Article: 6859 of fa.future-culture Path: ifi.uio.no!internet-mailinglist From: Erich Schneider Newsgroups: fa.future-culture Subject: thought for the day - process loss Date: 16 Mar 1994 14:45:30 +0100 Organization: Internet mailing list Lines: 79 Message-ID: <2m72hq$otr@ifi.uio.no> Reply-To: Future Culture NNTP-Posting-Host: ifi.uio.no Return-Path: <<@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU:owner-futurec@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU>> Original-Message-Id: <19940316134506.25497.ifi@ifi.uio.no> Original-Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 07:38:30 CST Comments: To: futurec@uafsysb.uark.edu To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC So, we had a brief flareup of Libertarian Stuff, lots of Social Contract Discussion, and now we turn to the Rise of Lag and the Horde of Newbies. Last spring I took a special topics course on "computer supported collaborative work". (Don't be put off by the fact that I was taking a course; it was very much a "read 1000 pages of journal articles and discuss them" type of thing.) CSCW researchers work on systems designed to help people work together. They think about email, they think about Usenet, they think about real-time multi-user graphics editors, "electronic community systems", etc. They also implement many of these things. A set of concepts that are referred to again and again are "dual level languages" and "process loss". The first refers to the fact that, when conversing over a given medium, there is communication that is the doing of whatever it is one is supposed to be doing (socializing, discussing the future, assembling a report, etc.) and there is communication about how one and all will use the medium to do the type 1 communication (how to sub and unsub, how to determine who will talk when, how to determine who can change what objects, etc.). Of course, it can happen that this type 2 communication can so dominate use of the medium that it effectively becomes "type 1" communication; this well-known phenomenon is known as "flipover" (it happens in the other direction, too). (Sideline: I've argued that Jaron Lanier's claim about VR ushering in post-symbolic communication is bogus because it doesn't allow for this.) The second refers to "loss" of time spent in type 2 communication. Time spent negotiating process rather than doing what it is one wants to do is considered "process loss". It's an open issue among researchers as to which is best in a given situation - implementing technical solutions to help solve these negotiation problems (e.g. some sort of podium-passing system built in to the system so only one person can have the "floor" at a given time) or to "let social protocols mediate", i.e., let the participants wrangle. One thing is pretty clear, though, and it's that people don't like process loss. People don't like having to slog through extra much to do what they want to do. The net is ballyhooed by many for its social environment. "It's a working anarchy! There's total anonymity!" Right now, there's little penalty in real terms for obnoxious behavior on the net, but this will change. Also, many people are vocal proponents of the "we have no dispute-settling mechanism here" point of view. Frontier justice, as befits the electronic frontier. You don't like it here, pull out your gun and shoot, or pick up stakes and leave. These twin items force the migration of many a decent person from a once-nice place. Axiomatic libertarians seem to want this kind of environment IRL as well. No overarching mechanisms. Everybody negotiates contracts with everybody else. A problem with both of these situations, though, is that while process loss can be kept to a minimum with a small, elite group of like-minded participants, process loss starts to build up when more people with divergent points of view are included. On the net, people spend lots of time migrating from list to list looking for a community they can live with, or just try to live in lots of places at once and suffer Andy Hawks-style burnout. It seems that the 3x5 Social Contract theorists here want a perfectly open, "transparent" social contract. However, most people do not like process loss. They do not want to spend large portions of their time negotiating with other people as to "how will we share this medium to do what it is we want to do". It is the case, however, that present-day centralized bureaucracies also increase process loss, because the negotiation mechanism is so clunky. People on the net, and IRL, are getting bugged about process loss, and it seems they hunger for mechanisms to reduce it so they can get on doing whatever it is they want to do. Maybe this set of terms will help steer someone's energy into productive use. -Erich erich@bush.cs.tamu.edu