Memi: a tool for cultural democracy

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MA thesis

Memi: a tool for cultural democracy

Submitted by

Owen Kelly

ePedagogy Design Visual Knowledge BuildingUniversity of Art and Design Helsinki

In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of

Master of Arts

November 2007

Primary reviewer: Professor Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss,

University of Art and Design, Helsinki

Secondary reviewer: Lars Lundsten, PhD,Director of R&D, Arcada University of Applied Science


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Owen Kelly: Memi: a tool for cultural democracy Page 2


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Abstract

The thesis offers a view of the cultural and technical history of the last one hundred years that seeks

to demonstrate the existence of recurring attempts to construct devices that will act as memory

extenders, and to use these devices in a form of constant self-learning and refocusing, of a kind that

has been moved to the sidelines by industrial capitalism.

It proposes the creation of a software based tool to act as a portable, personal, lifelong dataspace

for purposes of memory extension to be called a memi . This web site is intended as a working

prototype of a memi , and is intended as a proof of concept, that will be developed later into a fully

functional version to be made publicly available.

The thesis argues that cultural history, and the development of tools like the memi , to be used in

the cloud, will force a rethinking of pedagogy, and the move towards an epedagogy founded on a

belief in mentored peer to peer learning. It concludes by showing how the ultimate goal of such an

epedagogy will be cultural democracy, something that can be seen as another strand in the same

lightly woven cultural history.

It is important to note that this thesis is only a staging point in a longer process. It does not seek to

prove the benefits of using a memi, nor even to articulate in authoritative detail what such a memishould consist of. Those steps are for later.

At this stage I am trying merely to demonstrate a proof of concept, in order to be able to claim that

research in pursuit of the memi is likely to be a worthwhile and fruitful activity. This thesis then

seeks only to explore the idea of a memi, to place it in context, and to show the benefits such an

idea might bring in its wake.

Key definition

In The Little Book on Living, Krishnamurti asked: Why do you want to read others books when

there is the book of yourself? The memi can be seen as a way of rendering the book of yourself

tangibly so that it can be studied whenever it is needed with a view to finding patterns that might

otherwise go unnoticed and learning lessons that be otherwise be unavailable.

I have thus defined the memi as

a portable, personal, lifelong dataspace, under the control of its user, and capable of

publishing to, and subscribing to, a range of networks simultaneously. At its simplest itcan be seen as a combination of a diary, address book, aide memoire, personal library,

expense sheet, notepad, and portfolio. Everything you might want to remember, or be

reminded of, or reuse, can be found in one place, where it can be searched, sorted,

linked and cross-referenced.

The memi is intended to store a lifetimes worth of data, from birth to death. It is not an official

document, maintaining a log of data that has been taken from you. Rather it s a personal record of

whatever data that you wish to keep for later use: data you may choose to share or not share, in a

spirit of radical transparency .


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Structure of the thesis

This paper is notthe thesis. The thesis itself exists on the web, atwww.owenkelly.net where it exists

as a trail. What follows here is a condensed version of the core arguments presented in a linear

form, rather than as the linked and discursive trail that they were supposed to be.

I have adopted this strategy because the web site is organised in a way that I have found impossible

to duplicate in a printed publication. Since the structure of the web site is an integral part of the

argument I am proposing this has presented me with many difficulties.

The web site contains many internal and external hyperlinks. Wherever possible I do not reference a

work in a footnote, I create a direct link to the work itself or a commentary on the work. I have also

created links to related articles, both within the site and elsewhere on the web. I have not attempted

to duplicate this here. Those wanting to see the full references and footnotes should consultthe

online version.

The online essays link to, and are accompanied by, a set of concept maps that are difficult toreproduce on a page, as well as various diagrams, screen-shots and other visual documentation.

This bound edition is apparently required for formal and historical purposes. It is necessary, in

effect, that a physical copy of each thesis is housed in a library. However, since it is my intention to

carry on the work that I have begun here, I am confident that the work will continue to exist on the

web, and will in fact continue to grow and develop there.

This version, then, should be seen as a reference copy of the arguments as they stood at the

beginning of November 2007. It is a snapshot. The nature of the project means that the snapshot

will rapidly become out of date as the web site continues to develop, and to realise more fully the

ideas that inspired its creation.

Because of this I have added two appendices. The first attempts to describe what you would find

today on the web. It explains the site as it is now. The second draws together ideas from elsewhere

on the site. It describes the next stages in the research, and the site's evolution.

Structure of the online trail

The trail that constitutes the core elements of this thesis begins with a single page that presents an

overview and summary of the main arguments. This contains a few introductory paragraphs,

followed by three main sections. Each section is a summary that is expanded in a longer overview

entry. Each of these overviews also contain three sections which are themselves summaries of thearguments in three much longer essays.

Each of the nine essays, in turn, makes many internal links to other entries scattered throughout the

site from which the original research and observations are drawn. Thus there are thirteen core

elements to the thesis trail, although the actual amount of relevant material that can accessed along

the trail is very much larger.

It should also be noted that, since the conception and development of the site itself has formed a

large part of the practical research, the nature of the trail; the relationships between the elements;

and the ways in which they are related internally and externally, itself forms an experiential

dimension of the main argument.
http://www.owenkelly.net/http://www.owenkelly.net/http://www.owenkelly.net/


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Table of contents

1 Overview 5

2.1 Background and purpose 8

2.2 Analysis and anatomy 11

2.3 Uses and key roles 14

3.1 The purpose of the research 16

3.2 Cultural and technical precedents 20

3.3 The long birth of the prosumer 25

3.4 A lifelong dataspace 32

3.5 Software, hardware and relations 37

3.6 Functions and options 42

3.7 Heads in the clouds 46

3.8 Rethinking pedagogical theory 51

3.9 The memi and cultural democracy 56

4.1 References 63

4.2 The site tomorrow 64

4.3 References cited 65


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1. Overview

Starting points

This project had a number of linked starting points. One was my growing belief that there were

many exciting possibilities in the fact that increasing amounts of information now lived on the web

or on servers: cultural, democratic and pedagogical possibilities. Another was a long discussion that

I had with Alex Tscheulin and Ralf Appelt about the differences, if any, between blogs and wikis;

and the possible advantages of combining the two forms into one. A third was a rereading of the

works of Ivan Illich and John Holt, and a realisation that many of their more radical ideas could

now be seen as failing primarily because they lacked the technical means for implementation.

Illich posited radical decentralisation and Holt advocated peer-to-peer learning networks. Arguably

both have these have arrived through the growth of the internet, and the permeation of networking

into all aspects of our lives; although not necessarily in the form originally intended. Perhaps, then,

it is worth looking at how the cloud might be used to further autonomous learning of the kind Illich,

Holt, Friere, Goodman and others envisaged in the late nineteen sixties.

As a result of this I constructed a specific kind of research programme for myself. I already had a

web site - I had had one since 1996 - and I decided to see if this could be re-imagined in ways that

would increase its use as a learning tool.

The background and purposeThe research began, then with participant observation, underpinned by a wide reading programme,

and a series of online discussions with friends and colleagues.

I began by defining a set of research questions that were intended to focus what was inevitably

going to be a wide-ranging exploration. I established a research methodology which involved, in

part, using myself as the subject of the research, and monitoring progress through rigorous self-

documentation.

During this process, it became clear that I needed to make an object that would stand as a proof of

concept, and that I would need to be able to describe the object that I was seeking to build. For a

number of reasons that are explained later I ended up calling this imagined object a memi, and the

ultimate goal of the research became the construction of an alpha version of a memi that would, at

the very least, indicate some of the benefits such an object could bring with it should it finally come

into existence.

The memi has its origins in several different ares of cultural and technical thinking. Not only does it

encompass the ideas of Ivan Illich and John Holt, but also those of Marshall McLuhan and,

importantly Buckminster Fuller, whose personal experiments with the chronofile have been crucial

to my thinking.

The memi is seen as a lifelong dataspace that can be used to retrieve, store, sort and publish

information. Its purpose is memory extension and its aims are several. It will permit a user to

retrieve personal historical data and to use this for personal reflection and learning. It will permitusers to share personal information for peer-to-peer learning, and it will permit users to publish

information in ways compatible with ideals of cultural democracy.


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In this regard the memi draws strength from a number of learning theories that have, in recent years,

challenged the orthodox models. Informal learning and microlearning; action learning; the concepts

of digital natives and digital immigrants: all these are crucial to the thinking behind the memi.

So too is the belief that the processes of production and consumption are merging, in many sectors,

with a parallel growth in the number of active prosumers. The term prosumer was coined originally

by Alvin Toffler and refers to those people who willingly and habitually consume through processes

of production - and the institutions that have grown to facilitate this. The ubiquitous nature of flat

pack furniture provides a simple example. Where our grandparents bought a dining suite, and had it

delivered, we return from Ikea with boxes containing the materials, tools and instructions that we

need to manufacture our own sofa and chairs.

This is a remarkable change, and one that is being paralleled in the more immaterial realms of

education and leisure. It is one that the memi is intended to address.

The above is expanded in Essay 2.1 (Background and purpose) on page 8.

Analysis and anatomy

In its current form the memi consists of a suite of software configured to meet certain goals. In its

more complete form it may well also require dedicated, portable hardware. This requirement is by

no means certain, however, since one of the issues that has come to seem central to the research is

the question of whether the memi should be an object or the name for a relationship to a personally

controlled network of linked resources.

In practice this dichotomy can be reduced to the question: where is my memi? The arguments

advanced here suggest that the search for a single application that a user can own (an application

that stores all the data it needs in its own repository, like a supercharged Microsoft Outlook) is

doomed to failure. A better approach would be to concentrate not on ownership but on access, andon the creation of a storage strategy based upon synchronised redundancy.

The nature of the memi is contestable in other ways. As I have developed the ideas embodied here it

has become apparent that writing for a memi necessarily imposes modes of style and form. These

will be examined in some detail. The core issues are concerned with how separate small notes and

jottings can be combined successfully into longer pieces. This thesis is a living example of an

attempted solution to these issues.

Not only do questions of style and form arise, so too do questions of ownership and licensing.

These too are examined in detail since they form an essential part of the memis anatomy. A memi is

a social construction, based on an assumption of grouped networking, which in turn applies

assumptions about the ability to share and reuse content. These can be dealt with by the adoption ofspecific policies with regard to copyright, but they can also be dealt with by the creation of the

means for distributed publishing

The above is expanded in Essay 2.2 (Analysis and anatomy) on page 11.

Uses and key roles

Current pedagogical tools do not, in the main, recognise the crucial changes that have occurred in

the last fifteen years. From the mid nineteen eighties to the mid nineteen nineties people used home

computers in isolation. Even when people accessed email they almost always used software that

downloaded their in-box in bulk in order that they could read and answer the mail offline, beforedialling up another connection to upload their replies in bulk. At this time almost all online activity

was asynchronous, costly and laborious and, in any case, most computer activity happened offline.


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It is a self-evident truism to note that this is no longer true. For an increasing number of people the

world is wired and information flows constantly in real-time. This has resulted in prosumers

adopting strategies of informal microlearning, whereby they expect everything they do to relate to

everything else. They expect to be able to aggregate information into knowledge rather than to be

handed prepackaged modules. We need not accept Prenskys assertions about digital natives anddigital immigrants to realise that the relationship between teaching and learning is in flux. I will

argue that the nature and direction of this flux is approximately what was prophesied by Illich, Holt

and Friere forty years ago, and what is needed now is a suite of digital tools that are designed for

socialised autonomous use; that are convivial in the sense that Illich used the word.

It may be that we are witnessing the beginning of the dismantling of teaching, as it was developed

in the industrial age. As atoms are replaced by bits, so the the monolithic structures of formalised

teaching are replaced by the bits of autonomous microlearning. This may result in a flatter

immersive pedagogy in which each learner becomes the centre of their own learning network, and

the strengths of their networking become a key element in the progress of their learning.

It is for this task that I have been thinking about the memi. Almost all educational softwareassumes a particular configuration in which the teacher or institution sit in the hub, with students in

a radial relationship. The memi assumes no such thing. In particular it does not assume that students

will use any official courseware to access their studies. It assumes that students and mentors will

work in the cloud, and that all that is required is that each person in each network has the means to

publish and subscribe to the network.

In the final analysis the memi is a preliminary attempt to banish courseware, and the centralised

control of online communication, as contradictory to the aims of a democratically charged

epedagogy.

The above is expanded in Essay 2.3 (Uses and key roles) on page 14.


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2.1 Background and purpose

The purpose of the research

In 2005 I began to explore the consequences of combining a blog and a wiki. This project initially

seemed to consist of two related problems: one conceptual and one technical. It soon became clear,

however, that they were simply two approaches to the same problem. That problem could be stated

as developing a path beyond the electronic portfolio.

The underlying issue concerned the question of how a portfolio and journal could best be digitised

to take maximum advantage of the changed format. To this end I began a research project with

myself as the subject.My overall aim was to extend this argument to an analysis of the kind of software necessary for

self-motivated, self-organised learning in the social and educational contexts described by George

Siemens, Marc Prensky and others. My intention was to move beyond a written critique to an

attempt to produce a proof of concept, in the form of an actual object that was an argument for its

own existence.

The form of this thesis, and the web site that houses the thesis, is intended as an example of that

object in use.

For a considerable time I doubted that I would be successful in attaining these goals since the more

I pursued the idea of a memi the more it seemed to dissolve, rather than come together. I began tofeel that, for many reasons it might not be possible to create a such an object. Finally, however, I

realised that not only could a memi not exist in the way that I had originally envisaged it - it should

not exist. Furthermore the very fact of its inevitable nonexistence made it a powerful, and possibly

indispensible, tool for learning in a digital age.

The fact that this thesis is an example of a memi in operation is, in some ways then, an illusion; but

it is an illusion with powerful pedagogical implications, particular where pedagogy is concerned

with providing learning tools for geographically dispersed self-learners. It is, I will argue, precisely

the kind of illusion that we should expect to find at the heart of epedagogy.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.1 (The purpose of the research) on page 16.

Cultural and technological precedents

The ideas that inspired the project to create the memi have three separate starting points.

The first strand is concerned with the nature of technology and its effects on society. Vannevar Bush

first proposed the idea of the memex in 1945 in an article inAtlantic Monthly. In this he grappled

with the concept of living in a world of limitless access to knowledge. He prophesied a personal

learning tool, and the descriptions he created of this tool lay behind my initial thinking about the

memi. (In fact the very name memi is a convoluted homage to the memex.)

The second strand begins with those thinkers in the 1960s who moved from an oppositional critique

of the current education system to a series of practical proposals for humane alternatives. These


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included (but, it goes without saying, were not limited to) Paolo Friere, John Holt, Paul Goodman,

and Ivan Illich.

The third strand draws the work of Buckminster Fuller and in particular his personal experiment

with his chronofile. This is a practical example that draws together the first two strands whiledemonstrating their value during the course of a lifetime. It can also be seen as a demonstration of

some of the underlying ideas behind Marshall McLuhans probes.

These were personalised through a fourth strand which related to my personal interest in, and use

of, a pda since June 2003 when I purchased a Sony Clie. I had purchased this as a deliberate

experiment in information handling, and I had subsequently used it to organise almost all aspects of

my life. I had seen at first hand the advantages of extending my memory digitally, and I had seen

the advantage of a single digital repository over a plethora of pieces of paper.

In 1917 Buckminster Fuller decided that he was determined to make myself the guinea pig in a

lifelong research project. Part of that project involved documenting every aspect of his life, and he

named this expanded diary and journal a chronofile. This was a self-conscious attempt, using paperand pen, to develop a medium that would be an extension of man providing a means to draw

objective conclusions from the data of ones life, and thus provide a solid basis for planning and

future activity.

In this way he anticipated the technological analyses of Marshall McLuhan, while also providing a

library of content suitable for inclusion in the memex, the theoretical machine that Vannevar Bush

sketched out in an article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945.

Bush saw the memex as a desk sized machine capable of reading data from microfilm and

displaying it visually. In this scenario people consulted their own memex as they might consult their

own bookshelves, and seeded it with new content through obtaining additional microfilms. Clearly

many of Bushs suggestions need to be reconsidered or reworked in the networked world, where theinstantaneous transmission and reception of information is axiomatic.

This work was later developed in startlingly original ways by Ted Nelson, who coined the term

hypertext, and thus opened up whole areas of research and artistic exploration. Nelson was not

concerned much with the machinery, and even less with Bushs rather patrician view of serious

professionals engaged in serious business. Nelsons concern was with computer lib, with the use of

intuitive linking to enable everyone to do whatever they wanted with the worlds store of

knowledge, including adding to it as they wished.

The invention of the database, and its by now key role in making information available dynamically

on the web, need to be included in any updated scenario which posits the use of memory

extenders as an extension of man.

The move from sites composed of static web pages to dynamic sites driven by content management

systems is important in this context. The advent of blogs and wikis point towards strategies for

collaborative knowledge building.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.2 (Cultural and technical precedents) on page 20.

The long birth of the prosumer

During the twentieth century a movement slowly grew dedicated to the proposition that the process

of learning had been industrialised with disastrous effects. This movement has never been more

than a small minority but its influence has grown much larger than its membership.

In 1921 AS Neill had founded Summerhill School in Dresden as an international school, in the


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belief that the function of a child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think

he should live, nor a life according to the educator who thinks he knows best. In 1923 he moved it

to Lyme Regis in southern England. From 1928 to the present day it has existed in buildings in

Leiston, in Suffolk, England. In 1962 he published Summerhill a radical approach to childhood

which was a national number one non-fictional best seller in the USA.

In 1964 John Holt publishedHow Children Fail, and in 1967How Children Learn. He too was

concerned with the problems of industrialised schools. He claimed that the only difference

between a good student and a bad student, is that the good student is careful not to forget what he

studied until after the test.

In 1972 Paolo Friere publishedPedagogy of the Oppressed. Friere insisted that learning was adialogic activity, and attacked what he called the banking concept of education, in which the

student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He insisted that dialogic

learning necessarily involved respect, and should be seen as the reciprocal activity of a teacher-

learner and a learner-teacher working together. In this he attempted to insert democracy not just as

the goal of education but also as a cornerstone of its methodology.

In 1973 Ivan Illich publishedDeschooling Society in which he claimed that most schools teach

students to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the

more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is

thereby schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma

with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is schooled

to accept service in place of value.

In 1974, in Take Today, Marshall McLuhan suggested that the difference between producers and

consumers would break down in the global village. Alvin Toffler codified this assertion in 1980 in

his bookThe Third Wave when he coined the term prosumer. As prosumers we have a new set of

responsibilities, to educate ourselves. We are no longer a passive market upon which industrydumps consumer goods but a part of the process, pulling toward us the information and services that

we design from our own imagination.

What these all have in common is a belief that learning does not need to involve either a

professional teacher or a specially designated teaching place. All seek tools to help learners, based

on the essentially unique nature of each individual learner, and the possibilities of such learners

coming together in mutually supportive learning networks.

In recent years this belief has, ironically, spread back to the very businesses who played a large part

in the industrialisation of the information industry. Consultants such as Don Tapscott, as well as

publications such as The Cluetrain Manifesto attempt to point out the benefits of re-imagining

business as a process of working playfully with prosumers, rather than working seriously to sell toconsumers.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.3 (The long birth of the prosumer) on page 25.


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2.2 Analysis and anatomy

Lifelong dataspace

The memi can be seen as a digital commonplace book, designed to enable its user to look back at

aspects of her life; reflect upon them; and learn. According toNotes About Notes, right up until the

end of the nineteenth century, readers habitually copied out passages they wished to remember in a

personal journal or commonplace book. The custom had the advantage of calling the readers

attention into intimate contact with those passages that appealed to them most intensely. They also

noted down recipes and business transactions; drew in them; and recorded whom they had met and

under what circumstances.

Even though they would not almost certainly have recognised the description, those who kept

commonplace books were, in effect, constructing a lifelong dataspace for themselves. They were

storing things that struck them as important or interesting, at the moment they recorded them, and

were thus able to look back at what they had collected throughout their life and reflect upon its

underlying assumptions.

They were thus empowered as autonomous learners in that their commonplace book was not

required to display any logic except their own. There was no standard format, and nobody would

declare a commonplace book to be faulty, or badly kept. Rather it was seen as a guide to the

keepers underlying concerns, and its (often impenetrable) structure was one of its points.

Only in the last century, with the industrialisation of knowledge and cultural production has thiscome to seem eccentric. In an age of digital networking it might now be seen as vital once again.

This prototype memi is a collection of materials, many of which originate from me, and some of

which originate from other people. Those pieces that originate from me are filled with hyperlinks -

both internal and external. This raises questions of style and form. Written essays stand alone, even

when they are stuffed with quotations from other peoples work. The entries here do not. I have

therefore devoted considerable time to examining how content is presented here, and experimenting

to see how the form of that presentation could be improved.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.4 (A lifelong dataspace) on page 32.

Software, hardware and relations

It has been suggested that the paper analogue of the blog is not the diary, but rather the

commonplace book. However, most blogging software is designed for a specific kind of use. It is

designed to sequence entries according to the time and date that they were posted, and to display

entries in reverse chronological order. This has two consequences: most blogs are read as though

they were newspapers, with older posts forming an archive; and most bloggers find it far from easy

to search through their archives of past posts in order to obtain the kind of overview that

Buckminster Fuller took from his chronofile.

At a minimum, then, a memi needs to be configured in specific ways to facilitate analysis based

upon retrieved data. This, in turn, requires the development of a detailed use strategy. Particularlyimportant in this strategy is the development of tools for visual knowledge building. The user needs

not just to be able to retrieve entries but also to see their relationships, relevance and relative

importance.


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If a memi is to act as a digital commonplace book then it must be accessible at almost anytime from

almost everywhere. This suggests that there may need to be a hardware component, whether in the

form of a PDA; an ultra-light PC; or something designed specifically with this in mind. It also

suggests that we have a need to look at how PDAs and ultra-mobile PCs are used at the moment.

The Sony Clie that I use is built up from a very different set of assumptions than my laptop or

desktop computer. These differences are instructive for our purposes, since they are as much about

usability as physical components. They are based on very different assumptions about how they will

be used and what users will regard as important and trivial features.

We need to consider not just how material can be entered, sorted and retrieved. We also need to

examine the constraints placed on the material itself. Since the days of the commonplace book the

grip of the copyright laws have tightened on almost every aspect of cultural production. Whereas

classical composers once borrowed freely from each other, today borrowing is almost seen as the

subject for an expensive legal action.

Although the connection to the memi might not be immediately obvious it is very real. If a memi is

to live (in part or whole) on the web, then it is going to effectively publish whatever is collected in

it. The usual way round this is for web sites to link to whatever is being collected. Thus the

original material remains where it always was, and all that has been created is a non-infringing

pointer. In a lifelong dataspace, this is more problematic.

A recent entry on the web site serves as a useful example of why this is so. I was noting that Google

have launched OpenSocial - a set of mini-programs that might change how the social web works. I

most definitely wanted to be able to look back at this later, and so I included the complete official

press release, in order that I can look back in five or fifteen years to see how far actual

developments deviated from what was planned at launch.

Since it is a press release I presume that I can include it here with little problem, but I can easily seehow the same reasoning might lead me to copy a complete article - for fear that it will be deleted

from the original server by the time I want to refer back to it. Current licensing arrangements

usually preclude this, because they take no account of the use prosumers might make of their

personal, networked cultural space. I do not wish to publish anything that is quoted or collected

here. I simply wish to store it for personal reasons in a way that makes it publicly available.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.5 (Software, hardware and relations) on page 37.

Functions and options

A single memi may be envisaged as a node in a larger network, much of which may not be directly

available to it. Each memi will be able to hook into others, and be hooked into. The strength ofthese hooks will be important, since these are the means through which a personal dataspace will

become a social learning tool.

Each memi, then, is capable of being used autonomously but provides most value to its user when it

becomes a federated member of a peer-to-peer network. Ideally it will operate both offline and

online, although its natural habitat will be the web. There will be no need to convert it into printed

text at any point. Instead it will live in the cloud, as the people at Zoho are fond of saying.

I have been discussing with the development team at Zoho Writer the possibility of tweaking the

application in such a way that it is capable of easy-to-use distributed publication. This is now on

their road map. Distributed publication would enable members of a network to grab chunks of each

others data for their own use, thus providing a vehicle for group self-learning, one of the ideas thatHolt and Illich were both concerned with developing.


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If the memi lives in the cloud then where is it? Or perhaps, more accurately: what is it? This is an

important question because it will direct the future development of the ideas outlined here. If the

memi is a thing then it will require developing in terms of its power and capabilities and, when

developed, it will be able to network. If, however, it is not a thing at all but, rather, a set of finely

balanced relationships, then it is those that should be developed and, when developed, housedwithin a suitable object.

Over the time I have been experimenting I have moved from thinking of the memi as an object

capable of networking to seeing it as a personally controlled node in a network. As I have moved in

this direction I have also been forced to think about the extent to which it needs to be self-

contained, if indeed it does.

It would have been nice to be able to draw my research together with a description of a box and its

contents, and an explanation of how my box might communicate with yours. However, I have come

to see the network as paramount in ways that have distinct parallels Friere, Holt and Illich, and

which prefigure democratic informal learning. If the network is paramount the other, more complex

issues also need considering.

Should the owner have a hard disk somewhere that is an almost exact analogue of the commonplace

book, in that the material is stored there and lost forever if the disk is destroyed? There are many

reasons why this would be undesirable. In a world of paper duplication was difficult and expensive;

in a digital world failing to duplicate or back up is almost wilfully perverse. A strategy of stored

redundancy would be more useful.

Should a memi be a walled garden? By this I am asking whether the memi should be a conceptual

pseudo-object, whereby we agree that anything stored at www.owenkelly.net is in my memi, and

anything of mine stored on, say, Flickr is not. There are, again, several reasons why this seemingly

sensible distinction might be neither safe nor satisfactory. Nor, indeed, sensible.

Perhaps, then, the noun memi might be said to occupy a similar position to the noun family. The

relationships that can be said to constitute either are geographically and temporally fluid, but can

nonetheless be defined with some certainty. In both cases the word defines a set of formal

relationships and those relationships in action.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.6 (Functions and options) on page 42.


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2.3 Uses and key roles

Heads in the cloud

Where is my memi? This can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer, once we assume that the

memi is networked and that it, or parts of it, are publicly accessible. Traditionally, applications

reside on disks, whether the hard disk that sits inside my computer or on a DVD that sits on a shelf

wating to be loaded.

My daughter plays The Sims as often as she can, and the answer to where her Sims live is fairly

straight-forward. The application is first copied onto the computers hard disk, after which it always

requires the original DVD of the latest upgrade to be inserted before the program will activate itself.The Sims themselves (their histories, houses, pets and jobs) are stored in a set of data files that can

be backed up separately.

When we talk about the Sims, then, we may be talking about the little characters, or about the

application that generates the little characters, but that is as complicated as the question gets. The

question about the memi is several levels more complicated, since it is necessary to answer a prio

question first: what is my memi?

At the moment this site is hosted by GoDaddy. One answer, then, is that my memi is stored

somewhere in a server farm in Scottsdale, Arizona. However, this presumes that the memi is a

single unit of data, like the set of files that constitute everything there is to know about Naas Sims;

and it isnt.

It is perfectly possible to set up music files to play from my site, while storing them at my Box.net

account. It is perfectly possible to have my photo galleries streamed in from Flickr, or somewhere

similar. If the data lives in the cloud then there is no need to keep it all in the same place, and

there might well be advantages in splitting it up.

The memi may, then, not actually be anything at all. It may simply be a conceptual space that

appears to house everything about me that I want stored, and a unified interface that enables me to

access this material in understandable and consistent ways. In this, it is not alone. There are an

increasing number of items in the cloud that might be said not to really exist, but to be better

conceived as thought experiments that enable us to envisage relationships.

As people become comfortable thinking in this way it will affect how they work and how they

learn. Among many daunting tasks this will involve rethinking pedagogical theory.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.7 (Heads in the cloud) on page 46.

Rethinking pedagogical theory

Marc Prensky has offered a challenging view of pedagogical theory in the post-industrial society. In

the 2001 essayDigital Natives, Digital Immigrants he asserted that students have changed

radically. Todays students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

However, unlike other cultural theorists he does not merely assert this: in part two of the essayDo

They REALLY think differently? he attempts to produce evidence to support his claims from recentneuroscience.

He suggests that, based on the latest research in neurobiology, there is no longer any question that


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stimulation of various kinds actually changes brain structures and affects the way people think, and

that these transformations go on throughout life. The brain is, to an extent not at all understood or

believed to be when Baby Boomers were growing up, massively plastic. It can be, and is, constantly

reorganized.

Based on this he has suggested that we need to change the current educational paradigm from

being taught to learning on your own with guidance.

Microlearning.org is a web site and a conference dedicated to finding ways to affect just this

change. They say that the increasing need for microlearning occurs because all is falling into small

digital fragments, loosely joined and permanently rearranging to form a multitude of new patterns,

tasks and threads. We have to learn to live in the micro-cosmos.

These, then, are some of the key pieces of the puzzle. These are some of the reasons why I believe

that something such as a memi is needed: to help provide a tool within which can support

continuous learning and growth, without being an educational facility. If Prensky and others are

correct (or even partially correct) in their predictions then there is a need once again for

commonplace books: a repository in which anything and everything might be stored for retrieval

later.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.8 (Rethinking pedagogical theory) on page 51.

The memi and cultural democracy

The cliched danger of life in the clouds is that we become mere digital cogs in a gigantic worldwide

machine. If 1984 has gone then this must be the Brave New World; and so on. Realistically, though,

the possibilities are much more interesting than this.

I have talked about the idea of radical transparency, which involves switching a key question

around. Instead of asking why are they storing data about me, and how can I stop them?, we can

ask what data shall I give them, and what will I get in return? This involves moving away from a

traditional starting point that asserts that nobody has a right to know anything about me unless they

are police officers in possession of a search warrant. Instead we accept that we are in an information

economy; that information is money; and that those are the main reasons that people want

information from us.

Since we all generate information all the time with every choice we make then the information

economy has a very different starting point than previous economies. This does not mean that

information wants to be free and everything will always be alright from now on. It does however

offer us the chance to consider retooling pedagogy for a world in which the relationship between

people and institutions is in many ways inverted.

Like much that was prophesied or foretold in the middle of the twentieth century, cultural

democracy is now undergoing a renaissance. In a networked world the radial nature of

communications has broken down, to be replaced by a vision of communication represented by

scale-free graphs.

In this emerging culture cultural democracy is both a possible condition and a principled goal for a

networked epedagogy.

The above is expanded in Essay 3.9 (The memi and cultural democracy) on page 56.


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3.1 The purpose of the research

The project began with my concerns about the differences between blogs and wikis. Both were

examples of database-driven social software. Both were used to gather together disparate bits of

information. Both of them were available in many different (often open source) softwares.

My concern was not merely theoretical. Students at Arcada, where I teach digital interactive media,

had been provided with their own home pages, but these had not been a universal success. Students

who were not trainee web designers, for example, often forgot how to create new pages, and let

their sites languish after an initial burst of enthusiasm.

I looked at this problem in some detail, thinking that I was, in effect, trying to find the best

mechanism for powering HomePage 2.0. Recognising that blogs and wikis were just two rather

specialised kinds of content management software, and that all were examples of dynamic web

sites, I constructed a concept map that analysed the relationships between them.

Later, in a seminar in Rotterdam, Ralf Appelt disagreed with, or extended, my conclusions in a way

that directed my thinking. He suggested that the most powerful underlying difference between

blogging software and wikis was the expectation that the programmers had as to how they would be

used. Blogs are designed to make linking to external sites as easy as possible. Wikis are designed to

make linking to other pages in the same wiki as easy as possible.

Thus, Ralf Appelt suggested, blogging software presumes that you are linking to, and quoting from,

the blogosphere, while a wiki assumes that you are building up a self-containing depository of

knowledge, information or opinion.

The Bliki

Like many interesting answers this only served to open up more questions. There had been several

attempts to create software that combined the two functionalities: so-called blikis. Martin Fowler

had tried such an experiment several years previously, although the ultimate outcome was not clear.

Martin Fowler still uses his bliki, and it forms a section on his site, but its use seems to me to serve

more as a notepad or the collection of tiny snippets of the kind that newspapers and magazines

sometimes run down the outside column of a page.

In May 2003, in a piece titled WhatIsaBliki?, he wrote:

Ive been watching the blog scene develop for a while, and its impossible to not want tojoin in. But there are things Im not so keen about blogs. For a start the name, as my

colleague Mike Two puts it, blog sounds like something I should pay a physician to

remove. Beyond the name, however, theres the very ephemeral nature of blog

postings. Short bursts of writing that might be interesting when they are read - but

quickly age. I find writing too hard to want to spend it on things that disappear.

I have similar mixed feelings about wikis. I like the way they allow you to quickly put

stuff together. But they can easily lead to long rambling sites. And I do like the fact that

blogs make it easy to see whats really changed recently - thanks to the hooks into RSS

and aggregators.

So I decided I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which

Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki. Like a blog, it allows me to post short


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thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces

that I hope will still be interesting in a years time.

Ralf Appelt, Alex Tscheulin and I spent sometime exploring the idea of developing a bliki, because

it was far from clear how they could best be combined. Should a blog have a section that acted likea wiki? Should a single software combine both functions or should two pieces of software have

their combined outputs amalgamated together?

Eeva Melvasalo worked with us to collect a list of online discussions and resources about blikis -

both conceptual and practical.

Data Portability

One element that seemed important from the very beginning was enabling the user to publish and

subscribe to other sympathetic users. This meant that the software needed to be able to import into

its database and export data from it. Wikis seemed more problematic in this regard, since the way

that they marked up the internal links was both non-standard in the sense of not being recognisable

by either HTML or XML parsers, and in the sense that the formatting used varied from one wiki

software to another.

I therefore decided to begin the construction of a personal site that might develop into a template for

HomePage 2.0 - and to construct it using WikkaWiki. I chose this because of its simplicity; its ease

of use; and its devotion to standards wherever possible. I kept logs of the changes that I made to the

structure, and to the look and feel of the site.

I began with a wiki because I wanted to see if the problems of data portability where going to be as

difficult in practice as I expected them to be. I also felt that it would be easier to look at the

differnces between blogs and wikis if I didnt get caught up (at least initially) in the fun of theblogosphere: of counting pings and trackbacks and so on. In September 2006, I considered the

question of what, actually is a blog post?

In November 2006 I decided to switch to WordPress, and the results were as painful as theory had

suggested that they would be.

There was no simple way of transferring the data from the Wikkawiki database to the WordPress

database; and no complex one that could be constructed in less time than it would take to copy and

paste the entries from one site to another. Although Wikkawiki is certainly standards-compliant in

the way that it outputs data and send it to the browser (it uses valid xhtml and all the styling is

contained within a css style sheet) the tags that it uses to maintain its internal structure only make

sense to Wikkawiki itself.I spent sometime rebuilding the content of the site, although I was very happy to find that the design

of the site was almost completely portable.

The choice of WordPress

I chose to move the experiment to WordPress because the question of data portability was only one

of a number of similar questions that had arisen through the process of using Wikkawiki. I was also

increasingly concerned with how my site could be placed inside a network, inside a cloud. Many of

the hundreds of Wordpress plug-ins seemed designed to address these specific issues.

The purpose of the research was to discover everything that I needed to make something that Ineeded personally, and which I believed other people would also need. The move to WordPress was

an important step in that process.


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The research questions

By this point I had already developed a working hypothesis into which my experiments slotted: that

the growth of networked working, learning and playing had, or would, drastically change the

environment within which most adult learning would take place, and that new tools would need to

be developed to meet the requirements of people living and learning in this new environment.

It would have been easy enough to use my work so far as the impetus to turn this hypothesis into a

theoretical research question: to investigate the extent to which this had proved true so far, and then

to extrapolate from the current data to suggest how the learning environment might continue to

change in the foreseeable future. However, I have read enough predictions of the future to know

that, while they have their own charm, they hardly ever prove useful in the ways that their authors

intended.

This has been particularly the case with regard to prophesies about the future of life online. Much

research in the nineteen nineties, for example, looked at the ways in which computer games

removed the players from social contact and isolated them from their peer group and society ingeneral. This turned out to be the ephemeral consequence of a particular stage of technological

development, for as soon as processing power permitted games to be played by multiple players

games ceased to be either isolated or individual.

I therefore declined to create a speculative work of futurology, and instead decided to continue to

create something of practical use for myself and others. To do this I began by accepting that the

initial hypothesis was true within certain limits to be found experimentally and experientally. That

is to say: the growth of networked activity, and its increasing everyday ordinariness, has

undoubtedly changed many aspects of living and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Whether these

changes are drastic or not is, however, a matter of conjecture and opinion outside the scope of this

work.

My primary research question, then, is: what kind of tool might I require to best integrate myself

with those online networks in which I participate or wish to participate? Within this lie several other

questions.

The research methods

Briefly stated, my research has encompassed a wide range of reading and discussions, including

interviews and conference attendance, in order to understand the original hypothesis and its

implications. While placing any attempts at predictive futurology outside the scope of this thesis, I

nonetheless needed to know how things stood today.Parallel to this, I took my own web site and used it as a living laboratory. I reconfigured it several

times to act in ways that I wanted a memi to act, and then observed the results, both in terms of

utility and usability. I analysed my usage of my Sony Clie PDA, and tried to draw maps of my

information needs.

Concept maps become an important tool for envisaging relationships within networks, and in

tracking the flow of information and the desire for information.

I encouraged discussion among students and staff at Arcada, where I teach digital interactive media,

about how my site was working and how, in their view, it should work. This gave me important

qualitative data. Finally I logged all progress on the site itself, using the increasing amount of data

to test strategies for displaying, sorting, searching, retrieving and publishing content.

These all combined into a strategy of participant observation with the crucial addition of continuous


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feedback loops from related networks which also contained both participants and observers.


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3.2 Cultural and technical precedents

When I first began this project I was surprised to discover that the idea of a portable, personal,lifelong dataspace struck many people I spoke with as pompous, pretentious, or self-aggrandising.

One person said that they could not imagine wanting to know anybody who had one, and another

suggested a reason for this: that the very idea seemed a thinly disguised way of announcing look at

me, look at my wonderful life; I am so important that even my bus tickets are historical artefacts.

After I had thought about this I realised that these reactions were in part based on a

misunderstanding of what I was actually suggesting. I have therefore devoted a whole entry here to

a more detailed analysis and anatomy of a lifelong dataspace to try to counter any future

misunderstandings. What I am suggesting is not a new Web 2.0 phenomenon. It has plenty of

historical precedents.

I also realised that most people already attempted to keep most of what I am suggesting would bestored in a memi, but because they habitually use a variety of albums, boxes, cabinets, drawers, files

and shelves to do so, they do not have an overall name for their collection, and therefore do not

necessarily see the various elements as parts of a larger whole.

This collection may consist of childhood photographs; holiday snapshots; old certificates, bills, and

legal documents airplane boarding cards; menus from foreign restaurants kept as souvenirs; and

even old love letters. It may also extend to memorabilia from years in a teenage band; a university

theatre group; a football or hockey team; an orchestra; a political party; and more.

There are two primary differences between this collection and the contents of a memi. Firstly, the

various boxes of old memories do not necessarily appear, even to their collector-owner, as

constituents of a larger whole, and are thus not available, as they might be, to be used as sources ofreflection and learning. Secondly, because of their disorganisation and apparent lack of value (we

only keep them for sentimental reasons), the contents of the various boxes are vulnerable in

various ways. They get jammed into cellars or attics and, for all practical purposes, disappear; or

they get left behind in the move from one place to another.

The various precedents for the memi suggest, however, that these collections of times past do have

a value; and that the value of data assembled in the past can be important in the present.

The Commonplace book

The first antecedent of the memi may well be the commonplace book. The Oxford EnglishDictionary describes this as:

Commonplace-book. Formerly Book of common places. orig. A book in which

commonplaces or passages important for reference were collected, usually under

general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially

remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.

According to an article in Wikipedia, commonplace books

emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in

England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into

books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medicalrecipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal

formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an


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aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book

was unique to its creators particular interests.

By the 1600s, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally

taught to college students in such institutions as Oxford. The commonplace tradition inwhich Bacon and Milton were educated had its roots in the pedagogy of classical

rhetoric and commonplacing persisted as a popular study technique until the early

twentieth century. Both Emerson and Thoreau were taught to keep commonplace books

at Harvard (their commonplace books survive in published form).

These, then, were self-conscious attempts to arrange material from the present into albums,

carefully arranged to facilitate retrieval later. This was part of a way of dealing with the world that

was inherently active, and inherently concerned with self-learning. According to Robert Darnton, it

involved a special way of taking in the printed word.

Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, earlymodern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke

texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in

different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the

patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable

activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world

was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of

your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

The idea of a memi would, I believe, have made perfect sense to anyone keeping such a

commonplace book, since they would rightly see it as simply extending the flexibility and power of

the activity of commonplacing; ideas that wrere marginalised during the industrialisation of theproduction and distribution of information and knowledge.

The chronofile

Buckminster Fuller never indicated that he knew anything of the commonplace book. In 1917,

though, he decided that he was determined to make myself the guinea pig in a lifelong research

project, and that he would document every aspect of his life as part of that project. He named the

expanded diary and journal he created for this purpose the chronofile. It was, in fact, a

commonplace book intended to be used in a much more rigorous way.

Not only did he use the chronofile to capture the minutiae of his life, he used to subject its contents

to regular, detailed analysis, and use these analyses as the basis of future action. All of this is

explained at length in an article entitledBucky, that was originally published in Marshall

McLuhans magazineExplorations, and later reprinted in The Buckminster Fuller Readeras

Buckminster Fuller Chronofile. He wrote that

The Chronofile consists so far of 250 volumes (half of them now bound in leather)

containing (circa) eighty thousand letters, ie 300 to 400 pages per volume.

The first important regenerative effect upon me of keeping this active chronological

record was that I learned to see myself as others might see me. Secondly, it persuaded

me ten years after its inception to start my life as nearly anew as it is humanly possible

to do. Thirdly, it persuaded me to dedicate my life to others not myself, not on analtruistic basis but because the chronofiled last thirty-two years of my life clearly

demonstrated that I was positively effective in producing wealth only when I was


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dedicated to others. Further chronofile observation then showed that the larger the

number for whoom I worked the more positively effective I became. Thus it became

obvious through the chronofile that if I worked for all humanity I would be optimally

effective.

Fuller thus extends the traditional role of the commonplace book from recording data that passes in

front of him (striking passages he has read, quotations from speeches he has heard, sketches of

buildings he has admired) to include the recording of almost every aspect of his life, including

reports of his appearances in the conversations of others:

I also keep a record of hearsay items published about my work and reported to me as

having occurred over and above the items which I have actually received and entered

into the record. There is a fairly constant percentage in the average of uncollected but

reported items as ratioed to collected items. Reliable reports of the existence of

uncollected items average twenty five per cent of the number of items collected.

It is from analyses such as these that he was able to form hypotheses about general social or

economic trends, which he could then explore further. The chronofile enabled him to use his own

life as part of his research laboratory, and thus everything he did, from taking a tram to attending a

movie, provided data that would have a later educational value.

The memex

In an article entitledAs We May Think, published in the July 1945 issue ofThe Atlantic Monthly,Vannevar Bush sketched out the idea of a hyothetical knowledge machine, which he termed the

memex (a neologism drawn from the phrase memory extender).

He was writing at the end a war in which scientist had played a large part, and scientific knowledgehad developed rapidly. His concern was to find a way in which this knowledge might be shared

among all scientists and not get lost, forgotten, or buried. He wrote that

Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are

generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate

time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio

between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously

attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and

continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how

much of the previous months efforts could be produced on call.

He looked for a technical solution to this problem and proposed a desk-like machine that contained

many of the features that were later built into desktop computers. This machine would consist of

a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece

of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which

material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of

buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved

microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest

to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take himhundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.


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Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of

all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into

place. Business correspondence takes the same path. And there is provision for direct

entry. On the top of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand

notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. When one is in place, the depressionof a lever causes it to be photographed onto the next blank space in a section of the

memex film, dry photography being employed.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of

indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard,

and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his

viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his

code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he

has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through

the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a

recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through thebook 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives

him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index.

Most importantly, this device enabled the user to make intuitive leaps between items, in the way

that Bush assumed people did in all other activities. These leaps would form personal trails through

the material, and these trails would themselves be stored as data, and could thus be recalled later.

The idea of the memex attracted wide attention and an artists impression of it was published in Life

Magazine, on November 19, 1945.

Hypertext

In 1965, Ted Nelson presented a paper at the Association for Computing Machinery in which he

first proposed the idea of hypertext, and first used the term. In many ways his ideas were similar to

Bushs with the important difference that his concern was not with the machine itself but with the

information: the ways in which it needed to be packaged and addressed to make intuitive links

between items possible.

He began by envisaging something similar to a word processor that would allow different versions

and documents to be linked together nonlinearly, by association. From there he developed the idea

of a global network of linked data, available worldwide, which he dubbed Project Xanadu. In 1967

he formally launched this, and although many people claim that the project has delivered nothing

since, although it continues to exist, this is not true. The Transliterature open standard has been

published and the first viewer for such documents is also now available.

In September 2007, Nelson and Robert Adamson Smith gave a plenary talk, Back to the Future, at

HT07. The abstract makes clear that his current position has not retrenched despite the popularity of

the web: Others imitate paper (Word, Acrobat) and the constant 3D world we live in (Virtual

Reality). Our system instead tries to create documents better than paper in a space better than

reality.

His initial ideas, which he has developed but never backed away from, are collected in the 1974bookComputer Lib/Dream Machines. Here he wrote that

paper media, whatever their disadvantages, have at least been compatible; you could


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store the books, magazines and notes on the same shelf, compare them on the same

desktop. Not for the new media, whether electronic or optical or magnetic or

computerised. Each one needs a separate device. You cannot presently make margin

notes on a video tape. I say it will all have to come together again. We need a

presentational and archival medium that can be as standard as paper, to reunify thepresent mess of separately beautiful and mutually unintelligible forms of storage,

presentation and annotation. The hope may be a shared-standard data structure.

His concerns here are more cultural political than technical. He is concerned with the

users abilities to derive meaning from the data at their disposal. He worries over the

need to use technology to further autonomy, in the service of cultural democracy.

For this reason, Nelson defined the Xanadu Project to which he has devoted most of his working

life as just one thing: a new form of interconnection for computer files - corresponding to the

interconnection of ideas - which can be refined and elaborated into a shared network. He also

added that if you truly understand this form of interconnection, you will understand itsrevolutionary potential.

It is these concerns, as well as his concern from intuitive linking and retrieval, that make his work

an important precedent for the memi.


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3.3 The long birth of the prosumer

Before the beginning of the twentieth century there were no consumers. This role was born out of

the split between production and consumption enforced by the spread of industrialisation from the

manufacture of heavy goods to all walks of life. Much of this was to do with the cult of efficiency

spread by Frederick Taylor. It was here that we can trace the beginnings of the resistance that would

later be embraced by post-industrial entrepeneurs as prosumption.

Taylorism and education

Taylorism is the term usually given to the replacement of processes of manufacture undertaken

informally using inherited skills by pre-planned automated processes using unskilled labour.

Frederick Taylor laid down the four underlying principles of this approach in his 1911 bookPrinciples of Scientific Managementwhere he stated that

First. They develop a science for each element of a mans work, which replaces the old

rule-of-thumb method.

Second. They scientifically select and then train, teach, and develop the workman,

whereas in the past he chose his own work and trained himself as best he could.

Third. They heartily cooperate with the men so as to insure all of the work being done in

accordance with the principles of the science which has been developed.

Fourth. There is an almost equal division of the work and the responsibility between the

management and the workmen. The management take over all work for which they are

better fitted than the workmen, while in the past almost all of the work and the greater

part of the responsibility were thrown upon the men.

However, as applied in practice (and according to the more detailed explanations Taylor himself

offers) the cooperation and equal division of work specified are friendly ways of ushering in

mindless repetition. In Chapter Two he looks at a detailed example of how steps three and four

could be implemented.

The necessity for systematically teaching workmen how to work to the best advantage

has been several times referred to. It seems desirable, therefore, to explain in rather

more detail how this teaching is done. In the case of a machine-shop which is managed

under the modern system, detailed written instructions as to the best way of doing each

piece of work are prepared in advance, by men in the planning department. These

instructions represent the combined work of several men in the planning room, each of

whom has his own specialty, or function. One of them, for instance, is a specialist on the

proper speeds and cutting tools to be used. He uses the slide-rules which have been

above described as an aid, to guide him in obtaining proper speeds, etc. Another man

analyzes the best and quickest motions to be made by the workman in setting the work

up in the machine and removing it, etc. Still a third, through the time-study records

which have been accumulated, makes out a timetable giving the proper speed for doingeach element of the work. The directions of all of these men, however, are written on a

single instruction card, or sheet.


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In other words, the men in the planning room make a short but complete set of timed instructions

that could be done by an idiot, and then pass it down to the machine shop where (presumably

donning the guise of idiots) the workers carry them out - over and over again.

Taylor was widely lauded for bring science into the workplace and for helping complete the

transition from the old-fashioned rural ways of life to the machine-led future. Many people began

looking eagerly for places where his theories could be applied. Indeed Taylors assistant Morris

Cooke made specific efforts to insert his methods into public services. His only real success was in

education, where he was able to get schools to start subcontracting their faculty, initiating the

adjunct professor movement.

In a paper written in 2001 Jonathan Rees says that

In 1962, the historian Raymond Callahan wrote the best-known account of how

scientific management has affected American schools. Much of his book recounts the

influence of Taylors ideas on educational administration everything from how to

make better use of buildings and classroom space to how to standardize the work of

janitors. Other aspects of scientific management in education treated students like

workers. The ability to add at a speed of 65 combinations per minute, with an accuracy

of 94 percent, wrote one reformer, is as definite a specification as can be set up for

any aspect of the work of the steel plant (John Franklin Bobbitt quoted in Callahan,

1962: 81). Another line of reforms required teachers to document their teaching

activities in order to minimize waste.

The best example of Frederick Taylors ideas at work in education today are high-stakes

standardized tests tests which have a significant effect on funding for schools and the

careers of individual students.

It was the growing acceptance that schools were a site of industry, and that pupils were raw material

to be reshaped according to the short but complete instructions from the planning room that led

from early efforts of AS Neill to the anti-school movement of the 1960s and beyond.

Deschooling

Since 1928 Summerhill School has existed in Leiston, in Suffolk, England. The schools own

description of itself says that Summerhill is

first and foremost a place where children can discover who they are and where their

interests lie in the safety of a self-governing, democratic community.

There are two features of the school which people usually single out as being

particularly unusual. The first is that all lessons are optional. Teachers and classes are

available at timetabled times, but the children can decide whether to attend or not. This

gives them the freedom to make choices about their own lives and means that those

children attending lessons are motivated to learn.

Many people suppose that no children would ever go to lessons if they were not forced

to. At Summerhill, it is rare for a child to attend no lessons at all - at least, after the

initial shock of freedom has worn off.

The second particularly unusual feature of the school is the school Meeting, at which

the school Laws are made or changed. These laws are the rules of the school, made by


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majority vote in the community meetings; pupils and staff alike having equal votes.

AS Neills bookSummerhill a radical approach to childhood, which was published in America in1959 (and in Britain in 1962), had a powerful influence on the nascent anti-school movement there.

It came in the wake of Paul Goodmans Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the OrganizedSystem, which was published in 1956.

In the introduction to this, Goodman describes the disaffection felt by young people towards the

opportunities they are offered and the organisations that offer them, and then lays out several

themes that recur throughout this discussion:

The school system has been subjected to criticism. And there is a lot of official talk

about the need to conserve our human resources lest Russia get ahead of us. The

question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same connections as the

youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the

structure of society that has become increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous

to the growth of excellence and manliness, why dont more people speak up and say so,and initiate a change? . . . .

This brings me to another proposition about growing up, and perhaps the main theme of

this book. Growth, like any ongoing function, requires adequate objects in the

environment to meet the needs and capacities of the growing child, boy, youth, and

young man, until he can better choose and make his own environment.

It was these two books, and the example that the Summerhill School offered of the ideas being put

into practice successfully, that helped light the stage for the Deschooling movement in the 1960s.

Three books by John Holt were also extremely important.How Children Failwas published in

1964, and a summary of its conclusions is available here. The sequelHow Children Learn is almostvitriolic in its rejection of unasked teaching which Holt believed was actually harmful in the way

that it taught children not to explore lest an adult turned the fun into a long lecture.

By the time ofInstead of Education, Holt had had a bruising account with Ivan Illich and had

rejected the whole institution, and the entire business of what he now perceived as akin to trying to

entertain children after kidnapping them. Although he didnt quote her, he certainly shared Hannah

Arendts belief that The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions, but to

destroy the capacity to form any.

The pivotal book of this informal movement was undoubtedly Ivan IllichsDeschooling Society.This book began with a viewpoint that was, like Paulo Frieres, based in the Third World. It view

was global. It provided a critique of society that linked industrialisation to the dehumanising of

education which Illich said that school

initiates, too, the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern myth is grounded in the

belief that process inevitably produces something of value and, therefore, production

necessarily produces demand. School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The

existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need

school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized

institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all

nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are taught that valuable

learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount

of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades andcertificates.


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Illich did not see the growth of the school system as an accident. He saw it as a deliberately

contrived training camp for consumers, with education as a label for the process of training

people how to act and behave as clients whose needs could be satisfied only by professional

intervention.

Conviviality

In his bookTools for Conviviality Illich greatly extended this analysis. He argued that the process ofindustrialisation has created a new kind of monopoly - a radical monopoly. This is not a monopoly

of one brand over another (the kind of monopoly that Microsoft is accused of from time to time, for

example). Instead it is a monopoly of one industrially produced and over-efficient product over

what people can do for themselves.

He gives many examples that include the compulsory use of doctors certificates to authorise time

off from work. Instead of diagnosing oneself as having flu, or a sprained ankle, and then curing

oneself by resting, one has to go to the doctor, have them diagnose what you already know,

prescribe unnecessary drugs, and then give you a certificate saying that a professional has decided

that you are unfit for work.

This, he argues, not only degrades people and devalues their own knowledge, but sets up situations

in which they gradually lose that knowledge through lack of opportunities and incentives to practise

it.

By radical monopoly I mean the dominance of one kind of product rather than the

dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial

production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing

need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition.

Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city in their image - practicially

ruling out locomotion by foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river

traffic in Thailand

Schools tried to extend a radical monopoly on learning by redefining it as education. As

long as people accepted the teachers definition of reality, those who learned outside

school were officially stamped uneducated.

Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereb restricts personal

autonomy. It constitutes a special kind of social control because it is enforced by means

of the imposed consumption of a standard product that only large institutions canprovide.

Against this he proposes the idea of conviviality, the guiding idea for a convivial society being that

everyone should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of

tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their

activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation,

dependence, exploitation, and impotence.

Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest

opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools

deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determinethe meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial

fashion.


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Owen Kelly: Memi: a tool for cultu

Memi: a tool for cultural democracy

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