily climb atop my soapbox and proclaim the Gospel of the Net. This iGospel or eGospel has a certain appeal to it, and many of its evangelists are growing rich and powerful from it, but I must keep in mind that network is but one way of framing reality, one way among other ways. Network has a temporary advantage perhaps—a heightened currency—but in the end, network, too, will be supplanted by other ways of viewing the world. Better ways perhaps, though I can't see it at the moment.

Knowledge Nonetheless

I take issue with how Castells defines knowledge in his book The Rise of the Network Society. To be fair to Castells, his book is not about epistemology, and he says up front that defining knowledge is problematic even for those who focus on the topic. Still, he gives a definition:

I have no compelling reason to improve on Daniel Bell's … own definition of knowledge: "Knowledge: a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form. Thus, I distinguish knowledge from news and entertainment." (17)

If I'm reading Castells correctly, then for him, knowledge is based totally on a formal subset of language: a set of organized statements that is grounded in reason or experimental result and that is transmittable or communicable. As I said in my posts about James Berlin's book Rhetoric and Reality, I am uncomfortable with limiting knowledge to language, especially in Bell's case, to a mere subset of language. I think that all sentient beings can learn about their environments, and the things they learn are knowledge and the things they can learn are knowable, even if those knowledges are not expressed, or even not expressible, in language.

I'll give a quick example from my own experience. I have coached youth soccer teams for fifteen years, and I have tried to teach many children to kick a soccer ball. Very little of what I said—or transmitted to these players through a set of organized statements—about kicking a soccer ball did any good. Rather, I was most successful when I allowed them ample opportunity to kick the soccer ball. Through the trial and error of repeated attempts, most of them learned how to kick a soccer ball. I could say of a player that she knew how to kick a ball, or that he did not know how to kick a ball. This was real knowledge, but hardly communicated through a set of organized statements, hardly even expressible through a set of organized, reasoned statements—knowledge nonetheless.

Writing in the Network

I'm reading a new book: Manuel Castells' The Rise of the Network Society, second edition (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Originally published in 1996, this book makes a strong case for the monumental shift caused by the emergence of electronic networks. Though I'm just beginning the book, clearly Castells provides exhaustive, well-researched evidence that networks have changed every sphere of life: political, social, economic, religious, educational, criminal, and mental. I'm thinking, then, that he may provide a useful context for exploring how composition and rhetoric have changed.

In the Prologue, Castells introduces the general problem for anyone wanting to write in a networked world. In speaking of how global networks switch on and off individuals and groups according to their perceived relevance to the global network, Castells notes that:

There follows a fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self. [Thus], in this condition of structural schizophrenia between function and meaning, patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress. … The information society, in its global manifestation, is also the world of Shinrikyo, of the American militia, of Islamic/Christian theocratic ambitions, and of Hutu/Tutsi reciprocal genocide. … Postmodern culture, and theory, indulge in celebrating the end of history, and, to some extent, the end of reason, giving up on our capacity to understand and make sense, even of nonsense. (3, 4)

As I understand him, then, Castells is saying that the complexity and irresistible momentum of the global networks is overwhelming individuals and groups who seek refuge in chauvinistic creeds and identities to provide the meaning and values that they need. As one might suspect from the sheer length of Castell's book and the amount of energy that has gone into writing it, Manuel Castells does not accept the end of history and reason. Rather, he affirms his faith that the world has pattern and that human reason can make sense of that pattern. His book is one attempt to discern and describe that pattern.

This is, perhaps, the heart of modern rhetoric: the use of reason (the regular and sharable heuristics of thought and communication) to explore and explain the world and to inform human activity in that world. But I wonder if Castell accepts an essentialist view of reason that posits one standard of reason applicable to all people, at all times, in all situations, or if he accepts a complex view of reason that posits a relative standard of reason negotiated by a group of people, at a given time, in a given situation. I suppose I will find out.

Whichever way he goes, he poses an interesting challenge for rhetoric: how do we communicate in a world that is polarized, on one hand, by global processes that can subsume and crush individuals and groups with an economic logic and, on the other hand, by the fragmentation of individuals and groups into discrete, antagonistic identities that not only resist communication with other groups, but deny that communication is possible? This is a tough challenge, if indeed, it is real.


P.S.— It happened that just an hour after writing this post, I came across a NYTimes article Does Your Language Shape How You Think? by Guy Deutscher. Mr. Deutscher argues that we have recovered enough from the excesses of Benjamin Whorf to look more clearly at the influence of language on the way we think, including the way we reason.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

I accept that we do not all think the same. I think common experience tells us this is so, and I think research is beginning to confirm that it is so. The challenge of academic rhetoric for me, then, is to reason about the world and our activities in the world, while at the same time being conscious of the thought structures we are employing and being explicit about them. Finally, we must employ strategies of engagement with our audiences that allow for those who, through willfulness or ignorance, disregard our own impeccable and exemplary reason. I must think more about those strategies.