The new public spaces that I am interested in are very large-scale conversations (VLSC). On the one hand, very large-scale conversation is a medium that those who inhabit the Internet know very well. Usenet newsgroups, large email listserves, and other places on the Internet where large volumes of email are exchanged are good examples. On the other hand, from the perspective of the history of media and public space, very large-scale conversation is an entirely new and mostly unexplored phenomenon. At no other point in history have we had a medium that supports many-to-many communications between hundreds or thousands of people. VLSC takes place across international borders, often on a daily or hourly basis. Unlike with older media—for instance, telephones—participants in these very large-scale conversations usually do not know the addresses of the others before the start of a conversation. VLSC on the Internet is a new space where people who might never have known of one another’s existence are now forging bonds. A space has opened in which, with some good luck and hard work, new forms of relations might be forged. Naturally, this vision about the future of a networked society involving a proliferation of global conversation implies an optimism and perhaps, as some critics would have it, a naïveté.
If I want to participate in one of these huge discussions, my problem is this: How can I listen to thousands of others? And, conversely, how can my words be heard by the thousands of others who might be participating in the same conversation? Phrased as a design problem, the question becomes the following: What software can be designed to help participants navigate these new public spaces? Toward this goal, I have designed the Conversation Map system.
Why, one might ask, is this sort of analysis of interest for the navigation of very large-scale conversations? To answer this question, I compare this sort of analysis with some work done by the cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In their book Metaphors We Live By they claim that one emergent metaphor of our culture is, for instance, that “arguments are buildings.” As part of their method they show how two nouns, which might be considered, a priori, to be completely unalike, show up in very similar contexts. For example, one can say, “The building is shaky” but one can also say, “The argument is shaky.” One can say, “The building collapsed,” and also “The argument collapsed.” Similarly, both buildings and arguments can be said to have “foundations,” “to stand,” and “to fall”; “ be constructed,” “be supported,” “ be buttressed,” etc. A set of similar sentences of this sort provides an empirical means for thinking about and discovering how definitions and metaphors are produced over the course of a large amount of discussion. Thus, this tool for automatic, rough-draft thesaurus generation can be seen as “training wheels” to allow us, within the context of a specific conversation, to begin to generate the sorts of hypotheses that Lakoff and Johnson explore in their book. So, the Conversation Map gives some data exploration/navigation tools to start to understand how different conversations differ from one another according to the metaphors and definitions that are produced by the collective efforts of their participants.
I am exploring four of these new sorts of social formation:
— One area of online conversation that I am interested in is national and international discourse about so-called “mass” media, especially television. Certain television shows have over one billion viewers. Despite the content, the sheer size of their audience makes them worthy of serious consideration. Internet discussions about television shows make it clear that audiences are not “masses.” They are, rather, highly interconnected groups of people negotiating the meaning and significance of shows, characters, and studio politics in daily, international, online forums.
— With the anthropologist Joseph Dumit I am also exploring very large-scale conversations that focus on medicine and health issues. Gulf War syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, and attention deficit disorder are all examples of what Dumit calls “illnesses you have to fight to get.” Many medical and insurance industries refuse to recognize their existence. Consequently, the sufferers mobilize amongst themselves to get the status of their illness changed and thus recognized so that they will be treated by medical practitioners and reimbursed for medical costs by their insurance companies. Since it is rarely the case that sufferers are geographically localized or members of some pre-established lobbying group, the Internet is an essential forum for their self-organization into cohesive groups.
— Probably the most widely recognized of the new social formations engendered by online communications is the Open Source Movement. Technical discussions and exchanges over the Internet have resulted in new pieces of software—e.g., Linux—that constitute a new social and economic force and challenge existing products and conventional production methodologies—e.g., Microsoft’s production of the Windows operating system. Very large-scale conversations devoted to technical issues are often some of the most tight-knit and productive of online forums.
— Finally, the newsgroup analyzed for the Conversation Map summary of “soc.culture.albanian” is an example of people functioning as “citizen diplomats.” Ordinary citizens are now conducting international relations through their discussions with ordinary citizens in other hostile and friendly nations. These discussions are often very messy. However, even in the form they take today, these very large-scale conversations point to new possibilities in the conduct of international relations.
More information about this project can be found in the publications and working demos at www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sack/CM. [link defunct—Eds.]
Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist. Prior to joining the faculty at University of California–Berkeley in the fall of 2000, Sack was a research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory and a member of the Interrogative Design Group at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.