Analysis

What to do with this blog? I hardly have time to write anything anything, not to mention anything of any value. Then again, this is basically written for myself as a document etc. on my PhD project. So, I’ll try to do just that in the future.

Right now I am preparing to give a small talk at the annual Sociology Days in Turku, Finland. My workshop group is focused on the sociology of knowledge and I’ll be talking about how I see Touraines analysis of social movements in connection with science and technology. I’ll post the damn thing here in English once it’s done.

Meanwhile I have gathered a good collection of books and other readings. For instance, yesterday I found Robert C Bannister’s Sociology and Scientism – the American Quest for Objectivity, 1880-1940. I’m also enjoying Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s A Social History of American Technology, and the superb Thomas Kuhn – A Philosophical History for Our Times by Steve Fuller.

This Fuller chap I’m going to keep my eye on. After reading Humanity 2.0 and (his PhD) Social Epistemology (see, wiki and Journal founded by Fuller) I was deeply convinced.

My own research is now going in a simple straight line. I’m deep inside data analysis and familiarizing myself with 19th century thinking on science and technology. I’ll blog about the talk at the sociology day later this month on some initial ideas and results.

City of Vaasa, Immigration and some Electric Sheep.

Today I hopped on a train heading north. In my work at the Kalevi Sorsa -foundation I am coordinating a research project on immigration and the work market. A few weeks ago I was asked to share some of my initial results from a series of workshops I hosted last fall and winter. Not only was I asked to do that, they asked me to host the entire ETNO seminar. The “Q-seminar method” I piloted with the process is focused on the question how immigrant NGO’s could start producing services to the open market.

And, since I am a true believer in open data and open knowledge, I’ll “release” the entire Q-seminar process “handbook” as a Creative Commons research method when I get the thing tweaked.

You may not know but in Finland there are only a few immigrants and even fewer refugees. With a falling birth rate and an ever expanding population of the elderly, not to mention the very costly and outdated welfare state, we really need immigration. At the same time  we are trying to avoid the mistakes in the integration process we see elsewhere in Europe – and even Sweden.

As you may know, we have our share of the right wing populist movements and this year is a local election year. Along with the Greece mess, there is going to be some heated discussions about immigration and the EU.

So, here I am in Vaasa and I am starting to realize all the stuff I forgot home.

I have some nice clothes for tomorrow but I forgot my “better shoes” so I’ll have to pull this of wearing green jack boots with yellow ties. Also, I have no toothpaste. All I have to snack is a bag of candy and some ED. Great. What I do have is a good collection of technology. There are at least two devices with 3G connections and this computer is wired to the hotels WiFi network. Everything I do is connected to this technology.

Since the long train ride here and the relatively lax day tomorrow, I thought I could take some time of from my research but no, technology follows me everywhere. And since my writing process is not going so good, all this electricity and connectedness is starting to hurt my head.

But I don’t complain, I love it. When I finish watching Reel Steal I hope to fall a sleep and dream of electronic sheep.

What! Nothing!

I seem to have trouble starting the writing process. The weeks fly by. Since I do my PhD part time, the time spent in the project is dependent on other projects I am involved with. I’d like to list them here, so you’ll get an idea what my life is made of.

1. The Kalevi Sorsa Foundation

This is where I work. It is a center left think thank where I have the responsibility of two different research projects. The other is about immigration and the job market and the other deals with mental problems in the workplace. The foundation work is pretty much my dream job and in a way the research centeredness supports my research process in general.

2. Start up

Last fall I won the Finnish Be a Change social entrepreneurship competition at Aalto University. This means my business is currently under development and I aim to launch the product in the fall of this year. Me and my associate got our demo version ready and are now starting the real development process.

3. The Open Ministry

This is perhaps the most interesting project in Finland right now. The Open Ministry is a crowdsourcing project that supports the new law that allows citizens to make proposals for a Law. It “only” takes 50 000 signatures and the parliament has to vote on the law suggestion. My job in the project is to function as a contact person between different organizations and our system. Also, I should try and think about how to develop the system to help NGO’s better.

4. Voluntary and NGO work

The Helsinki free thinkers (chair), Exitus, pro eutanasia (vice chair), SYY, social entrepreneurs in Finland (secretary)  and the Friends of Western Sahara in Finland (activist) are my major projects that take a lot of my time these days.

5.  The book

Last week I was asked to write a new book due to come out in the Spring 2013. This is a major task and there is a lot of work in it but I feel pretty confident about things.

6. Journalistic work

I have some regular columns and I also write for a magazine here and there. Nothing major but it does take tame.

7. The Open PhD Project

You are reading it right now. As you may notice, I do have some difficulties in finding time to do my work. However, I have not despaired yet. My material is ready and I have read enough books and articles to get the draft done. I just need to start writing and I’ll try next week. During the summer the first version of the article really should be done.

How to start

It’s time. I’m ready. I have  the time and the energy. But nothing happens. This is starting to be a problem since I should now start writing the first draft of my research article on my wiki.

Lately I have began to think about everything else than this work. I know I should spend more time on this project but I seem to be spending more and more of my time in NGO work or reading completely unrelated books. As long as I can remember that has been my way of getting inspiration but a PhD is such a big big project that there should be some hard hours put into it.

How do people do it? I know a lot of professionals who manage many projects and still are able to find time for their families and hobbies. Are they more clever than me or are they just better at organizing things. Yes, I suppose that’s what I am thinking deep down: are they better.

Being better then others in something has a nice ring to it but is  that how creative (?) research is done? Almost every spring here in Finland we go through the same public discussion that are we educating too many people too much. If I remember correctly about 75% of the working population has a higher degree of some sort. Sure, that’s all great. And since we are doing so well in Pisa, how can there be anything wrong with things.

Being better than the rest is a question deeply thought about in bettering human capacities. How is something branded better than something else? Are the qualities that make great researchers qualities that can be measured in any reasonable way? A very famous Frech sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent much of his career in trying to understand this.

He was not that liked in some Frech social circles since he made a very public and very unapologetic statements about the relation of success and other sociocultural factors. For instance, Bourdiue once stated that the best success in academic professions has less to do with abilities and more to do with a given social class.

This of course angered the upper classes in the static Frech society. Bourdieu argued that we are vester in different amounts of cultural, social or economic capital. The genious of Bourdieu is in being able to show that different capitals are transformed to other capitals. If you are brought up in the upper strata of society, that social capital will turn into wealth. Or  if you have a university degree you are also likely to have a lot of cultural and social capita as well. All in all, the more you have of these “good things” the better you are off.

I really am thinking about Bourdiu as I sit now in bed typing on my iPad2. I have a masters degree, I read a lot of books and I work in a very nice office. So, is that going to make my PhD project any easyer? I really don’t think so. But am I one of those people who have received “too much education”? Perhaps, but I really can’t answer that.

I am entertaining an idea that maybe being good or clever is not what I need here. Perhaps being better at something that can be measured is not in fact a very good starting point if you have to do something that has not been done before. Isin’t that just what any PhD project is really about?

In my research I have to make a number of claims on various issues. Currently I am adopting a critical realist view on sociology which in itsef is quite risky in a world of postmodernism and constructivist thinking. Also, I am trying to claim that technology and a subject somehow create a whole new social category of action. And if that’s not enough, I state that there is a possibility of technological exceptionalism in transhuman technology.

So, as I am trying to manage my confusion and frustration, I draw some megalomanic energy from the idea that I am doing something different. There is no measure, but is there a capital here or just singular ideas that have no value to anyone else? I don’t know but all I can do is wait and see if the writing frenzy will kick in this week.

Some light thoughts about researching transhumanism

I just bought an iPad and I am starting to realise that severe neck pains may be common in the near future of a technological lifestyle. Since I decided to install WordPress from the App Store, it may be time for an update on my research project.

As you may know, this blog and the wiki I set up are here because of my PhD project on transhumanism. My aim is to research transhumanism as a social movement and that is partly why I started this blog. Since transhumanism is very much an internet based phenomenon, it would make sense to ‘go native’ when trying to grasp the many dimensions of transhumanism. I suppose you could call this an attempt at internet anthropology – even though I am a sociologist.

Also, this is an attempt in researching the idea of an ‘open PhD project’. I am an open data and open knowledge enthusiast so this is a very personal part of the research. This way it is possible to come into contact with other researchers of transhumanism as well as philosophers and sociologists working in the field of science and technology studies.

So far I have found only a handfull of other general research blogs but I’m sure there are plenty out there. What makes this different is that I’m going to have my entite research process done ‘on-line’ in my wiki (openphdproject.wikispaces.com). There ain’t much stuff there yet but in the coming weeks I’ll be starting the work on my first research article. There is no ‘model’ on how to do this, so the first article is going to be a bit of a test for myself also.

This site is not really about exhibitionism so I’d be happy to get in contact with interested people and of course other researchers in the field. I have noticed that there are many transhuman related websites and organizations in the world so I decided that before summer I’ll try to contact most of them and tell them I’m here.

This wordpress page by the way is by no means ready. There is a lot of facelifting to do and there are very little ‘resources’ or even links available. I hope that in the coming weeks I’ll have the time and energy to do something about that.

Most my time goes into reading right now. My research has some very tricky theoretical concepts I’m trying to understand and make use of so my daily research time mostly is put into that.

However, in the near future there is going to be some activity and changes. Don’t mind the outlook of the page or the “work in progress” feel of it: if you are interested in transhumanism or this project, contact me or share this post in the social media.

Feel free to glanze through the site and give some feedback. By for now, I’ll be back soon.

Focusing the research

Some posts back I decided to focus on the concept of enhancement and what it means for a social actor. Back then I viewed enhancement as an attribute that alters the social relations in a given group or societal context. I still consider this a starting point but then I began looking for materials to use as my research data.

First I went through some transhumanist related literature that I had ordered form a bookstore. Then I perused through some blogs and websites contacted with transhumanism and tried to get some big pile of material to start analyzing. I’m not going to go in to detail how this analysis going to be done since I myself have not really decided.

Then I started wondering, that perhaps I need even a more focused concept than just ‘enhancement’. It is obvious when reading transhuman texts that enhancement is a marker for a variety of different methods and views on ‘human development’. In short, I decided to focus on some small piece of discussion.

Along came cognitive psychology and cognitive science in general. After some thinking I decided to try out ‘cognitive enhancement’ as my more focused area of analysis.

Cognitive enhancement has to do with ‘brain development’. So, the key focus in such actions is the human brain or cognition. It is argued, that enhancing the brain, the effects are felt in a personal human life and in society in general. Also, cognitive enhancement is not that utopian technology so there is a lot of ‘mainstream’ information about it.

And there is even a deeper point here. Since the crude argument goes that if the brain functionality is enhanced, the person is also enhanced. This creates a connection between the brain and the social. This poses a lot of questions but it also gives me an idea how the ‘actor’ could be defined in a brain centered manner.

Have no fear, I am not giving up on the core assumptions about constructivism or cultural phenomena in general, but I am trying to understand how transhumanism defines a person, technology, enhancement and the effects on the social cognitive enhancement has.

Preparing the argument: The technology-actor problem

I decided to start establishing some ground by trying to define some initial model for the ‘actor’. Some major assumptions have to be taken if one wishes to connect technology and to subject to a larger ‘macro theory’. This is a problem in any such research because it is very difficult to compel readers to accept the leap from the particular technology and it’s user to a larger scheme of ‘technology-as-culture’. However, this is something I hope to do and Alain Touraines theory actually implies it.

Here is a crude first version of my hypothesis.

An actor is an actor because it constitutes an active individual. In order for an individual to be active, it has to be able to perform intentiotal action. What exactly I mean with intention here is not relevant. We can just assume that intention means that an individual is able to make assessments, make choices based on those assessments and act upon the made choice. Clearly, this is what humans – or any intelligent beings – are able to do and it defines us as actors in our lives. So, an actor is flesh and blood. How can we then make a ‘leap’ from an individual actor or act to a larger scheme, like Touraines ‘action system’?

Well, I’m not yet prepared to make that argument but I hope I’ll get that far some day.

With my crude outline of an actor I’ll define technology as follows. An actor can either accept or decline what she considers ‘technology’. This means, that I assume technology as something given. Obviously a more precise definition of technology should start with the question of what is technology, but, since I’m just trying to get a handle on the whole, this will do.

Okay, so, technology is something given, so what our actors call technology could be pretty much what we in our mundane speak also call technology. Computers, railways, tooth pics, etc. The point I am making here is that technology is something that has intrinsic relevance to the actor. If not, then it would be irrelevant so the actor could not really accept or decline it. It would be invisible or to use an analogue, it would be like the tapestries of your home: they are there, but you don’t really notice them until you start focusing on them.

So, technology is relevant in a way that an actor can accept or decline it. An actor therefore has an opinion about technology so we can say (in a crude way) that the actor can have intentions that have something to do with ‘technology’.

Technology is not a ‘discourse’. In other words, it is not something that is just built out of meanings. People who are used to the foucaultian way of thinking would do well with just assuming that technology posits a kind of a discourse, a cultural text, and that would be all. The analysis would concentrate on the discourse and the actor would pop up equally constructed within (or with) that discourse. I’m sure you are aware, that this is also a very crude way to talk about Foucault.

Now, here is where I make my epistemic hand in hand with Touraine. At the center of my analysis there is a ‘flesh and blood’ actor that has a certain relation with the thing she calls technology. That’s great, but how does this play out when I try to connect this particular actor situation with some wider context, like an institution or – the biggest of them all – culture?

Let’s call a particular piece of technology an artifact. Now we have actors who can identify artifacts to be part of something they refer to as technology. Artifacts are, in a way, ‘owned’ by the actor. Different actors share the concept of an artifact and they all agree that it is a technological ‘thing’. If one feels like it, one can envision technology as being an attribute of the artifact.

Now, we have a flesh and blood actor that can touch, use and talk about real objects as pieces of technology.

At least for me, it gets tricky here. Since technology is something actors have to be able to identify and what they can also use, are there some competences or resources the actors must possess to identify an artifact as ‘technology’? If not, then how can anyone argue that a particular artifact has the attribute ‘technology’? It seems, there has to be some cultural (or cognitive, if we assume we are talking about people as actors) competence to ‘see’ technology.

I believe that actors must have some knowledge that helps them to classify things as technology. I am making an argument that technology is defined within a cultural system all though it does exist as an object and it can have causal or functional properties even if it is not identified by actors. This is probably something Ulrich Beck’s theory on ‘risk’ has in the theories epistemic assumptions.

This is one reason I’d like to have a real actor in my vision. If we treat technology as discourse, it would look much the same as above but there would be a very big problem in trying to relate the technology as discourse to a particular person or even a particular event in space and time.

Now, I have an actor with intentions and with an ability to identify technology and technology that is an objective part of ‘reality’ but what can also be ‘classified’ as artifacts.

I now assume that actors can relate to each other. To put it simply, they can talk and understand one another. This means they can communicate by using technological artifacts and they can also communicate about ‘what is technology’. Here I assume that the ‘culture’ of technology starts building on top of the world of artifacts. In fact, the reason these actors can even have technological artifacts is that they were together able to grasp the concept of ‘technology’ and then identify some objects as ‘technological’.

In the empirical world (?) there is a concept called ‘the technology divide’. It is often used in reference to the modern communication technology and it roughly means, that some people (children, poor, elderly) do not have the same access to technology as some technology savy individuals. In other words, some people have access to technology and they know how to use it. In our modern world this is an increasingly growing source of inequality.

I am assuming, this is how technology can be viewed as creating social relations among different groups. By using a simple dual model we can say that there is a divide between techno elites and techno populus. I’m not yet claiming that these are class differences, but I’m going in to that very direction with this argument on some other post.

At this point, I am defining the transhumanist concept of technology as follows.

Technology constitutes a cultural system where some people are more able to own and use technology. All technological artifacts draw their meaning from this shared cultural bed of knowledge. Transhumanists operate on a unique knowledge base withing a larger culture of technology. This means, that they can give extra meanings or new meanings to artifacts other people use for other purposes (like genetic engineering) or what other people don’t even consider ‘relevant technology’ (like perhaps creating a super artificial intelligence).

And, since technology is defined with a culture of ‘transhuman technology’, this culture gives the base for the cultural orientations, that Touraine speaks of when he conceptualizes the conflicts with actors: the elites and the popular classes have different cultural orientations to the same objective environment. We can talk about a ‘transhuman way of life’ as such a cultural orientation to the world.

With this definition I can start working on how actors relate to each other socially and how these relations can be seen as a creation of different and conflicting ‘classes’. The interesting part here is that the conflict is (at least partly) created by the use of technology. To do this, I’ll have to figure out how the ‘relation’ is built up from groups to institutions and organizations and ultimately to the tourainean concept of historicity. This is especially interesting in connection with transhumanism, since their ‘utopian’ technology does have a possibility to create really big cultural differences among social groups.

A mission impossible disguised as a To-Do list

I have done a lot of reading lately and I’ll add the books and articles to the bibliographical links some day next week. So far I have arrived at ever deepening questions and journeyed further in to European cultural history from the 18th century onwards. I think this could be called ‘combing the field’. Now, I’ll start of with a refined research question.

“In my first article I will analyze the transhuman concept of human enhancement. I will argue that enhancement creates new social relations much in the way Alain Touraine uses the concept in his framework of ‘sociology of action’. I also will argue for a technology-subject that breaches the nature-technology divide. This technology-subject is meaningful analytically but also empirically”.

Ok. That is really just for me as a reminder or a pointer. The question will start to make sense (even to me) as I go along with this project.

This post is where I try to make sense out of it for my self. Out of  a large collection of strips of paper that I use to sketch my ideas I am now trying to write something like a very short To-Do list. Oh, by no means this is much more ‘to do’s’ than I’d need for the article but I am having some vague ideas I want to test out first.

1. Different concepts of technology. 

Technology in the 19th and 20th century. I’ll try to see the Big Picture but also to get some hint about the ‘weight’ of history in the concept of technology, science etc. I have been reading a lot about the human-nature-relationship, the Enlightenment, Romanticism (Percy Bysshe Shelley mostly… and that could be going ‘too deep’ in to the matter).and others. The main focus here is to create a background understanding on the concept of technology and it’s different cultural meanings.

2. Construct a suitable ‘subject’ 

The subject is not just a concept but actually an actor where technology, nature and culture meet. It is alive. This subject should be concrete enough to connect to careful empirical analysis of different technologies. However, it should also be flexible enough to allow for theory building.

3. Subject-social relation-macro theory

Here is a real puzzle and I’m not even going to try to understand it myself. It involves a careful reading of Touraines work and others. I’ll need to start thinking about how I argue the actor is connected to a larger societal context and how this context could be viewed in light of some macro level theory.

4. The research data

I have to decide what materials am I going to use for my research data. This is really hanging in the air right now but I’ll figure it out later.

5. Read… read….read.

I have collected about 40 articles from various scientific journals and I need to get them read quite fast. Already I know there are some true gems in them and some articles I can discard right away. However, as my research at the moment is very theoretical, there are dozens of books and things I should either read or at least be aware of.

The Black Box of Technology

I’m working on a piece of theory I need for my first article. Last night I was laying in bed and going through some new articles on my iPhone. There were several and it will take weeks before I have read them all. And even then, I am not sure if the line of inquiry is a good one. Anyway, the problem is this: sometimes in STS literature technology is called “the black box”. This is to denote that technology is something we put things in and get other things out while we don’t exactly know how the ‘box’ works.

That sounds simple but in fact, the ‘black box’ offers a truly challenging problem in many forms. Obviously technology as a black box is extremely problematic for transhumanism that claims a certain essential knowledge about humans and technology. For me, this is very problematic because in order for me to link the subject and technology, there should not be a blind spot like this in the mix.

One approach I have been thinking about is inspired by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg in their excellent book Modernity and Technology. Here they simply pose the question why so little is written about technology in the large corpus of modernity theory in the social sciences. I paused as I read about it and then realized that, yes, there is very little written about actual technology and the ‘modernity’ in much of these works.

Now, my mission is to link some form of a tourainean theory of the subject and action (a macro level analysis) to the concrete technological corporeal subject (micro level). Therefore the link between theory of the modern and actual technology is seminal in my work.

Back to the box. The first question to pop in my mind was not ‘how’ can I do this if technology is something I cant ‘see’ with my theoretical gaze. The first question was ‘why’ technology is not mentioned in the theory of modern.

In the coming days I’ll post my initial argument with which I hope to show that the ‘technology as a black box’ problem is in fact a problem of a meta narrative. Theories of modernity only grasp technology when they have a meta narrative about concrete phenomenon like technology. If one does not exist, technology is viewed like any other ‘system’ and therefore it gets hard to analyse it’s meaning and functioning. This is why, I argue vaguely, that is why you don’t often see technology in a ‘grand theory of the modern’. I can think of at least Bourdieu and Touraine as exceptions but I suppose there are others. But, the argument is coming later. And yes, there are big problems in it’s wake.

With meta narrative I mean a system of meaning that ‘reflects’ reality (weather or not such a thing exists). There fore a meta narrative can encapsulate a phenomenon like the black box of technology, give it a meaning and have it function inside the system of the meta narrative. But, there is no epistemic view on what this black box is an there is only an ontology of ‘meaning’ around the black box. I will argue, that the omission of meaning in the meta narrative is in fact the black box of technology it self.

If the box is opened, it becomes something that interacts with the theoretical construction of ‘reality’ around it. In the case of technological imperative -model of understanding technology, the black box marches an en deux macina from it bowls. In the constructivist view, the black box contains a process of knowledge genesis and in the ANT-model the black box becomes a piece of the world.

So, let’s have a theory of the ‘modern’ that actually holds some concrete ideas about what there is inside the black box. This is what I am working on right now and it shows a lot of promise and even more peril. (Dramatic. Someone should open the ‘theater of scientific writing’ and see what fools we make ourselves into.)

Now, it was this link between meta narratives, technology as a black box and the theory of modernity that got me excited about Steve Fullers 1995 Review Essay Is there life for sociological theory after the sociology of scientific knowledge? in sociology journal.

In the essay Fuller questions the status of scientific knowledge in social science research. The whole technology as a black box problem has a lot to do with the theory of knowledge in general. For instance, we know that a certain object is made of whatever materials, that it has some cultural meanings and that it can be used to affect how the (social) world operates. It has effects and we have knowledge ‘based’ on it. Now, to have knowledge about it, we need a theory that can explain why it exists.

And here we are, back in square one. However, I think I have something you could call a solution. Well, nothing that dramatic but at least I think I have an approach that can take me where all sociologists eventually end up: inside the blue box…. no, sorry, a fan u see… I meant the black box.

The ways to describe technology-society relations

I just finished editing my draft for the first research article I’m working on. I have done a lot of reading and thinking but there seems to be a real difficulty ahead. In my research I try to argue that transhuman concept of technology also includes a social relation embedded within the technology itself. To argue this, I’ll have to revisit some of the ‘classic’ ways to define technology. As we may know, these could roughly be the deterministic, functional and constructivist ways to view technology.

But, these are constructed concepts. They are used to describe certain phenomenon that is called ‘technology’. To me, it is almost self evident, that these descriptions or concepts of course do not relay ‘reality’ in any meaningful sense. So, if I claim, that the way I conceptualize transhumanisms view on nanotechnology, they also postulate a certain (relevant) social relation within the technology, is there really anything worth researching there?

I am in a way confident about my case. There are difficulties but I am also aware that I am not making this case to point at a certain phenomenon within the transhuman movement but rather a generalization of how technology as such can be seen as (at least) a part of the actor in a society. Now, I am not supporting an ‘objectivist’ view on technology nor am I inclined to speak for technological determinism. My case may in stead reveal, that there is a way to make technology as the actor but fall short in claiming that technology somehow determines action.

I know, this does not make any sense. You can call this post my ‘fieldnotes’ if you will. In fact, I think I’ll create a category for ‘fieldnotes’ to keep track of these internal/public discussions I seem to be having.