The Social Structure Of Online Communities [1st Edition] 1108499139, 9781108499132, 1108585795, 9781108585798, 110861521X, 9781108615211, 1108599699, 9781108599696, 9781108615242, 9781108713153

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The Social Structure of Online Communities With great potential benefit and possible harm, online social media platforms are transforming human society. Based on decades of deep exploration, distinguished scholar William Sims Bainbridge surveys our complex virtual society, harvesting insights about the future of our real world. Many pilot studies demonstrate valuable research methods and explanatory theories. Tracing membership interlocks between Facebook groups can chart the structure of a social movement, like the one devoted to future spaceflight development. Statistical data on the roles played by people in massively multiplayer online games illustrate the Silicon Law: Information technology energizes both freedom and control, in a dynamic balance. The significance of open-source software suggests the traditional distinction between professional and amateur may fade, whereas web-based conflicts between religious and political groups imply that chasms are opening in civil society. This analysis of online space and the divergent communities is long overdue. William Sims Bainbridge has written or edited over forty books on culture and technology, most recently Family History Digital Libraries and Virtual Local Manufacturing Communities. Past books include Star Worlds, Dimensions of Science Fiction, The Virtual Future, The Spaceflight Revolution, and Goals in Space. He is currently a program director at the National Science Foundation.

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STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Edited by Mark Granovetter The series Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences presents studies that analyze social behavior and institutions by reference to relations among such concrete social entities as persons, organizations, and nations. Relational analysis contrasts on the one hand with reductionist methodological individualism and on the other with macro-level determinism, whether based on technology, material conditions, economic conflict, adaptive evolution, or functional imperatives. In this more intellectually flexible, structural middle ground, analysts situate actors and their relations in a variety of contexts. Since the series began in 1987, its authors have variously focused on small groups, history, culture, politics, kinship, aesthetics, economics, and complex organizations, creatively theorizing how these shape and in turn are shaped by social relations. Their style and methods have ranged widely, from intense, long-term ethnographic observation to highly abstract mathematical models. Their disciplinary affiliations have included history, anthropology, sociology, political science, business, economics, mathematics, and computer science. Some have made explicit use of social network analysis, including many of the cutting-edge and standard works of that approach, whereas others have kept formal analysis in the background and used “networks” as a fruitful orienting metaphor. All have in common a sophisticated and revealing approach that forcefully illuminates our complex social world. Recent Books in the Series Michael Kenney The Islamic State in Britain:  Radicalization and Resilience in an Activist Network Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar, and Vladimir Batagelj, Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek: Revised and Expanded Edition for Updated Software Isabella Alcañiz, Environmental and Nuclear Networks in the Global South Cheol-Sung Lee, When Solidarity Works Sean F. Everton Networks and Religion: Ties that Bind, Loose, Build-Up, and Tear Down Brea L. Perry, Bernice A. Pescosolido, and Stephen P. Borgatti Egocentric Network Analysis: Foundations, Methods, and Models Darius Mehri, Iran Auto Navid Hassanpour, Leading from the Periphery and Network Collective Action Benjamin Cornwell, Social Sequence Analysis (continued on after index)

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The Social Structure of Online Communities

WILLIAM SIMS BAINBRIDGE

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06-04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108499132 DOI: 10.1017/9781108615211 © William Sims Bainbridge 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-49913-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction Facebook Virtual Worlds Open-Source Software Wikis Citizen Social Science Digital Government Cultural Science

Notes Index

page ix 1 27 62 99 134 166 204 241 279 321

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Preface

This book illustrates how valuable research on the dynamics of social structure can be performed by individual scientists or small teams, at little cost, if the right approach is discovered for the particular problem and area of online society. While very impressed by many of the researchers who have submitted proposals to NSF (the US National Science Foundation, where I have been a program director) and given papers at computer science conferences over the years, I’ve noticed that traditional scientific approaches to the understanding of social structures and dynamics have largely been absent. Students in computer science need to develop so many technical skills and learn conceptual frameworks for understanding the hardware and software they work with, that they just don’t have time for the extensive reading and debating required to become a sophisticated social scientist. Computer science attracts many talented young people who compete for the best jobs in industry or academia; naturally they focus on designing new systems to accomplish very well-defined but often ambitious technical goals; they don’t have much time for research on the social implications of their systems. When they do feel the need for a social theory to guide some of their work, they tend to grab one that harmonizes with their personal values, often from the writings of an individual author who may not have been trained in social science. In some ways this view began to emerge early in my career, if not my life. By luck I was born into a family already oriented toward information technology, having many researchers as ancestors and connections to early IT companies. Most significant in framing the perspective of this book was Angus McIntosh, an uncle who worked with advanced information technology at the British code-cracking base, Bletchley Park, during World War II, and who founded in 1952 what is now the highly computational Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh; he also was one of the early theorists of machine translation of language. ix

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I first visited the Center in 1957, after already tinkering with primitive computers and conceptualizing human life as the structured integration of culture and technology. Many years later, while a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, I was especially influenced by the theories and methods for studying social structure and interaction developed by three of my professors: George Homans, Harrison White, and Mark Granovetter. A  very different influence was Seymour Martin Lipset, who combined political science with sociology and had traveled a considerable distance across the political spectrum during his life. He was the advisor for my dissertation, a social history of the space program in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and he was a role model for understanding the perspective of people with whom one personally disagrees. While earning tenure at the University of Washington, I collaborated extensively with a leading sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, and our approach combined formal theory, field observation, historical studies, questionnaires, and statistical analysis of diverse kinds of quantitative data. Our emphasis on formal theory of recruitment to religious movements reinvigorated my interest in computing, so in the 1980s I did extensive work developing simulation methods like neural-net multi-agent systems, and also published textbooksoftware packages on computational analysis of social data. Joining the NSF in 1992 to run its sociology program, I soon found myself representing the social sciences in the Digital Library Initiative and began learning from computer scientist Michael Lesk, who had become its leader. Eventually, at his initiative I  moved to NSF’s computer science directorate. After brief terms in programs across the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, such as eighteen months running the artificial intelligence program, I settled down in what for a time was called human-centered computing but is now known as cyber-human systems, the main area of the Foundation that funds academic research about online community. Since the birth of the World Wide Web in 1991, the importance of online communications has grown dramatically, becoming central to the global economy and greatly influencing culture. Recently, the possible or directly observable negative effects of the technology have become obvious, leaving specific online media uncertain, and potentially transforming the Internet into a political battleground. Without exaggerating either the ability of online communities to solve old human problems, or to create new problems, they have become crucially important for research. Facebook has grown from a college campus enterprise to a behemoth in commercial advertising and informal social communication, while currently facing questions about its fundamental principles. Online role-playing games like World of Warcraft and nongame virtual worlds like Second Life rapidly attracted a subset of educated humanity, yet were rejected by other subsets. Creative contributions in open-source software and online information sources like Wikipedia, for example, have partially democratized the Web, but now

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seem vulnerable. Meanwhile the integration of ordinary citizens into research and public activism offers uncertain optimism with respect to citizen science and digital government. In this book I  will suggest that the successful convergence of social and computer science, for the benefit of humanity, may require a reorganization of certain academic disciplines to form cultural science, analogous to cognitive science in the late twentieth century. Such a convergence will enable, as suggested earlier, small teams or individual scientists to make advances on the dynamics of social structure. And then, once the right approach is discovered regarding a problem and area of online society, a personally experienced pilot study is always necessary to explore unexpected possibilities and test the intended methods. The results may be publishable in their own right, or form the introduction in a proposal seeking grant money to fund a much more extensive study. Sometimes, it will turn out that it is possible to continue the pilot study, investing energy and imagination but not money, to complete a significant project. Each of the examples in this book could be expanded into a team research project in which students collaborate with their professors. Ideally, the team could be multidisciplinary, but the theories and methods of this book can be applied across the humanities as well as the social and information sciences, even to new kinds of online community as they emerge. In the aggregate, online communities are of tremendous significance for our daily lives and the institutions of society. To be sure, some appear to be escapist retreats from reality, but others are vigorous social movements seeking to achieve real revolutions, and many at both extremes are economically quite significant. Traditional social-scientific theories may apply well to some forms of online social interaction, and not to others, with the implication that internetbased research can often test or improve existing analytic frameworks, while at other times entirely new discoveries may be made. As this book demonstrates, many online communities can be explored easily in preparation for more rigorous studies, thus providing marvelous opportunities for both ambitious students and senior researchers. The end results can include increased knowledge about the nature of human beings, development of valuable new research methodologies, and the glorious experience of personal adventures.

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1 Introduction

Computer-supported global communications are transforming the socioeconomic structure of work and offering new environments for daily life, including social media, virtual worlds, and even citizen sciences. How similar their social structures are to traditional institutions is a challenging research question, undoubtedly with different answers for various online communities.1 At a series of multidisciplinary conferences organized by the NSF, hundreds of leading scientists and engineers debated the best means for achieving convergence of science, engineering, and society.2 This book certainly advocates convergence of sociology and computer science, as equal partners in exploring the social structure of online communities.3 Yet the key figure in the convergence movement, Mihail Roco, has argued that technological convergence produces conditions favorable to divergence, which may positively mean beneficial cultural and technical innovations, or more negatively may exacerbate existing forms of social conflict. Decades into the internet revolution, traditional news media are filled with reports about data hacking, identity fraud, and even cyberwarfare, giving at least a superficial impression that computer-aggravated social disorganization is on the rise. At the same time, new forms of social organization have emerged online, from guilds in virtual worlds, to time-banking collectives in real-world communities, to various forms of digital government. This book will have the full range of revolutionary possibilities in mind as it explores the potential of sociometric research to illuminate the dynamic nature of the new online communities.

1.1 The Information Technology Revolution The emergence of online communities over the past quarter century has been a development of great potential significance for social science. Traditional theories can now be tested and extended through internet-based research methods 1

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that are often low in cost, producing immense datasets that can be analyzed through both traditional statistical methods and new techniques constantly being invented by computer scientists. However, there are serious questions about the meaning and validity of online measures of social structure, even at the fundamental level of defining what a person, social bond, or group is. This book seeks to illuminate such issues and offer practical research approaches, by looking at a diversity of online communities, each with its own distinctive characteristics, but none of which may have yet achieved long-term economic, cultural, or technological stability. Christine Hine has suggested that comparative ethnography of multiple research sites can be an effective approach to develop middle-range theories, but the theories suggested here, especially in the final chapter, are intended as illustrations, believing that much comparable research by many social scientists will be required before we can theorize with confidence.4 Many of the “pilot studies” reported here can be considered preparations to undertake a major study of a social movement, and the author has indeed carried out more extensive studies on some of the examples, such as transhumanism, the science fiction subculture, and the virtual revival of ancient Egypt called A Tale in the Desert. Indeed, the variety of examples includes philosophical movements, political movements, religious movements, and artistic movements. A social movement is a dynamic social structure promoting somewhat distinctive norms, beliefs, and other aspects of culture. Thus, another way to conceptualize this book is as a somewhat quantitative but also qualitative exploration of the opportunity to develop a more convergent science of culture. Perhaps more relevant to the topic of online communities, focusing on social movements recognizes the possibility that human beings are not servants of corporate information technology, but are free to collaborate with each other in deciding how and whether that technology should be developed. Facebook is explored first, because it originated as a support system for real-world social relationships, initially college students and then potentially all of humanity, so it is a good bridge into virtual societies. It differs from many of the other examples because it requires users to reveal their true, real-world identities, and it earns its money primarily as a remarkably successful advertising medium. Yet these two core characteristics may be in conflict, because advertising seeks to influence people to see a product or service in the way desired by the advertiser, which critics might call a form of deception. Recently, Facebook has put more emphasis on encouragement of formal groups of users, and thus it has become a platform for promotion of political factions, social movements, and businesses related to other media such as movies, television series, and computer games. Therefore Chapter 2 will place Facebook in the context of social movement research. Massively multiplayer online role-playing “games” are the topic of Chapter 3, for two reasons: (1) they are most obviously distant from traditional society, thus contrasting with Facebook, because they expect “players” to operate multiple

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avatars inside their virtual worlds, none of which have public connections to real-world identities; and (2) the designers and programmers who create them build very rigid and complex social structures into the software, leaving some room for individual freedom, but illustrating the tendency of computer systems to control their human users. Since the peak popularity of World of Warcraft around 2010 with perhaps 12,000,000 subscribers, online social games have evolved somewhat away from the role-playing focus, becoming more similar to competitive sports, notably League of Legends that claims 100,000,000 players worldwide. However, if we focus on the most sociologically interesting examples, rather than the most popular at the moment, then even A Tale in the Desert with fewer than 1,000 players deserves attention. An analogy can be drawn with the extensive research on small utopian communes, of which the most prominent such as the Shakers or Children of God never had more than about 10,000 members.5 Chapter 4 explores the semi-professional territory of computer programmers who collectively create open-source software. This was a major factor in creating modern computer science, decades ago, but outside information technology companies. Programmers, who may or may not know each other in the physical world, exchange drafts of computer programs written in one or another standard source-code language. Commercial software, such as the word processor on which this paragraph is being written, has been compiled, making it more efficient for the computer to run, but unintelligible to humans. Beginning in the late 1970s, paper magazines began publishing the source code of programs that would run on the early personal computers, and that could be modified by the user, who gained professional skills by doing so. The magazines went out of business once the industry was well-established, then the Internet provided a medium through which amateurs could share their open-source software. This practice is fundamental for Second Life, a nongame virtual world in which the users create essentially all the content, but it also exists for multiplayer games that permit limited use of mod programs running in parallel with their commercial software, notably World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. Such options link the social structure of open-source software programmers with that of user communities. That chapter ends with consideration of the analogous maker movement, which may be considered open-source manufacturing, sharing programs and data files to create local goods in a manner opposite to that of mass production. Wikipedia is a very prominent example of a somewhat small community of a few thousand contributors who collectively publish the equivalent of encyclopedia articles, and many millions of users, only some of whom belong to Wikipedia-oriented social structures. As a collective endeavor assembling data inside information technology, Wikipedia is comparable to an open-source software community, but it is also comparable to role-playing games, because its editors are strongly discouraged from revealing their real-world identities, paradoxically at the same time they seek to gain social status by contributing.

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Introduction

Chapter 5 highlights identity uncertainties in Wikipedia, which often conceal group memberships, then considers one of the ways Wikipedia is manipulated to serve the interests of particular social strata. The focus then broadens to consider a cluster of the many thousands of other more specialized wikis, using the example of Memory Alpha derived from the original Star Trek TV series of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with surveys of two wikis heavily embedded in social structure, one for the game A Tale in the Desert where the identities are identical between wiki and game but separate from ordinary society, and a wiki created by ex-members and opponents of the Children of God religious movement as part of their highly visible conflict. Chapter 6 considers a form of online social structure, citizen science, which has some parallel with each of the four previous species of online communities. Like wikis, citizen science projects enlist a diversity of nonprofessionals to contribute to the development of socially valuable information. Opensource software could be described as citizen technology, especially in its more centrally organized forms. As in the case of online games, citizen science of the sort described here makes extensive use of internet-based communication technology and shared databases, under strict control by a formal organization, often a team of university researchers rather than a company. Like Facebook, and even often using Facebook, many citizen science projects incorporate informal online communications to build and guide contributors. The social structures of citizen science communities vary greatly, and may diversify even more in the future. Zooniverse employs volunteers almost exclusively as crowdworkers, who classify data such as images of galaxies or written texts, while eBird sends volunteers out into the natural world to observe birds. The possibility of future citizen social science is raised through examining Find A Grave, an early instance of citizen history. With such examples in mind, the chapter summarizes some of the extensive literature on citizen science, and considers the great potential of citizen social science that faces two very difficult challenges:  (1) To the extent that real-world observation of humans is conducted by volunteers, what ethical rules will be followed and how will they be enforced? (2) Given that large fractions of the population have ideologies that contradict one or another standard academic perspective, will social science diversify in the range of respected theories, or will it develop new influence through a convergence of viewpoints? In the 1990s, national governments in Europe as well as the United States, and international organizations like the United Nations, envisioned what some called digital government, ideally the use of internet and related technologies to better serve the needs of the citizens, which is the conflict-ridden theme of Chapter 7. A focal point for this effort was the Digital Government Program at the NSF, and NSF also pioneered the development of FastLane, a system for submitting, evaluating, and funding research grant proposals that serves as an example for how a range of government services may be managed. Soon, as

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part of the same general social movement that created Wikipedia, people outside government were developing means by which the Internet could help them serve their own needs, notably through egalitarian time banking. Primarily in Europe, a radical political movement named Pirate Parties International proposed a dynamic online replacement for traditional governmental legislatures, which blended the representation and referendum methods. The potential for digital government to descend into potentially revolutionary conflict is illustrated by the annual Wastebook online publication by which two conservative members of the US Senate opposed some forms of government support for science, and the remarkable case of Reality Winner, a woman whose arrest for revealing a document about Russian hacking of the US presidential election stimulated instant online activism. The concluding chapter, on cultural science, serves four functions. First, it pulls together themes and examples from the previous chapters, noting for example that computer programs are cultural objects comparable to systems of cultural norms. Second, it explores a form of online community that is usually not recognized as such today, recommender systems that historically were conceptualized as collaborative filtering of information and value preferences by swarms of people, often described as neighborhoods despite their lack of personal bonds with each other. Now recommender systems are tremendously prominent as advertising tools in Facebook, Netflix, and vast numbers of other systems, but have received less use than might be desirable as tools for charting cultural structures and trends. Third, the chapter conceptualizes science, technology, religion, and the arts as related forms of culture, even concluding with sociometric analysis of a group of ten fictional but well-known people who represent cultural archetypes. Fourth, given the current uncertainties surrounding politics, religion, and some branches of science such as social psychology, sociometric methods can be rigorous tools for finding order in chaos. It seems obvious that the Internet and the World Wide Web are powerfully transforming human societies in radical directions, now that “everyone” can access them through personal computers.6 Yet we cannot be sure the extent to which this is true, versus being merely the advertising rhetoric of a vast number of companies and special interest groups, including some within the universities. A common theory is that the Internet supports cultural and political fragmentation, by giving voice to every possible viewpoint, and by accelerating globalization as suggested by the name World Wide Web.7 Conversely, it is possible that societal fragmentation is taking place for other reasons, merely reflected in online disputations.8 But correlation does not equal causation, and currently it is very difficult to test large-scale theories about social change. This book will cite some of the macrosociological concepts and data relevant for evaluating them, but without any pretense that the author knows the answers to humanity’s greatest questions. Indeed, the prime methodology of this book is to assemble a set of contrasting pilot studies, some on the periphery of

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major topics as well as some at their core. The following observations suggest why this circuitous voyage may be worthwhile to take: 1. Online communities are intrinsically interesting, and their structure deserves academic study. 2. Exploratory pilot studies are necessary, to gain practical experience with a particular online community, in preparation for selecting and adapting the best research methods for more intensive research. 3. Appropriate research methods are likely to be hybrids of traditional social science methods with techniques drawn from computer science and from the practical experience of programmers and so-called “hackers.” 4. Requiring many kinds of expertise and efforts approaching the topic from different perspectives, research studies concerning online communities may themselves create new social structures, probably mirroring the diversity of social structures under study. 5. Despite the tremendous popular success of some particular online social media, this virtual universe has not yet reached stability, so researchers must be ready to respond to surprises including the quick emergence of new media, and failure of old media. 6. Research in this area is not limited to academics, but is performed in corporations and government agencies, as well as by individual citizen scientists. This book was written, and much of the research was done, under inspiration from the series of books on structural analysis in the social sciences edited by Mark Granovetter for Cambridge University Press, naturally citing some of that work here but usually seeking to contribute what the series did not already contain. Two largely qualitative social sciences provide both a background and a corrective, cultural anthropology and history. Yes, I  do consider history to be a social science, and I  certainly do not believe that cultural anthropology became merely a subfield of history when the world’s hunter-gatherers joined Facebook and got jobs as computer programmers. But the fundamental focus of the Cambridge series has been on developing quantitative models of social structure, whether communicated through sociograms or as here by statistical measures. Therefore, some introduction is necessary concerning how we can define a structure and the units of which it is composed.

1.2 The Unit of Analysis In his classic 1902 book, Human Nature and the Social Order, Charles Horton Cooley suggested a remarkably modern model for how one human being conceptualizes another, which could just as easily have been used in a work on artificial intelligence published a century later:

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Suppose we conceive the mind as a vast wall covered with electric-light bulbs, each of which represents a possible thought or impulse whose presence in our consciousness may be indicated by the lighting up of the bulb. Now each of the persons we know is represented in such a scheme, not by a particular area of the wall set apart for him, but by a system of hidden connections among the bulbs which causes certain combinations of them to be lit up when his characteristic symbol is suggested.9

By implication, identifying a particular person is not a simple binary bit, on versus off, represented by a single light bulb, nor even by a coherent area of the wall of lights. The connection between social structure and electronic systems became more than a mere metaphor during the extremely influential 1927–32 research at the Hawthorne works of the Western Electric Company. When Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William John Dickson published Management and the Worker in 1939, reporting some of the results, they employed sociograms to represent the social structure of a small group. Fourteen workers had been placed in the “bank wiring room,” soldering wires on complex telephone switching equipment rather like prototype computers, while under intensive observation. It is important to note that the researchers did not assume there existed one, definitive social structure of the group, but rather several overlapping structures that represented different activities: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

participation in games; participation in controversies about windows; participation in job trading; participation in helping; friendships; antagonisms.10

Because the workers were constructing telephone switching equipment, they could be said to be early professionals in digital information technology, or computers. They themselves could be defined either as persons or as functions in a work team, but the equipment they built involved another unit of analysis, namely telephones. A  telephone number identified a particular piece of equipment, not the user, and today some of the online data relevant to social structures identifies the internet address of the user’s computer, not the specific user. In the 1930s, a large fraction of telephones were on party lines, in which several neighbors had the same communication circuit, often alerted to answer the phone not because the bell rang, but when it rang a particular number of times to identify their particular home. Wikipedia notes:  “Party lines provided no privacy in communication. They were frequently used as a source of entertainment and gossip, as well as a means of quickly alerting entire neighbourhoods of emergencies such as fires, becoming a cultural fixture of rural areas for many decades.”11 Roethlisberger and Dickson were able to abstract a higher-level model of the social structure of the fourteen men in the bank wiring room, primarily

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dividing most of them into two cliques, but as in Cooley’s electronic metaphor, there was no assumption that any single model could represent the multidimensionality of human relations perfectly. Later in their book they offer a sociogram-like model of the primary social structure of Hawthorne, in which top management was connected to two separate kinds of middle management, technologists and work supervisors. The relationship between supervisors and ordinary workers was strong and direct, but workers were also connected to technologists more weakly. The technologists, in contrast, were strongly connected to the “job” by defining what work had to be done, with a weaker connection between this technical definition of “job” and the supervisors.12 In Management and the Worker, Roethlisberger and Dickson ignored a rather important social structure completely, the one that connects them to other social scientists, providing no footnote references or bibliography. When sociologist George Homans reprinted their sociograms in his influential 1950 book The Human Group, he very explicitly cited Jacob Moreno as the key sociogram methodologist: “Especially interesting from our point of view are the methods of studying the likes and dislikes of persons for one another developed by J. L. Moreno and given by him the name of sociometry.”13 While the Hawthorne sociograms were based on observations, Moreno tended to use questionnaires, but often framing the items in the context of the immediate physical environment. This point is especially salient here, because online communities are separated from the physical world, and thus their social structures may have qualities of superficiality or imagination. When Moreno surveyed adults, he had them think about whom they would like to have living next door to them. When he surveyed children, he wrote his key question around the physical situation in the classroom, where the children were sitting: You are seated now according to directions your teacher has given you. The neighbor who sits beside you is not chosen by you. You are now given the opportunity to choose the boy or girl whom you would like to have sit on either side of you. Write down whom you would like first best; then, whom you would like second best. Look around you and make up your mind. Remember that next term your friends you choose may sit beside you.14

After publishing his landmark book introducing sociograms and various statistical means for representing social structures, Moreno became a pioneer of group psychotherapy, and developed a group-oriented role-playing method called psychodrama.15 He founded a journal named Sociometry, implying by this term the measurement of social structures, and today it is often used for social network research. But in Sociometry many of the early publications were about psychodrama.16 Eventually, his journal was renamed Social Psychology Quarterly, and is the main social-psychology journal of the American Sociological Association, no longer promulgating Moreno’s distinctive theoretical and methodological perspective.

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A major debate about role-playing concerns the degree to which actors should subordinate their own personal characteristics to those of their characters. Traditional theatrical dramas are scripted, and Constantin Stanislavski was famous for arguing that the actor should become the character, in total submission to the author of the drama.17 This is often called method acting, or the method. Moreno took almost the opposite position, encouraging his clients to use psychodrama as a vehicle for expressing their own feelings, even as they also used it to understand better the friends or family members they would temporarily pretend to be. This debate is highly relevant for online communities, because they differ in the extent to which a user can accomplish personal goals freely, without first having to follow many very detailed instructions imposed by the computer software. Thus, the tension between freedom and control is a major theme lurking in the background. So, the unit of analysis in sociometry can be a person, a role, or even a particular address in an internet-based communication system, while roles can be defined as work functions, family relationships, or any other quality that is socially meaningful. A  very different method for measuring social structure was social distance, introduced in 1925 by Emory Bogardus.18 His social distance scale was a battery of questionnaire items that sought to measure how close the respondent feels to whole categories of people. This method was used for decades by other survey researchers. For example, for their 1966 book, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism, Charles Glock and Rodney Stark administered a questionnaire that asked respondents to imagine themselves “in the situation of just having met a person, and the only thing you know about him is that he is a Baptist.”19 The questionnaire then listed a number of other religious categories, asking the respondents to select one of these choices for their reaction when meeting a stranger in the particular category: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

I think I would feel friendly and at ease. I think I would feel friendly, but somewhat uneasy. I think I would feel uneasy and somewhat unfriendly. I think I would feel quite unfriendly. I guess I would feel nothing either way.

Following the questionnaire methodology of the day, Glock and Stark placed the “don’t know” response last, but the other four responses are in an ordinal scale from friendly to unfriendly. Two things are noteworthy. First, as a sociometric measure, this is the opposite of Moreno’s approach, minimizing the significance of the hypothetical person and maximizing the stereotype of the group to which that person belonged. Second, like many other traditional measures of attitudes and values, this kind of item has lost validity since the 1960s, because people have become very conscious of how their opinions may be judged by others, including by social-science researchers. This is an example of social desirability bias, which Allen Edwards defined thus in 1967:  “the tendency to give socially desirable responses in

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Introduction

self-descriptions.”20 A related concept emerged from the study of the Western Electric Company workers, and is called the Hawthorne effect, described today on Wikipedia as “a type of reactivity in which individuals modify or improve an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.”21 In studies intended to improve worker productivity, this principle suggested people might react favorably to almost any attention that was lavished upon them, thus obscuring which changes were real improvements.22 In recent years, experimental social psychologists have developed a computer-based system to detect psychological suppression of stereotypes, called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which currently can be explored online.23 Developed by psychologists Tony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek, it detects delays in how quickly the respondent reacts to a stimulus, with the assumption that such latency of response is caused by subconscious suppression of unwanted feelings.24 Latency of response was one of many contributions to psychology a century ago by Carl Gustav Jung, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, but advocates of the IAT tend to avoid framing their work explicitly in psychoanalytic terms, while still adhering to the view that much of the activity in the human mind is subconscious.25 Elsewhere I have suggested that other theories could also explain latency of response, but among them would certainly be that some respondents are consciously debating in their minds what to tell the researcher, rather than having suppressed their true attitudes from their own conscious awareness.26 The currently problematic state of some varieties of academic social psychology is mentioned in Chapter 6, and further thoughts on how the structure of cognition affects social structure are in Chapter 8. Whether or not our own favorite theory postulates a subconscious mind, or how we conceptualize social roles, clearly any research we do about online communities would need to recognize that defining the unit of analysis would present challenges, even as the wealth of online data offers great opportunities. We need to think clearly, and be aware of which choices we are making. The framework within which we define social structure is especially important.

1.3 The Concept of Structure This book primarily follows the definition of social structure embodied in the Cambridge series of monographs and collections of essays, which for the sake of simplicity may be called sociometry, but is somewhat broader and more modern than Moreno’s definition. Structures are primarily discovered through systematic empirical research that has a quantitative focus, and represented either graphically or statistically. In adapting for online research the traditional methods and theories used chiefly in sociology, but also in economics and political science, we certainly need to be open to new ideas from computer science, but at this point in their history the social sciences may also have much to offer.

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It is impossible to condense into a single paragraph the complex approaches to social structure of traditional cultural anthropology, but certainly kinship structures were a primary area of expertise in that science. When Lévi-Strauss employed the term structural anthropology, he suggested that as cultural structures, kinship systems were also cognitive structures that might manifest themselves well beyond the family.27 One area for debate is the question of whether kinship structures have had a curvilinear distribution over human history, simple and flexible among hunter-gatherers, complex and formal in tribal and agricultural societies, and again simple and flexible today.28 But that does not necessarily diminish the role of cultural anthropology, because as we shall consider again in the final chapter of this book, cultural structures unrelated to kinship may be especially worthy of study in the internet era. Bridging between cultural anthropology and sociology around the middle of the twentieth century, structural functionalism sought to frame all major forms of social action and organization in terms of mental categories, like LéviStrauss especially favoring dichotomous distinctions. Its own organizational center was the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University, which existed roughly between 1946 and 1971, led by sociologist Talcott Parsons. As I have described in a chapter about the department, structural functionalism believed:  Every society has a coherent culture that defines the norms people should follow and the values they should seek. The institutions of a society are collections of roles, and individuals are taught to play the roles the society needs for its survival. Because societies and roles differ, humans face complex choices between actions … Conceptually distinguishable systems of personality, society, and culture harmonize in practice to sustain the society.29

In collaboration with Edward A. Shils, Parsons edited a 1951 book, Toward a General Theory of Action, which emphasizes five dichotomous choices that each society’s culture faces, called the pattern variables: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

affectivity – affective neutrality; self-orientation – collectivity orientation; particularism – universalism; ascription – achievement; diffuseness – specificity.30

It can be said with some justice, that the “structures” of structural functionalism were configurations of concepts, mapped onto real society without much empirical verification. Often, structural functionalists considered the left side in each dichotomy to be archaic, and the right side, modern.31 In 1964, Parsons even published an extremely confident journal article asserting that human society was changing in obedience to evolutionary universals.32 In later chapters, we will occasionally find reason to mention that some online communities, however, seem to be on the left side of one of these dichotomies,

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despite their obvious modernity. Parsons, Shils, and their collaborators and students, sought to achieve a unified social science, based on shared theoretical principles, and the dissolution of the Department of Social Relations was a symptom of failure. However, there is much to say in favor of scientific convergence, so long as it arises naturally rather than being imposed from one of the many competing ideological perspectives. Both Parsons and Shils were heavily influenced by Max Weber, a German sociologist often mentioned in the same introductory sociology lecture to undergraduates with Emile Durkheim, as the archetypes of true sociologists. In 1930, Parsons had even published his own English translation of Weber’s influential 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.33 The pattern variables are examples of Weber’s concept of ideal type, which Wikipedia describes today in a rather ambivalent manner:  “For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of abstract, hypothetical concepts. The ‘ideal type’ is therefore a subjective element in social theory and research, and one of the subjective elements distinguishing sociology from natural science.”34 Whether we agree with Wikipedia’s statement or not, the second sentence in this quotation carries tremendous weight that must somehow be handled. Computer scientists do not consider their field to be subjective, and tend to present themselves as rigorous natural scientists, even while occasionally this book will suggest that their field is a somewhat arbitrary culture. Online socialscience research needs to draw upon many fields and schools of thought, both as a practical matter and because a unified social science really does not yet exist. The “sociometry” approach to measurement of social structure may indeed offer the best methods for defining and exploring online social structures, but at times it needs to draw upon a range of alternatives. Possibly, the Internet does indeed usher in a new era in human history, which may support unification of the social sciences, but the collapse of structural functionalism was not the only time an attempt to unify social science failed.35 It would be a gross oversimplification to say that Weber, Durkheim, and a host of earlier and later continental European intellectuals associated with the socialism movement created sociology, yet this is certainly how some political opponents of sociology view history. Yes, honest attempts to improve the intellectual basis of socialism contributed to the early development of sociology, but more as a temporary scaffolding rather than a foundation. In fact, much modern-looking social science existed in Europe and the United States long before Weber and Durkheim, some of it rather more modern in my judgment than their work. Take for example Edward Jarvis, who presided over the first meeting of the American Social Science Association in 1865, inspired by his earlier participation in the British Association for the Promotion of Social Science.36 He began publishing theory-oriented quantitative studies in 1842, based on analysis of data from the 1840 US census, and he came to play a major role

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in later US censuses, writing on a diversity of topics such as a brilliant and totally modern statistical study of immigration.37 In 1855 he published a book documenting the correlation between insanity and low social class, not very different from what Hollingshead and Redlich published a century later, based on a census of the insane population of Massachusetts he himself carried out.38 One of his main empirical findings, replicated by much more recent studies, was “Jarvis’ Law” that rates of mental hospitalization were higher near the asylums than at greater distances.39 He himself contemplated many explanations for this finding, but several focused on the geographic structure of social communications. Thus, considered more broadly, Jarvis’ Law expressed the fact that prior to the Internet, communication patterns were geographically confined, with implications for many forms of behavior. Later chapters of this book will occasionally note cases in which online communities are also geographically concentrated.40 From today’s perspective, Jarvis would be defined as a sociologist, but that term was never used during his lifetime, and today’s sociologists almost never cite his works. As evidence of his objective significance, he was president of the American Statistical Association from 1852 until his death in 1884. In the 1880s, the American Social Science Association ran into financial difficulties, and began to fade, coincidental with the birth of the American Economic Association in 1885. It had never been able to root itself in the expanding system of American higher education, and the emergence of these specialized organizations caused its demise: American Psychological Association (1892), American Anthropological Association (1902), American Political Science Association (1903), and American Sociological Association (1905). We can imagine an alternate path history might have taken. Suppose the Civil War had never been fought, so Harvard had not needed to build Memorial Hall to honor the alumni who had been killed in it. Then Jarvis, who had graduated from Harvard in 1826, could have returned to found a Department of Social Science, preempting its much later Department of Social Relations, and giving much greater emphasis to statistical methods and empirical testing of theories. This parable suggests that the structure of social science itself is historically contingent, and the appropriate structure for the postindustrial future defined by the Internet may be very different from the current one. Without claiming any historical significance for myself, I must report that I observed some of the early online history firsthand at the NSF when I was running NSF’s sociology program from 1992, joined the nascent Digital Library Initiative in 1993, and became the first webmaster for NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. As soon at the Mosaic browser was available, I began posting workshop reports online, and they are still available on the sociology program’s website today. The first was a discussion of the sociological applications of artificial intelligence, held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in May 1993 and published the following year in the Annual Review of Sociology.41 A workshop

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I organized on religion, democratization, and market transition in December 1993 offered an observation that is even more true today: “Such tremendous changes are occurring so rapidly in many nations that researchers must move quickly if they are to collect information crucial for understanding them.”42 That same month, I represented sociology at a meeting named “Democratization: A Strategic Plan for Global Research on the Transformation and Consolidation of Democracies.”43 In 1994, we organized a workshop largely in support of innovative economics research, “Investing in Human Resources:  A Strategic Plan for the Human Capital Initiative.”44 I represented all the social sciences in the Digital Library Initiative, which led to the development of Google, and a link from NSF’s sociology web page goes to that field’s core online history, D-Lib Magazine, which first published in July 1995. In June of that year, the workshop “Connecting and Collaborating: Issues for the Sciences” sought “to understand the scientific, social, and economic impacts of using advanced communications technology.”45 In October 1997, the NetLab workshop, which I helped organize, offered a fresh conception of social structure that greatly informed the writing of this book two decades later: The Social and Behavioral Sciences are fundamentally concerned with “knowledge networks.” Such networks, which may include widely distributed individuals, are ubiquitous. Examples of such networks include markets, which aggregate diffuse individual behavior into prices; election systems, which take pieces of information embodied in individual votes and aggregate to yield a leader; and social systems that aggregate many individual characteristics into social hierarchies.46

We might have expected the information revolution to be finished by now, two decades later, but it proceeds apace. I tend to think of the Internet as the Wild West, a metaphor we shall expand upon in Chapter 5 and return to in the final chapter of this book. Telegraph wires crossed the United States in 1861, and the “golden spike” completed the transcontinental railroad in 1869, but the frontier did not officially close until 1890. However, conceptualizing the Internet as a purely beneficial innovation that will soon stabilize may be naïve. It is especially difficult to evaluate the extent to which global social relations have entered a prolonged period of conflict, when the news media are undergoing their own revolution, and possibly exaggerating the threats. Serious major studies should be done concerning the question of the changing relationship between each of the social sciences and computer science over recent decades, drawing upon a wide variety of existing but more modest publications. Without possessing great certainty, I  get a sense that many of the scholars who have been welcomed by computer scientists since the emergence of the World Wide Web have been qualitative, even perhaps working in the humanities rather than being statisticians. For example, the 2009 book Internet Inquiry, edited by Annette Markham and Nancy Brown, offers discussions concerning qualitative research that quantitative researchers might

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benefit from reading.47 Its section on ethics will contribute to the chapter of this book on citizen science, where I shall also consider the problematic nature of social science during an era of human history in which the Internet, as well as the “real” world, is experiencing increased ideological conflict that could have the effect of undermining ethical systems. The provisional observation that qualitative methods have recently become influential suggests two possible factors shaping the social structure of humancentered computing research. First, from the very beginning of the Internet, computer scientists were using sophisticated mathematical techniques to model networks, but often the connections between machines rather than people. One of my colleagues in that area used to say he loved social networks, but only after the human beings had been removed. Publications by such computer scientists cite very little of the long tradition of mathematical social science, but often explore new algorithms they themselves developed. Second, both computer scientists and users of information technology may have reacted against the excessive impersonality of computer science by seeking connections to those fields of academic scholarship that seemed most humanistic, including the arts as well as humanities. What is science, as an ideal type or professional practice? At the risk of sounding insulting, why do information technology experts call themselves computer scientists rather than computer engineers? Since the emergence of the cybernetics social movement near the end of World War II, computational activists have believed that information could achieve a beneficial revolution for human society.48 Also, to some extent computer science is a schism from electrical engineering, with more emphasis on deep concepts than immediate practical devices, thus contrasting science with engineering. On the other side of the partnership, social science blends into the humanities. In the United States, programs for sociology and anthropology are found in the NSF, but in Canada they are in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. As a technological revolution, computer science provided new frontier territory with room for migrants from other cultural traditions, some of whom may not have found a proper home previously. One of the more remarkable qualitative successes is the popularity of activity theory in human–computer interaction research, based on a Russian school of thought developed between the world wars. In their introduction to it, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi describe it as part of a “second wave” of theories in human–computer interaction, considering that the “first wave” was based on information-processing psychology or cognitive science. Among the other traditions they list in this second wave are ethnomethodology and its philosophical parent, phenomenology.49 One feature of activity theory is that it focuses on relations between subjects (human beings) and objects (actions and entities) that can be conceptualized in formal structures. For example, the Wikipedia page for activity theory includes a diagram, similar in structure to a sociogram, but connecting these six concepts: (1) instruments, mediating artifacts; (2) subject; (3) object;

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(4) rules; (5) community; and (6) division of labor.50 However social they may be, these structures are not what sociometric sociologists have traditionally called social structures. They do bear some similarity with algorithms used by computer scientists, for example in rule-based reasoning forms of artificial intelligence. While there are ample opportunities for convergence of Russian activity theory with American sociological social psychology, activity theory is a fundamentally autonomous perspective that has proven its value without being integrated with similar approaches that have also proven their value. For example, both differential association theory and balance theory also concern human relations with respect to actions and nonhuman entities.51 In a rather poetic preface to their book, Kaptelinin and Nardi suggest: “Social theory should be judged according to standards of truth, beauty, and justice.”52 Rather than agreeing or disagreeing, we might better note that people may legitimately set different standards for theory, depending upon their goals and context. Under this definition, socio-biological theories like those of E.  O. Wilson would fail, because they are based on the theory of evolution by natural selection from random variation, in which justice has no role.53 From the perspective of a literary theory with some similarity to activity theory, Porter Abbott has contributed an essay to a cognitive science collection arguing that this theory of evolution is nonnarratable – incapable of being stated in terms of conscious action to achieve goals – and thus not possessing beauty either.54 The influential and probably true theory called the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” by Robert Michels is both ugly and supports injustice, because it argues that societies will oscillate between near-democracy and near-tyranny, never achieving justice, because the leaders of reform movements will use them to their own advantage, becoming a new elite.55 To the extent that activity theory meets standards of truth, beauty, and justice, then it may be described as a normative theory, in contrast to descriptive theories that will feature here. A normative theory provides guidance for human action, for example providing a design principle for computer hardware or software design that provides greater benefit for users. Philosopher William James argued for a pragmatic definition of truth, that combined ethics with accuracy: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”56 “ ‘The true’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in our way of behaving.”57 Thus activity theory may function as an ethical corrective to the technological determinism of traditional computer science, just as classical cultural anthropology served as a corrective for colonialism. Decades ago writers who had begun their intellectual lives as Marxists but evolved in innovative directions, notably Daniel Bell and Manual Castells, contemplated the emergence of a new postindustrial information society.58 Post-Marxist perspectives may continue to define social structure in terms of classes, merely replacing

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capitalists with information scientists, as Bell seemed ready to do. Today that vision is possibly becoming reality, but we really do not yet know the human consequences. A  reorganization of social science is quite possible, hopefully involving synergy between normative and descriptive theories. How do we define science here? A standard definition concerns the empirical testing of rigorously stated hypotheses logically derived from formal theory, although this paradigm may be criticized from many directions. With a focus on social structure, my own perspective is that a theory is not scientific unless it can be modeled by computers, testing its formal clarity and coherence, quite apart from empirical tests of whether it is true. In the early 1980s, Rodney Stark and I developed the axiomatic theory of religion briefly explored in Chapter 8, with great emphasis on social networks, the dynamics of formal organizations, and connections between social and cognitive sciences. Hoping to improve the formal coherence of the theory, I programmed computer simulations of many aspects, including especially of how humans mentally conceptualized each other, interaction of multiple kinds across social networks, and the emergence of shared cultural beliefs. Many of the programs were what computer scientists call multi-agent systems, in which individual people were represented by artificial intelligence methods like neural nets, and social structure emerged as patterns of characteristics and bonds across social networks. I am not claiming that this work was marvelous, or even especially innovative, given that I was inspired by earlier work like that of Thomas Schelling and Robert Axelrod.59 But it provided a framework I could draw upon for this empirical rather than theoretical book.

1.4 Online Research Methods This book will emphasize observational research, with a quantitative focus while guided by qualitative ethnography, but an alternative quantitative online research methodology is questionnaire surveys. Its chief limitation for measurement of social structures is the rather low response rate garnered today by online questionnaires, recalling that Jacob Moreno was in a position to require essentially all of the students in the school he studied to respond to his sociometric question. In 1989 I  had published a textbook with software about computer administration of questionnaires, so naturally I was anxious to try web-based surveys as soon as they were feasible.60 In 1997 I  set up a website called the Question Factory, struggling to attract respondents and responding to that practical challenge by posting open-ended items from which fixed-choice items could be distilled later, and that did not require large or perfectly representative samples.61 This reflected the good experience I had in 1986 doing a pair of questionnaires about the goals of the space program, the first one gathering written statements from respondents that were edited into fixed-choice items for the second questionnaire that provided statistical data.62

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In 1999 the opportunity arose to join a team led by James Witte, who planned a really major online questionnaire, with support from the National Geographic Society, calling it Survey2000 and garnering about 46,000 adult respondents.63 This was followed by Survey2001 that had fewer respondents, but representing different populations, including schoolchildren and speakers of German, Spanish, and Italian. Several publications resulted, but especially relevant here are chapters in a more general 2004 survey of online research methods, Society Online, edited by Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones. Howard had been a central member of the quantitative Survey2000 team, while Jones was an experienced qualitative researcher. Witte’s own contribution began with a rebuke: “Social scientists, particularly survey researchers, were slow on the uptake when it came to considering the impact of the internet on society. Once its significance crossed the academic radar screen, however, scrutiny has been intense and the debate has been loud and (at times) bitter.”64 He then made two specific points: (1) consensus has not been achieved concerning whether the Internet is a net benefit for society, or very harmful; and (2) there are severe methodological challenges for survey researchers, connected to the problem of achieving representative samples, given the variable online accessibility of different groups and the generally low response rates. Society Online contained three other chapters that drew upon the Survey2000 or Survey2001 data. In “Wired and Well Read,” Wendy Griswold and Nathan Wright examined the effect of internet use on the reading of literature, in the context of evidence that the Internet clearly drew many people away from TV watching. In “The Disembodied Muse,” Richard A.  Peterson and John Ryan considered how music preferences might be evolving given the ease of downloading it from the Internet, with a focus on whether preference differences across genres might be declining, thus concerning the possibility of the erosion of traditional cultural structures. My own chapter, drew its ambitious title, “The Future of Internet,” from an open-ended item I  had placed in Survey2000 to which about 20,000 people had responded:  “Imagine the future and try to predict how the world will change over the next century. Think about everyday life as well as major changes in society, culture, and technology.” The vast text was distilled into 2,000 specific statements that became items in a computer-administered questionnaire, The Year 2100 that the user could rate on two 8-point scales, bad–good and unlikely–likely. For example, one of 100 predictions in a technology battery was: “Society will become so dependent on computer technology that ordinary daily functions will collapse if that technology fails.” The software offered several kinds of analysis to the user, including combining the bad–good and unlikely–likely scales to group items into a pessimism batch (bad and likely), an optimism batch (good and likely), and even a utopian batch (good and unlikely), based on the user’s own personal judgment.65 The Year 2100 was included on the CD disk included with a remarkable 2002 project edited by historian Orville Vernon Burton, Computing in

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the Social Sciences and Humanities.66 The CD contained all the chapters of the printed book in which it was enclosed, plus many more essays and computer programs. My chapter was the only quantitative study in the printed pages, concerning whether the lack of representative samples was a fatal flaw for online questionnaires; it showed in the case of Survey2001 that two subsamples in which the variables had very different distributions nonetheless produced comparable correlation patterns. Placing many chapters of a book on a CD in a pocket inside its back cover was an experiment that was not especially successful, but did suggest the editor’s creativity in a new age of exploration. Of three CD-only chapters directly concerning social structure, only one could be found in a Google search fifteen years after the book-CD was published, “Adoption of Communication Technologies and the Evolution of Communication Networks in Organizations” by Noshir S. Contractor and Carolyn Leveque, on the website of one of the authors.67 Online questionnaire research has continued and evolved since Survey2000, and a crucially important recent trend has been exploring the range of viewpoints about the ethics and fundamental nature of many online community services, including algorithms built into the software that shape the information and experiences transmitted to users.68 Publishing on the open-access Social Science Research Network in 2017, Megan French and Jeff Hancock reported a three-phase survey they had done about how people conceptualize the Facebook News Feed and the Twitter Feed, which supposedly select material based on the user’s personal preferences, but may also try to influence users for commercial or political purposes. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, they had developed a set of metaphors describing these feeds, then performed a factor analysis resulting in four quite different folk theories that assess a news feed: The Rational Assistant is characterized by positive feelings towards the feed, beliefs that the feed understands and prioritizes their interests. The Transparent Platform is characterized by positive evaluations and beliefs that the feed is unfiltered. Unwanted Observer is characterized by negative evaluations, and beliefs that the feed is overreaching in their use of personal data to serve the company’s interests. Finally, the Corporate Black Box is the least coherent of the four folk theories. However, this folk theory is associated with beliefs that the feed serves the company’s interest. Our results also suggest that the Corporate Black Box is associated with beliefs that the process underlying the feed is opaque and difficult to control.69

Even more recently, the NSF has decided to invest nearly $3,000,000 to support development of a six-institution collaboratory, or virtual center, to collect and analyze a wide range of social-science data, including questionnaires and interviews, to gain insight into the range of viewpoints held by different stakeholders concerning pervasive data ethics for computational research: The research includes attention to multiple ethical issues (privacy, risk, respect, beneficence, justice) as well as the full network of stakeholders involved in research ethics (user

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communities, computing research communities, technical platforms, and regulations). The project conducts interviews with, and surveys of, (1) user communities, (2) computing researchers, (3) data ethics regulators, and (4) commercial platform providers. The project also gathers numerous shared document sets, including (1) pervasive data research publications, (2)  pervasive computing curricula and degree requirements, (3)  news articles and public discourse about pervasive data research, (4)  a corpus of existing data ethics training, (5) pervasive data grant summaries and data management plans, and (6) corporate ethics guidelines and regulatory documents. The project uses these resources to: discover metrics for assessing and moderating risks to data subjects; document how user attitudes and media reactions shape subjects’ willingness to participate in pervasive data research; model user concerns in ways accessible to computational researchers; discover how existing ethical codes can be adapted and adopted for the real-world working conditions of sociotechnical and cyber-human research; determine how the changing practices of academic and corporate regulators impact users and researchers; and illuminate implementable and sustainable best practices for research ethics.70

An extremely well-developed toolkit of analytical methods exists for studying traditional social structures, notably all the mathematical ways of charting and measuring social networks.71 However, we often cannot be sure which analytical method to apply until we have become familiar with the data and selected a theoretical framework within which to understand it. In the case of online communities, some of the best analytical methods may be drawn from computer and information science, thus adding to the social science toolkit. But more essential is finding the right method by which to collect the data in the first place, and that requires not merely familiarity with the computer science behind the online systems, but also a bit of the hacker ethic that favors improvisation over rigid application of textbook formulas. By “right method,” I mean not some well-defined framework or technique, having universal application, but a set of actions that best serve the goals of the particular research project. When a high-potential new technology is first introduced, it may exhibit great diversity, then consolidate into conventional forms that reflect an accommodation between social forces promoting orthodoxy and objective technical characteristics. The battle in the early electric industry between direct current and alternating current is a classic example. One with more limited technical implications is the decision in the development of automobiles concerning which side of the road they should drive on, and the obvious internet-related example is which operating system the user’s computer should have. But it is far too early to be sure whether any of the computer platforms that support online communities are mature yet, versus being temporary accidents of history, or large-corporation monopolies that may have limited lifetimes. An apt example of a short-lived form of online social structure was the webring: “a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among amateur websites.”72 While the user was looking at one website that was in a webring,

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the user would see links to two others, which flanked it in a literal ring. Around 1998, I explored several webrings in the GeoCities system that had organized websites into topic-related virtual cities.73 I  tried recruiting respondents for online questionnaire surveys from the individuals represented by personal sites on carefully selected webrings, but had little success. Today, Facebook and its competitors have replaced webrings and website cities, in part because most human beings are unprepared to create their own personal websites from scratch, as early adopters of the Internet were happy to do years ago. Notice, however, a shift in the social structure, because every site in a particular webring was treated equally to every other, while Facebook groups differ greatly in their popularity and thus the density of their social connections with other groups. The standard system for doing extensive online research today involves seeking a government research grant or support from an information technology corporation, then hiring trained staff who can produce specialized software to “scrape” the data off the Internet and analyze it. However, much fine research can be done by individuals lacking funding but possessing a willingness to work hard, explore alternative approaches, and gain some general computer programming skills. One need not create a full scraping program, because many kinds of data can be downloaded manually, at only moderate effort, and transformed into the right structure for analysis, using a set of ordinary software tools. Even when the plan is to invest substantial grant money in a programming and data-analysis team, I suggest that a pilot study should be done by the principal investigators themselves, following methods like those employed in this book, to gain direct familiarity with the data, identify unexpected problems, and discern better methods on the basis of firsthand experience. At the same time, one would want to consult existing social scientific literature on the most comparable traditional research topics, and consider how the well-established methodologies might best be adapted for new uses. The following chapter will focus on Facebook groups, and in some examples will look at how many of the same people may belong to two groups. This immediately reminds us of traditional research on interlocking directorates, the study of social connections between corporations reflected by the fraction of members of the board of directors of one that are also members of another. As Mark Granovetter documents in the chapter about economic power of his 2017 book, Society and Economy, social ties connecting industrial and financial companies have been conceptualized in various ways, and indeed have possessed different structures and functions at different points in time.74 This means that the literature on interlocking directorates offers a range of methods and theories, from which one may select those that seem most applicable to a new but somewhat similar topic. One limitation of interlocks connecting corporate boards of directors is the fact that the absolute number of people involved is often objectively small, even just one person linking two companies, whereas group membership of

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online communities is often in the thousands.75 In a study of US companies in the period 1886–1905, William Roy found that only 77 of 1,348 officers and directors at the beginning of this period were interlockers for just 93 such connections, although his analysis seemed meaningful because he documented apparently strong concentrations between some industries, and a changing pattern over time.76 A variety of other studies have explored alternative ways to measure and interpret interlocks.77 However, that literature has developed over the decades, and studies of the rather new online communities should probably begin with simple analytical techniques, and commonsense interpretations, while gaining experience with the subject matter under study.

1.5 The Necessity of Occasional Manual Labor When studying Facebook groups, as in the following chapter, often one can see a list of the members in one’s web browser. Suppose we want to calculate the fraction of members of one group who also belong to a second group. It is quite feasible, but extremely time-consuming, to type all the names into a column of a spreadsheet, then for each name mark whether the person belongs to this group, that group, or both. With a little bit of practice, it is much more efficient to paste the data into the spreadsheet, but it is not initially in the correct format. Facebook often displays the members of a group in two columns, along with the person’s thumbnail picture, a button labeled “Add Friend” by which one may send a social link invitation to the person, and four lines of text, the first of which is the person’s name with a link to his or her personal page. A maximum of about a hundred members are initially displayed, with a “See More” button at the bottom to display an additional subset. The chunky nature of the data can require much scrolling and clicking to display all members simultaneously. Ideally, and in a really major study with funding support, one would want to develop software augmenting a web browser to download the most complex version of the data. But it is really necessary for the researcher to understand the details of how the data were collected. Therefore, as tedious as it may seem, one must become familiar with a few programming minutiae. Here, for example is the HTML code for my own data displayed November 19, 2016, in the membership list of a Facebook group oriented toward the HBO television series, Westworld, called Westworld Fans: William​ BainbridgeProgram​ Director​ at​ National​ Science​Foundation​(NSF)JoinedAdded​ by​ Chafiq​ Boukhari​ about​ 3​ weeks​ ago

This may seem quite incomprehensible, but it contains some simple information. My Facebook ID is 100008979973582, and the code offers a link to my personal page, set in HTML, which allows the user to get to my page by clicking on the display of my ordinary name. If people have entered their employment information into the “About” section of their personal pages, it will appear here. Note the phrase, “Added by Chafiq Boukhari … Tuesday, November 1, 2016 at 1:22pm … about 3 weeks ago.” Chafiq Boukhari is one of the four people who serve as administrators (admins) of the Westworld Fans group, and indeed looking at his information I see he created this group September 23, 2016, and he lives in Morocco. All that information is public. The HTML code contains more information than is actually displayed to the user, which is: William Bainbridge Program Director at National Science Foundation (NSF) Joined Added by Chafiq Boukhari about 3 weeks ago One way to extract the data, without writing a complex computer program, is simply to save the web page, after manual scrolling down had displayed data about all 8,607 members. Opening the file in a limited text reader like Notepad, displays all the HTML source code, like the example of one case shown above. Other online sources do not present all the data on a single page, and Facebook offers group memberships separately, so one must be ready to merge multiple data files. Even a solo researcher lacking funding but with programming experience could write software to extract the desired data from multiple files and merge them in a form suitable for statistical analysis. For a different kind of research I  wrote such a program to scan novels for the frequency of adjectives that describe people, from a set of 800 antonym pairs.78 But when for Chapter 8 I combined data about ratings of 15 movies from the Netflix dataset, each of which was in a different file, I  used simple manual methods involving spreadsheet macros. For pilot studies like those in the following chapter, I  found it practical to ignore the hidden data and all the HTML code, and run the information through Notepad and Word to prepare it for pasting into an Excel spreadsheet. At this point, each of the 8,607 members is represented by a five-line block of text, like mine above, but with “Add Friend” for any case that is not already a friend of the user. After Notepad instantly cleans the data, we copy it and paste into Word for editing before pasting into Excel. For the spreadsheet, we would want all the information for each member to be on a single line, rather than multiple lines. In the text file, there is a blank line separating each person from the next, and in the Word word-processing

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24

program, this is represented by a hidden “^p^p.” A “^p” is a line feed, with “p” standing for “paragraph.” We want to move each line for a given person to a different column of the spreadsheet, and this can be done by replacing the single line feeds by “^t” with “t” standing for “tab.” Often, formatting changes require a temporary change, and we need to avoid anything that is likely to be in the text we are reformatting, so I always use “@@@” that has no meaning. Using Word’s search and replace, three sets of commands reformat all 8,607 cases almost instantly: replace every ^p^p with @@@ replace every ^p with ^t replace every @@@ with ^p For a small part of the linkage analysis in Chapter  2, I  performed the same steps for a second and somewhat smaller group named only Westworld, which had 3,722 members. I always save data at several stages in the complex process of formatting and combining, in order to guard against errors and permit trying different methods. One problem that slightly reduces the accuracy of this methodology, is that some different people in the sample have the same ordinary names. There were twenty-two same-name pairs in the Westworld Fans group, and six in Westworld. Of course, measurement errors exist in all social science datasets, and we do our best to resolve them. Here, the best choice, for practical reasons of efficiency in handling the data in this exploratory study, was to remove one name in each pair, so that Westworld Fans wound up with 8,585 members and Westworld with 3,716. Of course, an additional small error is introduced by false matches when we combine the two lists of names. But these two cases suggest that the error would be well under 1  percent. Using the individual’s Facebook ID from the HTML code, rather than the normal name might seem to be a perfect solution. But it is not, because when I have done that I found that most of the time when a moderate-sized group included two members with the same name, they actually were the same person, as the harpsichord study in Chapter 8 reports. In preparation for combining the membership list of these two groups, I had one Excel sheet listing the names of 8,585 members of Westworld Fans in alphabetical order in column A, then put “1” in column B for each name and a “0” in column C. Another Excel sheet had the names of 3,716 members of Westworld in alphabetical order with a “0” in column B for each name and a “1” in column C.  Then on a third sheet I  pasted the rows for data from Westworld Fans first, followed by the rows of data from Westworld, giving a total of 12,301 rows. Then, the names were alphabetized again, which put the data for people who belonged to both groups on adjacent rows, the Westworld Fans data in the row before the Westworld data. It is not necessary to do much manual work to combine the data correctly, because simple Excel macros can do most of the work. A blank row is added

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at the top, so the first name is in row 2, column A.  This can be put in row 2 column D:  “=IF(A2=A3,1,0)” and then the equivalent is automatically added to all rows below. This has the effect of putting a 1 in column D if the person belongs to Westworld Fans and the row below has the same name and belongs to Westworld. Then this different formula is put in cell row 2 column E: “=IF(A2=A1,1,0)” and its equivalent in all subsequent rows. A 1 in column E means that the name at the head of the row is the same as the name immediately above it – which means that the row can be removed, because its information was already moved to the higher row by the other macro. A few other steps are required, including copying the columns containing the functions as their numerical results before reordering or removing any rows, but this gives the general idea. Many of the classic studies of social structure illustrate relationships between individuals and groups by means of sociograms, pictorial representations of social networks. Many recent studies make good use of them as well. However, the structures we shall examine here may more accurately be conceptualized in terms of statistics. If the two Facebook groups are nodes in a network of related groups, do we really want to draw 1,323 lines between them? Perhaps it would be better to follow the example of multiple regression or path analysis diagrams, having one line labeled with a statistic. If so, the line itself may not add much. What statistic should we use? Given the other functions this book must perform, deciding which statistic is exactly the best for particular data within a scientific study having particular goals would be a burden for reader as well as author. Therefore, I will tend to present quantitative results in tables using very simple statistics, easy to explain when they are not already familiar. In this example, 1,323 of the 8,585 members of Westworld Fans also belong to Westworld. That is about 15.4 percent. Reciprocally, 1,323 of the 3,716 members of Westworld also belong to Westworld Fans. That is about 35.6 percent. The average of 15.4 percent and 35.6 percent is about 25.5 percent. So we can use this average percent of shared membership as a reasonable measure of interlock, even though we can imagine reasons for employing more sophisticated measures under particular circumstances. The reader might immediately wonder why we do not use the correlation between the two variables as our measure of the connectedness of the two groups. The problem is that this would require complex adjustments or a shift in how we conceptualize correlation coefficients. Missing from the data are all the cases of Facebook users who do not belong to either group. In consequence, the actual correlation between the two variables is –0.738. This has a minus sign rather than the plus we might expect when belonging to one group increases the probability of also belonging to the other. If we added thousands of cases of Facebook users who do not belong to either group, eventually the correlation would become positive, but we have no clear criterion about how many to add. The goal of this book is to explore the online social world, using

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Introduction

measures that are adequate for recognizing social structures, but not burdening an already complex narrative with the ideal statistical measures. Later we will see when correlation coefficients can validly be used as the interlock measure, as in the paleontology example in Chapter 6.

1.6 Conclusion The many pilot studies offered in this book can be seen as a somewhat introductory curriculum on how to do sociometric research on the social structures of online communities, but the intent is rather more. The challenges and opportunities these diverse pilot studies encounter are evidence of the dynamic, often unconventional, and even problematic nature of human online relationships. With an emphasis on technology-oriented social movements, the primary purpose is improving the integration of traditional sociology and related social sciences with computer and information science. The goal is not to provide insights that can help corporations and governments improve information and communication technologies, although that could result from more intensive studies along the lines of these pilots. However, even the pilot studies raise questions about possible harm online communities might do, especially if humanity has entered a period of history marked by a vicious circle of social separation, consolidation of competing cultures, and increasing hostility between them. We should not assume that dire process is happening, nor decide prematurely about its reality on the basis of pilot studies, but neither can we assume that all manifestations of the new technologies are beneficial.

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2 Facebook

Facebook would seem to be the ideal online community in which to do research on the structure of personal social relationships and most related forms of social structure, both because it was originally created to support friendship interactions and because it has so many frequent users. Wikipedia reports:  “Facebook is an American for-profit corporation and online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California, United States. The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.”1 So it was born in a network of intimate friends and grew to encompass a large fraction of humanity. However, its source of revenue is advertising, so to a significant extent it has evolved from a social network support service into one of the mass media, competing with radio and television, becoming the source of news and entertainment for a large faction of its users.2 Here we must use the term advertising broadly, because individual users, social movements, corporations, and even hostile governments promote themselves and their causes through Facebook, sometimes dishonestly. Thus, without careful pilot studies, we cannot be certain which aspects of social structure can readily be studied using Facebook, or which research methodologies will be most appropriate. Furthermore, the nature and clientele of Facebook have never fully stabilized, and this platform for social structures has undergone serious public pressures recently, thus requiring constant reevaluation as a research laboratory.

2.1 Finding the Starting Point A sense of the lofty ambitions research may have is offered by a 2015 article titled, “One Trillion Edges:  Graph Processing at the Facebook-Scale.” The Authors explain, “Facebook manages a social graph that is composed of people, 27

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Facebook

their friendships, subscriptions, likes, posts, and many other connections.”3 However, the meaning of “friendship” in Facebook is not at all the same as in the “real world,” and varies greatly across individuals and user groups. For example, a recent legal case involved the assertion that “the trial court judge should be disqualified because the judge is a Facebook ‘friend’ with a lawyer representing a potential witness and potential party in the pending litigation.”4 Furthermore, only Facebook has access to all its data, and users can easily exclude researchers who are not allied with Facebook from accessing much of their data. Indeed, the five authors of the Trillion Edges article list their affiliation as Facebook, 1 Hacker Lane, Menlo Park, California. This chapter will explore what kinds of information relevant to social structure can be obtained without help from the Facebook company. After conducting pilot studies externally, researchers may seek cooperation from Facebook, but many social media companies refuse to collaborate with academic researchers, and those that do may set burdensome restrictions. In the summer of 2014 a major controversy broke, concerning the ethics of an experiment done by academic researchers in cooperation with Facebook, in which the human subjects did not give informed consent to be manipulated, nor were they even informed they were being studied.5 The first publication was titled “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,” and reported:  “The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure – thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion.”6 To their credit, the researchers subsequently took the lead in seeking common ethical principles to guide future academic research, but social media companies thrive by learning how to manipulate users, so naturally they conduct extensive research of this kind, without the nuisance of having to submit to universities’ institutional review boards on research with human subjects. Recently, a network of young researchers has formed around the critical methodology called algorithm auditing, which can be used to document how such commercial services as Facebook and Google may be manipulating users. The public abstract of an NSF workshop grant to Christian Sandvig defines it thus:  A research design that has shown promise in diagnosing the unwanted consequences of algorithmic systems. Automated software-based systems in finance, media, information, transportation, or any application of computing can easily create outcomes that are unforeseeable by their designers, so algorithm auditing has the potential to improve the design of these systems. Auditing in this sense takes its name from the social scientific “audit study” where one feature is manipulated in a field experiment … The topic of

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algorithm auditing brings together computer science, information science, and social science in novel combinations.7

A research grant to Christopher Wilson is supporting development of “methodologies to audit algorithms in three domains that impact many people: online markets, hiring websites, and financial services.”8 For example, a study of an online marketplace could simulate multiple customers, identified as belonging to different races, to see if the company algorithm was applying price discrimination.9 A grant to Nicholas Diakopoulos is specifically supporting “a series of algorithm audits of two major media platforms that dominate human attention to news information: Google and Facebook.”10 Both Sandvig and Wilson were plaintiffs who filed an action with the US government, in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has the unintended effect of blocking experimental research using the algorithm audit method, because “audit testing generally violates websites’ terms of service, which often prohibit providing false information, creating multiple user profiles, or using automated methods of recording the information displayed for different users.”11 More generally, the computer science community came to recognize that many of its subfields were facing serious criticism, and in response the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established a task force to revise its code of ethics. However, it is not strictly speaking a professional organization, unlike the American Medical Association or local medical societies, with no power to enforce norms, especially on the large numbers of computer scientists and engineers who do not belong to it. On June 22, 2018, the ACM adopted a rather lengthy new code of ethics, beginning with seven general principles: 1. Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing. 2. Avoid harm. 3. Be honest and trustworthy. 4. Be fair and take action not to discriminate. 5. Respect the work required to produce new ideas, inventions, creative works, and computing artifacts. 6. Respect privacy. 7. Honor confidentiality.12 The ACM does not naively assert that following these rather abstract principles will be easy: “[C]omputing professionals should approach the dilemma with a holistic reading of the principles and evaluate the situation with thoughtful consideration to the circumstances. In all cases, the computing professional should defer to the public good as the paramount consideration.”13 To start discussion of how very general principles might be applied to specific circumstances, the ACM offered six fictional case examples, two of which might directly apply to

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Facebook, discussed at length on the ACM’s website but introduced by these paragraphs: Dark UX Patterns: The change request Stewart received was simple: replace the website’s rounded rectangle buttons with arrows, and adjust the color palette to one that mixes red and green text. But he found the prototype confusing. He suggested to his manager that this design would probably trick users into more expensive options they didn’t want. The response was that these were the changes requested by the client. Malicious Inputs to Content Filters: The U.S. Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) mandates that public schools and libraries employ mechanisms to block inappropriate matter on the grounds that it is deemed harmful to minors. Blocker Plus is an automated Internet content filter designed to help these institutions comply with CIPA’s requirements. During a review session, the development team reviewed a number of complaints about content being blocked inappropriately.14

Wikipedia defines the technical term in the first example:  “User Experience (UX) refers to a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership.”15 Stewart, a fictional worker we can imagine is employed by one of Facebook’s advertisers, has qualms about exactly what the company apparently seeks to achieve: manipulating users to the company’s advantage. Blocker Plus is a fictional example of software now being deployed across most major social media, largely automatic systems designed to block nasty communication content, but with the potential to make many random errors and to discourage expression of unconventional ideas. Increasingly, Facebook has become the focus of public controversies, very few of which have been fully settled when this book went to press. Apparently one of several internet-based tactics used by the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election was deceptive political advertisements that pretended to come from legitimate groups.16 One of Facebook’s responses was to set up an archive of political advertisements, where anyone could enter search terms and see information about allegedly political advertisements that had been posted on Facebook.17 For example, in this database we can see that on May 19, 2018, a politically conservative American organization, Turning Point USA, posted on its Facebook page a news article quoting Nigel Farage, a British politician who has become a leading figure in American conservative thinking, as saying “The Global Establishment Was DESTROYED In 2016!” Facebook blocked the message on May 23, with this explanation: “This ad ran without a ‘Paid for by’ label. After the ad started running, we determined that the ad was related to politics and issues of national importance and required the label. The ad was taken down.” This tiny case of one, small Facebook post illustrates several large issues, such as why the Farage quote was defined as an “ad” rather than a link, a news item, or an unspecified kind of post. In its database, Facebook said that

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between 10,000 and 50,000 people had seen the post, gave their age ranges and geographic distribution across US states, and reported that the people accessing the Turning Point USA page were overwhelmingly male, information the organization might wish to keep private. Wikipedia, which has some of the characteristics of social media and that we shall examine closely later, reports that, “Since 2016 Turning Point USA has maintained a Professor Watchlist that lists college professors it alleges discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”18 Clearly, Turning Point USA is part of the rather intense internet-based ideological conflict currently raging, but requiring it to answer the “Paid for by” question might force it to reveal its full list of contributors. If it were an advertising agency, then there probably would be an identifiable payer for each advertisement. Thus, Facebook seems to have responded to public criticism over a few Russian-sponsored advertisements in the presidential campaign, with a crude and possibly harmful solution. Furthermore, what is the meaning of the criterion “related to politics and issues of national importance?” In parallel with the “Paid for by” policy, throughout the world governments and social media services are blocking messages they consider harmful, such as some from InfoWars, which Wikipedia calls “a far-right American conspiracy theorist and fake news website and media platform owned by Alex Jones’s Free Speech Systems LLC.”19 Nigel Farage himself is of the view that Twitter uses shadow banning against the political right wing, the practice of preventing conservatives from being found in searches, even through their postings were not explicitly blocked. It is possible that the search algorithms have a “natural” Liberal bias, if Liberals more often use the particular social medium, and the system is unified rather than providing a pluralistic search that prioritizes results favored by people who share characteristics with the particular user. In a recent essay, Farage raises what really is a legitimate and often debated issue about services like Twitter and Facebook: And while many on the libertarian right and within the conservative movement have their issues with Alex Jones and InfoWars, this week’s announcement by YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Spotify represents a concerted effort of proscription and censorship that could just as soon see any of us confined to the dustbin of social media history. These platforms that claim to be “open” and in favor of “free speech” are now routinely targeting – whether by human intervention or not – the views and expressions of conservatives and anti-globalists. This is why they no longer even fit the bill of “platforms.” They are publishers in the same way we regard news outlets as publishers. They may use more machine learning and automation, but their systems clearly take editorial positions. We need to hold them to account in the same way we do any other publisher. Just as you cannot libel someone on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, if the Silicon Valley cartel wants to act like a publisher, they should have to assume the same burden.20

We could list many other specific criticisms of Facebook, and each may relate directly to interesting theories and research topics. But the general instability

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of the cultural definitions for social media also can introduce problems for researchers even when their questions are unrelated to political conflict. Facebook is a hybrid of social network platform, entertainment mass medium, and advertising business, operating among many competitors, some as in China defined by national borders, and others offering alternative technical designs. As Wikipedia summarizes, it is both economically significant and unstable: Facebook held its initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company … On July 26, 2018, Facebook became the first company to lose over $100 billion worth of stock in one day. It fell from nearly $630 billion to $510 billion, a 19% loss, after disappointing sales reports.21

Six months earlier, a Facebook press release had asserted: “2017 was a strong year for Facebook, but it was also a hard one,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “In 2018, we’re focused on making sure Facebook isn’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being and for society. We’re doing this by encouraging meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content. Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day. By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term.”22

While explicitly aimed at investors, and reporting good earnings gains, this report revealed a decline of “roughly 50 million hours” per day of user time, which should worry advertisers, who are the sources of the earnings. Showing “fewer viral videos” illustrates the apparent power of Facebook over their users, but also reflects competition from YouTube and other online entertainment sources. A different but not unrelated issue is the changing technical nature of Facebook.23 On the technical side of the equation, it uses continuous deployment, which means that many small changes occur often in every aspect of the system, some of which might interfere with the particular data collection method being used in a research study.24 A few of these changes are substantial, such as the introduction of the timeline as the main focus of the user’s page, causing significant changes in how people interact with the software and thus with each other.25 Researchers may not only lack warnings of impending changes, but may encounter difficulty learning key information about how the system is structured even when it is relatively stable.26 Much of the most influential and inspiring public research on social structure in this new social medium employed its original definition as a support for social relations at colleges and other schools where students are highly motivated to develop new social ties, and Facebook’s adoption by users was rapid during its early days. For example, one study that began a decade ago explored the 1,640-student Freshman cohort of a college, 97.4 percent of whom had a

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Facebook profile, using extensive data from the college as well as the contents of those profiles to examine the nature and implications of informal social structure. In addition to the friend links in Facebook, social ties could be measured by pictures in the photo albums many students posted, as well as with data from the college on the “housing groups” of students who requested living together at the school. Part of the study tested the theory that friendship ties would exhibit racial homophily, focusing on the 45  percent of the students who posted pictures of themselves and their friends.27 This is a standard topic within social-structural studies of young people, of some significance for setting school policies, so it is valuable to see that online methodologies may be useful in this regard.28 Of course, some kinds of research that concern online communities are best done not online, but using traditional methods. For example a study of the factors encouraging use or nonuse of social media was administered to 1,060 first-year college students through a paper questionnaire, so that an adequate sample of those who were not active online could be included.29 Many studies of social media draw inspiration from influential social network research completed before the Internet was opened to the general public, for example a study of online relations between high school students and adults that called itself “The Strength of Awkward Ties” in imitation of Mark Granovetter’s article, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”30 A large group of researchers at Cornell University has studied many of the ways in which close personal relationships may be enacted in Facebook.31 There are many ways to measure social structure in Facebook, and this chapter will illustrate several of them. However, each has methodological problems, the most common being how meaningful each datum is. The two most obvious issues are the wide range of meanings that a user may invest in having a “friend” relationship with another user, and being a “member” of a Facebook group.32 Recently, Anthony Paik and Kenneth Sanchagrin considered serious concerns within sociology about apparent findings that social connectedness may be declining in the United States, focusing on the possibility that this was just an interviewer effect.33 Like friendship relations, group memberships in Facebook differ greatly in their meanings and thus the implications for research.34 Some are online communication hubs for solidly established real-world organizations, highsolidarity social networks, and coherent subcultures. Others promote ideological agendas and thus are more like social movements or even commercial advertising media. The rules governing membership and action in a group vary greatly, and are generally under the control of the one person who set the group up and those currently serving as admins (administrators), some of whom may play the specialized role of moderator in deleting inappropriate posts and encouraging good behavior more generally. In this research I have belonged to many groups, in three rough but official Facebook categories: public, which means open; closed, which means visible but limiting access

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to information and the ability to post messages; and secret, which means invisible to nonmembers. It is easy to request membership in a public or closed group, but as a practical matter the only way to join a secret group is to be actively invited by a member with the power to recruit new members. For an extensive study published as the book Family History Digital Libraries, I created a secret group called Bailiwick Archives to which only members of a particular extended family could belong, sharing old family photographs in the discussion section, and a diversity of private historical documents in the files section.35 One of the most questionable features of Facebook’s rules was that when I began research inside it at the beginning of 2015, people could be given membership in a group without requesting it or even being aware that the group existed. A large fraction of people with Facebook pages are inactive, which means that if their owners are placed in a group, they may never learn about it, and the group’s membership will be padded with false positives. This does not invalidate membership statistics for Facebook groups that have experienced, responsible admins, but does raise concerns for researchers. One practical solution is to prioritize members who clearly are active, whether because they serve as administrators of a group, post frequently in it, or give some other evidence of commitment. Another solution to the problem of the meaning of membership is to consider the ideological meaning of the group itself, because Facebook groups have become a common tool for promotion of social and cultural movements.36 Because there is no cost to “join” a group, membership in one may often be the equivalent of checking a positive box in response to a preference item in a questionnaire, meaningful but only weakly related to social structure. A research method used here and also in later chapters is to tabulate the numbers of people who belong to a pair of groups, within a larger collection of groups, thus serving as interlocks. The previous chapter noted the extensive research done years ago on interlocking directorates of major corporations, the many cases in which individuals serve on the boards of directors of two or more companies.37 These social connections could have very great significance for the behaviors of the organizations and were often accused of being tools of collusion between companies, setting higher prices than a free market would have established, or otherwise transforming a network of legally independent corporations into implicit monopolies. However, across the full range of Facebook groups I have studied, very few have immediate economic consequences, neither buying nor selling, and they seldom organize any real-world activity aside from an occasional social event. Memberships in multiple Facebook groups, and friendship links between individuals as well, do serve as communication channels. The founders of a Facebook group tend to define it in terms of its topical area of interest, so groups often become broadcasters of propaganda promoting a particular point

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of view. Interlocks between such groups may coordinate their propaganda to some extent, but they may also serve to differentiate them, as each seeks a distinctive role in a division of ideological labor. Thus for researchers who study social movements, collective behavior, and mass media, the study of Facebook group interlocks can be an excellent method for charting the conceptual structure of a culture or subculture, via the social structure.

2.2 The National Space Society Our first example will be a high-technology social movement that was already well established when the Internet was invented, has entered a perplexing period of stasis, and now uses online communities in the attempt to revive itself. A 2009 issue of the journal Futures, titled “Space: The Final Frontier,” contained studies of the near paralysis that direct human exploration of the solar system has suffered since the last voyage to the Moon in 1972. The introduction is a decade old but could have been written today: “The saga of space exploration has long wandered in a strange twilight period, arguably either dawn or dusk, in which the goal of human expansion into the galaxy is being neither achieved nor abandoned.”38 On its website, the National Space Society (NSS) organization proclaims it is “an independent, educational, grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization.”39 It is not the only such organization, others including the Mars Society and the British Interplanetary Society, but is an excellent selection for research on the evolution of social organizations, not only because it remains active but also because of its interesting history. Roughly speaking, three sociological theories compete to explain the development of space technology: 1. Technological determinism: When the economic and technical preconditions are in place, new technologies will naturally emerge, assisted by diffusion of innovations through an extensive social network of innovators, but otherwise connected to social phenomena primarily by cultural lag as existing societal institutions slowly adapt.40 2. Political ideology: Dominant institutions in society will promote those technical innovations that seem to support the interests of the elite, such as revolutionary propaganda in the case of the Soviet space program or corporate profits and national prestige in the case of the American space program.41 3. Social movements:  New technologies that do not immediately serve the daily needs of the populace require collective behavior and social movements, whether motivated by idealism or status envy, in which advocates promote their cause effectively with other groups and institutions of society.42

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Each of these theories has some merit, and could also be applied to the development of computer technologies. But the third theory is especially relevant in understanding the NSS, which is itself a social movement organization. While the history of spaceflight has been documented in remarkably great detail, there remain major questions about the social factors that motivated the technological developments. Walter McDougall considered the first Sputnik to be a natural expression of the progressive rhetoric of the Soviet Union, yet the early technology developments had primarily occurred in Germany.43 The social movement theory of spaceflight was largely framed by Willy Ley, who had been very active in the world’s first significant pro-spaceflight organization founded in 1927 in Germany, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), which Google Translate renders as the Spaceflight Club, but might more precisely be the Society for Spaceship Travel.44 Ley abandoned Germany in 1935, out of disgust for the Nazis, and became a successful science fact author in the United States. Led by Wernher von Braun, many of his VfR colleagues created the Peenemünde facility that developed the liquid-fueled V-2 rocket, designed both as a terrifying but inefficient weapon of war, and as a prototype spaceship. Small social movement groups comparable to the VfR arose in the United States, Russia, and Britain, gaining influence after World War II.45 In terms of social structure, the evolution can be conceptualized in three stages: 1. Parallel behavior: Starting late in the nineteenth century and continuing into the 1920s, several men developed serious technological concepts that later contributed to the development of space rockets, with similar motivations and goals, but without influencing one another. 2. Collective behavior: Especially in the 1920s and 1930s, individuals who were either engineers or advocates communicated spaceflight concepts widely, influencing each other but without much planning and no real social organization. 3. Social movement: Beginning with the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, formal organizations arose, but radical in their aims and operating outside any well-established societal institutions.46 In the United States, the social movement became institutionalized in a government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and a professional organization, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), both of which blend spaceflight with ordinary aviation and represent the economic interests of large aerospace corporations.47 The NSS is the residue of the independent spaceflight social movement, resulting from the frankly incomplete merger of two wings, as Wikipedia reports: “The society was established in the United States on March 28, 1987 by the merger of the National Space Institute, founded in 1974 by Dr. Wernher von Braun, and the L5 Society, founded in 1975 based on the concepts of Dr.  Gerard K. O’Neill.”48

37

2.2 The National Space Society

37

Von Braun had been the head of the German V-2 project at Peenemünde, and was brought to the United States, originally secretly, to develop the US Army’s ballistic missile program at Huntsville, Alabama. As a very young man, he had been an enthusiastic member of the VfR, and the National Space Institute was like a mature, intellectual successor to it. O’Neill was a visionary who advocated building an orbiting city at the L-5 point in the Moon’s orbit, one of five Lagrangian points where a large structure could hold a stable position indefinitely.49 Thus, the NSS represents both respectable and radical perspectives on the future of spaceflight, in a possibly uneasy alliance, outside the formal institutions of the society, and thus it is an activist social movement organization. While much enthusiasm for space exploration exists in the general public, it has never been sufficient to motivate the large investments required to accomplish significant missions beyond the boundaries of our planet.50 Information on the NSS website identified thirty-five local chapters, and it was possible to find Facebook pages for eighteen of them, divided equally into two types, organizations and public groups. The case of the Washington, DC chapter, which does not apparently have its own Facebook page, suggests the complicated choices a local branch of a social movement may have. The website connected with the DC chapter is in fact the main page for the entire NSS, which has offices at the corner of P and 5th streets NW in the nation’s capital. The name of the chapter is DC-L5 suggesting that it represents the more radical L5 wing of the movement, at least historically. The website for the chapter is also for a limited-distribution monthly cable television program, Around Space, produced by DC-L5. As of mid-2016, the website scheduled monthly Sunday afternoon meetings for two hours at Dolly Madison Library in the DC suburb of McLean, Virginia.51 Like the national NSS Facebook page operated from the DC chapter, the nine local organizational chapter pages listed in Table  2.1 are essentially websites that use the Facebook technology to broadcast news. Visitors to a Facebook page may click a thumbs-up icon, to register a like for that page, rather like a one-item preference questionnaire. This takes essentially no effort, but differences in the likes statistics do express a rough measure of the popularity of the page. The data in the following three tables were all collected in late July, 2016. Table  2.2 lists the nine NSS chapters that have Facebook public groups instead of organization pages, that people may join as members, which generally allows them to post news items on the group’s page. Often a public group is set so that one’s request to join must be approved by an administrator. The main NSS website gives the name of each chapter’s contact person, so I also counted them. In addition to providing some evidence about the comparative popularity of different groups, these three categories of people can serve as links to other groups. Frankly, these groups are surprisingly small, given the popularity of spaceflight, and the linkages between them seem inconsequential.

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38 Table 2.1 NSS Facebook organization pages NSS chapter

Brief self-description

Likes

NSS Chicago Society for Space Studies

The Chicago Society for Space Studies is a chapter of the NSS devoted to providing space exploration educational services to Chicago and the northeastern Illinois area Welcome to the Space Society of Silicon Valley! We support space exploration and settlement through education as a chapter of the NSS Our mission: To exchange information and ideas – both pro and con – to further the discussion of opening the space frontier for everyone We are a nonprofit space technology educational organization The NSS St. Louis Space Frontier is a chapter of the NSS. It is a nonprofit education organization Official Homepage: www.NSSofNT.org

2,495

We’re an independent, nonprofit, volunteer, membership organization that advocates the exploration, development and settlement in space The local chapter of the NSS. The NSS is an educational, nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization OSA is part of NSS, helping make Moon, Mars, and orbital settlements possible. See OSA meetup and http://chapters.nss.org/ok/osanss.html

116

Space Society of Silicon Valley NSS Western Spaceport Chapter Minnesota Space Frontier Society NSS St. Louis Space Frontier NSS Austin Space Frontier Society NSS Space and Astronomy Society of NW Jersey Middle Tennessee Space Society Oklahoma Space Alliance NSS

772 569 398 322 298

61 60

Table 2.2 NSS Facebook public groups NSS chapter Florida Space Development Council Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) Space Societies of Phoenix Tucson L5 Space Society Georgia Space Society NSS Seattle Memphis Space Society Oregon L5 L5 Society of Sacramento

Members

Admins Contacts Links to Links to Florida Huntsville

288

4

2

–

7

229

5

3

7

–

65 30 28 24 22 21 18

3 5 1 1 2 2 1

2 1 1 1 1 1 2

4 0 0 1 2 1 2

2 0 1 0 1 1 2

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39

By a variety of means, it was possible to find personal Facebook pages for twenty-three of the thirty-five chapter contacts. At the time this research was done, each personal page listed the public groups the individual belonged to, but five of the twenty-three had decided to keep all their group memberships private. Also, seven of the twenty-three kept their lists of friends private. A  friendship link is reciprocal in Facebook, meaning that one of the parties sends a friend request to the other, and the dyad is formed only if the other accepts it. Depending on how one sets one’s preferences, one may automatically get news items from a group or friend, and can see which friends are online at the moment. If one party to a friend dyad makes friends private, this does not affect the visible friends list on the other person’s page. It is certainly quite feasible to create sociograms and do other kinds of social network research, based on Facebook friend dyads. Among the sixteen NSS contacts with visible friend lists, there were thirty-one friend dyads. Two of these contacts were not party to any dyads, and of the remaining fourteen there was a core group of six with thirteen dyads. Three members of the six-person core had links to all five of the others, and the two missing dyads involved the same individual. Remarkably, there were also twenty-seven dyad connections between the sixteen contacts whose friend lists were public, and the seven whose lists were private. Of course we do not know about dyads within the set of seven whose friends lists were private. It is possible that some of the twentythree contacts with Facebook pages use very different means to communicate with each other, email being the most obvious alternative, and thus have social ties that cannot be measured in this way. Some of the most interesting information in Table  2.2 is not in the data about individual people, but in the total memberships and the names of the groups. On its website, the Florida Space Development Council says it is “a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the development of Floridabased space enterprise through policy advocacy, networking and outreach.”52 It has an office in Orlando, the city closest to Kennedy Space Center, and thus may be one of the local organizations related to the space industry. However, the president of the Council is active in a variety of other future-oriented activities, including the transhumanist movement examined later in this chapter, and there is reason to believe it functions rather independently from the other components of the NSS.53 The other large group is the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), which like three of the other public groups has retained its L5 identity, and thus potentially more radical than other somewhat sober NSS chapters. Huntsville, Alabama, was a key location for the American space program during the years of competition with the Soviet Union. It was the main site for development of long-range rockets for the US Army, the Redstone Arsenal, and it was there that the German rocket scientists brought over after World War II worked. Since 1965 it has been home to the US Space and Rocket Center, a museum featuring a major collection of rockets, from the original German V-2, the

40

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American offspring of it called the Redstone, and both a Saturn I and Saturn V huge launch vehicle from the Apollo program, along with the Apollo 16 crew reentry vehicle. The seven other NSS open groups seem quite small, perhaps nothing more than information hubs for the very few dedicated members who attend local monthly meetings. The membership lists for these nine open groups offer a sense of how membership in Facebook groups can be used to map social structure. As the last columns in Table  2.2 show, only seven people belonged to both the Florida and Huntsville groups, and smaller numbers between them and the others. Two people belonged to four groups each. One was an NSS chapter contact, and the other was one of the administrators of the Florida group. Just nineteen people belonged to two groups, only one of them being a chapter contact, and the remaining 640 belonged to only one group. Depending upon one’s definition of “success,” this was a very successful network analysis, with accurate data for a large number of people and a large fraction of the memberships of the groups. But if one wanted to see a nice sociogram based on numerous multi-person interlocks between the groups, the word “successful” seems out of place. In science, negative findings can represent success, and here we see good evidence that these Facebook groups do not directly belong to a solid social network. There seems to exist a relatively cohesive network among the chapter contacts, at least among those who have personal Facebook pages, but ordinary members of chapters do not seem to be part of a wider social network, at least as reflected in these Facebook data. Recalling that the NSS was the result of a merger of two geographically dispersed social movements, from Facebook we have further data suggesting that they have retained something of their original separation. To explore the possibilities for using Facebook to study a living subculture, rather than the social network that is its skeleton, I  checked all the public groups to which the eighteen NSS contacts with public memberships belonged. Table 2.3 lists all the ones to which at least three of these contacts belonged, with statistics dating from November 4, 2016, and all of them have more members than any of the nine NSS public groups. As demonstration pilot studies go, this list offers a quite good overview of the contemporary culture of spaceflight enthusiasts. The number of admins is displayed by Facebook in the Members section of the page, while public admins are the subset of admins whose personal page is accessible and where the public groups they belong to are displayed. A sense of the interconnectedness of these groups is provided by the final column in Table 2.3, which reports how many of the total population of admins of all these groups are known to be members of the particular group. SpaceX, the most populous of these public groups, should not be mistaken for the corporation with the same name, described thus by Wikipedia: “Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, United States. It was founded in 2002 by former

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Table 2.3 Spaceflight activist groups connected to the NSS in Facebook Organization

Members

NSS contacts

Admins Public admins

Admin members

SpaceX Space Travellers – Your Stairway to Heaven Space Hipsters Mars Settlement Research Organisation Space Renaissance Initiative Space-Based Solar Power – SBSP Space Settlement Alliance Moon Society World Space Forum Helium 3 Lunar Mining Leeward Space Foundation Coalition for Deep Space Exploration Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) Space Development Starship Commercial Spaceflight

22,029 9,331

7 3

9 2

8 1

38 18

8,512 7,383

4 3

6 6

6 5

38 30

6,201 5,089

7 11

47 10

31 9

49 45

4,507 3,123 2,955 2,068 1,846 1,803

5 11 5 7 3 3

18 14 5 2 6 1

14 12 3 2 6 1

25 45 26 15 25 19

1,905

5

10

8

15

1,261 461 317

3 3 3

2 4 1

2 2 1

10 6 8

PayPal entrepreneur and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk with the goal of creating the technologies to reduce space transportation costs and enable the colonization of Mars.”54 This more formal SpaceX is an example of one of the elite movements that have received far less sociological attention than have populist movements. Its Facebook page is a channel disseminating news about projects and launches, having fully 1,552,377 likes as of August 7, 2016. It does not however refer to SpaceX as a social movement: “SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft.”55 The SpaceX public group explicitly distinguishes itself from the corporation: “This group is not affiliated with SpaceX in any capacity. We are solely an enthusiast group.”56 Space Travelers describes itself thus: “This group is made for all who are interested in general space, space history, human spaceflight, space exploration, astronomy and astrophysics, aerospace engineering and future aspects of using and going into space.” The information on the Space Hipsters page gives strict rules for positing messages, rather than an ideological focus, and the group’s founder expresses her orientation on her personal page: “Space stuff, memes, and more. My main form of exercise is runnin’ thangs” [sic].57 The SEDS is a

42

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student-run educational organization that “believes in a space-faring civilization and that focusing the enthusiasm of young people is the key to our future in space.”58 The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration promotes American supremacy as “a collection of space industry businesses and advocacy groups that collaborates to reinforce the value and benefits of deep-space exploration with the public and our nation’s leaders, as well as to build lasting support for a long-term, sustainable, strategic direction for space exploration.”59 The Space Settlement Alliance calls itself “a community of leaders, technologists, scientists and colonization advocates working towards the establishment of multiple inhabited outposts throughout the solar system, and ultimately beyond.”60 The World Space Forum is “Committed to improving the state of the world through space applications and the peaceful uses of outer space.”61 The Facebook page for Space Development is unclear about its focus, but links through its senior administrator to a website that reports: “Areas of particular interest and perceived of economic value include low Earth orbit … the EarthMoon L5 Lagrange point, near asteroids, the moons of Mars, the asteroid belt, and the rings of Saturn.”62 The Space Renaissance initiative is a remarkably ambitious social movement, that with some justice could be described as the secular equivalent of a new religion, rather like the parallel transhumanist movement described below that advocates transforming human nature through technology. Its website explains: “Space Renaissance is a new, global philosophy, having its basic ground on Earth, and its natural development in the extraterrestrial space. Our founding concepts are New Humanism and Astro-Humanism. We look at the past Renaissance (1500) as an inspiration for patronage and capability to aim high, and to make great projects by means of good will and mutual cooperation.”63 It has branches in Italy, Britain, Germany, and the United States and lists Facebook groups for Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Nepal, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It has a remarkably large number of administrators (fortythree), who may function as an organizing committee for all the branches. Just one of them is an NSS contact, notably the one belonging to the largest number of dyads in our sociometric analysis, and one is a representative of the transhumanist movement. The Mars Settlement Research Organisation has a more definite focus, and could be described as a citizen science communication channel, thus relevant to Chapter 6 of this book: “MSRO is dedicated to conducting research and developing solutions that lead us to human settlement of Mars. It doesn’t compete with other Mars groups but supports them all. Everyone is welcome to participate.”64 SBSP advocates a plausible but expensive technological solution to energy and pollution problems on Earth, placing solar power satellites in orbit and beaming the power down, probably by means of microwaves: “The

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43

greenest of all green energy sources. Unlimited safe clean energy 24/7 daily delivered anywhere.”65 Helium 3 is named for the isotope of Helium with two protons and only one neutron rather than the more common two, created in the topsoil of the Moon by the solar wind. So the group named after it offers a second space-based path to safe energy: “to mine the moon for fuel used in fusion reactors – futuristic power plants that have been demonstrated in proof-of-concept but are likely decades away from commercial deployment. Helium-3 is considered a safe, environmentally friendly fuel candidate for these generators, and while it is scarce on Earth it is plentiful on the moon.”66 The goal of the Moon Society is “furthering the creation of communities on the Moon involving large-scale industrialization and private enterprise.”67 Two NSS contacts are among its administrators, and in 2010 the Houston, Texas, chapter of the Moon Society merged with the local NSS chapter.68 The Leeward Space Foundation is incorporated as a nonprofit organization, promoting development of a controversial alternate to rockets for reaching orbit called space elevators, which would be satellites with structures reaching down towards the Earth, counterbalanced by structures reaching far away, indeed incorporating an elevator system.69 The two least populated groups in the table, Starship and Commercial Spaceflight, seem to belong to individuals at opposite ends of the technical spectrum, one hoping that nuclear fusion could eventually power quick travel to the stars, and the other promoting very near-term developments. Examination of the personal pages of the public admins for all these groups not only provided the data for the final column of Table 2.3, but also revealed that at least ten of them belong to each of the following other spaceflight groups, beginning with twenty-two in the group associated with the governmental European Space Agency: 22 21 19 18 16 16 16 15 15 13 13 13 12 12

ESA – European Space Agency, Fans Group (42,988 members) LiftPort Group (1,648) Lifeboat Foundation (6,168) British Interplanetary Society (2,294) NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration (337,352) OpenLuna Foundation (666) SpaceX Club (1,784) International Space University (6,916) NASA and World Space News (14,156) Elon Musk (25,038) Living Universe Foundation (602) ROSCOSMOS Fans Group (4,541) Asteroid Mining (196) Global Space Exploration Missions! Science and technology! SDN (9,601)

44

Facebook

44

12 12 12 12 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10 10 10

MARSDRIVE (711) Open Scientific Speculation of Fermi Paradox (3,239) Space and Universe (38,219) Virtual Astrobiology Society (10,327) Colonizing the Solar System (1,672) Icarus Interstellar (2,699) Lunar Research (3,499) Mars Colonist Registry (184) Mars One – Aspiring Martians Group (13,308) Mars One Club (4,400) Scientific Transhumanism (18,025) Space and Interstellar Travel (4,864) World Space Week (1,640) Immortality (7,545) Mars Orbital Alliance (544) MARS X™ (Mars + Earthlings = Martian Unknowns) (275) Society of Displaced Aerospace Contractors and Consultants (319) Tau Zero Foundation (1,075)

Most of these names confer the general focus of the group, recalling that Elon Musk was the founder of SpaceX, and noting that the Fermi Paradox is the failure of astronomers to have detected real evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.70 Like the Scientific Transhumanism group, the Lifeboat Foundation and Immortality groups link to the technocultures considered later in this chapter. Considered as a reconnaissance of the spaceflight social movement to which the NSS belongs, this pilot study was quite successful. Although many individual pieces of data were missing, there was a sufficiently ample and diverse supply. We saw much evidence of collective and parallel behavior, as well as connections to organized social movements. Considered apart from government agencies and aerospace corporations, the spaceflight social movement could be described with the term general movement, which Herbert Blumer defined as a loosely organized expression of change-oriented tendencies in the wider culture of a particular period of history.71 The social structure of the full set of spaceflight groups listed here could also be interpreted as the conceptual structure of the movement’s ideology, thus connecting social structure with cultural structure, as discussed at length in Chapter 8.

2.3 A Yachting Community Compared with many other kinds of online community and subculture, Facebook links very directly to people’s real lives, so we should explore how much information it may add to traditional methods for studying social structure in the outside world. This section reports a pilot project using many forms

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of online public data, but finding Facebook of only marginal utility. If we were doing a major study, we might want to duplicate the classical Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, done in the 1920s and 1930s by Robert and Helen Lynd.72 Or we could emulate the vast collection of urban studies carried out by sociologists at the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago, from the early work of Park and Burgess up to today.73 Here, for the sake of efficiency, we shall start with one topic in one town, yachting in Greenwich, Connecticut. In a 2016 critique of how financial corporations and government regulations that favor them may be increasing inequality in the United States, Alana Semuels compared Greenwich with nearby Bridgeport: Bridgeport, an old manufacturing town all but abandoned by industry, and Greenwich, a headquarters to hedge funds and billionaires, may be in the same county, and a few exits apart from each other on I-95, but their residents live in different worlds. The average income of the top 1  percent of people in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metropolitan area, which consists of all of Fairfield County plus a few towns in neighboring New Haven County, is $6 million dollars – 73 times the average of the bottom 99 percent – according to a report released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in June. This makes the area one of the most unequal in the country; nationally, the top 1 percent makes 25 times more than the average of the bottom 99 percent … On the surface, the reasons behind Bridgeport’s poverty and Greenwich’s wealth do not seem related. Bridgeport is struggling because it is a one-time manufacturing hub whose jobs went overseas as factories moved away in the late 20th century. Greenwich became a home for New York City financiers who wanted to live somewhere a little more bucolic than New York, and later hedge-fund managers decided they could work closer to home and set up their companies there, too.74

Future research may determine the extent to which the Greenwich-Bridgeport contrast is a symptom of the increasing social class inequality that may to a significant extent be caused by information technology, which facilitated globalization and puts great power in the hands of technically sophisticated elites. Among the areas where social scientists have had difficulty doing intensive research, observational studies of the upper-class elite are among the potentially most important. Yachts have not been the focus of much sociological research, although in 1940 Elmo Roper noted that ownership of one can be an indicator of high social status, at least in yachting communities, and in 1951 Melville Dalton reported that membership in a yacht club can contribute to promotion at work and thus causing an increase in social status.75 Greenwich is a yachting community, serving prominently as a bedroom community for executives in New  York City. Entering “Greenwich Connecticut” into Facebook’s general page search turned up many hits, beginning with these eight: Images of Greenwich, CT, public group – 3,458 members Friends of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, public group – 1,905 members Greenwich Moms, closed group – 1,214 members Greenwich Wiffle Ball

46

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Facebook Grta Greenwich You Know You’re From Greenwich If, public group – 10,556 members Greenwich, Connecticut, city  – 10,672 like this, 123,146 people checked in here Greenwich WINE + FOOD Festival Presented by Serendipity – 20,266 likes

The Images and Friends pages may have been first in the listing because I had already joined these public groups when I did this search, and there are Facebook groups like these for many other towns. Greenwich Moms is a closed group, which Facebook explained thus back when I did this research in 2016: “Anyone can see the group and its members in News Feed, search and other places on Facebook. Only members see posts.” However, this policy changed in 2018, and the membership lists of closed groups are no longer visible to nonmembers.76 Researchers will need to decide carefully when it is ethically appropriate to request membership in closed groups, and I did not seek to join this one because of its special purpose: “Group is for day to day advice, support and interaction with other moms in Greenwich, CT and surrounding areas. We love fun play dates, ideas and suggestions, and are generally care free and easy going.” Greenwich Wiffle Ball is rather unconventional, set up as if it were the page of a person, complete with a list of friends, but actually advertising an annual public event that also has a website.77 Grta Greenwich also violates Facebook’s conventions, set up as if it were a personal page but advertising horse shows for the Greenwich Riding and Trails Association, which also has a public group with 239 members. You Know You’re From Greenwich If might be called a nostalgia group, primarily for people who lived in Greenwich, perhaps during childhood, then moved away. Many towns have groups with almost identical names, and checking a few gives one the sense that they are created by local business people who might benefit from implicit advertising. The seventh page in the list belongs to the town government. When people visit a Facebook page, they may click a “like” icon, almost like checking a preference question box in a questionnaire. The reference to “people checked in here” concerns a Facebook service through which people at the location can use a mobile device to alert online friends that they were there at the moment.78 The last item on the list is a very fancy commercial advertisement, set up in the conventional manner for Facebook, which also has a website, selling costly tickets to elite social events.79 Greenwich contains many historical sites, the century-old Bruce Museum, and many other locations that could provide information for a social science researcher, but the obvious starting point is Greenwich Library. Its Facebook page advertises events and services, and even says how many minutes remain until it opens for the day. The first three brief reviews that visitors posted on the page are rather poetic: “A place where your mind wanders off, imagination comes to life, peace quite and tranquility, and my favorite yet: helps you

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FORGET troubles and so much more!!!!?!!” “It is a place of peace like no other library in the world! Filled with memories of my childhood & yet always evolving. Beautiful!” “Greenwich Library is simply the finest library around. It’s proof that physical libraries are just as relevant in the age of the Internet as ever.” The sitemap for its rather spectacular website refers to many projects, of which the oral history project is justly famous among historians.80 It has its own website, with this introduction: The Greenwich Library Oral History Project is a collection of interviews with people who have helped to make or witnessed the history of Greenwich, Connecticut, since 1890. To date, the collection contains more than 850 interviews and 138 books. The entire collection is available at the Greenwich Library, as well as the Cos Cob and Byram branches, and Perrot Memorial Library. Books and transcribed interviews may be purchased at the Oral History Project office.81

Chapter 6 will consider how local oral histories managed by local libraries and recruiting volunteers may suggest an approach to future citizen social science. Immediately, any fantasy of studying such a community entirely online is challenged. Huge amounts of data relevant to the social sciences are held inside physical libraries, and not available online. Thus, many research projects might best be done physically within the community, supplementing direct observation and interviews with archival data, and perhaps adding some relevant online data, but not exclusively over the Internet. For this pilot study, we shall visit the Greenwich Library, but only virtually, and move from there to the Yacht Club in the most striking location, Tod’s Point in Old Greenwich, the district of the town with the oldest heritage, having been settled by English immigrants in the year 1640. We do this by entering the Library’s address – “101 W Putnam Ave Greenwich, CT 06830” – into Google and selecting the street view version of Google Maps. Google’s photographing vehicle had taken its series of 360-degree views in January 2016, and at that time the rather large and modern-looking library was undergoing improvements and was covered with scaffolding and blue tarpaulins. While locally called Putnam Avenue, the street is the Boston Post Road, the historic US-1, some portions of which were trails used by the indigenous people even before the English arrived.82 We virtually drive east on it toward Old Greenwich, passing many landmarks, and pausing when we reach Greenwich High School. Among the detailed information on its website is the fact that it serves fully 2,700 students and: “All students at GHS are issued a Chromebook computer which they are required to bring to every class.” It is noteworthy not only that a personal computer is essential for a student’s education, but that the internet cloud-based Chromebook was selected, and it uses the Linux operating system, which will feature in our chapter on open-source software communities.83

48

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The Greenwich High School Alumni page in Facebook, with 3,618 members on November 25, 2016, says it is “[t]he largest site for all GHS alumni to find one another, post pics, share news, and stay in touch, with links to 25+ other GHS alumni groups.”84 A sense of the sociocultural location of the school is the fact that the town appropriated 17  million dollars for its Performing Arts Center, and the December 2015 performance of the Hallelujah Chorus by a choir of 300 students and alumni was shared on YouTube through videos taken from three different directions by members of the audience.85 Our virtual car turns off the Post Road at Sound Beach Avenue, going south and soon reaching the Perrot Memorial Library on the left, and Binney Park on the right, both of which have Facebook information pages. Soon on the left is First Congregational Church of Greenwich, which currently features a colorful photo of a maypole dance on both the Facebook page and website. Remarkably, in 2015 this church celebrated its 350th anniversary.86 In terms of social structure, it is worth noting that the Congregationalist denomination has undergone complex splits and mergers, as Wikipedia reminds us: “Modern Congregationalism in the United States is largely split into three bodies:  the United Church of Christ, the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches and the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, which is the most theologically conservative.”87 The historical timeline on the website of this particular Congregational church reports that it joined the United Church of Christ in 1961.88 Chapter 6 will illustrate an alternate approach to citizen social science by inspecting the volunteer contributions in the online Find A Grave database of the church’s original Tomac Burying Ground cemetery. One of the many documents on the church’s website is a history of the period 1965–90, which happens to mention a Summer Youth Festival that used the church facilities but was not an activity belonging to the church itself: “Each summer high school and college-age young people of the church and local communities produce a well-known musical, giving a large number of them an opportunity to display their talents as actors, dancers, designers, costume makers, technicians and business people. They use church facilities for try-outs and rehearsals and pay for that use.”89 This is interesting as an example of a way in which formal organizations may cooperate with each other, and the actual performances took place in a public school. A nostalgic 213-member Facebook group exists for this Summer Youth Festival, set up by a woman who belongs also to a group named Greenwich High School Class of 1966 and currently lives in a different state. The next landmark after the Congregational Church is the Old Greenwich railroad station, which was built in 1892 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.90 Passing through the small town business district and turning right on Shore Road, we see water on both sides of the road, Long Island Sound on the left, and an extension of it called Greenwich Cove on the right. Continuing south, Shore Road becomes Tod’s Driftway, and is flanked immediately on both sides by water, before we

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reach the former island that is now Tod’s Point, with a town beach on the left, and a road to boat moorings on the right. Because Google took the photos in January 2016, the boats are not in the water, but large numbers of different sizes and shapes are up on the land, in storage through the winter. We find two buildings belonging to Old Greenwich Yacht Club, one a small structure beside the dock, and the other labeled Community Sailing Center, Old Greenwich Yacht Club, housing an Office for “enrollment, rentals, information.” None of the visible yachts are large, mostly small power boats and tiny craft such as canoes. This does not appear to be a major yacht club, such as those with big yachts and a restaurant. It does have a Facebook page, calling it a “nonprofit organization,” and one post was a video dated July 23, 2016, showing members dancing outdoors under strings of light, and linking to videos of sailboats sailing. Without actually visiting, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish a commercial boat yard from a yacht club from a more general club oriented to seashore recreations. A first-stage search inside Facebook turned up eight organization pages in Greenwich, Connecticut, that looked like yacht clubs, listed in Table 2.4. How can these Facebook pages illuminate the social structure of upper-class yachting? For someone who knows nothing about the phenomenon, they at least document that something interesting is happening. These eight are organization sites, but the check-ins hint that each may have an associated group on Facebook. If we can find those groups, we might be able as in the NSS study to look at what other groups the members belong to, thereby working out the structure of the subculture, perhaps ultimately reaching hundreds of yacht clubs and groups all around Long Island Sound. The table also indicates that many people posted reviews of the yacht clubs, and they also could be used as links. Actually, it turned out to be difficult to find these hypothesized public groups, and the only initial success was the Indian Harbor Yacht Club. It had 129 members, although this included an odd case in which one person had two Facebook pages, one apparently the successor to the other. As noted earlier, Facebook has three kinds of groups, as defined by the privacy setting: public, closed, and secret.91 This was a closed group, which meant I  could not see what members had posted on the page, but at that point in Facebook’s history I could see a list of members, go to their personal pages, and see in many cases what other groups they belonged to. How much one can see on a personal page depends partly upon whether one is “friends” with the person, but in each of these cases I saw many pictures and messages about family, friends, and recreational activities. We can speculate that each of the other seven Greenwich yacht clubs might have a group of members, but kept secret so that it cannot be found in a search, let alone seen in the list of a stranger’s group memberships. The Indian Harbor group description says, “The club is based mainly around

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50

Table 2.4 Greenwich yacht clubs and boat yards advertised in Facebook Name

Total page likes

People checked in here

People talking about this

Reviews

Greenwich Water Club Belle Haven Club Mianus River Boat and Yacht Club Indian Harbor Yacht Club Greenwich Boat and Yacht Club Byram Shore Boat Club Riverside Yacht Club Old Greenwich Yacht Club

290 268 240 227 221 164 77 46

2,265 3,006 1,068 2,870 1,548 0 1,397 130

22 82 6 30 23 6 41 3

26 27 16 23 15 0 8 2

personally owned yachts and pleasure boats and has a long history of competitive racing.”92 What, then, can be discovered by checking the group memberships on the 129 personal pages of Indian Harbor members? An outsider to the elite yachting communities of Long Island Sound would get some of the flavor of upper-class life, for example links to equestrian clubs, owners of elite breeds of dogs, garden clubs, boarding schools, colleges, and even rather impressively several Facebook pages that memorialize deceased friends or represent nonprofit charitable organizations like one devoted to curing paralysis. Yet the links to other yachting groups are at best spotty. In no case does a personal page report membership in the Indian Harbor Yacht Club group, despite the fact that all are members, because as a closed group that information was automatically withheld. This suggests that it may be difficult to find sufficiently rich and representative data for reliable statistical analysis of social structures. A very different approach could be the basis of a serious study:  research about social structure reflected not through people but through their boats. For example, a few Indian Harbor members belong to the Atlantic Class public group in Facebook, with 293 members, for owners of a particular sailboat type originally designed in 1928. Members of yacht clubs already exist as cohesive social groups, so they do not need Facebook, and may wish to exclude nonmembers from their communications. Owners of a particular class of boat are not already a social group, but have interests in common, so Facebook can be a valuable medium for them. Many Facebook groups represent particular boat classes, but similar data can be found online in other ways, for example the website for forty-foot Concordia sloops and yawls (with cabins to house a family of four) that lists the home port and ownership history of 103 of these costly yachts, or even the historical Lloyd’s Register of very expensive yachts that dates back over a century.93

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For example, Concordia yacht number 39 was built in 1956 and originally moored in Darien, Connecticut, and given the name Land’s End. When it was bought in 1960 and moved to the Riverside Yacht Club in Greenwich, it was renamed Tripoli, then became Fledermaus when it was bought by a resident of Bronxville, New York. It kept that name when in 1968 it moved to a new owner in Marshfield, Massachusetts, then in 1972 to another in Port Clyde, Maine. Remarkably, it then crossed the continent to Seattle, Washington, where it was renamed Candide, a name the next owner retained, in Friday Harbor, Washington. In 2000 it returned to the east coast, specifically to Boothbay, Maine, where it became the Donegal. Since 2013, the Donegal has been moored at Southport, Maine, where it has now completed its sixth decade of existence.94 Recent research in social computing has begun to use the concept stigmergy, especially in reference to open-source software, as described in Chapter  4. Wikipedia explains:  Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.95

Exactly how stigmergic Concordia yachts are remains to be seen. Yet many social organizations persist beyond the memberships of specific people, First Congregational Church of Greenwich being an extreme example. Dating from 1888, the Riverside Yacht Club claims to be the second oldest in Connecticut.96 While technically a year younger, Indian Harbor is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, presumably because its building is older.97 The oldest yacht club in the United States is the Narragansett Boat Club in Rhode Island, established in 1838 and still going strong.98 As we shall see throughout this book, privacy is a key factor in online communities, difficult to sustain and almost impossible to revive once it has been lost. Much of the computer science research on privacy naively concerns only security, the technical ability to prevent access to data by people who have not been given permission. Recently, from a variety of perspectives, researchers have explored other dimensions of privacy, for example the power of ordinary individuals with neither money nor expertise to prevent powerful organizations from exploiting personal information. Today’s privacy researchers would do well to study a half-century-old article by Barry Schwartz, which I described thus in a chapter of an edited collection about pervasive medical information systems:  “Schwartz, so long ago, offered the needed fundamental insight:  Society is a dynamic system, characterized by both social cohesion (intimacy) and social separation (privacy). He noted that social status divisions in society require and impose privacy, as the societal elite withdraws from the common people, while possessing considerable power to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens.”99

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The example of Greenwich suggests three important points that may apply to some other kinds of online community: (1) the ideal data for a planned study may not be available, or be of such low quality that they diminish the value of the study; (2)  exploration of alternative research pathways may suggest another kind of study that is both feasible and worth doing; (3) the extent to which it is necessary to augment one source of data with another very different one will vary by the topic of research. These points sum up to the observation that online research on social structure must employ mixed methods, in a dynamic manner that balances rigor with flexibility.100

2.4 Technocultures Two such different pilot studies as the NSS and Greenwich yacht clubs cannot be expected to offer comprehensive scientific results, yet they may offer hypotheses. Both involve technology, simplistically spaceships and sailboats. With a hint of sarcasm, we may suggest that both are obsolete technologies, but members of the NSS would argue that the current lull in the development of space travel technology will someday be overcome. As part of its campaign to keep the dream alive, the NSS is using modern information and communication technologies aggressively, while the well-established elite Greenwich yachting community seems more comfortable preserving its privacy with only minimal use of Facebook. That raises the possibility that many futuristic technology-oriented social movements will use Facebook as a medium for publicity and recruitment, and thus be suitable topics for research within this online social medium. An especially good example, and a timely one, is the worldwide transhumanist movement that consists of highly educated techno-radicals, some of whom hold influential positions in universities or high-tech corporations. I began research on this group observationally, by attending its 2003 Transvision conference at Yale university, the 2006 Transvision conference at University of Helsinki, and a 2006 conference at Oxford University. Then the movement migrated into existence almost exclusively online, notably the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), which chiefly seeks to develop an ethical system for managing technological innovation for human benefit, and has a vigorous blogsite.101 As of November 25, 2016, the IEET’s closed Facebook group had 2,327 members. Wikipedia describes the movement thus: Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics of using such technologies. The most common transhumanist thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.102

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53

For a chapter of a different book, I analyzed in some detail the transhumanist movement, which consists of many cooperating organizations in many nations and online.103 In the case of IEET, the organization has 95 members who hold formal positions, but another 77 who had published at least one blog on its website in the year ending July 5, 2016. I found personal Facebook pages for 96 of these 172 IEET members, and could access the friend lists of 67 of them. Their median number of friends was about 1,700, and the range was 24 to 5,000 which is the rigid limit beyond which one cannot gain one friend without abandoning another. Of course no human being really has over a thousand close friends, but public figures who are active promoting social movements or businesses through Facebook tend to seek the most extensive social networks, compatible with their particular interests. Table  2.5 lists the fifteen central IEET members with the most friends, four of them having the maximum of 5,000. All of them are by definition public figures, and the information about them is quite public. The column labeled “mutual” reports how many friends I shared with the individual, at a time when I had 2,453 friends, evidence of the intensity of online participant observation research, and suggesting the potential utility of a researcher’s friend ties for interactive research inside Facebook. Zoltan Istvan, with 5,000 virtual friends, in an especially interesting example of online self-promotion in the service of an ideological cause.104 Beginning in 2014, he campaigned for the presidency of the United States, asserting that he was the candidate of the Transhumanist Party, which when he began was only a dream, not an organization. In November 2013, Alexey Turchin had established a Facebook group called Transhumanist Party (TP), which described itself thus: “The Transhumanist Party is politically-centric and aims to support its candidates and voters with future-inspired policies that will enrich America and the world. We believe science and technology can solve most of the world’s problems.”105 Subsequently three other similar groups were founded: Transhumanist Party Virtual (TPV), Transhumanist Party US (TPUS), and UK Transhumanist Party (UKTP). The Transhumanist Party Virtual not only lived online but extended its definition of constituency to include nonhuman intelligences, which transhumanists generally believed would soon be created by computer scientists through artificial intelligence: “Transhumanist Party Virtual is open to all sapients, corporeal, digital, and virtual. Transhumanism Virtual is the viewpoint that sapient society, corporeal, digital, and virtual should embrace, wisely, thoughtfully, and compassionately, the radical transformational potential of technology.”106 During the presidential campaign, a rift developed between IEET leadership and Zoltan Istvan, and shortly before the election IEET took definite steps to define itself as “a global technoprogressive ideological tendency to intervene in debates within futurism, academe and public policy” acknowledging its “leftof-center” political history but avoiding partisan politics.107 Zoltan Istvan belonged just to TP and TPV, not to the US and UK Transhumanist Parties, which connect to other IEET members. The Transhumanist Party (US)

54

Facebook

54 Table 2.5 IEET leaders with the most Facebook friends Name

Friends

Mutual

Zoltan Istvan*

5,000

416

Aubrey de Grey*

5,000

252

David Pearce*

5,000

267

Gerd Leonhard

5,000

19

RU Sirius*

4,996

311

Natasha Vita-More*

4,992

496

David Brin*

4,979

208

Hank Pellissier*

4,971

356

Andrea Kuszewski

4,821

273

Ramez Naam*

4,807

222

David Orban

4,610

295

Russell Blackford*

4,587

297

Roland Benedikter*

4,239

12

Alexey Turchin*

3,930

319

Ben Goertzel*

3,822

449

2016 Transhumanist Party candidate for US president English author and biomedical gerontologist Advocates Hedonistic Imperative: abolition of suffering Futurist, author, keynote speaker, think-tank leader Cyberculture writer, editor, talk-show host, musician Transhumanist pioneer, media art and design innovator Scientist and award-winning science fiction author Writer, editor, speaker, producer on futurist topics Science writer, behavior therapist, cognitive scientist Author of technocritical nonfiction and science fiction Investor, entrepreneur, author, keynote speaker Australian writer, philosopher, and literary critic Political scientist and sociologist of the global system shift Writer, translator, researcher of global risks, futurist Author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence

* There is a Wikipedia page for this person, Benedikter’s being in the German version, or in the case of Turchin (Алексéй Валéрьевич Турчи́н) a page in Cyclowiki.

is the “font and rallying point for the US Transhumanist movement.”108 This Facebook group was created on January 12, 2015 by five transhumanists, including Zarathustra Amadeus Goertzel, son of Ben Goertzel. The UK Transhumanist Party was created on December 25, 2014, by a team of nine transhumanists, including David Pearce, who like Ben Goertzel and Alexey Turchin is listed in Table 2.5. Its self-description harmonized with some of the parallel European intellectual cyber-movements, such as the internet-oriented Pirate Party that will be considered in Chapter 7 of this book:

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55

The Transhumanist Party is a new political organisation in the UK, part of a network of similar groups around the world, committed to positive social change through technology. Transhumanism is the idea that we must improve ourselves and society using the most effective tools available – to go beyond what we have been, in order to overcome the world’s problems and create a better future. The Transhumanist Party will work toward that vision by building an organisation which not only pursues innovative policy, but also strives to become an example of new approaches to problem solving and decision making. For example, Party policy is developed by the membership, rather than by the leadership. In other words, membership means actually having the chance to make and vote for policy, and to influence the party’s development. It also means being a part of something historically significant: A new party dedicated to the new politics of the 21st Century.109

Beginning in 2007, IEET member RU Sirius began developing a concept of open-source politics, making government totally transparent to its citizens, and developing online systems for achieving a new kind of democracy. By 2011 he was drawing an analogy to what was happening overseas: “European hacker culture has created vital minority parties – ‘Pirate Parties’ – largely based on open source cultural principles like liberalizing copyright laws and greater state transparency.”110 He is a prime example of a problem facing modern culture, very relevant to research on social networks: the possession of multiple identities. Following a long-standing tradition in the performing arts, RU Sirius is the professional name of Ken Goffman, just as Judy Garland was also Frances Ethel Gumm. But Facebook originally prohibited the use of “false” names altogether, and today still has a very inconsistent and poorly enforced policy about special cases. On October 29, 2015, Jon Lebkowsky posted on Facebook: Frustrating – my friend Ken “RU Sirius” Goffman has been “turned off” by Facebook, evidently because he’s included his pen name as part of this user name here. If you’re a mutual friend, this is why you haven’t seen him around. If you’re staff at Facebook, please help revive Ken’s account. If you insist, he’s okay ditching the mask and persisting Ken Goffman, even though “RU Sirius” is the name most know, and the name he used when he was helping create and mainstream the cyberculture that made such things as Facebook possible.111

Among the comments to this post were several that criticized Facebook intelligently: “Wow, this is beyond absurd. RU Sirius is supposed to be under FB’s ‘new’ policy where they allow people to use names they are widely known by.” “RU Sirius is a household name in some circles. Decision makers at FB weren’t even born when he made a name for himself.” “This is what happens when you let little children manage grownup things. Roots, baby. Roots.” “Indeed – this is what happens when you put too much power into one network’s hands – and try and automate policies.” “I think they require real names for no reason other than it’s easier for them to market things to us, not for some high-minded reason, though they might use that as their rationale.”

56

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56 Table 2.6 Techno-radical political group interlocks (N = 5,204 people) IEET IEET Transhumanist Party Transhumanist Party Virtual Transhumanist Party (US) UK Transhumanist Party International Open Source Party US Open Source Party

2,192 174 395

TP

TPV

TPUS

UKTP

IOSP USOSP

16.1% 19.6% 21.1% 715 25.6% 27.2% 264 1,858 28.7%

15.8% 16.9% 23.1%

3.9% 3.2% 4.0%

4.9% 3.7% 4.3%

268

216

346

893

13.3%

2.3%

4.3%

177

124

248

109

755

2.9%

3.0%

18

12

18

9

11

257

14.4%

15

10

13

12

8

29

165

Lebkowsky  – along with Ken Goffman and Ben Goertzel  – is one of the admins of the International Open Source Party (OSP), which is “an exploratory net-roots campaign to re-envision the world political system and government as an open source exercise in democracy rather than what it has become – to a large extent, an oligarchy of the super-rich, and a playground for mega-corporations aimed at optimising goals other than human good.”112 Lebkowsky is also one of two admins of the United States Open Source Party (USOSP), which is “an exploratory net-roots campaign to merge social networking and political association as means to amplify the voice of people sharing needs and values. We are dedicated to unifying citizens who support greater governmental transparency, increased democratic participation and a defense of basic civil liberties.”113 Given this intense if unconventional political activity, it seemed worthwhile to examine social interlocks among these seven groups, using their entire memberships rather than just small numbers of leaders. Table  2.6 reports analysis of data collected by methods described in Chapter 1, on October 4, 2016, when for example the IEET Facebook group had 2,192 members and the Transhumanist Party had 715. These 2,907 memberships belonged to only 2,733 people, because 174 people belonged to both groups. That means that 7.9 percent of IEET members also belong to the TP, and 24.3 percent of TP members belong to the IEET. The simplest way of combining these percentages is to take their average, which is 16.1 percent. The average interlock percentage between the IEET and the four Transhumanist Party groups is 18.2 percent, but this connection can be seen from other perspectives. Of the 2,192 members of the IEET group, fully 583 or 26.6 percent belong to at least one of the four Transhumanist Party groups. Of these 583, 39 belong to all four groups, 84 to three, 143 to two, and 317 to one. Using the average of the percent membership overlaps between pairs

57

2.5 Countercultures

57

of groups, the four Transhumanist Party groups have slightly more interlocks with each other than they do with the IEET, 22.5 percent. The modest 14.4 percent interlock between the two Open Source Party groups is greater than their small interlocks with the five other groups.

2.5 Countercultures We have seen that analysis of interlocking memberships that link Facebook groups to each other can be a useful method for exploring clusters of technoprogressives, in the examples of the NSS and IEET. We can now apply the method to two very different forms of technology supported culture: mass media fandoms and members of radical religious movements. Both arise out of creative alternatives to conventional society, whether merely imagined or actually lived for a time in real life. In a genuine but perplexing way they offer alternative social theories, in the way that utopian and dystopian novels and communities did in previous centuries. The related pair of fandoms considered here were oriented to two of the more innovative television series, specifically Westworld and Game of Thrones. Despite the lurid images in every hour-long, commercial-free episode, they both have considerable intellectual depth. Westworld first broadcast on October 2, 2016, but is a remake of a 1973 science fiction movie of the same name that was written and directed by Michael Crichton who later developed the fundamental idea into the Jurassic Park series of movies. An expensive theme park, affordable only to rich customers, gives them the experience of going back in time to visit the Wild West, where robots made to look like human beings play the roles of bandits, townspeople, and aborigines. In both versions of Westworld, the complex machinery gets out of control, and the episodes of the ambitious 2016 version go deeply into questions of freedom versus control, emotion versus calculation, and human versus robot. The special effects and many scenes are artistic in the extreme, and like the earlier HBO series, blend surrealism with realism. Game of Thrones, which premiered on April 17, 2011, was in its annual hiatus when Westworld launched, had many of the same aesthetic features, but was based on a series of rather intellectual fantasy novels by the former science fiction writer George R.  R. Martin. It belongs to the popular pseudo-medieval genre of literary fantasy, far darker and more erotic than J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but likewise epic in scope, and possessing a little of the horror quality of H.  P. Lovecraft. Much of the fictional technology seems rather ancient, except that some forms of magic tech exist, and in some cases the contending feudal lords possess amazingly rich cities. A vast number of remarkable characters struggle for dominance over each other, and a common joke about the Game of Thrones mythos is that George R. R. Martin cannot use Twitter, because he already killed all of its 140 characters. Less common but plausible is the reinterpretation that this epic is set not in a

58

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58

Table 2.7 Interlocks among six fan groups of HBO series (N = 31,068 people) Westworld Westworld Westworld Game of Game of Fans (group) Deep Thrones Thrones Under Fans Discussion Westworld Fans Westworld (group) Westworld Deep Under Game of Thrones Fans Game of Thrones Discussion Fans Beyond the Wall

Fans Beyond the Wall

8,585

25.5%

24.3%

1.1%

1.0%

0.8%

1,323

3,716

16.6%

1.2%

1.0%

0.9%

1,102

558

3,078

0.8%

0.6%

0.8%

84

57

35

6,989

5.4%

2.3%

72

41

26

381

7,150

0.8%

49

39

30

131

49

4,973

fictional past but in the real human future, after the Internet destroyed civilization, thereby causing its own demise, recapitulating Martin’s abandonment of science fiction for fantasy. To get a sense of how specialized but popular culture can be studied in the context of social structure on Facebook, late in November 2016 I examined three groups oriented to each HBO series, to which a total of 31,068 people belonged:  Westworld Fans (8,585 members, created September 23, 2016), Westworld (3,716, October 3, 2016), Westworld Deep Under (3,078, October 16, 2016), Game of Thrones Fans (6,989, May 23, 2016), Game of Thrones Discussion (7,150, April 2, 2012), Fans beyond the Wall – Game of Thrones Memes (4,973 members, created October 21, 2016).114 In the same format as Table 2.6, Table 2.7 shows the interlocks as both the raw number of shared members and the average percentage of the populations of the two linked groups. It was hard to know what to predict, given the similar styles of the two series and the fact that both were available only to HBO subscribers, but the data show that the Westworld groups are much more strongly connected to each other. The fact that they were created over a very narrow span of time may be one explanation, but one of the Game of Thrones groups was created at about the same time and does not show much connection to them. The fact that the three Game of Thrones groups are not strongly connected to each other suggests that researchers will need either to be cautious, or collect substantial troves of data by multiple means, when using this method to map subcultures.

59

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59

Bearing some similarities to both of these HBO series, the online religious community we shall briefly examine is the current virtual manifestation of the Process, a radical, millenarian communal movement I  studied through participant observation ethnography in the period 1969–76, at its communes in New York, Chicago, Toronto, and most intensively in Cambridge and Waltham, Massachusetts.115 Of course, many other radical religious movements have online expressions, but this one was ideal for me to explore for two reasons: (1) as a practical matter, I  already had extensive documentation plus enduring communications with several members; and (2) it is an example of the diversity of pseudoscientific “cults” or “new religious movements” (NRMs) that directly compete with academic social science for public attention, because they are based on theories about human relationships, and many of their rituals are framed as social-psychological training exercises. Ethnography can be a valid method for discovering some features of social structure, although this book emphasizes more quantitative methods that result in statistical measures of the connections between individuals and groups. In the case of the Process, only very extensive participant observation could enable the interviews, observations, and collection of documents needed to understand the origins and social structure of this particular group. As is typically the case for NRMs, the married couple who were the founders had served an apprenticeship as lower-ranked members of an earlier group, in this case Scientology. Similar ethnographic research in Scientology documented that it was itself an offshoot of the science-fiction subculture, psychoanalysis, general semantics, and the diffuse Golden Dawn collection of groups sometimes called Illuminati, Rosicrucians, or Ritual Magick [sic] practitioners.116 After leaving Scientology, the founders of the Process were explicitly influenced by Aleister Crowley’s Thelema variant of Golden Dawn, as well as by Alfred Adler’s variant of psychoanalysis. Like Scientology and the entire Golden Dawn tradition, the Process evolved into a highly stratified organization, mirroring the stratification system of universities, with a status ladder explicitly called degrees by some of these groups, but different from secular academia in that higherstatus levels were defined by access to secrets and increasingly intensive activities, concealed from lower-status members. Both Scientology and the Process employed an electronic device to measure galvanic skin response as an indicator of emotion during high-level spiritual-discovery sessions, which they called E-meter or P-scope, ultimately derived from early experimentation in Carl Jung’s variant of Psychoanalysis. In the period 1974–76, the Process underwent a traumatic schism, rather common among radical religious groups, in which the married couple divorced and each attempted to build a group rivaling the other. The more successful half renamed itself the Foundation, stressed duty of members to obey the leaders, and after several further evolutions exists today as an economically prosperous animal welfare charity. Its peripheral members today may belong to either or both of two Facebook groups: Best Friends Animal Society – National

60

60

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Volunteers, with fully 9,633 members, and Best Friends Animal Society – The Learning Experience, with a membership limited to 266 formal interns in training, as of August 18, 2017. The other group from the mid 1970s sought to preserve the original culture of the Process, but disintegrated rather quickly. Many in the subset of members who valued the original Process culture kept in communication over the decades, especially making use of email from the early 1990s, and posting websites by the end of that decade, often using the Internet to distribute the extensive original literature. Even back in the early 1970s, the transcendent music of the Process began to influence popular musicians, notably the rock group called Funkadelic, and as musicians began to make heavy use of the Web around 2000, a whole series of musical groups took inspiration from this frankly esoteric tradition, most impressively one that took its name, Sabbath Assembly, from the main Process ritual, and performed many of the group’s original chants. For a chapter published in a recent book on secularization, I conducted a revisit ethnographic study of the Process, which included active participation in the four Facebook groups listed in Table 2.8.117 The membership statistics are as of August 17, 2017, but over the previous two years no one new had joined the Reunion group, even as the two largest groups had grown somewhat, while not approaching the size of the main Best Friends group. The pattern of interlocks makes perfect sense in the context of ethnographic observations of the groups. The Reunion is exactly that, not a revival with any religious or spiritual intent at all, but a Facebook group where people could make contact with long lost friends and reminisce with others who had shared similar experiences during their young adult years when they had all joined the Process in the early 1970s. We do not actually know the date on which the first and largest group was formed, but examination of the original HTML code reveals that January 19, 2009 was the earliest date on which a current member joined. This is a fine proxy for the foundation date, which is definitely known to be September 29, 2009 for the Reunion group, the day before foundation of the third group in the table. Two of the three 2009 groups are indeed revival attempts, while the 2016 group is an attempt to promote the musical tradition inspired by the Process. The interlocks document that the people interested only in reunion seldom joined the three other groups, while the two 2009 revivals share many members – the larger one essentially absorbing the smaller  – and the very recent 4P musical group has begun to connect with the much older revivals. The Process is a good segue to the topic of the following chapter, online role-playing games, because it conceptualized life as both a game and the playing of roles. The universe was understood to be the Game of the Gods, and each of us was playing a role assigned by one of them. Upon reaching Messenger rank and living in one of the hierarchically controlled communes, each member was given a new “Sacred Name.” The fact actually made some reminiscent discussions in the Reunion group difficult, as for example when

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61

Table 2.8 Interlocks among Process Church groups (N = 625 people) Group

Founded

The Process

The Process – Church of the Final Judgement Reunion Group for the Process Church and the Foundation Faith Process Church of the Final Judgement 4P The Process Church of Final Judgement

January 19, 2009 September 29, 2009

377 5

September 30, 2009 November 4, 2016

Reunion Process Group Church 5.7%

4P The Process

50.5%

16.1%

50

5.5%

3.6%

53

3

61

13.3%

48

3

13

247

participants knew a fellow member under two or even three different names. One of the weekly rituals, called the Processcene, was explicitly theatrical, but really all of the rituals were dramas, in which ordinary mortals could channel one or another supernatural being. For example, one of the gloomier scriptures presenting the Process, The Valley of the Shadow, consoled: “Whatever role he might play, each individual will be relieved at the right time and in the right way, of his human burden, whether it is sin or sorrow.”

2.6 Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the feasibility of studying modern social movements and cultural trends through Facebook, but the discouraging results of attempting to learn about elite Greenwich yacht clubs should not prevent researchers from using online social media to study real-world social structures. The early research combining school data with Facebook data to study social relations among students may be only one of several areas where such research is feasible. Over its more than two decades of existence, Facebook has certainly evolved, and other social media change as well, often even more rapidly and extensively. Thus, we must combine enthusiasm with caution in designing high-investment research, even as we may realistically hope for a high rate of return in social-science knowledge. Among popular social media, Facebook is the single most obvious online expression of real-world social relationships, so it makes sense to select for the next example a genre of dozens of examples that are significant and possess complex social structures, yet are especially remote from the so-called real world.

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3 Virtual Worlds

Some online communities are significantly independent from the families and towns in the so-called “real world,” and they are often called virtual worlds. The following chapter will consider one in which the users create almost everything, and little in the way of cultural assumptions is imposed upon them. Here, however, we will consider virtual worlds marketed as games, in which the rule set is rather restrictive. Our examples will be World of Warcraft, a fantasy world, two science-fiction worlds, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Anarchy Online, plus a utopian-historical world, A Tale in the Desert. Each is rich in social theory, but the theories are somewhat different from those taught in universities today, thus raising the difficult question of whether the conflict contained by the most popular virtual worlds might exacerbate the culture wars said to be raging in the surrounding society.1

3.1 The Silicon Law For the past twenty years, increasingly complex and realistic virtual worlds have evolved online, typically marketed as games but also as nongame social and educational environments. The user enters one of these environments through an avatar, the graphic representation of a person who can be seen on the computer screen, made to walk around and perform actions in a visually realistic environment, and communicate with avatars of other users through voice or text chats.2 These are persistent worlds, in which the actions of an avatar have consequences, and where over time enduring social relationships may be built. Especially in the games, avatars cooperate to accomplish shared goals and join or create distinct social groups, in which they play different functional roles within a division of labor.3 To a very significant extent, these online communities operate under very different rules than Facebook. While real-world friends and family members 62

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may carry these social relations over into a virtual world, it is essentially never designed to favor this practice.4 Almost always, avatars in gameworlds have names very different from those of their players, assuring privacy but distancing them from the traditional “real” world, even as they express themselves through these alternate identities.5 Even more significantly, in most of these virtual environments people operate multiple avatars, usually only one at a time, but several over a period of weeks. Researchers used to assume that each user had one main avatar and one or more alts or alternate avatars. But that is clearly not the case today, because an avid player often has a dozen avatars, each optimized to perform a different role for various periods of time, often totaling over a thousand hours. These virtual worlds are called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, MMORPGs, or simply MMOs. Inspired by the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which Robert Michels explicitly said governed the balance between democracy and tyranny in the game of life, I postulated the rather obvious Silicon Law of Technology, which said information technology energized both freedom and control, in a dynamic balance.6 That is to say, in many online communities, people must accept rather extreme control over their actions, imposed for example by the software they are using, to gain new freedoms. MMOs vary, but historically most of them gave the users permanent choices when creating a particular avatar, assigning it to a specific class that means the ability to play some roles much better than others, a specific race that determines the starting location in the virtual world and a fictional cultural heritage, and a faction that permanently defines one or two other factions as enemies. The Silicon Law applies to social groups in gameworlds, as well as to individual avatars. In most cases, one avatar cannot cooperate with an avatar belonging to a different faction, and they may even be prevented from communicating. Many of the software systems facilitate quick assembly of teams of often five avatars but sometimes as many as forty, often composed of strangers, who combine their talents to accomplish a specific mission, either involving combat against simulated people called nonplayer characters or NPCs, or limited battles between two teams of avatars.7 Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to study these temporary teams, called pick-up groups or PUGs when they are composed of strangers, because information about them is available only to members or more significantly to the company that operates the MMO. Far more feasible for a range of studies is research on persistent groups typically called guilds, to which hundreds or even thousands of avatars may belong, and that may endure for years.8 Data about guilds can be obtained through the software’s interface, in some cases from websites that offer huge datasets with many variables describing each avatar, and in a few rare cases MMO companies have agreed to share such data directly with researchers. One limitation is that many MMOs allow each avatar to belong to only one guild, so it is difficult to use memberships to chart interlocks between guilds. A user may assign different avatars to different guilds, but this is probably not

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very common, because having all one’s avatars in one guild allows them to play the full range of roles within the most valued social group, and few MMOs even allow researchers to know which avatars belong to the same user. The methodological relevance of the Silicon Law need not be simply that some kinds of research are prevented by the MMO software even as others are facilitated. Rather, the rules built into an MMO that shape social relations are themselves a valid topic for research, just as formal kinship laws were for anthropologists studying pre-industrial societies.9 To the extent that online communities are already an important sphere of human life, and may be even more important in future years, the rules programmed into the software become influential variables defining the social structure of society at large. MMOs are serious virtual societies that in their great diversity are both simulations of reality and alternate realities in which millions of people live out significant fractions of their lives.10 Furthermore, at the cost of some effort and development of expertise, they can be sources of vast troves of quantitative data about social interactions and enduring social relationships. Senior game researcher Celia Pearce has culled from the extensive literature nine different ways in which these computer-based environments are worlds, here rephrased and slightly expanded: 1. Spatial:  They provide the subjective conjunction of space and time, defined by direction, distance, travel time, and the realistic separation of an action taken here, from the effect occurring there. 2. Contiguous: Locations exist near and far, over spaces sometimes equivalent to miles, with some kind of excuse when the continuity is broken, such as going through a gateway from one region to another. 3. Explorable:  The users are generally free to go in whatever directions they wish, except when the environment presents barriers like those in the physical world, such as a mountain that is too steep to climb, or water that can be crossed only by boat. 4. Persistent:  The environment is almost always available to be entered, events have consequences that last for at least a significant period of time, and there may be representations of the passage of time, as in the cycle of nights and days. 5. Embodied persistent identities:  The user is represented by a personal avatar, usually visually depicted as a human being or human-like creature, or in some cases as a vehicle such as a spaceship, which may evolve over time, but will be the same upon reentering as it was when the user last left the virtual world. 6. Inhabitable: The user may live for hours or days within the environment contributing to the culture shared with other users, and participating in actions comparable to those of daily life, often eating and even in some examples sleeping.

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7. Consequential participation: The actions of one user have consequences for other users, often allowing multiple users to cooperate in the accomplishment of shared goals. 8. Populous: The environment is shared by multiple users, often by dozens, sometimes by hundreds, and in some extraordinary cases by thousands participating in a mass event. 9. Worldness:  As Pearce expresses this elusive idea, there is “a sense of coherence, completeness, and consistency within the world’s environment aesthetics, and rules.”11 This chapter will initially concentrate on data collection and analysis concerning the most influential MMORPG, the one that has been studied most intensely by many academics, World of Warcraft.12 WoW, as it is appropriately called, launched in the year 2004 and at its peak around 2010 had 12,000,000 subscribers. The particular period in 2016 during which this pilot study was done covered a major expansion of the virtual world, in which new territories and action possibilities were added, which helps illustrate how the dynamics of social structure may be studied. After using WoW to introduce a number of methods and concepts, three other MMOs will be studied more briefly, to suggest the variety of research possibilities across virtual worlds that set different rules for social connectedness.

3.2 A Massive Virtual Social Structure Like Facebook, WoW places a high priority on development of social relationships, but often separated from the relationships players have in the real world. Similar to the groups in Facebook, players of WoW may create guilds, each with up to 1,000 members, some of which survive for many years. While many people visit Facebook only occasionally, WoW requires a degree of commitment. After an initial trial period, players in the United States must pay a subscription, currently $15 on a monthly basis, or $13 per month every six months. This virtual world is vast, with many regions having diverse environments, and filled with dangers, virtual resources, and story-based missions called quests.13 Given the extensive research I have done inside WoW over a full decade, reported in a book and several shorter publications, I have operated fully thirty avatars for a total of approximately 3,000 hours, but many ordinary players could report similar statistics.14 Like Facebook, WoW is international, existing in several languages and available in many nations. One reason that it is an excellent example to come at this point in the book is that it is surrounded by a host of separate but related sources of online information. On Battle.net, launched online in 1996 by Blizzard Entertainment, the creator of WoW, it was easy to obtain detailed information about every established character and guild, an opportunity we shall take advantage of shortly. As of July 21, 2016, an independent online

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archive called Wowhead documented the details of fully 20,818 quests in WoW. There were also two wikis, WoWWiki (wowwiki.wikia.com) that had 104,291 articles, and rival Wowpedia (wow.gamepedia.com) that had fully 146,361. Originally, there had been just one WoW wiki, but in 2010 a conflict involving the wiki’s staff and the host company caused a schism, illustrating real-world social separation expressed online.15 This chapter will stress the close connection between role-playing and social structure, so a brief supplement to the introduction provided in the previous chapter is needed here. Some of the roles played through WoW characters are primarily shaped by the practical conditions of the virtual world that embody the rules of the game, or by personal feelings.16 Within the community of game designers, there has been much theorizing about the motives that impel people to play MMOs, which has been reflected in the rules coded into the software of new games. Thus an implicit feedback loop has linked design practice with social theory, although the theories are only indirectly related to the ones favored by academic social scientists. The central figure in this effort to conceptualize the personal and social motives of gamers is Richard Bartle, who was earning a doctorate in artificial intelligence at the University of Essex, when he and fellow student Roy Trubshaw created the MMO predecessor MUD1 in 1978.17 A  “MUD,” or Multi-User Dungeon, is an online text-based virtual world, similar to so-called table-top role-playing games, of which Dungeons and Dragons dating from 1974 is the best-known example.18 Guided by specially written software, players of MUD1 essentially co-author a short story in the fantasy genre, living through its events online in what looked like today’s text chats. In 1996 Bartle published through the ephemeral Journal of MUD Research an article reflecting upon two decades of MUD experience, titled “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades:  Players Who Suit MUDs.” The names of the four suits of playing cards were metaphors for four motivations or personality types that shaped player social behavior, more fully described in his 2004 book, Designing Virtual Worlds: 1. 2. 3. 4.

achievement within the game context (achievers); exploration of the game (explorers); socializing with others (socializers); imposition upon others (killers).19

His original article explained the card metaphor, saying “achievers are Diamonds (they’re always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).”20 When contrasting this model with ones more common in academic studies of personality, in my introductory 2010 book Online Multiplayer Games, I noted: Bartle suggests that these four categories can be mapped in two dimensions:  acting versus interacting, and orientation toward players versus toward the world. Of those

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oriented toward other players, killers act and socializers interact. Of those oriented toward the virtual world, achievers act and explorers interact. But one could also connect these ideas with standard psychological concepts. Achievers might be high on need for achievement, socializers high on need for affiliation, and killers high on need for power, the three dimensions of psychologist David McClelland’s personality theory.21

Inspired by Bartle’s model, but using iterative survey methods and factor analysis, Nick Yee proposed a somewhat different five-factor model of MMO player motivations, which might explain why different players habitually play different roles in teams, or favor solo playing over group membership: 1. Relationship: “To interact with other users, and their willingness to form meaningful relationships.” 2. Manipulation: “To objectify other users and manipulate them for … personal gain and satisfaction.” 3. Immersion: “Being in a fantasy world … being ‘someone else.’ ” 4. Escapism: “To temporarily … escape from real-life stress and problems.” 5. Achievement:  “To become powerful in the context of the virtual environment.”22 Many social scientists and information scientists have studied WoW, including anthropologist Bonnie Nardi who did so through role-playing. Her 2010 book about WoW expresses this dramatically in its title:  My Life as a Night Elf Priest. Central to her multifaceted analysis is the activity theory mentioned in Chapter 1, and a diagram in her WoW book summarizes “the hierarchical structure of activity.” This is not a sociogram, but a set of relations between types of concepts, rather similar to forms of artificial intelligence, such as rulebased reasoning. “Activities are composed of actions, which are composed of operations.”23 Operations relate to the momentary conditions; actions relate to a goal, and activity relates to a motivating object. Many words in the English language have multiple meanings, and object is among the more fascinating. A  physical object is a unitary thing, but in human action the word may refer to a very general goal, which may exist well beyond the immediate action situation. Consider this quote from The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan:  “My object all sublime I  shall achieve in time.”24 In grammatical structures, a sentence should have a subject and an object, perhaps both a direct object and an indirect object. Adjacent to Nardi’s perspective, the psychoanalytic concept of transitional object proposed by Donald Woods Winnicott in his 1971 book, Playing and Reality, deserves consideration.25 He claims that infants cannot yet distinguish themselves from their mothers or the world around them, and for each child one or more favorite physical objects may become a mental tool through which they discover the existence of themselves as distinct entities. Yet, one of the remarkable evolutionary characteristics of humans is neoteny, the persistence of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. So we may continue to redefine

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ourselves throughout life, by use of transitional objects, which need not be physical things but might be any of the components in activity theory or any comparable cognitive science formulation.26 The connection to role-playing in WoW is clear in these observations by Nardi: “The goal of most WoW activities is to develop a character, enabling it to perform more and more difficult challenges … The notion that one’s ‘character’ can be shaped and refined through deliberate activity is a powerful motivational field in which cultures, or subcultures, may organize themselves.”27 “The gaming experience was woven of sociality, the visual beauty of the game world, and a sense of performative mastery.”28 Whatever cognitive or aesthetic theories we wish to use to explain personal behavior, sociometric research requires attention to quantifiable relationships between entities arranged along a spectrum including roles, individuals, and groups. The mere title of Nardi’s book raises two questions: What is a night elf? What is a priest? Night elves are a fictional ethnic group, whose primary home is an island named Teldrassil, with a capital city named Darnassus.29 Each ethnic group in WoW has a very complex backstory, or virtual history, which distinguishes each from the others and provides part of the myth that sustains a shared feeling that this virtual world is meaningful. Wowpedia summarizes the night elf history, which is given at vastly greater length in several novels and WoW itself: The night elves, or kaldorei (“Children of the Stars” in their native tongue of Darnassian), are a powerful and mystical race whose origin extends back to ancient times. The founders of a magical and advanced civilization which at its peak spanned the breadth of ancient Kalimdor, the night elves came into a horrific conflict with the Burning Legion and achieved a pyrrhic victory that sundered Kalimdor’s landmass into the continents of the present age. The devastation wrought by their conceit caused the kaldorei to abandon the ways of arcane magic entirely, and craft a radically different society centered around the worship of Elune, harmony with the natural world and its denizens and Druidism. The far-reaching and ancient legacy of the kaldorei has shaped them into a race of very self-sufficient and self-conscious individuals, who often display strong streaks of isolationism. The night elves ended a long period of seclusion in the aftermath of the Third War, standing with refugees from the Eastern Kingdoms during the Battle of Mount Hyjal, and began to associate themselves with the Alliance from the Eastern Kingdoms in response to the Horde’s presence in Ashenvale.30

The last sentence makes the crucial distinction between the Horde and the Alliance. These are two factions of avatars in WoW that often wage war against each other. The Alliance, to which night elves belong, was founded by humans, who indeed look like ordinary people. Night elves are taller, have pointed ears, and have a different range of skin colors, but look very much like humans. Currently, these other races belong to the Alliance: dwarves, gnomes, draenei, worgen, and some of the pandaren, although other members of the pandaren race belong to the Horde.

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The Horde was founded by the orc race, a primitive tribal group with powerful humanoid bodies and fierce faces bearing tusks. The Wikipedia page for “orc” notes that they belong to ancient Anglo-Saxon mythology, were publicized by J. R. R. Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings novels, and can be found in other online virtual worlds, such as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online.31 WoW is actually the fourth game in its series, the first being Warcraft:  Orcs & Humans, launched in 1994, which is a real-time strategy game about conflict between the two races that laid the basis for the two later factions. To form today’s Horde, these other races joined the orcs: trolls, tauren, goblins, undead also called forsaken, blood elves, and some pandaren. As Thomas Brignal and Thomas van Valey noted in 2007, WoW and similar MMOs exhibit a new tribalism, distancing themselves from real-world racism yet exploiting the natural human tendency to conceptualize social solidarity in terms of extensions of the biological family.32 Two of the races in WoW’s Horde are fanciful representations of real ethnic groups:  (1) the trolls are Afro-Caribbeans; and (2)  the tauren are Native Americans, combining the Plains and Northwest Coast cultures. Immediately, a sociologist would wonder to what extent WoW and similar fantasy worlds are concealed expressions of racism. A definitive answer is not available, but WoW seems more to be a debate about race relations than an explicitly racist ideology. The trolls and tauren have formed a coalition with other races, against the Alliance that includes both night elves and humans. Only one race can decide which faction to join, the pandarans who were added to WoW long after the game’s launch. As a simulation of the human world, WoW therefore supports the potentially racist notion that races really exist as objective categories, but considers them equal and capable of cooperating with each other. Many regions of the WoW virtual world depict environmental degradation by imprudently used technology, thus balancing its appearance of racism with one of environmentalism, but both connect intellectually with the classic conflict model of society to which both Thomas Hobbes (1599–1679) and Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) contributed.33 As I  summarized this perspective in Dynamic Secularization: “Resources are limited; population increases; groups must compete in bloody combat to survive. Therefore, each group must develop shared loyalty and a sense of transcendent meaning, accomplished through building a leviathan socio-economic-cultural system typically expressed through an established state religion.”34 Once upon a time, some of the most popular social theories concerned the rise and fall of civilizations, often suggesting that any successful civilization required a transcendent faith and dedicated elite to grow and survive. Prominent examples were Oswald Spengler and Pitirim Sorokin, who focused on the life cycle from birth to death of civilizations.35 That perspective has not vanished from academia, represented more recently by the works of Samuel Huntington, but has survived largely among politically conservative intellectuals outside academia, notably James Burnham and Patrick Buchanan.36 Toynbee’s theory

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of challenge and response is especially relevant for WoW, because many of the stories are motivated by risks taken by fictional aristocrats to expand or at least sustain their power.37 As I conjectured in a recent book on computer simulation of societies: Probably these theories lost currency, especially in the 1960s, for three reasons. First, such ideas tended to be classified as politically conservative or right-wing, and thus dissonant with the values of many younger social scientists. Second, they offered little advice on how a technologically progressive society could prevent collapse, other than continuing to promote innovation which was happening even in the absence of these theories. Third, it was not obvious how such theories could be tested, given that there seemed to be no practical way to run experiments on statistically significant numbers of civilizations.38

Without claiming that WoW can actually test such theories of civilization, it is nonetheless a simulation of them, thus potentially increasing their plausibility in the minds of players, conceivably working against the values of many academic social scientists. They are also theories of social structure on the large scale, therefore relevant here. While the creators of WoW were not academics, some of them were definitely serious intellectuals, notably Chris Metzen who played several key roles in the game’s creation.39 In a remarkable novelette titled “Of Blood and Honor,” Metzen contrasted two moral systems, one based on devotion to one’s own family, and the other based on categorical imperatives that guide interactions with all people.40 This is the distinction between particularism and universalism among the pattern variables of Parsons and Shils. While academics may in principle favor universalism, the world at large is still struggling to decide the proper balance between them, or if indeed any universal code of ethics will ever be viable. The traditional source of ethics was religion, and a priest is a standard role found in many online games, in which the priest heals team members as they battle against other players or against the ubiquitous nonplayer characters that look like players but are operated by simple artificial intelligence routines.41 It is one of the traditional trinity of three mutually supportive roles:  (1) the heavily armored tank stands close to an enemy in melee battle using a sword or battle axe; (2) the DPS or “damage per second” stands at a safe distance while shooting at the enemy to great effect; (3) the healer also stands at a distance, using magic spells to heal the tank as it is wounded by the enemy, and in more complex battles heals any teammate who is seriously injured. Priests are healers, and the same role exists in many other online games, although sometimes called cleric or minstrel. In a scientific conference I organized in WoW in May 2008, night elves were not able to participate fully, because the guild I created for it belonged to the Horde, not the Alliance.42 Also, there are effectively hundreds of WoWs, each operated on a different internet server, so even participants who already had been playing WoW needed either to pay for their character to move, or in most

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cases created a new one. Character is the term commonly used by WoW players, who do not often use the term avatar. The difference in meaning of these two terms reminds us of the Moreno-Stanislavski disagreement cited in Chapter 1. To a significant extent, the behavior of a character is pre-scripted, for example being able to play the role of priest but not effectively tank as a warrior could. The commonly used term avatar is derived from Hindu theology, as the god Vishnu is too vast for a human to perceive him, but can come to Earth in simplified form as an avatar; for example, some Hindus believe that Buddha was an avatar of Vishnu, as Jesus may be described as an avatar of Jehovah. At two points in the conference, I brought one of my own Alliance characters into a meeting of the Horde guild, as special demonstrations of the gulf between the factions, one being a human, and the other, a night elf. This was facilitated by the fact that I had two WoW accounts, with separate monthly subscriptions, and operated two computers side by side in what is called multiboxing. Role-playing following Stanislavski’s method can be an especially effective method for theorizing about virtual worlds, if one creates avatars based on particular real people, then attempts to understand the environment and patterns of social interaction  – not from one’s own intellectual perspective, but the viewpoint of the person on whom the avatar was based.43 For a recent book titled Virtual Sociocultural Convergence, I ran avatars based on several social scientists through virtual worlds selected to harmonize with or challenge their theories: William F. Ogburn in Xsyon, William James in Fallout 3, Robert Michels in ArcheAge, Angus McIntosh in Lord of the Rings Online, Bronislaw Malinowski in Vanguard, George Homans in Final Fantasy XIV, both Oswald Spengler and Pitirim Sorokin in Fallen Earth, and both Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell in WoW.44 However effective in developing theory that qualitative method may be, and in preparing to do quantitative methods, censustaking is a better way to document social structure.

3.3 Census of the Races There are many ways one could do a census of the characters in WoW but visiting their homes as in a traditional decennial enumeration is not one of them, because characters earn homes only very late in their status progression, and they are not readily visitable by strangers. I could position a character on the dock at the town of Ratchet in the Barrens on the east coast of the Kalimdor continent, and observe characters as they boarded the boat that frequently crosses the Great Sea to Booty Bay in Stranglethorn at the southern end of the Eastern Kingdoms. But that work would be exceedingly time consuming, and most characters would not take that route in any given month or even year. So that is a feasible method, but not an efficient one. All the scientifically valuable methods require exploiting aspects of the computer software and comprehensive database that support this virtual world.

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The censuses I  did myself for this chapter were all on the Earthen Ring realm (server) in the United States. Today, there are several different ways in which to structure a virtual world database and server system, but WoW follows the traditional method in which many separate versions of the world were created, each capable of handling about 4,000 players at any given moment. Computationally, the design is very complex. A  realm may actually be hosted on multiple small machines, for example one set for Kalimdor and another for the Eastern Kingdoms, or use sophisticated load balancing to distribute regions across the hardware dynamically, to handle the fact that player population may be high in one area now, but in a different area later. Each realm has many instances, separate versions of the same location, so that multiple teams of players may do the same missions independently without encountering each other. Also, for some formal battles, characters from multiple realms combine in small armies to fight in special instances called battlegrounds. In order to reduce lag, the irritating delay of actions caused by latency of transmission of data over the Internet, and to facilitate team building by friends who live in the same area, realms are assigned to particular time zones. Because WoW is literally worldwide, realms are also distinguished by language, and the business details of subscribing differ by nation. A dozen forms of written language are available beyond English:  French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, both European and Latin American variants of Spanish, and Chinese in both traditional and simplified forms. Much interaction within WoW, between players as well as with the nonplayer characters that assign quests and do various other kinds of business, is conducted through written text. Teams of players often run voice-chat systems simultaneously with the game, notably TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, Mumble, or Skype. Recently improved, WoW’s own Blizzard Voice Chat is also available, although players have become used to running voice communications separately from the game itself. Of special interest to social scientists, realms also differ in two dimensions concerning social relations:  (1) the degree of hostility between factions, and (2)  the degree of emphasis on role-playing. In some, called PvP for “player versus player,” a member of one faction may attack a member of the other faction without warning, outside specified safe areas. In others, called PvE for “player versus environment,” players are protected from such attacks, and must agree to a duel or enter a combat instance before a member of the opposing faction may attack them. A small number of both PvP and PvE realms are also listed as RP for “role-playing,” which means that players are encouraged to stay in character, for example usually not text chatting about their real lives unless they begin with “OOC,” which means “out of character.” As of late July 2016, in the United States there were 101 ordinary PvP realms, plus 6 that emphasized role-playing, 114 ordinary PvE realms, and 17 that also encouraged role-playing, including Earthen Ring.

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The extreme fragmentation of WoW across many internet servers is only one of the factors that complicates census taking. Naturally, a complete census exists in WoW’s own central database, but it is property of Blizzard Entertainment and not shared with researchers. Extensive data from a very comparable MMO, EverQuest II, was made available to a team of researchers by its company, Sony Online Entertainment, and formed the basis of some excellent studies.45 But among Sony’s motivations for cooperating was the fact that it was not doing well in the worldwide competition for players, and it hoped to benefit from the researchers’ discoveries. Subsequently, in 2015, Sony spun off its online game division, which became Daybreak Game Company, currently struggling to survive. Several researchers have created their own software or used a popular program called CensusPlus, to do censuses inside WoW.46 As will be further explained in the following chapter, CensusPlus is amateur addon or mod software that runs simultaneously with the WoW software and accesses the part of WoW’s interface that players use to find new team members. For example, just before noon on July 30, 2016, I logged into WoW, specifically into a Horde character I had on the Earthen Ring realm, ran CensusPlus for five minutes, and obtained data about the race of 324 Horde characters. To do a census of Alliance characters, I  would have needed to log in through one of my own members of the Alliance. Table  3.1 shows the racial distribution from this modest census, in comparison with other data. Remarkably, more than six times as many blood elves as goblins were counted in this demonstration census. Originally, there were only four races in the Horde: orcs, tauren, and undead, each of which had its own city, and trolls who were refugees and started life in the same location as orcs. In the 2007 Burning Crusade expansion of WoW, the blood elf race was added, also with its own city. Goblins joined the Horde in the 2010 Cataclysm expansion, and pandarens were added with the option to join either the Horde or the Alliance in the 2012 Mists of Pandaria expansion. Over the years the links between races and classes have also changed. For example, initially only the tribal tauren could be druids, but in the Cataclysm expansion when the trolls regained their home in the Echo Isles, they also gained druids.47 Blood elves are visually the most beautiful of the Horde races, and have extroverted personalities, so they may be more attractive intrinsically than the ugly, grumpy goblins. A new player may start with the most normal or attractive race, given their own personal preferences, and select the race of a later character on the basis of the roles it best plays, the interesting special stories associated with it, or the fact that it has just become available during one of the occasional expansions of the WoW world. When CensusPlus finishes running, it urges the user to upload the resultant data to a website called Warcraft Realms, where it is combined with data uploaded by other users, thus producing a partial census across all European and North American realms.48 This aggregation is only partial, because

74

Sunstrider Isle, Eversong Woods Bilgewater Port, Kezan Valley of Trials, Durotar Shang Xi Training Grounds, The Wandering Isle Red Cloud Mesa, Mulgore Echo Isles, Durotar Deathknell, Tirisfal Glades

Blood elf Goblin Orc Pandaren Tauren Troll Undead

TOTAL

Starting location within a region

Race

Table 3.1 Multiple censuses of Horde avatar ethnicities

324

34.6% 5.2% 14.2% 5.2% 15.7% 13.0% 12.0% 100.0%

July 30 Census

589,893

33.8% 5.4% 16.2% 5.0% 13.8% 12.6% 13.4% 100.0%

Warcraft Realms

15,778,652

29.8% 7.1% 16.0% 5.8% 14.4% 12.6% 14.5% 100.0%

Realm Pop

278

29.1% 11.5% 8.3% 7.2% 17.6% 11.5% 14.7% 100.0%

Science

908

28.3% 7.8% 14.1% 7.5% 14.2% 12.9% 15.2% 100.0%

Animus Populus

7,323

29.9% 7.2% 14.8% 9.2% 17.5% 10.0% 11.3% 100.0%

Alea Iacta Est

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CensusPlus counts only the characters that were currently active, their player being online and currently logged into that particular character. Repeatedly running CensusPlus over a period of hours or days will achieve much higher numbers. The results may differ, for example if during different hours or years characters belonging to different races are favored by the subset of players who are currently active. The second column of percentages in Table 3.1 was downloaded from the Warcraft Realms website, and it is noteworthy that the percentages for each race are rather similar: 34.6 percent versus 33.8 percent for blood elves and 5.2  percent versus 5.4  percent for goblins, between the two CensusPlus datasets. This suggests that rather stable factors shape the popularities of the different races. More than 15  million Horde characters in US realms are tabulated in column three of the table, data obtained at the website of Realm Pop that uses a very different method to perform a more complete census. Realm Pop exacts its data from WoW’s own online database, Battle.net, where only very limited tabulations are available, then combines data based on the names and realms of the characters: What: We currently record character names, races, classes, genders, levels, and guild memberships for all characters on every realm in the US and EU regions. How: To get the list of characters for a realm, first we record all the characters who posted to the auction house. Then we fetch and record their guild rosters. This should cover the majority of characters on a realm. To avoid getting listed, a character must never post to the auction house, and never belong to a guild where a guild member posts to the auction house. Who:  It’s important to remember that we’re simply counting the number of characters seen for each category. This does not mean the number of players, nor the number of actively played characters. We can’t efficiently get activity data yet, so some characters may not have been played for a long time.49 The auction house is an economic exchange system in WoW, through which players may buy and sell virtual goods. Indeed, some characters do not use it, and some do not belong to guilds, so even this census is incomplete. The following chapter will explain how sophisticated auction house traders use special addon software to chart prices in this very real economic system, in order to maximize their virtual profits. Originally, WoW had three separate auction systems, one for each faction and one at a remote location in the virtual world, which spanned both factions and thus could be used for smuggling between factions. More recently, the auction houses were unified, thereby integrating the economic systems of the factions to some extent.50 With the notable exception of Entropia Universe, MMOs attempt to separate their economic systems from the real-world economy, many today allowing people to invest “real” money in virtual goods but not sell their goods for dollars. Economist

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Edward Castronova has argued that virtual economies are rapidly increasing in scope and diversity, thus deserving study in their own right, and that often they follow the same laws as real-world economies and thus are good laboratories for researchers.51 The three additional columns in the table report counts I did myself through Battle.net, focusing on members of particular guilds. The Science guild was founded by me in the spring of 2008 for the conference held that May, and the online roster of members lists 278 of them currently only about half of which have been active recently.52 Not counting my own characters, I still have the names of 121 characters that participated in the conference, and I see that 18 of them are counted as still belonging to Science over eight years later. After the summer of 2008, other players took over the guild, gradually added new recruits, and for more recent phases of research I created a new character who belongs to the guild but did not attend the conference. It is not uncommon for guilds that grow to a couple hundred characters, or a few dozen players, to endure for many years, especially if they actively recruit new members who take on leadership roles once they become veterans. It is also true that many people have made WoW a permanent part of their lives, just as they traditionally did for a local amateur baseball team or bridge card-playing club. For guilds as small as a couple hundred members, it is easy to tabulate characteristics of the membership by hand, but Battle.net does allow one to filter the data displayed by race and class within the guild. For example, selecting blood elf among the races lists the eighty-one members who belong to that popular race, and the Science data in the table were obtained in that way. On the web-page display, each character is a row in a table, with race and class depicted as a picture, a tiny face in the case of race. Each race has two kinds of faces, male and female, so one may count the sexes, but with some difficulty, and there is no option to display the sexes separately to facilitate counting. For this new research I added a new Horde character, chiefly to gain personal experience with some of the changes that WoW had introduced recently in the virtual environment, mission arcs, and user interface. Using a part of the interface where many but not all guilds post, I was able to join the largest listed guild, Animus Populus, so I could perform participant observation in parallel with the quantitative data collection. A sense of the technical opportunities for researchers, and the method by which Realm Pop obtained its data, here is the HTML code for the Battle.net display of one row of the public Animus Populus guild roster, the row for its guild master, Scaphis:

Scaphis

100 Guild​ Master 16520

In HTML, begins a row of a table, and ends it, while one cell of data in that row of the table begins and ends . This code shows that there are six cells within the row, the first one giving the name of the character, Scaphis, as a hyperlink such that clicking on it takes the user to the set of pages offering vast numbers of variables describing Scaphis, for example that she loves to cook but never bothered to try the hobby of collecting archaeological relics.53 The second row of the table states that Scaphis is an orc, displaying that word when the user mouses over the icon that is the face of a female orc. The name of that tiny picture is race_2_1.jpg, while the icon for a male orc is race_2_0.jpg. The icons of male and female human faces are race_1_0.jpg and race_1_1.jpg. So, one could program software to scrape data off this website, using the numbers in these file names to tabulate gender by race. Of course, the player who owns Scaphis is a human, not an orc, and the character’s gender does not reveal the player’s gender. The third cell in the HTML states that Scaphis belongs to the death knight class of character, a formidable fighter with dark magical powers. At the time these data were collected, WoW characters ascended a ladder of status and power called experience, with 100 rungs, each called a level, often abbreviated in text communications “lvl,” and we see that Scaphis has achieved the maximum level 100. She has the supreme rank in her guild of guild master, and has earned 16,520 achievement points for the guild, which enhance the abilities of all its members. The death knight class of character illustrates the complexity of life careers of characters in virtual worlds. Most classes typically begin at level 1 of experience and work their way gradually up to the current limit of 110 that was raised from 100 in the late summer of 2016. Each change in the software and database is called a patch, and really major ones are called expansions. Death knights were added in a major expansion in 2008 that also added an additional continent to the world, as outlined by Wowpedia:  The death knight is the first hero class of WoW, introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Each death knight begins at level 55 in a phased, instanced area known as Plaguelands: The Scarlet Enclave. Originally, only one death knight could be created per

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realm per account, but this restriction was lifted in patch 5.3. The requirement of already having a level 55+ character in order to create a death knight was lifted in patch 6.1.54

The expansion that took place on August 30, 2016, added another hero class called demon hunter a few days before, that began life at level 98 in a large but temporary environment beset by magical warfare, restricted to the night elf race in the Alliance and the blood elf race in the Horde. These observations suggest that we should be prepared to do frequent tabulations of the numbers and characteristics of virtual world inhabitants, whenever our research purposes concern the dynamics of rapid social change. In doing a major census research project we might collaborate with Warcraft Realms or Realm Pop, or we might program our own software to extract data either inside the gameworld or from Battle.net. I  selected a labor-intensively more limited approach, for demonstration purposes here, and because it suited particular research questions.

3.4 The Die Is Cast The final column of data in Table 3.1 concerns the remarkable organization of WoW players called Alea Iacta Est (AIE) that had been exceedingly helpful in supporting our efforts to hold the May 2008 conference, and had grown even more important over the years. The name is the motto Julius Caesar spoke when he led his army into Italy and thus into rebellion: “The die is cast!” Dice are game toys, but Caesar’s wager was of historical significance. On its complex website, AIE describes its history and nature: The guild was founded as a fan guild for fans of podcasts associated with Scott Johnson’s Extralife forums: The Instance, Extralife Radio, Buzz Out Loud, and Jawbone Radio. The guild grew rapidly in its first month. Within three weeks, it had hit the limit of 500 members which are visible in the guild roster. The guild continued to grow to an estimated 6600 active members when Blizzard introduced the 1000 member limit on guilds in 2010. To allow the guild to continue as it had, the guild developed the GreenWall addon to link the guild chat of multiple physical guilds. The guild is primarily a social guild to [sic] values mutual courtesy and respect. Game activities like raiding, PvP, and RP are organized independently by members of the guild, not at the guild level. While members have a wealth of opportunities when it comes to these aspects of the game; there are no participation, experience, or gearing requirements to join the guild.55

To obtain the data for the final column of Table 3.1, on July 29, 2016, the full roster of all eleven parts of Alea Iacta Est (AIE) was copied from the Battle. net website into a spreadsheet. This was done manually but swiftly, copying the display that shows 100 characters at once, pasting it into a spreadsheet, then moving to the next block of 100 characters and repeating this process. The alternative would have been equally practical, saving the raw HTML code

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as a text file and then writing a computer program to port the text files to a spreadsheet. Because Battle.net structures the data display differently from Facebook, it is much more convenient to use. However, since race and gender were represented only by one icon, and class by another, considerable hand coding was required. The rows were sorted alphabetically by character name to check that there were no duplications, and indeed there were not any. The total number of characters was 7,247. To get a sense of how active the players were, the list was then sorted by experience level, and it was found that exactly 4,700 or 64.9 percent, had reached the maximum cap of 100, which had only become available with the November 2014 Warlords of Draenor expansion, from the earlier cap of 90. The average level of those below 100 was 70.7, and some of them were recent additions, so in general the members of AIE are active, committed members of the WoW community. Three other censuses of AIE were performed on August 29, when most of the demon hunters already existed but the full expansion had not yet occurred, and on September 29 and October 30. Table 3.2 offers a high-level overview of the data for 6,350 characters who already existed July 29 and still were members of AIE on October 30. This is considerably smaller than the 7,323 counted in Table 3.1, so I checked Battle.net for several of the members missing on October 30, and found that most were no longer listed as existing at all, and a small number had moved to a different guild. When a player stops subscribing to WoW, the characters do not vanish quickly from Battle.net, and WoW retains their data internally for a long time, hoping they will resubscribe. There apparently was a partial database purge around the time of the August 30 expansion. That implies that some of the 6,350 characters counted in Table 3.2 may belong to “inactive accounts,” but many other characters are temporarily being ignored by active players who are on other alts. To address this complexity, Table 3.2 highlights the 3,761 characters that gained at least one experience level or some additional guild achievement points. The first column of figures in Table 3.2 shows the distribution of the 6,350 total AIE members across the pre-existing classes. In my own experience, the two most popular classes, hunter and paladin, are especially good for solo play. A hunter can be conceptualized as a DPS class, shooting a weapon at a distance against an enemy that may be focusing its attention on a warrior or other tank in the hunter’s team. However, each hunter has a collection of virtual animal assistants, called pets, such as a simulated trained wolf, that attacks the enemy directly and serves as the tank. It makes sense for each player to have at least two characters, one optimized for one of the specialized roles played as a member of a team, and one for solo play when team members are not available and to explore various missions designed for solo play. The second column of figures concerns the sex ratio of characters, which in some degree replicates gender stereotypes.56 Only 21.4  percent of violent warriors are female, compared with 52.7  percent of nurturant priests. The gender distribution of the 214 AIE demon hunters was 43.0 percent female.

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TOTAL

Death knight Druid Hunter Mage Monk Paladin Priest Rogue Shaman Warlock Warrior

Class

100.0

8.7 9.7 13.0 9.5 7.5 10.6 9.0 6.2 8.8 9.0 7.9

Cases (%)

35.3

29.0 28.3 37.7 42.2 34.2 35.4 52.7 38.5 30.4 36.8 21.4

Female (%)

59.2

57.8 62.0 59.8 64.7 50.7 59.6 56.9 55.2 57.0 64.0 60.3

Active (%)

6,350 total AIE members

93.0

96.5 94.6 95.2 92.4 89.2 93.0 92.9 91.3 91.6 92.5 90.5

July

96.0

98.0 97.4 97.3 95.4 93.1 96.7 95.7 94.8 95.2 95.6 94.5

August

99.2

101.2 101.1 101.1 98.1 95.4 100.2 98.3 98.0 98.4 98.8 97.3

September

100.1

102.0 102.3 102.0 99.0 96.0 101.1 99.3 99.0 99.8 99.4 98.1

October

Mean level at end of month in 2016

3,761 active AIE members

Table 3.2 Dynamic census of members of a gigantic online guild

23.9

22.4 29.9 26.7 27.1 19.0 23.3 22.4 21.6 25.4 21.4 18.9

27.7

31.2 34.6 34.4 20.5 18.2 31.8 21.2 26.6 27.6 26.3 25.2

Leveled in Achieved month (%) level 110 (%)

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While players of MMOs tend to be male, WoW does have a significant minority of female players, but male players may create female characters either as virtual girlfriends, to add variety to a roster of many characters, or because some role-playing favors one gender or the other. For example, among the nonplayer characters on the night elf island of Teldrassil, all the religious professionals are priestesses, and their deity Elune is a goddess rather than a god. The least active class, monks, only 50.7 percent of whom accomplished anything from July 29 to October 30, was introduced in the 2012 expansion, associated with but not limited to the pandaren race, who were designed as perhaps the most fun but nonserious race, essentially Chinese pandas who practiced meditation, only committed themselves to a faction around level 20 of experience, and did not often fit well-defined roles in teams. The measure of activity is not ideal, because players often assign special roles to particular characters, other than completing the missions that will advance them in experience level. An extreme example is called the bank alt, who is parked permanently near a bank in a major city, and serves as an intermediary between adventuring characters who can send goods or money to and from this alt via the email system, and the large storage warehouse called a bank, plus also the nearby auction house. Bank alts may not appear in the census at all, because they are often lower than experience level 10 and thus not included in the Battle.net database. The other columns of the table measure in different ways the activity over a period of three months of the 3,761 AIE members, the last three columns dating from October 30. Most active were three classes already described, heroic death knights and the solo-friendly hunters and paladins. Wowpedia explains why druids might be especially active:  The druid is a shapeshifting hybrid class available to the night elf, worgen, tauren and troll races. Druids are able to perform each of the three group roles (tanking, healing, and dealing damage) by utilizing their shapeshift forms. While a druid is most effective in the role determined by their active specialization and equipment they can also use their shapeshifting abilities to temporarily switch to a different role in combat. In addition to combat forms, druids can shapeshift into forms that increases movement speed while running, swimming, or flying. The ability to switch roles out of combat – and temporarily perform a different role in combat – makes the druid class one of the most versatile in World of Warcraft.57

Thus, druids emphasize freedom within a relatively constrained system of control by the computer system. As I believe that systematic research in virtual worlds requires some at least preliminary participant observation, I naturally created one of the new demon hunter heroic characters, leaving the starting instance at experience level 100. On October 1, ample time after the expansion for a level 100 character to reach 110, I checked the Alea Iacta Est guild in Battle.net and discovered that all 214 demon hunters who belonged to it had reached level 100 but not gone

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higher. The logical interpretation was that members of the guild had wanted to experience creation of this new class, but initially devoted their energies primarily to taking one or more of their existing characters up to the new 110 experience cap, tackling all the new challenges through familiar avatars. The number 214 sets a lower bound for the number of active player accounts whose characters belong to Alea Iacta Est, because initially each account could have only one demon hunter.

3.5 A Galaxy Far Away Remarkably, Alea Iacta Est is not limited to WoW, but at last count had expanded into nine other gameworlds, including Star Wars:  The Old Republic, or SWTOR as it is familiarly called. There may be many examples of organizations that span multiple social media, and I have directly encountered two other guilds that are active in both of these games, the Syndicate and Old Timers Guild.58 Having already studied SWTOR, I  returned to perform censuses of the two AIE guilds in this popular version of the Star Wars universe. There exist three tiny Alliance guilds in WoW named Alea Iacta Est, none with more than a dozen members, but the main organization belongs entirely to the Horde faction. There are also two factions in SWTOR, the Republic led by Jedi knights, and the Empire led by their Sith equivalents on the Dark Side of the Force. In the Star Wars universe, AIE members chose to participate in both factions roughly equally. Superficially, WoW and SWTOR are very similar MMOs, operated in multiple languages on multiple internet servers, in which players’ avatars undertake many missions, different avatar types begin in different virtual environments, and ascending a ladder of status called experience. And yet there are very substantial differences between these two virtual universes, especially obvious when considered from the standpoint of the science and humanities rather than popular notions of games. The most general difference is that WoW is fantasy, while SWTOR is science fiction of the action-oriented variety often called space opera. Yet amazingly both derive core elements of their culture ultimately from the same literary source, the Mars novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. George Lucas wrote his own Star Wars stories only after failing to get the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie, and Flash Gordon was a comic-strip rip-off from Burroughs’ work, after negotiations to adapt Burroughs’ stories failed.59 Princess Leia should have told us in the original 1977 Star Wars movie that she was the granddaughter of Dejah Thoris in the eponymous novel, A Princess of Mars, written in 1911. The 1922 novel, Chessmen of Mars focuses on jetan, a Martian game similar to chess, which Burroughs invented and played with his friends, and that many fans have played as well, following the instructions in the book, and considered again in the following chapter.60 The creators of Dungeons and Dragons, the table-top game from which all MMOs are derived, explicitly credit Burroughs

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with much of their inspiration,61 and the first Warcraft computer game in the series of which WoW was the fourth, followed a similar conception to jetan, merely in a more complex environment. Yet SWTOR pretends it is possible to visit other planets by means of spaceships, while WoW employs magic, and WoW’s planets, perhaps shaped by their designers’ satirical impulses, are flat rather than round. Both WoW and SWTOR contain numbers of avatars of both genders, yet the research done by Nick Yee indicates that these games are rather atypical with respect to the gender balance of their genres. Earlier we noted that 35.3 of avatars in the AIE guild of WoW are female, but mentioned that this may not be the fraction of players who are female. Based on extensive survey data from players, Yee reports that just 23  percent of WoW players are actually female, which is less than the 36 percent for the high fantasy genre to which it belongs. He reports an opposite bias for SWTOR within the science fiction genre: “SWTOR has almost double the Sci-Fi MMO genre average of female gamers (29% vs. 16%). Without SWTOR, the genre average would be 11.3%, at which point the group average for High Fantasy MMOs would be more than 3 times higher than Sci-Fi MMOs.”62 A key structural difference between the two MMOs is that SWTOR uses a much more strictly designed narrative structure. Within each of the two factions there are four main classes, and each follows a different rigidly defined narrative path from experience level 1 to 50, essentially allowing the user to experience being the hero of a novel or movie. After level 50, the paths converge into a shared series of narratives rather like the Flash Gordon movie serials of the late 1930s. These narratives are explicitly structured in chapters, as in a novel, and contain animated cutscenes in which the user can make minor decisions but sees the avatar as just one more character on a movie screen. This strict narrative structure poses difficulties for the emergence of informal social structure, because characters in different functional classes were assigned to separate stories. In the early years of SWTOR, it was very difficult for a player to get through some of the more challenging climaxes without help from other players, but later SWTOR was nerfed, rendering progress trivially easy for solo players. From the very beginning, after the earliest levels each avatar was accompanied by a nonplayer companion that employed somewhat simple artificial intelligence. Each of the eight classes gained a total of five companions during the course of the story, each fitting into the narrative and having a different personality. The effectiveness of each companion depended partly upon its intrinsic characteristics and partly upon the extent to which it approved of the words and deeds of the player’s avatar over the time they spent adventuring together. This simulated the development of social bonds of different qualities. These contingencies were changed when the designers nerfed the game to hold and attract casual customers. But SWTOR is a classic example of something that

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may become more common in many spheres of life as artificial intelligence improves in quality: Relationships with real people were replaced by social ties with artificial people. Although hunters in WoW may be accompanied by pet wolves, the emphasis has always been on assembly of teams composed of other players, so this is a major difference in comparison with SWTOR. A  few other popular MMOs offer nonplayer companions as substitutes for other players when there are no friends online at the moment, notably the original Guild Wars and Star Trek Online. Thus we can conceptualize a spectrum of the degree to which a virtual world allows or even requires replacement of humans by machines. This is obviously a very real issue for the future of work and domestic life in the real world, even if today we can frame it only in terms of somewhat naive stereotypes. Setting it aside for the moment, we can consider how Alea Iacta Est members have organized themselves in SWTOR. Just as AIE existed entirely on one role-playing server in WoW, Earthen Ring, it chose one server in SWTOR, named Jedi Covenant. There actually were many more servers early in SWTOR’s history, and elsewhere I have examined in some detail the challenge to social structure caused by the merger of multiple servers into one, given that players forced to move from one server to another needed to re-establish their guilds from scratch, after making provisions to keep in communication and carry guild resources as their individual avatars moved.63 This would have been far easier for AIE, given that it maintained high-quality communications outside each of the ten multiplayer games, and was exceedingly well organized. It is much more difficult to study social structure in SWTOR than in the three other games analyzed in this chapter, because addon data-processing software like CensusPlus is blocked by the software from tabulating the avatars online at the moment, and the websites reporting the equivalent of censuses are rather limited. For example, there still exists a website called SWTORProgress, but it offers data only from the first months of SWTOR, entered directly on the website by players: “Since swtor.com does not provide any data swtorprogress. com is solely depended on you guys entering, updating your own characters. If there is anything missing it’s basically because someone did not enter their character yet.”64 Operating inside SWTOR, the only practical means for obtaining data are primarily manual, either through the membership list of a guild available only to members, or from the interface system used to recruit team members for the group missions that exist outside the main story lines. As a member in good standing of AIE for over eight years, and whose publications mentioning AIE were available to leaders, I had no trouble joining both the Republic and Empire halves of AIE on Jedi Covenant. First, two avatars were created on that server, one in each faction; next I applied on the AIE website, and then each avatar used a special chat channel within the game to ask for membership in the appropriate half of the guild. The display of guild members can be sorted but does

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not have any analysis tools, other than reporting on August 12, 2016, that the Republic had an AIE avatar membership of 566, and the Empire had 649. To facilitate manual entry of the data and provide a permanent record, a series of screenshot images were taken, stepping through the entire membership in alphabetical order by character name. One obvious idea would be to use optical character reading with a scanner to port the data into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the print in the display is very faint, probably intentionally so as to inhibit extraction of the names by spammers or scammers who would try to exploit the players through the text chat, which is quite common in some games. As mentioned in the following chapter, it proved possible to use OCR with a scanner to port information from lists of group members in Second Life, but just barely using the available graphics software to increase contrast and switch from light print on a dark background, to black on white for printing out. But the available commercial graphics software failed when this was tried with SWTOR. So the AIE membership list had to be entered by hand from the screenshots. To demonstrate the opportunities for cross-cultural analysis in MMOs, data were also obtained from all nine of the European servers, three each in English, French, and German. This required creating eighteen avatars, two on each server. At a time of day in Europe when many players were online, the team recruitment part of the interface was used to search for all the avatars who were at the current top level of experience, which was level 65, in each of the two subclasses for each of the eight main classes. For example, senior Jedi knights divide into two subclasses in terms of their specific skills, Jedi guardians and Jedi sentinels. Conveniently, the search system not only lists the names of avatars retrieved in the search, but provides a count that can be copied manually at little effort into a spreadsheet. However, the interface can display no more than 100 names, so the most popular subclasses may be undercounted. In earlier research, it was possible but very difficult in such cases to narrow the search by which planet or other location the avatars were on, but there were very many such locations, so the labor was tremendously increased, with the possibility of double counting when avatars moved from one location to another. For this demonstration study, a simplified version of this method was used. If the interface reported that exactly 100 avatars of the request type were online, the list was sorted in the interface by location, and the number who were on the faction’s fleet were counted. Each fleet is actually the central social hub for the faction, with many virtual services such as access to the auction system that permits trade between players, so this is the one location where many avatars of all levels except the very lowest can be found. Then the search was repeated but focusing only on the fleet, getting a result well under 100 that could be used to estimate how much 100 had been an undercount. A good example is the Republic faction of the German server called T3-M4. At the time of the census, there were 81 Jedi sentinels but apparently 100 Jedi

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guardians. Of these 100, 19 were at the Republic Fleet. A search just there also found the same 19 avatars. Thus, 100 was judged to be a good estimate for calculating the total number of 181 Jedi knights, from 81 + 100 = 181. The second of the two Jedi classes, Jedi consular, consists of Jedi sages plus Jedi shadows. There were 41 shadows but again 100 sages. Of these 100, 18 were on the fleet, but searching just there discovered 21 of them. Assuming this 21/ 18 undercount ratio was the same for the entire subclass, it was estimated there were 111 Jedi sages, and thus 111 + 41 = 152 Jedi consulars. One of the two nonmagical Republic classes, trooper, consists of commandos plus vanguards. The census found 100 commandos, 22 of whom were on the fleet, but 24 when the fleet alone was searched. Here the undercount ratio is estimated to be 24/ 22, which implies 109 commandos were actually online, which added to the 37 vanguards gives an estimated total of 109 + 37 = 146 troopers. While these estimates may be good enough for our present purposes, in a very serious, high-investment study one would either want to do the laborious real-time counts by every location, or verify the undercount estimation technique by comparing with more perfect data, or use completely manual methods using the names of the avatars, as was done for the AIE data. Here we can reasonably compare the AIE members in North America with the three European language groups, in terms of the popularity of different classes. Thinking of the avatar activity variable so important for WoW in Table 3.2, a study might even want to repeat censuses over time, counting how many of a well-scheduled set of censuses each avatar was counted in, to provide a more precise measure of activity – what fraction of the time a particular avatar was in use. This point is essential for fully understanding the data in Table 3.3. The distribution of avatars across classes is much more uniform in AIE than in the three European censuses, and the likely explanation is very simple. In order to experience all the stories in SWTOR, as well as the full range of avatar abilities, a player would need to create several, each in a different class. But whether for story-based or ability-based reasons, a player would tend to favor some avatars over others in terms of hours invested. The percentage distributions across the three European languages are very similar, implying that their cultures do not greatly differ, at least in terms of how perceptions of the Star Wars universe shape online avatar choices. An earlier study contrasted class choices between Japanese-language and English-language players of the Japanese MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, finding only modest differences, but Japanese were less likely to be playing solo at the time the censuses were taken.65 The tendencies of SWTOR players to prefer classes with the magical ability to control the Force, the Jedi and Sith, and to prefer the vile Empire over the self-righteous Republic, replicate earlier findings that were based on representative samples of North American players.66 In SWTOR it is possible to discover which avatars belong to the same player, because the avatars belonging to each user are typically linked in a legacy, so they can earn collective rewards. Each legacy has a name, and they can be seen

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Table 3.3 Class distribution in four SWTOR censuses AIE Jedi knight Jedi consular Trooper Smuggler Sith warrior Sith inquisitor Bounty hunter Imperial agent TOTAL Magical Imperial

13.9% 11.7% 10.9% 10.1% 12.8% 15.8% 14.4% 10.4% 100.0% 1,215 54.2% 53.4%

English

French

German

16.3% 10.9% 8.3% 6.6% 19.2% 22.7% 8.5% 7.6% 100.0% 2,395 69.1% 57.9%

14.3% 13.3% 8.6% 5.6% 20.0% 20.4% 9.6% 8.2% 100.0% 720 68.1% 58.2%

13.4% 12.0% 9.7% 5.8% 18.6% 20.8% 12.9% 6.8% 100.0% 1,696 64.8% 59.1%

in the private roster of members of a guild. Thus, it was simple to collate the names and see how many actual people belonged to AIE, and their distribution across the two factions. The Republic part of AIE had 214 distinct players, while the Empire part had 220, and together exactly 300 people belonged to one or both of them. That is, 134 people belonged to both, for an average interlock of 61.8  percent. The average number of avatars per player was almost exactly 4.

3.6 A Simulation of Political Rebellion and Social Structure Launched in 2001, three years before WoW and a decade before SWTOR, Anarchy Online is a science-fiction gameworld created by an innovative Norwegian company with an English-style name, Funcom, that imbues its products with considerable ideology from a range of European and other traditions.67 In the far future, a dominant corporation named Omni-Tek exploited the mineral resources of the distant planet Rubi-Ka, which were especially useful for advanced nanotechnology.68 The science-fiction novel Prophet Without Honour, by a Funcom game designer named Ragnar Tørnquist, describes the long history that led to a rebellion of many workers that fractured the colony on Rubi-ka.69 Omni-Tek continued to hold a main city; roughly equal territory was seized by the rebellious Clans, and smaller areas remained Neutral. The rebels lacked a sophisticated political ideology, as the name “Clans” implies, and fit the sociological definition of primitive rebels.70 Thus there are three factions in Anarchy Online  – Omni-Tek, Clans, and Neutral – rather than two as in both WoW and SWTOR. However, the Neutrals are a default faction, and the player can decide after making some

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progress which of the two main factions an avatar should join, if either. The pandarens in WoW can decide whether to join the Alliance or the Horde, but are not permitted to remain neutral. A few significant MMOs have three competing factions, notably Dark Age of Camelot, set in Dark Ages Europe, in which the three factions are Albion (English), Hibernia (Irish), and Midgard (Norse), and each is at war with the other two. Some MMOs have factions but do not let them battle each other, notably Lord of the Rings Online and The Secret World. In such cases they primarily provide different backstories that encourage players to develop multiple avatars to gain different narrative experiences. A player in Anarchy Online may have multiple avatars, but each must belong to one faction, and guilds are limited to the faction its members belong to. They do not apparently have any limit on how many avatars may belong, and a few rival the size of AIE in all its components. When the data reported here were collected, on October 22, 2016, the largest organization was Athen Paladins, to which fully 4,574 avatars belonged, perhaps representing a thousand players. A huge online database contains information about all player organizations, offering this introduction on the page for this group: ATHEN PALADINS Faction: Clan Government: Department Description: A family among the clans, a band of brothers among the organisations. The Athen Paladins were created by and for people who wanted an organization behaving like a family more than like an org. Objective: Friendship through all trials, Honor and Loyalty above all else. Every day they embark on a new adventure, may the fates shine upon them. History: Founded in West Athen at the top of the watchtower, 195 x 191, by long-time inhabitants of Rubi-Ka who decided to take fate in their own hands on June, 2003.71 Athen is a region of Rubi-Ka occupied by the Clans and containing twin cities, Old Athen and West Athen, which I had explored in my earlier study. To gain perspective on the history of this organization, in 2016 I explored it again with a new second avatar, which was located in the Clan capital, Tir, far to the east. A “whom-pa” teleporter sent him instantly from Tir to Old Athen, from where a moderate hike took him past West Athen to a watchtower on a hill, indeed at map coordinates 195 x 191. The most difficult step in creating a new organization is to collect six players in a team, using the game’s system for connecting members of a small group to

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undertake missions too dangerous for a single player. As it happens, one of the group of six who planned to participate in creating Athen Paladins was unable to attend on that day in 2003, so a substitute joined to get the team size to the required six. On June 20, 2016, the website of the Athen Paladins celebrated the anniversary of its founding: More than 13 years later, not only are we still there but we have become the largest and probably most active organization in Anarchy Online. This is not the success of a few or of one, this is the victory of many, all together, united in the same family. United not only to be stronger all together but to be happier all together. This means all of us, each and every. This means you. To all, thank you for the incredible work that made this possible! But let’s not forget that our success is an everyday work; that we must stay faithful to ourselves, and willing to always do more, for each and all of us. Despite all the concerns with an old game, we must and we will keep on providing fun and activity to our family.72

When creating a new organization, the leader of the team must select one of six structural forms, and the one selected in this case was department, which primarily means that there will be six status ranks below that of the founder. I downloaded data about all 4,574 members from the online database, sorted them by rank, and got the results shown in Table  3.4. The president was a male avatar who had reached the maximum experience level of 220. We might imagine that large, hierarchical organizations have a triangular or pyramidal shape, but here the relatively large number of squad commanders places a bulge above two smaller statuses, while the two lowest ranks do indeed form the bottom of a pyramid. Creators of guilds in WoW and comparable groups in many other MMOs have some freedom to set the rules for each rank, and the titles of the ranks, but organizations in Anarchy Online are largely determined by member behavior, following some simple rules that may have complex consequences. First, new members get the rank of applicant and can ascend the ranks only if promoted by a current member who is at least one rank higher. To join an organization, one must be invited by a current member who is at least three ranks above the bottom rank, or the top leader if there are few ranks. An applicant in Athen Paladins can be promoted to unit member rank by any member of unit leader rank or above, which means that one cannot promote someone to one’s own rank, and promotions go up only one step. Demotion by one level is also possible, so long as the demoted person was above applicant rank, and the person doing the demoting has a higher rank than the person being demoted.73 Notice that this system allows a good deal of dynamism within the membership structure, even without intervention by the top leader. Several factors add to the complexity. Unlike the situation in most other MMOs, there is no limit on how many members an organization may have, other than the challenge of recruiting more given that each avatar may belong to only one organization. Many members of applicant rank may never have contributed anything to the

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Table 3.4 Membership in the ranks of the largest Anarchy Online organization Rank

Title

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

President General Squad commander Unit commander Unit leader Unit member Applicant

Members

Mean level

Percent female (%)

1 39 218 64 37 1,009 3,206

220 183 187 143 174 165 113

0 18 20 33 22 32 29

group, and thus have not deserved promotion, given how long Athen Paladins has existed, and suggested by their low mean experience level. Someone of unit member rank may have been active only briefly. The 258 members who are squad commanders or hold higher rank may constitute the active core of the organization, roughly equal in participation. For example the top two ranks could represent 40 real-world people, and the 218 at squad commander rank could be their alt avatars, which they play when a team needs an avatar with different skills from that of their main avatar. Of course, without close observation or interviewing, we cannot be certain what factors shaped the status distribution of this particular organization. But speculation can suggest more general hypotheses. Notice that the 64 unit commanders have much lower experience levels, a mean of 143, not much above the mean for the entire group, which is 130. Also, compared with other elite ranks, the female percentage is high, at 33  percent. There are actually three genders among the human inhabitants of Rubi-Ka, and within this group 48 percent are male, 23 percent neuter, and 29 percent female. The neuters are actually archetypically masculine, having huge brutish bodies, and presumably a large majority of players are male. One possibility is that many of the unit commanders are special purpose alts of the elite members, for example females belonging for fun to male players, and often parked in cities where they can, for example, serve the bank alt function of handling economic transactions, when the player’s main avatar is far away on an adventure. The online database offers similar statistics for 15,766 Anarchy Online organizations, with a total membership of 372,787 avatars having a mean experience level of 86.3. I cannot offer precise statistics, but each level after the first few seems to require well more than an hour to complete, so even passing level 80 requires a real commitment of time. But given a mean membership of just about 24 for all these organizations, clearly many of them are not significant. I was able to extract the summary data for all of them, and here we can analyze in terms of governmental structure as well as population. There are forty-five organizations with over 1,000 members, and all but four of them use

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the department form of organization. The five other forms are as follows, with decisions made through voting in each: • • • • •

Republic: five ranks (president, advisor, veteran, member, applicant). Faction: five ranks (director, board member, executive, member, applicant). Feudalism: four ranks (lord, knight, vassal, peasant). Monarchy: three ranks (monarch, counsel, follower). Anarchism: one rank (anarchist).

The summary statistics, reported in Table 3.5, indicate that large groups tend reasonably enough to have larger numbers of status ranks, and that differences in structural forms between factions are visible but perhaps smaller than we might have expected from their fictional histories or role-playing ideologies. Social organization in both WoW and SWTOR is fractured because they operate on multiple, separate internet servers. That is not currently the case for Anarchy Online, as Wikipedia reports:  For much of its existence, Anarchy Online featured two game servers for Englishspeaking players, Atlantean and Rimor, and one for German-speaking players, Die Neue Welt. In 2010, Die Neue Welt was brought offline with most of its player population distributed between the two English-speaking servers. In 2013, the two remaining English servers, Atlantean and Rimor merged to form a single unifying server to host remaining Anarchy Online players.74

Prior to the 2013 merger and probably dating from 2006, the wiki devoted to Anarchy Online listed especially active player organizations with links to their websites, 55 belonging to Omni-Tek, 69 to the Clans, and 29 Neutral.75 At the end of 2016, just 31 of these 153 websites still existed, and several had not been updated in years. This fact offers three observations: (1) merger of MMO servers can disrupt existing social groups; (2) over time, people leave MMOs as their popularity declines; and (3) observational research projects of important topics are urgent, because crucial data disappear over time.

3.7 A Virtual Utopia Some of the most interesting cases of virtual worlds, and indeed of all forms of online community, are not actually very popular. They can be considered creative experiments, which could become popular in future when the ambient cultural has evolved further, or they may be fascinating special cases that repay research effort with distinctive insights. As a metaphor, we can recall that oxygen and hydrogen are essential for human life, but rare elements like gold or uranium have special values of their own. Two of the most valuable socialscientific studies of the nineteenth century are History of American Socialisms by John Humphrey Noyes and The Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff, which described tiny utopian communes, including Oneida that Noyes himself led.76 In the twenty-first-century universe of online

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15,766

7,833 2,427 1,469 2,486 257 1,294

Department Republic Faction Feudalism Monarchy Anarchism

TOTAL

Organizations

Forms of government

23.6

35.1 22.9 15.0 3.9 5.5 7.8

Mean membership

100.0% 7,047

53.9% 13.0% 11.8% 13.0% 1.5% 6.8%

Omni-Tek

100.0% 2,861

41.5% 13.3% 9.2% 22.8% 1.7% 11.5%

Neutral

100.0% 5,858

48.7% 19.3% 6.4% 15.7% 1.7% 8.3%

Clans

Organizations per faction

Table 3.5 Social structure variation across a set of virtual organizations

100.0% 159,119

77.1% 9.3% 8.8% 2.1% 0.3% 2.4%

Omni-Tek

100.0% 48,279

72.7% 15.5% 4.0% 3.7% 0.4% 3.7%

Neutral

Clans

100.0% 165,389

70.9% 20.2% 3.7% 2.2% 0.4% 2.7%

Members per faction

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gameworlds, the most distinctive long-lasting but unpopular utopia is A Tale in the Desert, or simply Tale as its citizens call it.77 Tale is a slightly fanciful simulation of ancient Egypt, covering a huge territory along the Nile river. Violent combat is impossible, which may account for Tale’s unpopularity, but also renders it especially interesting. The goal is to cooperate in building a civilization incorporating many aspects of ancient Egypt, including its religion and architectural style. For a period of about two years, participants build everything from scratch, from farms and mines to temples and pyramids. Then through ceremonies that confer subjective status on those players who have contributed significantly, everything is destroyed, and the process of creating Egypt begins again. Of course, the history of the real ancient Egypt is generally charted in terms of three periods of rise and fall, called the Old, Middle, and Late Kingdoms. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin argued that all successful civilizations may go through cycles of advance and decline, but the episodic nature of Tale is primarily determined by the fact that it is oriented toward creation rather than destruction.78 Each period of activity is called a telling of the tale, with beginning, middle, and end. As Tale’s Wikipedia article records, there have been eight tellings:  Tale 1 beginning in 2003, Tale 2 in 2004, Tale 3 in 2006, Tale 4 in 2008, Tale 5 in 2010, Tale 6 in 2011, Tale 7 in 2015, and Tale 8 in 2018.79 I  observed the middle of the fourth telling, the middle and end of the sixth telling, the early and middle parts of the seventh telling, and the beginning of the eighth. To get census data on the total citizenry of this virtual Egypt, one’s avatar must walk to one of the widely scattered universities of leadership and consult the constantly updated data offered there, which includes the numbers of citizens who have achieved each status rank within seven parallel disciplines: architecture, art and music, harmony, the human body, leadership, thought, and worship. Each avatar can simultaneously advance in all seven disciplines, and acquire all kinds of resource collection and product manufacturing skills, so there is little incentive for people to have multiple avatars. On Tale’s only internet server there were only 933 citizens on November 26, 2015, and 616 on December 10, 2016. Considerable other data about the population can be obtained through the user interface, but an efficient way to obtain a list of all the members of a guild is to walk across the desert to a particular guild hall building, from which a file with the names and ranks of all members can be downloaded as an easily edited text file. Especially interesting for the study of social structure, one avatar may belong to many guilds, and therefore the players were free to create a variety of kinds of guild performing specific social functions. Tale was created by one very small company, essentially one person assisted by a small group. It is actually common for computer games to be created by small groups, but the successful ones are typically bought up by large corporations. The original creator’s interest faded during the sixth telling, and one of his associates took Tale over for the seventh telling. Thus, the transition

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Table 3.6 Continuity of social structure across a disruptive transition Name

Helping Hands of Friends Palm Valley Festivals zFree Helping Hands Worship Safari Club River Plains Public Works The HIVE Humble Priests Mentors of Egypt Amigos The Point 7 Lakes Research

Type

Members

Feb. 2015 elders

Elder continuity

Feb. 2015

Aug. 2016

As elders Total (%) (%)

Regional-universal

261

117

53

30

47

Regional Special events Regional Quasi-religious

182 164 162 145

– – 160 134

20 24 19 18

– – 32 44

– – 32 44

Animal hunting Manufacturing resources Bawdy humor Quasi-religious Introductory Regional Regional Research

128 125

80 –

3 12

67 –

67 –

119 96 96 92 92 77

100 –` – 138 98 77

8 17 22 16 14 2

38 – – 13 36 100

63 – – 56 64 100

from Tale 6 to Tale 7 was also a transition between real-world leaderships, when one tiny company succeeded another. All guilds dissolve at the end of a telling, and the avatars vanish, but dedicated players create new avatars with the same name, and then cooperate to establish many of the same guilds. Table 3.6 considers what were probably the thirteen most influential guilds of the sixth telling as of February 2015, and their successors in the seventh as of August 2016. Helping Hands of Friends (HHOF) was already the most significant guild in the fourth telling, and had the largest population of any in the sixth. It became less significant in the seventh, in part because of a real-life health problem faced by one of its leaders. A  regional guild serves the general population who had set up their own homes near its guild hall, providing storage and manufacturing resources, and holding social gatherings. In the case of Helping Hands, it served so many social functions that it was a universal mentor and organizer for all of Egypt. In February 2015 fully 53 of its 261 members were of such great significance across Egypt that they had earned elder rank within the guild, and many were also leaders in other guilds. An obvious example was the Helping Hands Worship guild, which was the organizational focus of the series of quasi-Egyptian religious rituals that must be performed collectively to advance in the Worship discipline. Of the fifty-three HHOF elders, 47 percent had been resurrected for the seventh telling and joined Helping Hands of Friends, and 30 percent of the fifty-three were again serving as elders.

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Special event guilds like festivals prepared the necessary resources, including information it distributed through its page of the Tale wiki, but were not needed early in a telling.80 While the avatars of players could not fight each other, they could hunt animals, and these beasts appeared roughly at random as to time and place. Therefore, players needed a medium through which to report sightings of specific animals, using the separate text-chat channel of the Safari Club: “otter RP 1520 3113,” “gazelle 7 lac 1255-855:) gazelle always here if you need,” “otter hole at 1041, -261 in 7L, right in the middle of a camp site,” “live hoppin rat, LoR, 3763 6289.” The numbers refer to the special latitude and longitude system, and abbreviations name the regions, such that RP is River Plains, 7 lac and 7L are Seven Lakes, and LoR is Lake of Reeds. Because avatars may belong to multiple guilds, it is possible to chart interlocks between them, as in Table 3.7 using the August 2016 data. The first two guilds not only have their guild halls near each other in the Seven Lakes region, but share top leadership, as well as sharing an average of 50 percent of their general membership. Amigos provides members with shared storage and manufacturing resources, as well as mentoring newcomers and staging many social events for the wider region. Their guild halls are just west of the Nile, where a bridge across it leads immediately to another built-up area east of the river and provides indirect access to other nearby communities. The reason for having two partner guilds rather than one unified guild, is that research guilds have a specific social function in the Egyptian division of labor. A research guild organizes the difficult collective task of unlocking technologies so that all avatars in a given region may learn them. This is done by contributing a specific and usually large number of manufactured products at an appropriate university, which is not only too much work for one avatar to accomplish, but also requires special skills and equipment. For example, to unlock barley cultivation requires donating at the local University of Worship 1,000 units of meat from the carp fish that must be caught in the right water using the learned fishing skill, 1,000 toad skin mushrooms that can be collected only occasionally at unpredictable locations, and 1,000 units of dirt that require merely digging.81 Once collective research has unlocked this skill, citizens may learn it and not only grow barley from seeds, but also construct a grain oven, a malting tray, prepare grain fertilizer and weed killer in a kettle, and brew beer from the barley. A research guild not only organizes its members to donate the materials needed to unlock the technology, but also reports on the Tale wiki which of many possible goals they are working on now and which have already been completed. In the case of barley cultivation twelve of the thirteen regions of Egypt had completed this task by December 10, 2016, while the Sinai University of Worship was still accepting donations.82 One apparently useless research topic called Distillation Experiments, which requires donating many kinds of beer to a University of Thought, had been completed only in the Seven Lakes

96 50% 138 12 33 22 21 21 24

77 49 3 20 7 6 15 11

7 Lakes Research Amigos The Point zFree HHOF HHOF Worship Safari Club The HIVE

7 Lakes

7 Lakes

Region

Regional

Research

Amigos

Type

7 Lakes Research

zFree

3% 10% 98 35 41 37 13 24

River Plains 19% 22% 29% 160 43 44 39 38

River Plains

Regional Regional

The Point

Table 3.7 Interlocks among guilds serving different social functions

8% 17% 38% 32% 117 76 29 25

Four Corners

Regional

HHOF

6% 15% 33% 30% 56% 134 22 28

Four Corners

Worship

HHOF Worship

19% 21% 15% 37% 31% 22% 80 24

River Plains

Hunting

Safari Club

13% 21% 24% 31% 23% 24% 27% 100

River Plains

Humor

The HIVE

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Region, while some residents of Eastern Grounds were also making donations to unlock it in their region.83 The Amigos guild is socially somewhat more separate from the other three regional guilds, than they are from each other. The percentage overlaps between Amigos and the others are 10 percent with the Point, 22 percent with zFree, and 17 percent with HHOF, for an average of 17 percent. The average interlocks for the other three are higher: 26 percent for the Point, 28 percent for zFree, and 29 percent for HHOF. We see in the table that HHOF’s worship guild serves members of the main HHOF guild most intensely, but also two of the three other regional guilds, zFree and the Point, but Amigos less strongly. The relatively strong links between zFree and the two communication-related guilds, Safari Club and the joke channel called the HIVE, reflects the intense activism of zFree in a period when it replaced Helping Hands of Friends as the largest guild. There is something poignant and perplexing about the low popularity of Tale, given the high quality of its social life and the interesting complexity of the tasks required to build Egypt during each telling. One plausible explanation is that several competing kinds of online community allow people to construct a shared culture through collective action, documented in the following chapters beginning with open-source software creation. Yet as social scientists have found the communal experiments of nineteenth-century Americans worthy of academic study, the same should be true now for virtual utopias of the twenty-first century, such as A Tale in the Desert.

3.8 Conclusion Since the peak of scholarly interest in virtual worlds around 2010, the culturally most complex gameworlds have lost some of their popularity, and the emphasis has shifted to player-versus-player combat. Many of the most popular social games today that run on desktop computers or TV video-game systems are rather like competitive sports, in which two teams fight each other, thus avoiding cultural sophistication. In 2014, the most significant scholarly blog about online games, Tera Nova, was suspended. The editor, economist Edward Castronova, had argued in the prior decade that MMORPGs could not only serve as simulations of the ideal world, but even set examples for improvement of our world, such as affording equal opportunity to each person regardless of their family background.84 But in his farewell editorial for Tera Nova (TN) he wrote:  For a time in the last decade, there was a sense that an immersive 3D communal place was a substantial thing unto itself, and likely to become an important media offering. That has not happened. Instead, we’ve seen an unbundling of the parts of virtual worlds. Sociality went to Facebook. Complex heroic stories went to single-player games. Multiplayer combat went to places like DOTA and Clash of Clans. Economy

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games went to Farmville and the F2P clones. Virtual currency went to Bitcoin. As these applications grew in popularity, the need for a core intellectual group about virtual worlds themselves waned. The community dried up and the conversation dwindled.85

Other chapters of this book consider Facebook and a range of other online social media, but it may be too early to abandon research on MMOs, both because they offer vast troves of data relevant to research questions, and the game industry has tended to go through cycles of innovation and stagnation, so it may soon innovate socially again.

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4 Open-Source Software

A main socio-structural distinction, so commonplace that we often do not take it into account in our analysis of a dataset, is the ultimately ambiguous distinction between professional and nonprofessional, or amateur. In Chapter 6 on citizen science, for example, we shall fail to mention George Kelly’s theory of personal science, which can be interpreted to mean that every human being is a psychologist, developing throughout life a distinctive theory of the human mind, supported by empirical observations of events and experimental behavior.1 Here, it is hard to avoid the simplistic thought that every modern person is also a personal computer scientist, developing an idiosyncratic bundle of abstract theories and concrete expertise in the use of information technologies. Some computer users, however, call professionalism into serious question as they create new software and other systems, often without benefit of as much as a minute of formal university training. Especially noteworthy is the enduring and extensive subculture of open-source software developers, which spans the boundary between professional and amateur, many members engaging in what some call playbour, the synthesis of play and labor.2

4.1 The Good Old Days The term open-source software refers to a very general orientation to the writing and sharing of computer programs, with many implications for the social structure of both professional and amateur programmer communities. Wikipedia defines it thus: Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner. According to scientists who studied it, open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration.3 99

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Actually, there are many ways to define open source, each having a somewhat different set of implications for social structure. For example, the social structural results may be very different if many people contribute to the development of a single complex program, versus reusing segments of software code in a variety of programs.4 However, the mere fact that a software development project involves many geographically distributed programmers who communicate primarily online does not render it open source, if they are employees of a formal organization obeying the orders of management, which has also become common in recent years.5 Before considering the modern social situation, some technical and historical background will be useful, frankly based on the author’s extensive experience of programming computers since the early 1970s. At that point, social scientists were still entering quantitative data into computers by means of Hollerith cards, also called IBM cards, which were physical cards with eighty columns where holes could be punched in any of ten points, labeled 0 through 9.6 For example, for questionnaire data, each card could represent one respondent; each column could represent one fixed-choice question, and a hole would be punched on the number in a column representing that respondent’s answer. A  hint of programming entered the process because some parts of the card might be devoted to instructions or variable definitions, often written in short segments of the standard FORTRAN language, and a deck of cards would begin with some cards entirely devoted to them. A long-standing challenge for researchers was how to handle situations in which a dataset contained more than eighty variables. One solution employed by earlier social scientists who used electro-mechanical counter sorters rather than digital computers to analyze their data was to punch responses to more than one variable in a single column of a card, because these machines physically sorted cards into piles, so it was difficult to have more than one card per case.7 But by the 1970s, when cards fed data into computers, data about each case could be spread across several cards, which required writing some code to tell the computer where on which card each variable for a case could be found. One of the sociological studies I  did at that time involved administering a set of paper questionnaires at the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, in order to map the ideological dimensions of this especially interesting subculture, a study that will gain a slight modernization here in Chapter 8.8 The main section was a set of 140 preference questions rating 138 noteworthy authors plus 2 fake authors to check the validity of each respondent’s answers, and the intended computationally intensive analytical technique was factor analysis, including the use of factor scores to interpret author factors through correlations with another set of items measuring preference for different subgenres of science fiction and fantasy. With such a long set of items, there was a realistic concern that respondents would rush through and give similar scores to authors whose names were adjacent in the questionnaire, or even just on the same page. Therefore five different versions of the

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questionnaire were prepared, with the authors’ names in five different random orders. After the convention, the questionnaires were sorted into five sets and data from each was manually punched into cards separately, four cards per respondent. Then it was necessary to write four programs to rearrange the order of variables in four of the five sets, actually printing out four new sets of cards with the variables in the same order as one of the five original sets. The five sets of cards were then physically combined and fed into the commercial software that would analyze the data. Thus, in the 1970s, computer analysis of social science data often required the researcher to do part of the programming work, even when using one of the early statistical analysis packages. When personal computers arrived at the end of the decade, very little data analysis software was available that would be of any use to a social scientist. The VisiCalc program for the Apple II was the first significant spreadsheet for PCs, appearing in 1979, and it could handle only very simple calculations.9 A good example of a fully developed personal computer of that general period is the Apple IIe, which I used from the year of its introduction in 1983.10 The particular model claimed to have 128K of random access memory (RAM), but except for a few commercial programs it actually had only 64K, because the central processing unit could not directly address more than 64K of memory. The somewhat antique PC on which I am writing this sentence has 187,500 times as much RAM. Thankfully, a version of the BASIC computing language was built into the hardware of the Apple IIe, so it was easy to write BASIC programs, run them immediately, then refine them step by step, alternating running and programming without any intermediate tasks. As Wikipedia reports, “BASIC (an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use.”11 BASIC was an interpreted language on the early PCs, which means that both humans and computers can handle the exact same version of the program. While the precise meanings of technical terms naturally change as the technology does, today we may say that HTML and Java Script, fundamental to websites, are interpreted languages. Later in this chapter we will give examples written in the Linden Scripting Language and Lua, both of which fit this category. However, interpreted languages tend to be both slow and large, wasting time and computer memory. Thus when I first began publishing educational social science software in 1985, for both Apple and IBM computers, I would run the final draft of each program through a compiler, which produced a more efficient version of the program, but one that could not be understood by a human being.12 The interpreted version of a BASIC program was the source code, while the compiled version was what was actually sold to the public. Throughout the 1980s, a number of popular computing magazines published the full BASIC code for many short but interesting programs. Readers could manually type the source code into their own computers, and since BASIC was

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an interpreted language, they could modify the code as they wished. This was in fact how I  and thousands of other people learned to program in BASIC, rather than by taking formal courses in computer science, supplementing the magazines with whatever small book listed all the commands of the particular variant of the language.13 With that experience, it was relatively easy to move on in later years to languages like Pascal and C that were not interpreted, such that sharing their source code required a definite decision to do so. Today, copies of many issues of those old and obsolete BASIC magazines may be downloaded from the web, including two Apple magazines I read regularly in the mid-1980s, InCider (1983–93) and Nibble (1980–92).14 InCider’s name is a pun on the juice of apples, and Nibble refers not only to biting on an apple but also to the colloquial use of the word nibble to refer to half a byte of computer memory. To get a sense of the flavor and diversity of the amateur programming community of that period, here is a section of BASIC code for the rival TRS 80 computer from the December 1985 issue of its Rainbow (1981–93) magazine: 230​CLS 240​PRINT@68,”1.​SILVER​BELLS” 250​PRINT@132,”2.​THE​FIRST​NOEL” 260​PRINT@196,”3.​HARK!​THE​HERALD” 270​PRINT@234,”ANGELS​SING” 280​PRINT@260,”4.​O​COME,​ALL​YE​FAITHFUL” 290​PRINT@324,”5.​WE​WISH​YOU​A​MERRY” 300​PRINT@362,”CHRISTMAS” 310​PRINT@423,”CHOOSE​NUMBER?” 320​A$=INKEY$:IF​A$=““​THEN320 330​IF​A$CHR$(53)​THEN310 340​K=VAL(A$) 350​PRINT@437,K 360​ON​K​GOSUB​390,630,800,970,1140 370​RESTORE 380​A$=INKEY$:GOTO31015

This is part of a program created by Joseph M. Urbas to play the melodies of five Christmas songs, the titles of which can clearly be read.16 Unlike the popular programming languages used today, FORTRAN and BASIC assigned a number to each line of the program. The first line of this program is number 10, the last line is 1340, and the reason for assigning only every tenth number is to leave users room to insert more lines as they wish. The first command in this section, “230 CLS,” simply clears the computer screen, and lines 240 through 300 print the names of the five songs, with the instruction for users to press a number key from 1 through 5 to select one of them. On line 320, “A$=INKEY” tells the computer to look for a key press by the user and assign it to variable A$, and the rest of that line tells the computer not to move on in the program until a key is pressed. Variable A$ is a byte, in the traditional

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ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) coding scheme, where the number 1 has an ASCII value of 49, and 5 has an ASCII value of 53.17 If the user mistakenly presses some key outside the 1–5 range, line 330 returns the computer to line 310 and asks the user to try again. Line 340 of this program section translates the ASCI code of the key press into an ordinary number, K, which line 350 then prints. Line 360 tells the computer to go to a subroutine (GOSUB) later in the program, which one depending upon the value of K. If K is 1, the computer goes to line 390, which starts the process to play the tune of “Silver Bells.” The computer dutifully goes through several lines of code, playing the tune, and then returns to line 360 when it is done. Lines 370 and 380 prepare for the user to select another song next. This is a particularly good example not only because it is simple, contains key features of a BASIC program, and refers to five familiar Christmas songs. Most importantly for us here, the section of code represents a standard module in many kinds of social science software. Obviously, it can be altered to let a user of some sociology program written in BASIC select among five options of any kind. Most significantly, it provides the basis for programming a questionnaire to be administered through a computer. For example, a statement could first be printed on the screen, like “Open-source software is a sociologically interesting development.” Then the five responses of a standard Likert questionnaire item could replace the song titles, roughly like this (but actually changing the numbers after “@” to print at the correct screen locations): 240​PRINT@68,”1.​STRONGLY​DISAGREE” 250​PRINT@132,”2.​DISAGREE” 260​PRINT@196,”3.​NEITHER​AGREE​NOR​DISAGREE.” 270​PRINT@260,”4.​AGREE” 280​PRINT@324,”5.​STRONGLY​AGREE”

After this rather antique technical introduction, we can then consider the issues that relate to social structure today. When a team produces complex software within a corporation, the members need to be able to share the source code with each other, but generally keep it secret within the company and publish for sale only the compiled version. There have been many attempts to develop new techniques and norms to protect intellectual property rights, and software often carries copyrights and sometimes patents. These protections are not enough, so companies also treat their source code as trade secrets. Since the 1980s, however, open-source software communities have persisted, even after the pioneering magazines were discontinued, struggling not only with technical programming issues, and the challenge of how to organize communities so they can share the products of their work, but also with the problem of how to reward programmers for their efforts, whether with social status or money. Leveraging the background provided by the previous chapter, the first three sections of this chapter will examine the amateur open-source software

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communities associated with three highly popular virtual worlds: Second Life, World of Warcraft (WoW), and Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO). Once these three examples have provided an empirical context for understanding more abstract questions, the chapter will consider the formal open-source software social movement, using six Facebook groups in India to illustrate structural implications, then conclude with brief presentation of the comparable maker movement.

4.2 A Nongame Virtual World Technically somewhat similar to the MMOs considered in the previous chapter, Second Life is a nongame virtual environment created by Linden Labs in San Francisco, which launched in 2003 and continues to be used for a wide variety of social purposes today.18 Wikipedia summarizes:  Second Life users (also called Residents) create virtual representations of themselves, called avatars and are able to interact with other avatars, places or objects. They can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, build, create, shop and trade virtual property and services with one another. It is a platform that principally features 3D-based user-generated content. Second Life also has its own virtual currency, the Linden Dollar, which is exchangeable with real world currency.19

Of significance for this chapter, the virtual objects created by users often contain open-source programs written in the Linden Scripting Language.20 An example of the complex range of uses to which Second Life can be put, and the range of social activities that place there, is a large virtual area devoted to a simulation of ancient Rome, which describes itself thus in the search utility of the interface:  “Come visit the ancient Roman Market, Pompeii Tavern, Baths, Chariot Racetrack, Gladiator Arena and more! Join the oldest, nicest, and most ‘grown up’ ancient Roman community on the grid.” Its website further explains:  “ROMA was founded by an archaeologist and attracts many people who have an interest in ancient history, culture, art, and languages. Several of the buildings and attractions in the estate are based on real ancient Roman buildings and artifacts.”21 As a form of participant observation field research, I joined in many of its activities in 2010, which included everything from watching a realistic chariot race, to belonging to a set of interlocked groups of Roman history buffs, to setting up my own small museum containing many virtual artifacts such as one that would recite quotations at random from Catullus if clicked by the visitor’s computer mouse. A  simpler artifact to describe existed in several varieties, representing different ancient books as scrolls that appeared identical except in their titles. Visitors to the museum were allowed to copy each virtually ancient book, and change the brief software program inside their own copy as they wished, so this is an example of open source.

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A tool built into the Second Life interface allows one to create any of a number of simple 3D geometric forms, adjust their dimensions, set their color, upload images to cover their surfaces, and assemble them into more complex objects. Each fundamental object was called a prim for primitive, and each scroll book consisted of three prims connected as a unit, all with the same sandy background color representing papyrus or vellum. In the middle was a flat rectangle representing the page of the scroll book that could be read, and it had a tiny image of such a real page on it. To either side was a thin cylinder representing the rolled-up part of the scroll of earlier or later pages. The rectangular prim contained a brief program that gave the user the option to open a web browser to an online copy of whatever ancient book the scroll represented. Once the user has created a virtual object, a program may be inserted into it to make that object perform a great variety of actions. Using the object creation part of the interface, the user clicks a command to insert some code in the Linden Scripting Language, and the following default program appears: default { ​ state_​ entry() { ​ ​ llSay(0,​"Hello,​Avatar!"); } ​ touch_​ start(integer​total_​ number) { ​ ​ llSay(0,​"Touched."); } }

As Wikipedia explains, when an object containing this code is “first saved, initialized or reset,” it will cause the words “Hello, Avatar!” to be printed in the text chat part of the Second Life interface, which is primarily used for textbased communications between users.22 Clicking one’s mouse on the object – touching it – will similarly output the text, “Touched.” As the reader may have guessed, it is a simple matter to replace “Touched” with any desired text, save the revised program, and that text will be printed instead. Or, if the user has access to different programs, this default code may be entirely replaced with something else, such as: integer​onOff; default { ​ touch_​ start(integer​num_​ detected)​{ ​ ​ onOff=​!onOff; ​ ​ llTargetOmega(​,​1.0*onOff,​1.0​); } }

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In this, onOff is an integer variable, defined at the beginning, which actually has two states, on and off. Touching the object with the mouse changes onOff from one state to the other. The rest of the code makes the object rotate, the speed and direction determined by the exact numbers in “< 1.0, 0.0, 0.0 >.” Touching a second time stops the rotation. I  originally found this program inside an object I acquired that had been programmed by somebody else, who had set the rules of the object so that users could see and modify the code, which is one definition of open source. One simply experiments with the speed and direction numbers until an object rotates in the desired manner, and the code can easily be copied from one object to another. Here is a somewhat more complex program that illustrates several points about shared open-source software: vector​target=; vector offset; default { ​ moving_​ end() { ​ ​ offset​=​(target-​ ​llGetPos())​*​(ZERO_​ ROTATION​/​ ​llGetRot()); ​ ​ llSitTarget(offset,​ZERO_​ ROTATION); } ​ state_​ entry() { ​ ​ llSetText("Teleport​to​Exhibits",,1.0); ​ ​ offset​=​(target-​ ​llGetPos())​*​(ZERO_​ ROTATION​/​ ​llGetRot()); ​ ​ llSetSitText("Teleport"); ​ ​ llSitTarget(offset,​ZERO_​ ROTATION); } ​ changed(integer​change) { ​ ​ if​(change​&​CHANGED_​ LINK) { ​ ​ ​ llSleep(0.5); ​ ​ ​ if​(llAvatarOnSitTarget()​!=​NULL_​ KEY) { ​ ​ ​ ​ llUnSit(llAvatarOnSitTarget()); } } } ​ touch_​ start(integer​i) { ​ ​ //​ llSay(0,​"Please​right-​ click​and​select​Teleport"); } }

This is a teleport program, which means that it will move an avatar to a specified new location, swiftly even at a great subjective distance, if the user rightclicks on the object and selects “Teleport.” This exact version of the program

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relates directly to social structure. The Second Life island on which I ran review panels for the NSF was large, in part because we needed the space to be walledoff from the rest of Second Life, so only authorized avatars could visit it. But it also gave us room to set up three different review panel rooms suitable for committees of different sizes and purposes, plus exhibit areas. An avatar in one of these areas was far enough away from any of the others that neither text nor voice chat originating there could be seen or heard. Occasionally, one of the people serving on the panel will have a conflict of interest with respect to a particular proposal, for example having published a paper co-authored with the principal investigator during the past forty-eight months, so that panelist must leave the panel area while that particular proposal is being discussed. The above program was placed in virtual objects shaped as wide, flat disks, convenient for an avatar to stand on then click to teleport. One was placed in each of the panel rooms. When the discussion moved to a research proposal on which a panelist had a conflict of interest, that panelist would use the teleport disk to go almost instantly to a distant part of the island, unable to perceive any of the discussion that went on. That area contained exhibits relating to the human aspects of computer technology, some of which included a variety of other programs, thus giving the panelist something interesting to do until the discussion of the conflicted proposal was finished. At that time the person managing the panel could send a special message unrelated to this program, which opened a teleport request on the panelist’s computer screen. Clicking on it would teleport the panelist back to rejoin the group. The first line of the program, “vector target=,” specifies the location to which the panelist’s avatar would be teleported, so identical disks in the three panel rooms would use the same destination. For easy transport across different routes on the island, it was a simple matter to make alternative versions of the program that differed only in terms of the target destination and replacing this text with something appropriate, such as: “Teleport to Exhibits.” Disks with different destinations were color coded, by setting the color of the objects appropriately, through a command outside the program. At one central “hub” location on the island there were several disks with different destinations and corresponding colors for easy identification. So, this program in the Linden Scripting Language relates to social structure in that it separates people temporarily in terms of an agreed-upon set of norms, concerning how to manage conflicts of interest in deciding how to invest taxpayer money through a government agency dedicated to support of scientific research. But it also illustrates a feature of open-source software, the fact that programmers often must innovate – use what they call kludges – to solve practical problems. Notice the word “sit” in several of the command lines. This whole code is an adaptation of the simpler program originally developed for Second Life to allow an avatar to sit on a nearby chair! It achieves teleport by making the avatar sit at a distant location, rather than on a nearby chair, then promptly stand up again.

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The short line “llSleep(0.5)” is similarly interesting. The amateur programming community noticed that sometimes the original version of the teleport program failed to work properly. Through trial, error, and social communication, it was decided that it was necessary to add a brief delay at this point in the program, which was accomplished by having the avatar “sleep” for 0.5 of a second. There are several different ways programmers may communicate in Second Life about their work. Perhaps the most important has already been mentioned: By following open-source norms and allowing other people to see and modify the programming code in the virtual object they create, they give their programs a secondary function as media of communication. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, physical objects such as yachts can serve to link people together, even if they never meet in person. For a decade, the standard terms in literature on open-source software have been stigmergy and stigmergic.23 Yet a stigmergic link is not especially significant unless it communicates meaning. A hugely important issue for any socially based software production system is documentation, adding information to the source code that will help a human reader understand what is happening at each step in the program. The Linden Scripting Language accomplishes this to some extent through the way it names its extensive set of pre-existing functions. All begin with “ll” for Linden Labs, then provide a hint of what the function does, in the above example:  llSay, llSitTarget, llUnSit, llSleep. It is also easy to insert a comment into a program, which a human can read but the computer will ignore, merely inserting “//” at the beginning of a line, followed by the desired text. The official Second Life website includes a wiki called LSL Portal, where both employees and experienced users provide the equivalent of a textbook on programming in this scripting language, along with many examples and an extensive script library.24 The relevance to social structure becomes obvious when we consider the fact that LSL programmers, both amateur and semi-professional, have established a number of groups inside Second Life, devoted to software. One of my research avatars joined fully seventeen of them, to facilitate studying their goals and social dynamics. These groups were especially open to new members, practically regardless of their personal goals, so long as they did not disrupt the group’s activities. Of course, my avatar’s user profile made it clear I was a researcher, giving my full real name and institutional affiliation, and I  had set the visible display name to be my real name. When this particular avatar was created, back in 2008, Second Life did not permit using one’s real name as the primary name for an avatar, requiring me to select from a set of predefined family names, from which I had chosen Thespian, to emphasize the role-playing function. The majority of names of members of these seventeen groups are pseudonyms, thus reinforcing privacy norms. Other examples later in this chapter also illustrate the widespread use of pseudonyms by open-source software creators, and the following chapter will find that the same is true for wikis, just as it was for MMOs in the previous

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chapter. One interpretation is that open-source software may be either work or a hobby, with hobbyists more comfortable concealing their real identities.25 Yet the traditional literature on role-playing versus expressing an authentic identity offers many critical suggestions, that it may be deceptive, immature, pathological, or result from alienating conditions that afflict society.26 Some researchers have argued that avatars in virtual worlds may become ideal manifestations of the self, and then exert substantial positive influence on the self-conception of the person in real life.27 As interesting as these dramatic ideas may be, empirical research on the motivations behind participation in open-source communities indicates that they are numerous with complex relations between them.28 Table  4.1 reports data derived from the membership display, viewable by any member of each of the software groups, giving the year in which each member of the group last logged into Second Life. It would be easy to tally membership interlocks across these groups, if some future study wanted to look more closely. But this seemed a good opportunity to illustrate membership dynamics over time, and the display inside Second Life specifies the exact date of last activity for each member. The rows are arranged in descending order of the total number of members counted in each row. On December 4, 2016, the first group, simply named Scripts, had 4,818 members and proclaimed: “4000+ SCRIPTS members help each other with LSL Scripts. Our members are beginners as well as very advanced scripters. Scripting chat is welcome!” However, 159 of those members had not logged into Second Life since the bygone year, 2009. The fact that 3,244 members logged in at least once in 2016 does not prove they were active in the group. The zeroes for 2007 and 2008 probably indicate that the group was created in 2009. The Second Life interface allowed any member to see the name of each other member, and a simple click on the name opened up that avatar’s profile, where often but not always could be seen a list of all the groups that avatar belonged to. Thus it might be straightforward if tedious to map interlocks between this group and others, by inspecting the group memberships of all members. Here, purely for brief illustration, we can focus on the leadership of Scripts. Six people held the rank of Guru of Scripts, “intended for creators and mentors of the group,” but one of them had not been online since 2010, so we shall focus on the five who had been active in Second Life during the past month, and indeed one was online when I was accessing her profile. She belonged to fully forty-two groups, among them the Firestorm Support English group where people using the alternative SL interface Firestorm could advise each other, plus three other scripting groups:  **Script Collectors**, NCI Scripters, and Script Academy, which is the second most popular among the groups in Table 4.1. Unfortunately only one of the other active leaders revealed their group memberships, but that one also belonged to Script Academy. The Second Life interface does not permit automatic downloading of the membership list, so researchers who want to build comprehensive matrices of interlocks between groups may need to copy the names manually. However, a

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Scripts Script Academy Free Script Library SL Scripters’ Market Script House Script! Scripter for Hire Scripts Marketplace Script Collectors Ltd. Script Seekers Script Database Group Learn to Script Script Shack Every Free Script Scripter’s Market Script Scholars Set Scripts Free

Name of a group in Second Life

0 16 0 20 11 0 0 0 1 1 8 0 0 7 0 10 9

2007 0 82 0 24 34 0 0 0 1 0 20 0 1 31 0 12 4

2008 159 118 0 37 24 9 0 7 7 11 18 0 7 18 2 7 8

2009 171 174 0 51 21 15 0 7 10 7 16 0 14 21 4 10 3

2010 193 144 0 38 29 13 0 18 16 18 23 0 15 14 6 11 3

2011 198 150 0 64 42 25 2 19 11 9 19 0 7 15 7 10 2

2012 192 156 87 64 34 28 4 12 19 16 23 5 8 10 7 4 4

2013

How many members last logged into Second Life in the given year

Table 4.1 Groups devoted to programming in the Linden Scripting Language

266 242 197 94 41 36 20 21 13 18 23 11 8 12 10 8 5

2014

395 321 264 110 74 38 34 39 36 33 24 20 16 20 16 5 4

2015

3,244 2,465 1,476 1,187 604 282 376 217 200 197 135 205 146 66 117 60 29

2016

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possibly more efficient method that does work – if just barely – is to capture a screenshot picture of each displayed subset of fourteen members. The text is pale on a dark background, so it is best to run a set of these images through graphic transformation software to make the text black on white, then print it out and scan it in using optical character reading. I tried this, and it does work for Second Life, but not well enough for the Star Wars data in the previous chapter. Script Academy had been created at least as early as 2007, because sixteen members had deserted Second Life way back then. There are primarily two ways an avatar can leave a group, either resigning from it, or being expelled by a leader with the authority to do so. Therefore, many people who stop using Second Life are still listed as members of groups years afterward. The only way to shut a group down is for its leader to expel everybody, and then after a couple days’ delay the system will automatically erase the group.29 When I ran the island used for review panels and other NSF meetings, we had a group that had ownership of the virtual island and to which each visitor would be added, in order to gain access to this secure space. Each visitor and I would communicate by internal Second Life channels to make a friendship link to facilitate communication between us, and I would invite them to the group. At that point I could send the visitor a teleport invitation that would transport them in less than a minute. When people had completed their visit, they would leave the group, in order to preserve security and privacy for subsequent panel meetings on the island. Script Academy is an old group, but also an active one, which provides mentoring and collaboration for creating programs. A constant conversation takes place in the text chat channel devoted to Script Academy, which the user can read in one corner of the screen, noting when members are discussing something of interest to the user. The chat is backed up by two online forums, one “for posting code snippets when you need help,” and the other “for specific questions that seem to come up over and over.”30 The first of these is on the Pastebin website used by open-source programmers to share information more generally.31 The following example from the December 4, 2016 text chat replaces each avatar’s name with a pseudonym and refers to Pastebin: [08:50] Avatar 1:  someone needs to fix the line numbers on the pastebin website, in the script the lines start with 0, on the website they start with 1 [08:55] Avatar 2: LSL Editor starts with 1 [08:57] Avatar 3: yea i believe i reported that as a bug to firestorm years ago, but ofc it comes from the official viewer, so you know LL will never address it [08:58] Avatar 3:  no one in the world starts code line numbering at 0, except LL [09:00] Avatar 4: though it is more programmer like to start with 0 [09:01] Avatar 3: for arrays yes, doesn’t make sense for line numbers

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Here, LSL stands for the Linden Scripting Language. LL stands for Linden Labs, “ofc” means “of course,” and Firestorm is a third-party interface that can be used with Second Life but also with dozens of independent virtual worlds that employ the same program specifications but are organizationally separate from Linden Labs.32 The apparently obscure topic of the conversation is the line number, which automatically appears inside the Second Life programming environment but is not often copied outside it, as in the above examples that lack line numbers. The plentitude of “curly braces” – {and} – in the programs above was inherited from the popular C and Java programming languages that do not generally use line numbers. But when amateurs are discussing opensource software programs, they find line number a convenient way to tell each other where to look in a program for the topic of discussion. Many computing languages have a default structure for their data arrays that begins with the number 0 rather than 1, a trivial difference, but one these members of Script Academy discussed energetically. Brief descriptions of the three other groups with more than 500 members offer a sense of the variety in this complex and technical oriented set of social structures. Free Script Library is a news-sharing medium for the central archive of LSL scripts.33 SL Scripters’ Market is literally a marketplace where people can sell complex scripts they have already programmed or arrange to write scripts for pay. The Script House is similar, advertising:  Join this group and ask if you’d like a custom script or just a regular script. Custom scripting costs money, the bigger and more complicated the script the more expensive it is so don’t come in and ask for free scripts, this is our business. Hopefully you can get the script you want:) Scripters have the Title “Pro Scripter” – Pros can send notices to promote their work. Only once! Pls! Willing Scripters have the title “Scripter.”

The titles referred to here are the membership statuses within the group, and “Pls” means “please.” For comparison, Script Academy has two admin administrators, four instructors, and five mods who moderate the chat discussions. The students in Script Academy have the delightful rank of “llSetAwesome(TRUE);” which is a fictional programming command to make them become awesome.

4.3 WoW Mods Some of the most popular MMOs, notably WoW, permit users to run amateur programs called addons or mods that add onto the official software and modify the way the interface presents information.34 To illustrate how mods work and indicate that they can be useful for research, we can begin with a vignette from a day in the life of one of my WoW characters, named Lipset, a level 92 worgen member of the Alliance who happened to be in the human capital city, Stormwind, on December 2, 2016. Two of the general professions he had learned were cooking and fishing, so naturally he wanted to learn all the recipes for cooking fish. Some

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recipes can be bought from NPC vendors, found in a vast array of locations, but other recipes are looted from dead enemies or otherwise obtained while adventuring across this wild virtual world. Anyone who gains a recipe but has no use for it can sell it through one of the auction houses found in a few major commercial centers, so Lipset ambled over to the Stormwind auction house. There, three NPC auctioneers were standing behind lecterns, and clicking my computer’s mouse on one opened up WoW’s auction interface. Selecting from a list of categories at the left opened up recipes, and within it another list of categories offered cooking, which contained a list of all the cooking recipes that had had been offered for sale by other characters, including the seller’s name, how long the auction for that item would last, and the high-bid and buyout prices. Several copies of a fish recipe called “Savory Deviate Delight” were available, the cheapest having a bid of seven gold, forty-nine silver, and ninety-nine copper coins, and a buyout price of 9-99-99. Lipset could have offered eight gold coins and waited a while to see if he could get the recipe for that, but the auction information indicated the high bid would not be automatically accepted for a “very long” time, so he paid nine gold, ninety-nine silver, and ninety-nine copper coins. To actually get the recipe, he needed to walk outside the auction house to a nearby mailbox, used by players to send emails to each other, where it was delivered to him. The only ingredient required by the recipe was one fish of a variety called deviate, but he did not currently have one in his inventory. Thinking of going on a fishing expedition to catch a few deviates, he opened up the interface of a nice addon program called Fishing Buddy, which displayed a record of where he had caught different types of fish in the past. He clicked a button to sort by fish type, rather than location, and scrolled down the alphabetical list. He saw that he had caught deepsea sagefish at three locations: Twilight Highlands with a 54  percent success rate, Twilight Shore with a 32  percent success rate, and Verrall Delta where he had experienced only a 13  percent success rate. But the next item in his alphabetical list was simply useless Driftwood, so he realized he had never caught a deviate fish before. At this point, without leaving WoW but switching to a window outside it, I checked Wowpedia and discovered that deviate fish are found only around the Wailing Caverns, which are in a region called Northern Barrens on a continent far across the ocean from Stormwind, so it seemed that having Lipset voyage all the way there to catch one fish for purposes of this demonstration would be a waste of time.35 So he returned to the auction house to see if any deviate fish were for sale. Indeed, there were three, two posted by one player at a buyout cost of twenty gold coins each, and one posted by a different player whose high bid was currently just over thirty gold coins and had a buyout price of thirty-three. He bought one of the cheaper fish, went back to the mailbox to receive it and then started a campfire near it on which to cook the fish, using the new recipe. Not feeling hungry when the cooking was finished, he decided to sell the resultant fish dinner.

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For sake of this demonstration, Lipset turned on a mod program called Auctioneer, which he had run earlier to scan the auction house for the prices of available items. It told him the market price of “Savory Deviate Delight” might be twenty gold coins, three silver, and twenty copper. It also noted that the cost of placing it up for sale for forty-eight hours would be one silver coin, which frankly did not seem like much. However, to get really reliable price estimates for calibrating sale prices, Lipset would have needed to use Auctioneer many times to scan the auction house. As an experiment he followed Auctioneer’s advice, setting the buyout price at twenty gold coins, and the minimum bid at fifteen. Unfortunately, the fish he had cooked did not sell at this price during the specified auction period, so it was automatically returned to him, and he effectively lost his investment. At this point in WoW history, there were three popular mods that could assist selling through the auction house: Auctioneer, Auctionator, and TradeSkillMaster. Auctioneer was actually a whole suite of programs, dozens of separate files totaling 12.8 megabytes, sophisticated enough that economists could use it to study the complex WoW market. Although there is no legitimate way to cash WoW’s gold coins in for real-world dollars, economist Ted Castronova once estimated that the annual trade through WoW auction houses was equivalent to hundreds of millions of dollars.36 Auctionator is popular because it is the simplest of the three, and TradeSkillMaster is a complex suite of programs comparable to Auctioneer but with a different scope and focus. Auctioneer can be downloaded from auctioneeraddon.com, but like most popular WoW mods can be obtained for free from a general communication hub for WoW open-source programmers named Curse (www.curse.com). As of the day Lipset cooked the one deviate fish, Curse provided statistics with which to compare the mods. Auctioneer had been created on October 23, 2006 and most recently updated on November 3, 2016. After an update like the one WoW had experienced a few weeks earlier, users typically need to download the new version, so 435,147 downloads of Auctioneer through Curse had taken place during the previous month, and fully 23,741,745 during its entire life. Auctionator had been created on May 10, 2008, updated on November 4, 2016, with 899,647 downloads in the past month and 20,631,781 over its lifetime. TradeSkillMaster dated from October 16, 2010, was updated on November 8, 2016, with 277,036 monthly and 12,012,469 lifetime downloads. Although users of a WoW mod will occasionally need to repeat downloading a mod after a significant update, one download serves all a player’s WoW characters, so the implication is that more than a million people have downloaded each of these open-source programs. Like essentially all other WoW mods, Fishing Buddy and Auctioneer are addon programs that interact with the part of the game’s user interface that displays data, and a limited set of the game’s ordinary input variables. Blizzard carefully constructed WoW’s interface so that addons would have great difficulty influencing any of the variables that directly or indirectly determine the outcome of combat or other valuable actions inside the game. One cannot use a mod to improve the quality of one’s weapons or armor, for example. However

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a popular addon called Pawn allows one to compare swiftly and clearly a piece of armor that the character is wearing with one currently in the character’s inventory, assisting a decision about switching them. That is to say, the mods assemble, preserve, and present information, rather than empowering actions. All WoW mods are written in Lua, a scripting language that is comparable to the Linden Scripting Language used in Second Life. Developed in Brazil and used by several MMOs, as described by Wikipedia: Lua was originally designed in 1993 as a language for extending software applications to meet the increasing demand for customization at the time. It provided the basic facilities of most procedural programming languages, but more complicated or domainspecific features were not included; rather, it included mechanisms for extending the language, allowing programmers to implement such features. As Lua was intended to be a general embeddable extension language, the designers of Lua focused on improving its speed, portability, extensibility, and ease-of-use in development.37

An open-source interpreted language, Lua code can be read and modified simply by opening a file in an ordinary text editor. We can do that now for the part of the Fishing Buddy code to organize the information provided by the WoW interface about schools of fish, local swirls of water from which special types of fish can be caught. While much of the code would make no sense to someone lacking experience with languages of this kind, throughout the files there are comments to the human reader, text that Lua will not act upon because it is preceded by a double dash “--.” Here are the first few lines of code, out of a total of 236 lines in this small part of the total Fishing Buddy program: -- Support for schools local​FL​=​LibStub("LibFishing-​ 1.0"); local​LT​=​LibStub("LibTourist-​ 3.0"); --​5.0.4​has​a​problem​with​a​global​"_​ "​(see​some​for​loops​below) local _ local​zmto​=​FishingBuddy.ZoneMarkerTo; FishingBuddy.Schools​=​{}; local​CLOSEENOUGH​=​15;​--​fifteen​yards --​Let’s​store​fishing​holes​like​this --​FishingBuddy_​ Info["Schools"][ZONE] --​Store​everything​to​two​digits? local​function​AddFishingSchool(kind,​fishid,​zidx,​sidx,​x,​y) ​ ​ ​ local​entry​=​{}; ​ ​ ​ if​(​not​zidx​)​then ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ zidx,​sidx​=​FishingBuddy.GetZoneIndex(); ​ ​ ​ elseif​(​type(zidx)​=​"string"​)​then ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ zidx,​sidx​=​FishingBuddy.GetZoneIndex(zidx,​0);​ ​ ​ end ​ ​ ​ if​(​not​x​or​not​y​)​then ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ _​ ,_​ ,x,y​=​FL:GetCurrentPlayerPosition(); ​ ​ ​ end

With this background, we can consider the size and variety of the WoW addon programs available at Curse. As of October 2, 2016, a total of 4,704 mods

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Table 4.2 Overview of mods for one popular game on the Curse distribution website Category

Mods Leader

Year made

Leader downloads

Miscellaneous Chat and communication Bags and inventory Boss encounters Combat Unit frames Libraries Achievements Quests and leveling Data broker Map and minimap

399 320

2008 2008

290,401 212,558

2,261 2,384

2008 2008 2007 2009 2008 2009 2016 2016 2016

663,449 6,080,941 2,913,362 1,747,600 142,309 2,605,867 467,951 62,744 1,090,427

8,096 57,655 28,906 18,059 2,587 25,732 9,669 927 58,319

Buffs and debuffs Audio and video Action bars PvP Guild Auction and economy Plugins Tooltip Artwork Professions Garrison Titan panel Companions Roleplay Battle pets

143 140 138 124 119 118

MoveAnything BadBoy: Spam Blocker and Reporter Pawn Deadly Boss Mods Recount Tidy Plates Addon Control Panel NPCScan World Quests List Broker WorldQuests Handynotes_Legion Rares&Treasures WeakAuras 2 BigWigs_Voice Bartender4 Gladius RCLootCouncil TradeSkillMaster

2013 2014 2008 2008 2012 2010

1,025,335 32,348 410,372 217,730 381,028 1,360,817

14,071 595 7,701 8,366 6,662 35,839

102 98 96 88 65 61 56 53 52

GatherMate2_Data TipTac LUI Core Fishing Buddy Master Plan Titan Panel Collect Me Total RP 3 PetTracker

2010 2007 2011 2008 2014 2005 2009 2014 2012

215,284 81,824 51,078 385,857 1,739,840 945,091 133,348 32,648 229,280

6,973 2,711 2,618 15,833 51,090 17,436 4,442 1,148 12,119

291 245 231 211 184 183 182 163 160

Average downloads

were available. Despite so many choices, finding, downloading, and installing them was very simple. Curse ranked all the programs in terms of their number of downloads, and assigned them to topical categories. Each mod had its own page of information, with a button to click to download a zip file of the program, which merely needed to be copied into a subfolder called AddOns inside the Interface folder of WoW’s own software. I  transferred the full list of WoW programs on Curse to a spreadsheet file, then sorted by category and the number of downloads over the previous month. Table 4.2 summarizes data about the categories containing at least fifty mods, with information about the leader – the one in each category with the highest number of downloads. As we might expect, the miscellaneous category contains the most mods. The most popular one, MoveAnything, is a tool for easily moving around the

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various display windows, icons, and the like on WoW’s display screen. It had been created in 2008 and downloaded 290,401 times in the previous month. The average monthly downloads for all 399 mods in the category is 2,261. The dataset includes the download numbers of all the mods, and in this category the two lowest were both at 12. One had been created in July 2016 but not updated since then, and the other was older and had not been updated within a year. A  review on the page for one praised it as the best mod for taking screenshot pictures inside the game, first removing all the user interface information windows and control icons, then taking the picture and restoring the interface, all from only one key press. So some unpopular mods may simply be specialized or failed to get enough publicity to bring them to many players’ attention. Much more information is available about each of the 4,704 mods, for example the name of the person with the official role of project manager for it. In the case of Fishing Buddy, the project manager uses the pseudonym Sutorix, which happens to be the name of a senior WoW avatar who has reached the maximum fishing skill level of 800, has caught 28,881 fish, and completed 462 daily fishing quests.38 We can assume these are one and the same person, indeed a respected public figure, but cannot connect them to a real-life identity. On Curse, the profile page for Sutorix says he has been active for more than eleven years and has posted 1,200 forum messages.39 From the profile page of a contributor one may either go to the messages, and laboriously tabulate which other contributors exchanged messages about a particular open-source addon, or to a page listing all the software projects the particular programmer had submitted. Table 4.2 reported the high-level structure that maps the 4,704 mods, and the structure of collaborations between programmers could similarly be mapped. Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi has extensively studied the WoW modding community, naturally including the social and cultural aspects of this active, worldwide network of thousands of people. However, she notes that a primary motive for modders is nonsocial, concerning their own individual relationships with the technology: Modding is part of a larger movement of participant production on the Internet in which people create content simply because they want to … Modding establishes an ethos that allows for a more open relationship between people and technology. While sustained by a great many technological features and processes beyond the reach of players, World of Warcraft represents a family of technological artifacts that open the black box at least partially, trying out alternative principles of human engagement with technology that enable the incorporation of direct user experience. World of Warcraft, and, more broadly, a range of video games, allow players to intervene and modify some of the ways games are played. In this respect, games such as WoW are to some degree reflexive, allowing the experience of playing to feed back on the game and aspects of the software through which it is enacted.40

Remarkably, such popular games as recent ones in the Fallout series allow players to “hack” the program, not by writing mod programs, but by entering

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commands that put the avatar into God mode in which it becomes invulnerable and its gun will never run out of ammunition.41 The typical player does not initially know what these commands are, but can learn about them online. This may be an advertising tactic by the game company, energizing interest in a game after a player has already progressed far in it, and helping publicize the game months after it was originally sold. But it does not cause blatantly unfair competition, because Fallout games have been solo, rather than being massively multiplayer. To the extent that solo game players do compete, for example by posting YouTube videos of their accomplishments, it may be obvious when they are in God mode, but more limited hacking of the game parameters will not be visible. In principle, the WoW addons may help in economic competition within the game, but have only limited effect on combat. Still, the meaning of modding is open to debate, and may be shaped by the wider culture. In research done in collaboration with a number of other social and information scientists, Nardi has compared the WoW modding communities in the United States and China, finding differences that might reflect national culture, the particular commercial organization of the game industry in the two countries, or that point in the parallel but unsynchronized histories of modding when the studies were done.42 With direct encouragement from the company that created WoW, and a longer period of time in which to organize, the American community was somewhat more mature than the Chinese, which relied more heavily upon informal mentoring of newcomers by veterans. Subsequently, the Chinese MMO industry became very competitive on the world scene.

4.4 Music as Software or Data Online gameworlds differ greatly in which mods, if any, they permit. In its early months after launching in Europe and North America on September 16, 2014, ArcheAge was infamous for permitting cheaters to use “bots” to buy up property faster than human players could without the assistance of these virtual robots. Given that this was a Westernization of an existing Korean game, the losers in this unfair competition were not sure whether to complain to the XL Games company in its native land, or to the otherwise very respectable Trion Worlds in America that had adapted it for its new audience. Pluribus Games, the very small company that operated the marvelous simulation of ancient Egypt, A Tale in the Desert, tried to limit bots to tools like one that simplified cutting the grass, and instituted a system in which players could vote to ban cheaters. The much larger BioWare, Electronic Arts, and LucasArts companies that owned SWTOR simply programmed its software so that a mod had nowhere to attach itself. Turbine, the company that produced LotRO, went in a different direction, encouraging fans to create mods that enhanced the user interface with tools for

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the performing arts. A simple demonstration case is Poetical, a plugin as mods are known in some circles, created by someone using the moniker Simbo.43 To obtain it, one goes to a website called LoTROInterface which is similar to Curse but offering far fewer programs, all also written in the Lua language. One downloads a free mod into a folder on one’s computer titled Plugins, starts up LotRO, then enters these private slash commands into the text chat of the interface: “/plugins load poetical” followed by “/poetical show.” A fairly large window opens up on the screen, where one can enter the texts of several poems, select among them, and print each line of text into the public text chat by simply clicking the button to the right of it. When all the poetry has been expressed, “/poetical hide” will close the window. As a first test, to embrace the archaic style of Middle Earth, I entered the first several lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the first four could be textually uttered by my avatar with four leisurely clicks: Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour …

For a second test, taking archaisms to an even deeper level and testing the system’s ability to handle Anglo-Saxon, I  entered the beginning of Beowulf, which worked equally well: Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Unless I erased them, my avatar would have those two works of Tolkienesque poetry available whenever the social occasion suited. In fact, Tolkien’s Hobbits seem to speak Anglo-Saxon, since they use the word mathom for treasure, given that the original Anglo-Saxon is máðum.44 Poetical is one of five plugins created by Simbo, who has also created two that simulate speaking in the fictional Elvish Neo-Sindarin language, and in the Neo-Khuzdul tongue of Dwarves. Simbo uploaded five increasingly perfect versions of Poetical from February 26, 2015 to April 23, 2016, and inhabitants of Middle Earth downloaded it 2,410 times by October 17, 2016. Although singing is not possible in LotRO, there is an advanced system for playing musical instruments.45 Its essential features are built into the game’s software, but two very different kinds of open-source creativity add greatly to the potential. First, the software requires the music to be written in an alphabetic notation system called ABC, so contributors must laboriously translate their music into that system, whether they composed it themselves, or arranged it from an existing printed score.46 Second, open-source software, here examined in the variant called Songbook, allows many avatars to play as if they were an orchestra, with some simple animation as well as the blended sounds of

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multiple instruments. To get a sense of the ABC notation, here the first phrase of J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, as transcribed by someone using the moniker Celestial: “A/2G/2A6 z G/2 F/2 E/2 D/2 ^C3/2 D4 z.” We normally think of a musical score as data, comparable to a text file as written language, yet in serious computer science the distinction between data and software is blurred, and this is really an open-source program that another program can interpret to play musical tones. In the virtual Middle Earth environment, the following instruments can be purchased for two silver coins each from an NPC bard: clarinet, flute, harp, horn, lute, drum, theorbo, bagpipes, cowbells, pibgorn, Misty Mountain harp, and Lute of Ages. Instruments can also be built from scavenged raw materials by any character who has gained sufficient skill in woodworking. One class of character, the minstrel, not only plays music on these instruments but also uses them to create magical advantages during combat, following complex musicological rules. Any class of character may play one of these instruments, after receiving the right training from another player whose minstrel character has achieved at least level 30 of experience and is willing to serve as mentor. Fairly realistic sounds are synthesized by the LoTROInterface on the user’s own computer. This means that anyone whose character is standing near the musician may hear it. The instrument does not really produce the sounds, but the character must be holding it for the sounds to be produced. A solo musician can play simply by pressing keys on the computer’s keyboard, but the marvelous Songbook mod created by Chiran is required for group performances. The LoTROInterface website says the current version of Songbook had been downloaded 134,248 times, and describes it thus:  “Songbook is a plugin for browsing your abc song files and playing them with a click of a button. The plugin consists of two parts, an in-game plugin which displays the song library, and an external windows program that generates a list of your abc song files in a format that the plugin can read.”47 An orchestra of a dozen characters can perform a series of musical works in perfect coordination, even if their players live on different continents in the real world. Since the music is actually produced on each user’s computer, the performance is not affected by internet lag. In that same way that LoTROInterface offers open-source mods like Poetical and Songbook, another website, called LotRO-ABC, offers the scores of orchestral music in the ABC notation. As of October 3, 2016, 1,466 scores from 142 arrangers could be downloaded, classified by the website into genres, 16 of which are listed in Table 4.3. Of these scores, 12 are not in the table because they belonged to nearly empty categories:  anime, documentary, jazz/blues, latin, nursery rhyme, other, ragtime, and rock/contemporary. Of the arrangers, 47 contributed only a single score, while 6 contributed at least 50 and have separate columns in the table. Given that the names are pseudonyms chosen by the arrangers, who are open to publicity, the table gives these one-word names

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Table 4.3 Classification of musical scores available from LotRO-ABC Ducksey Cyrano Ratissia Tiamo Cervantes Asphyx Other 136 Classical Contemporary Country Electronic Folk Hip hop/R & B Metal Original Reggae/ dancehall Rock/pop Seasonal/festive Spiritual Traditional TV/movie/ theater Unknown Video game TOTAL

0 4 0 2 0 0 11 0 1

10 10 3 0 1 1 11 4 0

0 3 0 2 1 2 0 0 0

7 2 0 1 1 0 2 0 0

0 4 2 0 1 3 9 0 1

0 1 7 0 0 1 10 0 0

78 87 30 12 26 14 111 12 12

60 0 0 3 5

29 28 2 0 5

50 0 0 2 9

8 0 1 28 12

30 0 0 0 5

27 0 0 0 8

329 3 2 48 121

2 21

1 0

0 0

1 0

0 1

0 0

6 106

109

105

69

63

56

54

997

as they appear on the site. Clearly, the rock/pop category is most popular, but patterns differ across arrangers. Ducksey and some of the less prolific arrangers have invested some effort into providing scores for music from popular video games, while Cyrano is almost alone in orchestrating traditional seasonal music, and also provides more classical scores than the others. Tiamo ignores the most popular category, offering some scores explicitly categorized as classical, but many with the more folkish traditional label. Given that Lord of the Rings is a pseudo-medieval fantasy, with strong religious overtones, it is surprising that there are no medieval or religious categories. Of the ninety-five scores classified classical, nineteen were works by Johan Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), seventeen by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), six each by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756– 91) and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93), and four by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759). There are also five arrangements of the same piece by Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706). Fully seven of the supposedly classical works, all arranged by Cyrano, are by a modern musician, Yann Tiersen. With the possible exceptions of “Greensleeves” and “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional category does not include medieval music, either. This point raises the more general question of the extent to which games based on erudite fantasies, such as J.  R.  R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of

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the Rings, can effectively connect modern audiences to their ancient cultural roots.48 There are no Gregorian chants in the list of scores, nor reference to such antique music as the recently popular Play of Daniel, now nearly 800  years old.49 Tolkien, it should be remembered, was a professor of historical linguistics and devout Roman Catholic, who intended his stories to revere the ancient past of his own English people, within the context of the wider Germanic languages and lore, and serving Christian reconciliation of parties to group conflict.50 His Ring can be seen as a refutation as well as partner of Richard Wagner’s Ring, seeking reunification of the Germanic peoples, after Tolkien’s personal trauma of seeing English friends die during World War I. The four races in LotRO are allies, rather than competing factions like the Horde and Alliance of WoW. LotRO was published by Turbine in 2007, also responsible for publishing the MMO version of the influential table-top game, Dungeons and Dragons Online in 2006, and responsible way back in 1999 for the heroic fantasy Asheron’s Call. For some time, employee layoffs testified to the challenges Turbine faced in the online game market, and in 2016 the company decided to concentrate on simpler games for mobile devices. Near the end of that year, it announced that LotRO and Dungeons and Dragons Online would be spun off into a new company, named Standing Stone Games in apparent homage to Stonehenge, publishing through Daybreak, a spinoff from Sony that was struggling to manage somewhat similar fantasy games like EverQuest.51 By the time this book is published we may know the outcome of this valiant attempt at preservation, but there is much to be said for the idea of creating a new kind of digital library, which would preserve the best MMOs even after the companies that created them cease to exist.52

4.5 A Software Social Movement The examples of open source we have considered to this point were natural successors to the openness that existed when personal computers were first introduced late in the 1970s, but much of the research on social structure in open-source communities has focused on rather more organized and ideologically articulated examples, notably the Linux Operating System, the central part of which is called its kernel.53 Wikipedia reports: The Linux kernel was conceived and created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his personal computer and with no cross-platform intentions, but has since expanded to support a huge array of computer architectures, many more than other operating systems or kernels. Linux rapidly attracted developers and users who adopted it as the kernel for other free software projects. The Linux kernel has received contributions from nearly 12,000 programmers from more than 1,200 companies, including some of the largest software and hardware vendors.54

Linux is far more complex than the examples of open-source software considered above, so it requires a larger team but also an appropriate social organization to integrate both innovation and evaluation, identifying bugs or other

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problems in any new code, and collectively seeking solutions to programs. Reporting their results of studying the Linux community in the journal Organziation Science in 2003, Gwendolyn Lee and Robert Cole proposed what has become a standard model of social structure of open-source communities, two tiers of participation, called core and periphery.55 The core may have a single formal coordinator, with a trusted group of assistants who are well known to each other and have earned each other’s trust, achieving success through energetic communications.56 The periphery can be much larger in population and diffuse in social connectedness, perhaps as in the Linux community playing somewhat distinct roles of developing new features or reporting bugs in parts of the program. In contrast to firm-based software development inside a company that keeps its source code secret, open-source has these features: • Knowledge is public but can be owned by members who contribute it as long as they share it. • Membership is open, so the scale of the community is not constrained. • Members of the community are volunteers who do not receive salaries in exchange for their work. • Distribution extends beyond the boundary of the firm. • Technology-mediated interaction is the mode of communication.57 The reference in the first point to ownership of the software by the members of the community is ambiguous, and there has been considerable debate over the years. However, the core meaning of ownership for most of these communities is receiving public credit for one’s contributions, as we gave the names Joseph Urbas, Sutorix, and Simbo, implicitly thanking them for specific examples, above. Clearly, Linus Torvalds deserves and has received significant credit for Linux and through its success for the open-source software movement more generally, although the result for many users was domination by the duopoly of Microsoft and Linux.58 Another name often mentioned is Richard Stallman, who was distressed by the shift taking place in the 1980s toward dominance of software by corporate monopolies, as described also in Organization Science by Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh: Richard Stallman, a brilliant programmer at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was especially distressed and offended by this loss of access to communally developed source code and also by a general trend in the software world towards development of proprietary software packages and the release of software in forms that could not be studied or modified by others. Stallman viewed these practices as morally wrong impingements upon the rights of software users to freely learn and create. In response, he founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and set out to develop and diffuse a legal mechanism that could preserve free access for all to the software developed by software hackers. His pioneering idea was to use the existing mechanism of copyright law to this end.59

Wikipedia describes the result: “Copyleft (a play on the word copyright) is the practice of offering people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a work with the stipulation that the same rights be preserved in

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derivative works down the line. Copyleft software licenses are considered protective, as contrasted with permissive free software licenses.”60 In order to gain open access to software already written by other people, a programmer who modifies the software must grant the same right to others in the future.61 The website for the GNU Operating System, based on Stallman’s ideas and Linux, proclaims a doctrine of four essential freedoms: • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.62 One of the most striking ways in which the open-source social movement deserves the designation “open” is that it has always been international. Richard Stallman was born and remains within the United States, while Linus Torvalds was born, educated, and created the Linux kernel in Finland, long before moving to the United States. Opensourcing has been compared with outsourcing, the transfer of jobs to places where the costs are lower but the quality still respectable.63 US companies like Apple that manufacture computer hardware often outsource to China, but software companies and those that use information technology for communications often outsource to India, at least in part because of the numbers of people there who have mastered the English language. Aware of this, I  decided that the next pilot study for this chapter should look at a subset of Facebook groups in India, associated with the opensource movement. A logical start is the Wikipedia page for the Free Software Foundation, established in 1985 by Richard Stallman, who is still its president.64 It contains a link to the page for Free Software Foundation of India, which says:  It was founded in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), the capital of Kerala in 2001, as a nonprofit Company. The FSFI advocates to promote the use and development of free software in India. This includes educating people about free software, including how it can help the economy of a developing country like India. FSF India regards non-free software as not a solution, but a problem to be solved. Free software is sometimes locally called swatantra software in India.65

Checking Facebook did not turn up much, but the Wikipedia page for the Free Software Foundation of India contains a link to what appears to be a rival group, the Free Software Movement of India  – movement not foundation.66 That page admits there has been some conflict between the two rival groups, and links to a page for Swecha, one of the subgroups within the movement:

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Swecha is a non-profit organization formerly called as Free Software Foundation Andhra Pradesh (or FSF-AP in short) later changed name to Swecha which is also the first Telugu Operating System released in year 2005, Swecha is a part of Free Software Movement of India (FSMI). This organization is a social movement that works towards enlightening the masses with the essence of Free Software and to liberate knowledge to the commoners. Swecha organizes different workshops and seminars in the Indian state of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh among the youth to spread the idea of knowledge liberation. The swecha has a sizable number of followers in states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and a vibrant community of software users, students, academicians and software professionals/developers determined to provide quality software built on the guidelines of free software development model. Presently Swecha is active GLUG (GNU/Linux User Group) in many engineering colleges like International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, St. Martin’s Engineering College, Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology, SCIENT Institute of Technology, CMR Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, Jyothishmathi College of Engineering and Technology etc. in and around Telangana & Andhra Pradesh.67

Searching Facebook for groups with names using the words and phrases in the movement’s Wikipedia pages turned up six groups with more than 500 members each, two of which are also included the open-hardware movement that applies similar principles to innovation in physical technologies: • Free Software Movement Karnataka (Karnataka, October 25, 2010):  “A non profit organization which works on awareness against the monopolizing the software. FSMK believes in the ideology of Free Software where the user should have the control over the software and not the vice-versa.” • Swecha:  Technology for Society (Andhra Pradesh, October 27, 2010): “Swecha is a not for profit organization in Andhra Pradesh working for computing freedom using Free Software through collaborative means. Swecha has evolved into an organization of researchers from industry, academia and users of computers who respect computing in freedom.” • Open Source (Tamil Nadu, March 14, 2011): “ ‘We believe in Openness, We believe in Freedom of Free Software and so you will.’ This Group is dedicated to the Lovers of GNU/Linux Operating System, Free Open Source Software. Here we shall share the information about the above all and can help each other for any assistance regarding GNU/Linux OS and the Philosophy of Open Source + Free Software and Open Source Hardware (Arduino). Even New members who do not know what is Linux can also join so that you will learn lot of things from here.” • Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu (Tamil Nadu, June 20, 2013): “Hackers & Makers: If you are already aware of Free Software & Free Hardware, then you might be interested to be part of our community. Some of our community works include creating or exploring and deploying Free Software Alternatives, Project Meshnet, Community Weather stations, etc.”68

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• Indian Linux Users Group Chennai (Tamil Nadu, September 16, 2013): “Facebook group for Indian Linux Users Group  – Chennai” [formerly called Madras]. • Open Hardware India (Andhra Pradesh, April 27, 2014): “This a community of open hardware enthusiasts collaborating to learn about new trendings of open hardware philosophies & technologies.” The combined memberships of the six groups had a total of 14,962 different names, of which 14,793 were in the Latin alphabet that English uses. Most of the other scripts in which names were written were the ones native to the ethnic groups living in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu: seventy-seven Tamil, thirty-one Kannada, nineteen Telgulu, nine Hindi, and four Malayalam. Of course, Tamil is also one of the main languages of nearby Sri Lanka, and one name was in the Sinhala script that predominates there. Interestingly, a few members gave their names in other alphabets from further away: twelve Chinese, five Russian, four Arabic, two Bengali, two Thai, and one Sudanese. The fact that these six Facebook groups use English as their lingua franca says something important about the changing world culture in the age of the Internet, but this does not mean that Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam are dying out. They belong to the Dravidian language family that is indigenous to southern India and spoken by well over 100,000,000 people.69 We might hypothesize that some Facebook users create two or more personas, one for each of the languages they use, but this could be explored in later research, and cannot be considered deeply in the present analysis. Only three people belong to all six groups, seven to five of them and forty-six to four. But as Table  4.4 reports, some of the groups have reasonably numerous interlocks. There is an average 21.9 percent interlock between Swecha:  Technology for Society and Open Hardware India, most likely reflecting the fact that both are centered in Andhra Pradesh. Similarly, the three Tamil Nadu groups have relatively high average percent interlocks of 18.2, 26.4, and 28.2 percent. The fact that the exact same number of people (sixty-eight), link Free Software Movement Karnataka with both Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu and Indian Linux Users Group Chennai is a coincidence, but the probability of such coincidences is not simple. In this case, thirty-nine people belong to all three groups, thus setting the lower bound of the probability distribution well above zero. It is worth noting that the names of half the groups specify a geographic focus: Free Software Movement Karnataka, Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu, and Indian Linux Users Group Chennai. Yet the group with the highly generic name, Open Source, links to the two other Tamil Nadu groups. A classic article in the social analysis of computer-supported cooperative work field, is “Distance Matters,” by Gary and Judith Olson, whose own social bond consists of marriage as well as scientific collaboration. They summarized their ambitious analysis thus:

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Table 4.4 Interlocks linking six open-source Facebook groups in India

FSM Karnataka Swecha Open Source FSF Tamil Nadu Indian Linux Open Hardware

FSMK Swecha Open Source

FSFTN

Indian Linux

Open Hardware

6,731 176 297 68 68 47

6.2% 2.5% 18.2% 597 176 9

5.7% 2.2% 26.4% 28.2% 653 7

3.6% 21.9% 1.7% 2.8% 1.0% 717

5.1% 2,318 67 24 22 240

5.0% 2.1% 5,304 195 307 21

We review over 10  years of field and laboratory investigations of collocated and noncollocated synchronous group collaborations. In particular, we compare collocated work with remote work as it is possible today and comment on the promise of remote work tomorrow. We focus on the sociotechnical conditions required for effective distance work and bring together the results with four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness. Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration and collaboration technology, have a chance at succeeding with remote work. Deviations from each of these create strain on the relationships among teammates and require changes in the work or processes of collaboration to succeed. Often they do not succeed because distance still matters.70

Two of their terms require definition: “Common ground refers to that knowledge that the participants have in common, and they are aware that they have it in common.”71 “We use the concept of coupling to refer to the extent and kind of communication required by the work.”72 So at least four other factors are significant, yet distance still does matter.73 The active members of these six Facebook groups in three regions of southern India are clearly information technology professionals, often with an entrepreneurial bent but technically sophisticated. Quite apart from their ideological dedication to open-source principles, many are using the Facebook groups to promote themselves and sustain the local but extended social networks that can help them find better jobs in the information technology industries that have already been established in their geographic area.74 We may well ask whether organizational boundaries still matter, walling common ground off from the surrounding society. The situation today is at best dynamic, but also uncertain. It is an open question how much the principles of open source or free and libre can benefit an organization like a software company, if practiced internally – what some commentators call open-source software 2.0 or inner source.75 Corporations may be very selective in operationalizing “open,” making only some of the software source code public, and they may tend to participate in open-source communities to the extent that the project is large, growing, or shows other signs of potential

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commercial success.76 A  considerable research literature has examined the processes by which open-source programming communities develop organizational structures, yet one limitation on both the reality and its scholarly interpretation is that information technology has been evolving so rapidly that social structures may often disintegrate soon after they congeal.77 There is some evidence that the degree to which a programming community is structured influences the degree to which the software they produce is also structured.78 A factor that may impact open- versus closed-source software differently is the vulnerability to cyberattacks. One may argue that publishing source code gives hackers and hostile governments an easy opportunity to devise computer viruses or other means of attack, because they can directly see any vulnerabilities in the original code. The opposite may also be argued, that members of an open-source community may be better able to find and remedy any such vulnerabilities, because they bring many different perspectives to their collective work. An intense and complex example is Mirai, a form of 2016 malware that takes control of systems that are running Linux to perform distributed denial of service attacks on websites, by flooding the target website with vast numbers of inquiries that prevent legitimate users from reaching the sites.79 Mirai is very innovative, because it primarily takes control of secondary devices in the “Internet of Things,” and much of the news about the attacks blames users for failing to update the passwords on all their devices. However, it is especially worth noting that Mirai is itself open-source software, enabling a vast community of hackers to use it in their search for power over conventional social organizations.

4.6 The Maker Movement During the Obama administration in the United States, but simultaneously worldwide as illustrated by the two Indian groups that included open-hardware with open-source software, a phenomenon called the maker movement encouraged ordinary citizens to manufacture complex, individualized products, often using computer-controlled devices such as 3D printers. A now-archived Whitehouse website proclaimed:  Nation of Makers:  America has always been a nation of tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. In recent years, a growing number of Americans have gained access to technologies such as 3D printers, laser cutters, easy-to-use design software, and desktop machine tools. This, in combination with freely available information about how to use, modify, and build upon these technologies and the availability of crowd funding platforms, is enabling more Americans to design and build almost anything.80

The introduction to the Wikipedia page for “maker culture” makes it very clear why this topic is the right choice for the concluding section of a chapter on open-source software:

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The maker culture is a contemporary culture or subculture representing a technologybased extension of DIY [do-it-yourself] culture that intersects with hacker culture (which is less concerned with physical objects as it focuses on software) and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of Computer Numeric Control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and, mainly, its predecessor, the traditional arts and crafts. The subculture stresses a cut-and-paste approach to standardized hobbyist technologies, and encourages cookbook re-use of designs published on websites and maker-oriented publications. There is a strong focus on using and learning practical skills and applying them to reference designs.81

A good deal of government-funded research explored the technical challenges, and some looked at a few social aspects. As the Internet was drawing people away from public libraries, some visionaries contemplated transforming the old magazine reading rooms into makerspaces or fab labs, where members of the library could use computer-controlled 3D printers and similar fabrication devices to explore new forms of creativity, or students could learn fundamentals of twenty-first-century engineering. The maker movement has not stabilized yet, or even acquired a clear definition, but here is some of the philosophy as expressed in a manifesto written by Mark Hatch: MAKE:  Making is fundamental to what it means to be human. We must make, create, and express ourselves to feel whole. There is something unique about making physical things. These things are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our souls. SHARE: Sharing what you have made and what you know about making with others is the method by which a maker’s feeling of wholeness is achieved. You cannot make and not share. GIVE: There are few things more selfless and satisfying than giving away something you have made. The act of making puts a small piece of you in the object. Giving that to someone else is like giving someone a small piece of yourself. Such things are often the most cherished items we possess.82 The maker movement is a complex conjunction of several different technologies and social motivations, so a pilot study lacking a clear theoretical focus and extensive observational experience inside the movement might not produce clear results. Here we shall see just enough information to understand the rough dimensions of this complexity. A quick Facebook search for “maker movement” turned up a few public groups, two of which were connected to major universities. Makerspace Urbana (1,097 members, 12 admins), based at the University of Illinois, offered this Facebook description: “Makerspace Urbana, a project of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, is dedicated to enabling the blend of arts, humanities, science and technology. Our mission is to provide an open community lab where people of diverse

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backgrounds can learn, teach, tinker, collaborate, share, innovate, socialize, and create.” Rutgers Makerspace (1,044 members, 9 admins), at Rutgers University in New Jersey, called itself a club, and in lieu of a Facebook self-description linked to two websites with these presentations on the home pages: We provide the knowledge, tools, and workspace to enable you to design and create whatever you can dream up. We provide usage of our machines for free, and only charge for any materials that we provide. The Makerspace will teach you to use the latest in rapid prototyping technology alongside woodshop, textiles, and electronics equipment to help you build out your projects. Typical projects at the Makerspace include school assignments, hobbies, customized gifts, or even learning a new skill. Our goal is to foster a community of students, faculty, and staff with enthusiasm for DIY projects and fabrication. Please reach out to us and let us help you make your ideas a reality!83 A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT: Rutgers Makerspace Club is a student-run organization, operating alongside the Rutgers Makerspace on Livingston Campus. We host weekly events to teach students how to use the Makerspace equipment. Some of the Makerspace’s equipments include 3D printers, a laser-cutting machine, electronics, and wood-working equipment. Our meetings are a great opportunity for you to meet like-minded, passionate people with different skill-sets and backgrounds. By providing resources to creative, passionate people, we hope to further Rutgers’ competitive stance in events nationwide.84

We might imagine that members of one group would be interested in reading the news and ideas for projects on the Facebook page of the other, and the two universities are comparable in academic status, but only nineteen people were members of both, none of them being an admin in either group. The Rutgers paragraphs make clear why. At the present time, maker groups are local, sharing a physical workshop with particular equipment and access to necessarily diverse raw materials. 3D printers and laser-cutting machines are computer controlled, although the software to run them is usually commercial and must be purchased with each machine or for each workshop. Efforts are under way to develop geographically dispersed networks comparable to open-source software communities, sharing modifiable data files that instruct a machine how to make a particular component for a project.85 But the maker movement is not defined as a twin to open-source software, merely having some features in common that may interest social scientists. A sense of the possible wider community was sought by inspecting the public group memberships of the twenty-one admins. This work was extremely perplexing, because some of them list many hobby groups that craft physical items, but may use nothing comparable to open-source software, although possessing online communities. For example, 13,899 people belong to Viking Clothing:  “This group is for Viking clothing enthusiasts.  – Experienced as inexperienced. It is aimed primarily at the re-enactor community, although of course others are more than welcome, provided they understand that the main aim of this group is historical accuracy depending on archaeological, historical and other scholarly sources.” The reference to “re-enactor community”

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connects to the rather popular and somewhat recent cultural movement called cosplay, which Wikipedia correctly describes thus: “A hobby in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character. Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture, and a broader use of the term ‘cosplay’ applies to any costumed role-playing in venues apart from the stage.”86 It is hard to imagine anything more suitable for socialpsychological field research, but further from the topic of this chapter. Here are some Facebook groups to which an Urbana or Rutgers admin belongs, which are more obviously representative of the maker movement, whether computational or not, leaving out one group with fully 594 members that is a selfexpression site for a pair of boys age nine and eleven whose names would be revealed in the name of the page: • Bangalore Makespace and Open Source Creativity (18,222): “A forum for Makers, Creators, DIY enthusiasts and Hobbyists who identify with the Global Maker Movement, Makerspaces, FabLabs and other avenues of Open Source Creativity!” • MakerSpaces and the Participatory Library (4,622 members):  “An open space for collaboration and sharing about MakerSpaces, digital media labs, and participatory/community spaces in libraries. Let’s share ideas, failures, successes, and resources!” • 3D Printer  – RepRap  – Unique-3D  – 3Д Принтер  – 3Д печать  – Unique3D (2,648):  A Russian Facebook group, with no description but marked with two of the standard Facebook tags: 3D Printing and Technology. The name RepRap is defined on the website reprap.org: “RepRap is humanity’s first general-purpose self-replicating manufacturing machine. RepRap takes the form of a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap prints those parts, RepRap self-replicates by making a kit of itself – a kit that anyone can assemble given time and materials. It also means that  – if you’ve got a RepRap  – you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend.”87 • Rapid Prototyping & Manufacturing (2,519): “News and discussions about new developments and trends in rapid prototyping, additive manufacturing, 3D printing, rapid tooling and rapid manufacturing.” • India Maker Movement (1,783): “This group is a place for anyone passionate about making things and then sharing with others. We’re a community of engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and makers who come together to learn from one another and sharpen our collective hardware skills. Whether you’re an early-stage startup, a seasoned manufacturing expert, or just someone that wants to learn, this is the place for you. The India Maker Movement Group is powered by Autodesk Fusion 360, the first 3D CAD/CAM tool of its kind; connecting your entire product development process in a single cloud-based platform that works on both Mac and PC.”

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• Fab Academy (1,640):  There is no Facebook description, but two of its four admins work at Fab Lab Barcelona, which “is part of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, where it support different educational and research programs related with the multiple scales of the human habitat. It is also the headquarters of the global coordination of the Fab Academy program in collaboration with the Fab Foundation and the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; the Fab Academy is a distributed platform of education and research in which each Fab Lab operates as a classroom and the planet as the campus of the largest University in construction in the world, where students learn about the principles, applications and implications of digital manufacturing technology.”88 • Small Fab Lab Network (1,199):  “Welcome to the burgeoning Small Fab Lab Network. If the startup cost for a regular fab lab is about US$100k, can we start a small fab lab for about US$10k? Such a suite must  – like the MIT standard suite – comply to conditions like stable product, worldwide shipping, open source where possible and ease of use. We’re developing a comprehensive bill of materials for small fab labs and facilitating their growth worldwide.” Although this group was created by an MIT graduate student, it links to a Dutch website: “The miniFabLab explores affordable desk-top fabbing machines. The focus is on their potential for home, artists, schools, makerspaces, libraries and mobile. We look at their possibilities, limitations and ease of use.”89 • Kerala MakeSpace and Open Source Creativity (849): “Please post things you’ve made, invented or enhanced across any category: DIY Electronics, Robotics, IoT, 3D Printing and Digital Fabrication, Art and Design, Woodworking, Metalworking, as well as how you went through your ‘maker journey’ – so as to create a true knowledge-sharing community of interested and sincere Makers.” • Shared Threads Workspace (51 members): “Offers a community space, in cooperation with Makerspace Urbana, that seeks to inspire creativity, innovation and expression of ideas through sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidery and other fiber arts.” • Fabulous Fabrication Academy 2015 (18): “If you’re in the Fab Academy ’15 Class this is a place to share your feels! Excited about something you’re working on? Please share! Happy you took a fabulous new pic of something you made? Yay we want to see! Frustrated by something you’re working on and want to destroy your computer? Post about it here … and then destroy your computer!” Only two of these have more than one Urbana or Rutgers admin as a member, Fab Academy that has two, and Shared Threads Workspace that is a specialized partner of the main Urbana group to which many of its admins belong. All four of the foreign groups are listed only because one of the Rutgers admins belonged to all of them. From a macrosociological theoretical standpoint, it is worth comparing the maker movement with the online spaceflight movement examined

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in Chapter 2. With the exception of a few intellectual entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who told an Australian audience in 2017 that his Martian colony could be established within a decade, knowledgeable experts do not believe that private citizens are in any position to achieve breakthroughs in space travel.90 Yet it is not a foregone conclusion that the maker movement can really transform manufacturing industries, given the low cost of mass production. There exists a totally different model of how future industry will be organized: distributed manufacturing.91 In one of its possible forms, many products will be made in local workshops, commercially by professionals rather than by amateurs, using the technologies currently promoted by the maker movement. Each local workshop will create products that serve the local culture, for example decorating dinner dishes with pictures of local landmarks or designs preferred by particular families, but in a franchise structure dominated by a large-scale supplier of technologies protected by intellectual property rights and global advertising. Currently, much research is in progress in and around distributed manufacturing and its relationship to the maker movement, including intensive studies of how comparable forms of manufacturing are organized in Asia versus the United States.92 A third model of future manufacturing, which some researchers are helping to develop, would involve a great diversity of totally independent workshops, in which technically skilled artists would create unique products, potentially transforming every object in human possession into a work of art.93

4.7 Conclusion The open-source software communities described in this chapter differ in terms of their relationships to other communities, both online and in the external world. Second Life is a nongame virtual world, which lacks the strictly imposed social structures of games like WoW and LotRO. The Facebook groups of southern India are much more closely connected to the real lives and careers of the members, who work in the information technology industry that is fundamental for all these communities. The norms of the open-source software community resemble those of the more traditional scientific community, where information was widely shared, so long as scientists were given personal credit for their discoveries. Today, many kinds of science rely upon software to gather and process data, with numerous motivations for following the open-source principles.94 Even beyond the scope of the maker movement, engineering is also using the software and applying its principles to technology development.95 More generally, it has been realized since the beginning of the current century that many kinds of complex work would migrate to a variety of virtual environments as the Internet matured.96 A highly significant example is how open-source software prepared the way for the emergence of wikis, collective projects for sharing huge quantities of information online within structured environments.

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5 Wikis

Wikipedia is the most influential example of a wiki, so people tend to define a wiki as an online encyclopedia, but Wikipedia’s own definition is rather different: “A wiki is a website that provides collaborative modification of its content and structure directly from the web browser.”1 This is a technical definition of how a wiki operates, and does not limit application of the technology to encyclopedias. The concept is somewhat similar to open-source software, in that users gain access to a shared online resource they can modify, each editor changing the experience for the next. Left open by this definition is the question of whether the user must register and be accepted into a closed social group before gaining access to the tool that permits modification of the website. Throughout this book I often cite a Wikipedia article, which means that its main content matched my understanding of the topic, and I think it would be a useful waypoint for any readers who wish to explore the topic. The topics cited here are usually directly related to online communities, with which Wikipedia editors have much personal and even professional experience. That does not mean I trust Wikipedia articles on very different topics, and indeed this chapter conceptualizes it more as an online community than a repository of truth. I  tend to use Wikipedia as a search engine like Google, sufficiently different in its technical and cultural configuration that the two should be used in partnership. Wikipedia often includes direct links to the literature it cites. Always it gives names and terms that can be googled, leading to publications. Thus I view wikis in two ways: (1) as expressions of the culture of its creators; and (2) as a pathway to the truth, not a storehouse of truth.

5.1 A Problematic Innovation The first wiki software was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who chose the name wiki from an Hawaiian expression meaning quick, and it was first 134

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applied to an encyclopedia in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Singer, giving birth to Wikipedia.2 A key feature is that the system preserves earlier versions of a page, so that vandalism can easily be undone, honest editing errors can easily be repaired, and researchers can analyze interactions between editors over time. By 2005, the journal Nature was reporting that the accuracy of Wikipedia was comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias.3 Yet today, no conventional encyclopedia can compete for breadth of coverage, given that the main English-language version of Wikipedia had 5,710,000 articles by September 2018. However, accuracy implies objectivity, while a very different theoretical perspective in social science, here called cultural relativism, would emphasize that online social media are shaped by the culture of their creators, and thus a wiki expresses one culture’s view of reality, at a particular point in the history of the society. The somewhat democratic principles built into Wikipedia would bias it toward popular culture, yet the fact that individuals possessing high social status within the editorship have the power to expel troublesome contributors and set standards for articles implies that the Iron Law of Oligarchy may be in effect, the dynamic struggle between equality and aristocracy that Robert Michels believed existed within every society.4 Many technical details of wiki software can be used as more-or-less subtle methods of social control, such as protecting some pages from anonymous editing and setting redirects that take the user to a page with a different title from the one the user searched for.5 This chapter will begin by using distinctive sets of Wikipedia pages to identify social phenomena that shape wikis, then consider social-structural principles illustrated by some of the many thousands of other wikis that express the perspectives of identifiable sociocultural groups. Reid Priedhorsky and Loren Terveen suggest that Wikipedia’s success demonstrates the viability of three original principles: 1. Invert the traditional publishing model, to publish first and review afterward. 2. Open editing to the maximum extent possible, offering the widest freedom to the greatest number of authors and editors. 3. Make changes in the most transparent way possible, preserving the version history in a way that is easily seen.6 Yet they note that perfect freedom ultimately brings chaos, so wiki creators have struggled to develop methods for structuring the wiki’s content, and controlling access to the editing functions, following rules consistent with their goals for the wiki. Several researchers have collaborated with social psychologist Robert Kraut to explore the variety of ways in which shared leadership operates in online volunteer communities, and how well or poorly newcomers are simultaneously socialized to the norms of the community and encouraged to contribute.7 Many other leading researchers have sought to understand the possible natural limits of open collaboration systems like Wikipedia.8 Most

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obviously, freedom and accuracy are somewhat contradictory values, and the imposition of strict quality rules on new contributors may discourage their further participation, especially if the rules are embodied in pre-programmed robot-like software rather than being gently applied as part of a recruitment process based on the development of social relationships with other human beings. In terms of the rate of new contributions, Wikipedia peaked about a decade ago, around the time that popularity of the MMORPGs and nongame virtual worlds like Second Life reached their maximum. There are many possible explanations, and the researchers who focus on any particular social medium tend to seek specific causes that they imagine might be countered by technical or social-organizational improvements. However, there are at least two classic sociological theories that might provide more general and thus more complete explanations. The extensive sociological research on the mass media over the decade following World War II emphasized the concept of early adopters, individuals who may have been more educated but certainly were more exploratory than the average citizen, who therefore tried a new communication technology first, and then promoted it among the less innovative members of their social network.9 Once the mass of the citizenry has adopted a new communication medium, it may become stale in the perspective of early adopters, who then migrate to some newer innovation. An obvious example is the transformation of television during that decade. Early programming drew upon a chaotic mixture of cultural sources, providing a significant degree of intellectual stimulation that suited the relatively prosperous and well-educated families that could afford to buy one of the early TV sets. For example, a popular 1948 model of Admiral TV set had only a ten-inch screen and thirteen channels, of which only four had programming even in the New York area, but cost about $5,000 in today’s money, including the cost of an often tall antenna.10 By the time television had become popular, it was what Newton Minow called “the vast wasteland.”11 A compatible but distinctly different theory can be imported from the sociology of religion. Religious groups can be distinguished in terms of the degree to which they are in tension with the sociocultural environment.12 This tension is both ideological disagreement and social-structural independence. A common process affecting social structure is the schismatic separation of a high-tension sect movement from a relatively low-tension established denomination. Typically, sects provide low-status members of the wider society with a special sense of honor, supported by a cohesive social community that is somewhat isolated from the extensive social network of the society. For a variety of reasons, including regression to the mean and religious encouragement of behavior that earns members increased status in the secular world, successful sects tend over time to reduce their tension, which sets the stage for new sects to erupt in schisms from the old sects. If online communities are separate

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systems of honor, their life cycle may be similar to that of sectarian movements. Chapter 7 will return to these concepts in the context of online movements that are explicitly political.

5.2 Challenges of Identity To get a glimpse beneath the surface of Wikipedia, we shall now consider the articles for two intellectually influential but nonexistent people, Publius and Bourbaki. Each is the collective identity of a group of collaborators, and thus comparable to the groups of contributors using pseudonyms who created the articles. These are extremely well-documented cases from previous centuries, so they offer a solid basis for considering the nebulous meaning of online identities today. Publius was the author of the Federalist Papers, described thus in the first paragraph of “his” Wikipedia article: The Federalist (later known as The Federalist Papers) is a collection of 85 articles and essays written (under the pseudonym Publius) by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution. Seventyseven were published serially in the Independent Journal and the New  York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of these and eight others, called The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787, was published in two volumes in 1788 by J. and A. McLean. The collection’s original title was The Federalist; the title The Federalist Papers did not emerge until the 20th century.13

That paragraph links to six other Wikipedia pages, and information about all seven is given in Table 5.1, with data dating from November 1, 2016. The ratification link went to a page named History of the United States Constitution. Data like these can easily be accessed from most Wikipedia pages, by selecting “View history” then selecting “Revision history statistics.” It is also easy if time-consuming to look at the page’s history itself, which lists all the edits by date, gives some information on the identity of the editor, and even permits close examination of what change was made by the particular edit.14 The most striking fact in the table is the very large number of editors, nearly 4,000 in the case of Alexander Hamilton. Many of the edits are very tiny, such as simply fixing a misspelling or typographical error, but some are substantial. On October 20, 2016, one eleven-year veteran of Wikipedia added 51,173 bytes on slavery, explaining “Fleshed out section in order to incorporate appropriate nuance. Hamilton’s views on and relationship with slavery were far more complex than this section was leading readers to believe. Included are sources from Hamilton’s own ledgers.” Later that day this editor followed the advice of another veteran, removing 48,932 bytes and “splitting this section off as a separate page (i.e., Alexander Hamilton and slavery).” On November 1, this new page had 59,522 bytes and had received twenty-two revisions by six editors.

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138 Table 5.1 Wikipedia pages associated with the Federalist Papers Wikipedia page

Size in bytes

Total revisions

The Federalist

47,323

1,750

938

156,260

9,957

3,963

116,877

7,356

3,229

72,526

2,867

1,310

139,061

1,420

779

145,846

8,753

3,822

4,510

51

22

Alexander Hamilton James Madison John Jay Ratification (History of US Constitution) US Constitution Independent Journal

Number First edit of editors

Most edits

IP edits (%)

Bot edits (%)

July 27, 2001 Feb. 24 2002 Aug. 15, 2001 Dec. 18, 2001 Mar. 1, 2004

2007

44.3

5.9

2006

37.3

2.8

2006

40.7

2.9

2008

36.1

4.5

2011

44.3

4.6

Oct. 15, 2001 Sep. 29, 2008

2006

39.2

2.0

2008

11.2

7.8

Worth pondering also is the fact that the first six pages in the table, all long articles with many revisions, had peak years for editing in the period 2006–11, which might be described as the high point of Wikipedia enthusiasm, after which recruitment of valuable new contributors became more difficult. The “IP edits” were made by people who had not fully registered with Wikipedia and were identified by the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of their computers, while the “bot edits” were minor changes made semi-automatically by bots or “software robots.” In its instructions to new editors, Wikipedia strongly advises against revealing their real identities, and permits nonregistration: You are not required to create an account to read or contribute to a Wikimedia Site, except under rare circumstances. However, if you contribute without signing in, your contribution will be publicly attributed to the IP address associated with your device. If you want to create a standard account, in most cases we require only a username and a password. Your username will be publicly visible, so please be careful about using your real name as your username. Your password is only used to verify that the account is yours. Your IP address is also automatically submitted to us, and we record it temporarily to help prevent abuse. No other personal information is required: no name, no email address, no date of birth, no credit card information. Once created, user accounts cannot be removed entirely (although you can usually hide the information on your user page if you choose to). This is because your public contributions must be associated with their author (you!). So make sure you pick a name that you will be comfortable with for years to come.15

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A very recent study of Wikipedia contributors reported: “We found that risks perceived by contributors to open collaboration projects include threats of surveillance, violence, harassment, opportunity loss, and fear for loved ones.”16 Thus, with high expectations of privacy nothing prevents someone from having multiple Wikipedia identities – I have two – although if one’s goal is to gain honor within the Wikipedia community, having just one identity maximizes the earning of the many status awards that are available through accumulation of points. Most articles permit editing by people who either have not registered or do not happen to have logged in as a registered editor. Since an IP address identifies a location in the Internet, rather than a user, contributions from several people may be assigned to the same IP number, and one person using multiple computers may be counted as multiple IP identities. A major cascade of scandals gained widespread publicity in 2007, when an online database called WikiScanner identified the organizations where IP edits originated, and other sites exist today that permit locating IP addresses.17 The US Constitution page received no IP edits after 2010, and the James Madison page received none after 2012. All the others in Table 5.1 received IP edits up through 2016. The reason is that unregistered editors had caused sufficient problems with the Constitution and Hamilton pages that only registered editors were allowed to make changes to them. I confirmed this interpretation by checking the Hamilton page both before and after logging into my main Wikipedia editor persona. Authorship of several Federalist Papers was disputed, and the article reports that Hamilton wrote fifty-one, Madison wrote twenty-six, Jay wrote five, and Madison and Hamilton collaborated on three. It cites a 1944 publication by Douglas Adair as its source. While Adair definitely deserves a good deal of credit, one wonders if sentimentality encouraged the Wikipedia contributors to emphasize his work, given that he committed suicide in 1968, and much of his scholarship was published posthumously by his friends.18 Were we so inclined, we could add a paragraph like the following to the Federalist Papers article. Ever since the deaths of the three authors, scholars have disputed which of them wrote a few essays for which authorship was contested. Already in 1897, Edward Gaylord Bourne suggested that when historical evidence was uncertain, the intellectual and linguistic content of the essays could be decisive:  “Fixed ideas, pet phrases, habitual modes of expression, characteristic political theories, will occur again and again, not only in the essays in question, but elsewhere in the works of the writer.”19 Bourne’s article presents text from disputed papers beside quotations from Hamilton, sees similarities, and declares him the author. In his 1944 paper on the subject, Douglas Adair, notes that in preparation for his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton wrote down his personal claims about authorship, in haste and probably making errors.20 Adair’s analysis includes much evidence and a good deal of logic, but is written dramatically, with more emotion than rigor. That does not mean that he was wrong to assign disputed papers to Madison, but it raises questions

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why the Wikipedia article on the Federalist Papers does not highlight the most significant study, listed in the citations but not mentioned in the text of the article. It was a pathbreaking 1963 mathematical analysis of word frequency by Frederick Mosteller and David L.  Wallace, using the disputed Federalist Papers as examples to advance the new field of computerized natural language processing.21 Speaking of mathematics, Nicolas Bourbaki was a mathematician of the twentieth century who made very great contributions to set theory yet never existed. Wikipedia’s article on set theory explains, “Set theory is a branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which informally are collections of objects. Although any type of object can be collected into a set, set theory is applied most often to objects that are relevant to mathematics. The language of set theory can be used in the definitions of nearly all mathematical objects.”22 How would set theory describe Bourbaki, given that he did not really exist? Perhaps he was the empty set, a type of null set that has no members.23 But there is only one empty set, since if there were multiple empty sets they could not be distinguished from each other, because all of them lack defining content. What about the set of all empty sets? It has a content of only one, the single empty set. So, we have at least one logical deduction already, that the set of all empty sets is not a member of itself. Is that Bourbaki? No, because Nicolas Bourbaki was an intersection of null sets, each of which was a different real mathematician. In less fake-rigorous language, Nicolas Bourbaki was the nom de plume – pen name or pseudonym  – used by a group of French mathematicians. Thus he was an it or a they, a group that was personified for purpose of collaborative publication: The founding members were all connected to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and included Henri Cartan, Claude Chevalley, Jean Coulomb, Jean Delsarte, Jean Dieudonné, Charles Ehresmann, René de Possel, Szolem Mandelbrojt and André Weil. There was a preliminary meeting, towards the end of 1934. Jean Leray and Paul Dubreil were present at the preliminary meeting but dropped out before the group actually formed. Other notable participants in later days were Hyman Bass, Laurent Schwartz, Jean-Pierre Serre, Alexander Grothendieck, Jean-Louis Koszul, Samuel Eilenberg, Serge Lang and Roger Godement.24

All of those named people are the topic of separate Wikipedia pages, so we could perform the same kind of analysis as we just did for Publius. But there is an additional feature of large-scale social structure, because the native language of Wikipedia is English, but the native language of Bourbaki was French. Therefore, purely as an illustration of the cross-cultural research that could be done in much more extensive projects, we shall compare the Bourbaki activity between the English and French versions of Wikipedia. Table 5.2 shows December 18, 2016 data from both the English and French pages for Bourbaki and the real mathematicians mentioned in the paragraph quoted from Bourbaki’s English page. The two Bourbaki pages are actually

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Table 5.2 The social structure of a nonexistent French mathematician Annual page views Number of editors Days after the first

Alexander Grothendieck Nicolas Bourbaki André Weil Jean-Pierre Serre Serge Lang Laurent Schwartz Jean Dieudonné Henri Cartan Samuel Eilenberg Claude Chevalley Hyman Bass Jean Leray Szolem Mandelbrojt Charles Ehresmann Jean-Louis Koszul Roger Godement Jean Delsarte Jean Coulomb René de Possel Paul Dubreil

English

French

English

French

English

French

6,186

3,914

601

276

1

850

3,880 2,290 2,216 1,447 1,283 843 734 583 456 405 373 291 226 202 167 86 76 36 28

2,035 675 999 162 1,536 640 433 45 329 24 122 139 83 87 202 53 78 50 33

249 242 217 169 147 84 135 103 68 63 71 66 49 41 43 33 8 39 31

277 120 157 41 218 94 142 29 59 15 63 60 56 30 69 20 31 31 11

472 0 554 1,042 718 1,116 153 776 780 1,821 626 1,116 930 1,693 1,080 1,205 4,226 1,116 1,205

332 850 570 2,175 402 1,157 850 2,632 1,368 3,666 1,364 1,302 1,290 3,654 1,371 2,924 2,976 2,586 3,636

quite different; for example, the French page does not mention Jean Leray and Paul Dubreil, but all the mathematicians have their own pages in both versions of Wikipedia. Table 5.2 arranges the pages in descending order of the number of views of the English page over the previous year, and all of the pages had indeed been created more than a year earlier, the most recent dating from April 21, 2013. The measure “day after the first” counts when the page was created, after the first one in the set, the English-language page for André Weil, which was created on September 25, 2001. Clearly the columns show very similar patterns, merely with the “days after” going from low to high, while the others go from high to low. Social scientists tend to use correlation analysis for large samples of even larger populations, and here we have small numbers that are hardly a random sample of the world’s mathematician population. Nonetheless, since Excel easily calculates Pearson’s r correlation coefficients, they seemed a convenient way to compare the trends. Comparing the English with French data, the correlations are 0.94 for page views, 0.80 for editors, and 0.61 for days after. These coefficients reflect the judgments of individual people, but they are more like ecological correlations,

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such as we find in studies where the unit of analysis is metropolitan areas or US states. Thus each datum contains less noise than is typically the case for an individual’s response to a questionnaire item. That largely explains why the correlations can be so large, but it is also possible that feedback loops are partly responsible, as editors make pages more attractive to be viewed, and views motivate editors to improve a page. For the English pages, the correlation between views and edits is a remarkable 0.97, and the 0.90 for the French pages is also unusually strong. While strongly correlated, both views and editors can be counted as measures of the influence or popularity of each mathematician. The same is true for days after, if more weakly and reflected by negative correlations given that the scale for days increases in the opposite direction. The correlation between views and days is –0.48 for English pages, and –0.55 for the French ones. We can speculate that these correlations are lower because in some cases one language borrows a page from the other. While the French version of Wikipedia beat the English one by 140 days in putting up a Bourbaki page, the English one beat the French handily with pages for Alexander Grothendieck, André Weil, and Henri Cartan. The original French versions were very brief placeholders posted the same day from the same IP address, rather than being full translations of the rather longer English-language pages that already existed, then they grew as many editors added to them.

5.3 The Structure of Elite Boarding Schools Wikipedia and many other wikis can be used as sources of information about traditional social structures, directly through the information content of their articles, as well as in any analysis of the relations between their editors. For example, an entry point to a social-structural analysis of American elite college preparatory (“prep”) schools is the Wikipedia article for the Eight Schools Association:  “It began informally during the 1973–74 school year and was formalized in 2006 with the appointment of a president and an executive director.”25 The first president was Edward Shanahan, the former headmaster of the Choate school in Wallingford, Connecticut, and the seven other schools are: Deerfield, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville, Mount Hermon, Andover, Exeter, and St. Paul’s. The name of each one on the Eight Schools page links to its own article, and the one for Choate says: The school has educated generations of the upper-class New England establishment and the American political elite, and it has introduced many programs to diversify the student population, including the introduction of a free education for families whose income is $75,000 or less … Choate is also a member of the Ten Schools Admissions Organization, established in 1966 and comprising Choate, Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, St. Paul’s, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville, Taft, Loomis Chaffee, and The Hill School.26

Here we will use the eleven schools in the combined memberships of the two groups to illustrate how social structure  – including especially status

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competition  – is reflected in wiki editing, with close attention to many fine details. But we shall do so in the context of recognizing that for many years these schools have played significant roles in shaping the social structure of the American elite. For example, President John Kennedy was a Choate alumnus, both presidents with the last name Bush attended Andover, and the children of President Donald Trump from his first marriage attended Choate (Ivanka) and the Hill School (Donald Jr. and Eric). Table 5.3 gives the summary information for the Wikipedia pages of the eleven schools. Among the 707 allegedly notable alumni of Phillips Exeter is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and it has even been claimed that Facebook is an adaptation of an existing system through which alumni of that school communicated.27 Often stereotyped as New England prep schools, we can see that two are actually outside New England, one each in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but all eleven are geographically concentrated, which supports a degree of integration between them, because their sports teams can easily compete against each other, thereby strengthening unity via friendly competition. Exeter and Andover were founded by different members of the Phillips family, and since 1878 have competed directly in sports, as described on a distinctive Wikipedia page: The Exeter-Andover rivalry is an academic and athletic rivalry between Phillips Academy (Andover) and Phillips Exeter Academy (Exeter), bearing many similarities of tradition and practice (as well as athletes) to the Harvard-Yale rivalry as Exeter traditionally educated its students for Harvard, much as Andover traditionally educated its students for Yale (despite being in the same state as Harvard). Today, Phillipians and Exonians continue to matriculate in large numbers to both Harvard and Yale, as well as many other top universities. The athletic rivalry between these two schools began with baseball, and football soon followed the same year. Today the two schools face each other in several sports every fall, winter, and spring semester. The rivalry is America’s earliest between preparatory schools.28

Every year since 1922, Choate and Deerfield have had a special day competing in all their sports, called “Deerfield Day” at Choate and “Choate Day” at Deerfield. A  similarly ritualistic sports rivalry exists between Taft and Hotchkiss, called “Taft Day” at Hotchkiss and “Hotchkiss Day” at Taft. Many similar connections have long existed or are being created now to link these elite schools. For example, here is some news from the St. Paul’s page:  “It was announced in April 2016 that starting with the 2017–18 academic year, the school will compete in the Five Schools League with Choate, Deerfield, Northfield Mount Hermon, Andover, and Exeter. With the addition of St. Paul’s, the group will become the Six Schools League (SSL).”29 The schools are concentrated in time as well as space, founded between 1778 and 1891, none of them in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The column of Table 5.3 reporting Wikipedia page views during calendar year 2016 shows large numbers, but also a wide range. The numbers of bytes per page as of December 31, 2016, as well as the numbers of revisions and

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Location

Exeter, New Hampshire Wallingford, Connecticut Andover, Massachusetts Pottstown, Pennsylvania Lakeville, Connecticut Lawrenceville, New Jersey Deerfield, Massachusetts Concord, New Hampshire Gill, Massachusetts Watertown, Connecticut Windsor, Connecticut

School name

Phillips Exeter Academy Choate Rosemary Hall Phillips Andover Academy Hill School Hotchkiss School Lawrenceville School Deerfield Academy St. Paul’s School Northfield Mount Hermon Taft School Loomis Chaffee

1781 1890 1778 1851 1891 1810 1797 1856 1879 1890 1874

Year founded 277,304 208,423 195,701 157,694 93,748 93,495 91,167 68,370 49,597 41,959 37,628

2016 page views

Table 5.3 Eleven elite college preparatory boarding schools in Wikipedia

64,292 91,946 48,588 10,590 49,330 31,621 28,016 44,269 21,461 5,599 13,338

Page size (bytes) 3,054 1,560 1,912 1,016 1,854 1,893 1,222 1,477 1,078 935 906

Revisions

1272 663 874 436 560 769 558 481 427 375 358

Editors

707 121 231 76 117 111 90 104 62 68 50

Notable alumni

newgenrtpdf

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editors (of all types), also vary widely. The schools at the very top of the list in terms of page views are especially aggressive in promoting their cosmic significance, through the behavior of both their administrators and their alumni, but the ones at the bottom are also very important components of American elite stratification. Apparently a key difference is the degree to which a few representatives of each school have decided that Wikipedia is a valuable mode of promotion, a perception that may have declined recently thereby discouraging partisans for the schools near the bottom of the table from raising them up. The final column of the table, notable alumni, was derived from a list of the school’s alumni who were the subjects of their own Wikipedia pages. Ten of the schools had a separate list of notable alumni on a Wikipedia page linked to the school’s main page, while Northfield Mount Hermon included the list on its main page. The 707 for Philips Exeter list is actually fewer than the list on its alumni page, which names 761 alumni, but 54 of them do not appear to have Wikipedia pages yet. The Wikipedia page listing alumni also includes 37 “Notable faculty members and trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy” who were not themselves educated at Exeter. Ironically, the only one of them whose name does not currently link to a Wikipedia page is John Phillips, the founder of the school, who indeed does have a Wikipedia page to which the main page of the school links.30 In 2007, from May 6 to October 1, the Exeter alumni page grew from 8,455 bytes to 13,416, largely through edits by a user whose pseudonym combines the names of three of the school’s dormitories. The last Wikipedia edit with this user name dates from 2010 and says the subject of the edit had been “my first history teacher at PEA,” indicating the editor was an alumnus. More generally, Exeter people have worked hard to create Wikipedia pages for alumni, many of them taken from a book produced by the school in 1903, titled General Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Philips Exeter Academy 1783–1903.31 Most of the men listed on the Exeter alumni page but lacking Wikipedia pages of their own were local politicians listed in that book. For modern alumni of these schools, it is impossible to know how many of their Wikipedia pages were created by themselves, by a family member, or by a professional publicist. This is only one subset of the many reasons why we may doubt the objectivity of Wikipedia as a source of information about supposedly important people. One of the Exeter students who does not have a Wikipedia page was the remarkable pseudo-anthropologist whom the alumni page calls “Antonio Apache (1900)  – impostor, cultural impresario (did not graduate).” His real name apparently was Tony Simpson, of mixed European-African heritage who in the early 1890s presented himself to Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of Harvard’s Peabody Museum, and became a research assistant for Putnam and for Franz Boas, ironically the anthropologist most responsible for the concept of cultural relativism. Antonio pretended to be of pure Apache heritage, even

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a member of the family of Cochise. In their history, Anthropology at Harvard, David Browman and Stephen Williams reported, Apparently at Putnam’s urging, Antonio Apache entered Phillips Exeter Academy in 1896, in preparation for attending Harvard … he did not continue class work after the first year because of poor academic performance … Although Apache dropped out of Phillips Exeter after less than a year, he did follow up on his ambition to earn a living collecting materials for expositions and museums.32

The schools tend to list their alumni alphabetically by last name, or by their years of graduation, but two arrange them in categories. The Hotchkiss page celebrates 15 in academia, 5 authors, 3 theology, 21 business, 18 entertainment, 11 art and music, 9 athletes, 29 government, and 6 military. Taft lists 6 academics, 20 arts and entertainment, 4 business, 13 government, 3 legal and judiciary, and 22 sports. We may criticize social media for giving undue publicity to celebrities, many of whom promote themselves nearly as deceptively as Antonio Apache did. Seen more positively, Wikipedia is a feasible research laboratory for understanding how celebrity is determined, which also provides links to other sources of information about social status in popular culture. Comparing the intensive presentation of prep schools in Wikipedia with the vagueness of Facebook groups concerning Greenwich, Connecticut, explored in Chapter 2, we may hypothesize that again a societal elite is using social media for its own purposes, whether concealment or promotion. Sociologist Jerome Karabel was highly critical of the leading prep schools in his award-winning book, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.33 It can be seen as good documentation for the ethical critique or political position that the United States must be a multicultural society in which social status is individually earned. Karabel describes Lord Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy as a “brilliant satire” written by a founder of the Open University, rather than a serious refutation of the views that both Karabel and Young held. However, Young suggested that making society more meritocratic might not reduce the resentment felt by losers in the status competition, and we may wonder whether his prophecy is now coming true in the angry nationalism and cultural particularism rampant in his native Britain, throughout Europe, and the United States.34 The central issue of Karabel’s book might be narrowly defined as antiSemitism, which became salient for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from the 1920s after Jewish applicants began out-competing the sons of rich, established Christian families. Karabel repeatedly explains how the prep schools served to deliver Protestant students to the three colleges, for example here describing the 1937 incoming class at Yale: Of 859 freshmen, a remarkable 351 – more than 40 percent of the class – came from just a dozen boarding schools. Leading the pack was Andover, with 89 students; other schools included Hotchkiss (40), Exeter (30), Taft (29), Choate (27), Hill (27), Kent

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(26), and St. Paul’s (21) … The appeal of prep school boys to Yale was the same as at Harvard and Princeton: typically, they had solid academic preparation, came from old Protestant families whose status would contribute to the genteel social atmosphere of the campus, were of good “character” and had “leadership” potential, and could pay for their schooling.35

A rather different yet compatible perspective was offered in the autobiography of Paul Cowan, who graduated from Choate in 1958, which describes his extensive journey not merely to find his historical Jewish roots, but to reaffiliate with the community.36 As his obituary in the New York Times reported, “In ‘Orphan in History,’ Mr. Cowan recalled how his family celebrated Christmas and sent him to Choate, an Episcopal school, where he was required to attend chapel services and where he occasionally was the target of anti-Semitic barbs from his classmates.”37 Cowan did not, however, express sympathy for atheists among his classmates, ignoring the fact that they were not merely required to attend chapel every day like him, but to pray to the Lord supposedly shared by Judaism and Christianity in whom they did not believe. The headmaster at the time, Seymour St. John, was an ordained minister and Choate alumnus who conducted the daily chapel services and believed students should all adopt Episcopalianism, but he recognized that the conversion process would be more difficult for some than for others.38 Perhaps it is merely an ironic accident that the head of the 1958 class, Peter Goldmark, is Jewish, has a well-deserved Wikipedia page that does not mention Choate, and it is not linked to from the list of Choate alumni.39 Choate ended the chapel attendance policy in 1970, and the other schools have gone through their own difficult secularization experiences, as have Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Yet the significance of religion for social structure remains a very serious social scientific question. It is possible to read classic sociologist Emile Durkheim as saying that religious unity strengthens a society, in more than one of his influential works.40 Max Weber argued that the affinity between Protestantism and both capitalism and science was a powerful but temporary symbiosis.41 But other social scientists suggested implicitly or explicitly that there was some enduring functional superiority of Christianity generally, or Protestantism more specifically.42 Earlier in the twentieth century, many Christian leaders were not anti-Semitic, even perhaps as Alan Edelstein suggests being philo-Semitic, but believed that Christianity would subsume Judaism, as education and interaction convinced Jews that Christianity was the natural fulfillment of their tradition.43 Of course this did not happen, and some mixture of multiculturalism and secularization became the norm. How permanent that norm will be depends upon the outcome of political debates and even warfare in many nations of the world today. Setting aside the profound issue of the role of religion in the postmodern world, even a very random empirical observation can suggest aspects of social structure in online communities. Here is an example that also illustrates the problematic identity of a Wikipedia editor. Looking at the history of the page

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for the Eight Schools Association, I was immediately struck by the name of the editor who had made the second greatest number of edits: Quaesivibonatibi. This was the traditional Latin motto for the Choate school, quaesivi bona tibi. It has multiple social-structural meanings in the context of this chapter. Google Translate renders it as, “seek thy good,” as if it were an imperative, but Latin is one of the languages that machine translation handles least well. In a 2009 news forum on the school’s website, an alumnus who is a classics professor offered “I have sought good things for you” but admitted that students usually translated it as “I sought to do thee good.”44 The implication is that the words were spoken by the school to express its own perspective, rather than admonishing students to perform good acts. But the current motto on the school’s Wikipedia page is fidelitas et integritas, or “fidelity and integrity.” Why was the old motto abandoned? Because the social structure went through a major transformation in 1971, when Choate, a school for boys founded in 1896, merged with Rosemary Hall, a school for girls founded in 1890. The two had been founded by the same family and always had a social connection, despite the fact that for most of its history Rosemary Hall was in Greenwich, Connecticut, rather than Wallingford. As the 2009 news page explained, Rosemary Hall’s motto had been altiora peto (I seek higher things), the two had kept both mottos for a time after merging, then for a while shared vetus tamen iuvenesco (I am old, yet I am ever young), before settling on the current motto twenty years ago. So the current motto has a deep meaning, because fidelitas may refer to the faithful tradition of elite private schools, even expressed through a word from an ancient language, while integritas may refer to the integration of the two sexes on an equal basis. All eleven of the schools faced a similar organizational transformation about the same time Choate and Rosemary Hall did, and Northfield Mount Hermon also is the merger of two prior schools, as its Wikipedia page explains: “Originally two neighboring schools (the Northfield School for Girls founded in 1879, and the Mount Hermon School for Boys founded in 1881), NMH merged into a single institution in 1971 and consolidated on one campus in 2005.”45 Its current motto is also in classical Latin: discere et vivere (to learn and to live). A second but very different observation about a Wikipedia editor using the name Quaesivibonatibi is that it implies the person represents the school, and may even be a current employee rather than just a dedicated alumnus or alumna. The editor who added more to the page for the Eight Schools Association than Quaesivibonatibi used the name Micheldene and actually created the page on February 22, 2010, also adding links to it from the pages of member schools. In one of his comments, Micheldene used the first name Roger.46 I infer that this pseudonym is an esoteric literary reference to the protagonist of Kingsley Amis’ novel One Fat Englishman. Andrew James analyzes this earlier Roger Micheldene as an antimodel, the opposite of a positive role model, “an experiment designed to show what becomes of a man who makes

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no attempts to curb his impulses and appetites.”47 The page listing the user contributions for Micheldene reported 286, most of which were updates to the Choate Rosemary Hall page or to the pages of notable alumni. Micheldene’s last edit was on June 8, 2010, and the first Wikipedia edit by Quaesivibonatibi was on the Choate Rosemary Hall page, on July 6, 2010, raising the hypothesis they might be the same person, given that Micheldene had gotten into some arguments with other editors about the Choate page, perhaps living down to the role model of his name. The last of Quaesivibonatibi’s 201 edits, most of which were on the Choate page, was on May 13, 2015, with this comment:  “A recent edit moved the standard opening sections of school articles to the very bottom of the page, below the history section. I  have restored the former longstanding format, carefully maintained by me for a number of years.” However we might speculate about the details, Micheldene-Quaesivibonatibi powerfully represented Choate Rosemary Hall on Wikipedia. This raises one of the great ambiguities about Wikipedia, the fact that people with a social relationship to a topic are discouraged by Wikipedia’s rules from contributing to its page: Conflict of interest (COI) editing involves contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships. Any external relationship can trigger a conflict of interest. That someone has a conflict of interest is a description of a situation, not a judgment about that person’s opinions or integrity. COI editing is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. It undermines public confidence, and risks causing public embarrassment to the individuals being promoted. If such editing causes disruption, an administrator may opt to place blocks on the involved accounts. Editors with a COI, including paid editors, are expected to disclose it whenever they seek to influence an affected article’s content. Anyone editing for pay must disclose who is paying them, who the client is, and any other relevant affiliation; this is a requirement of the Wikimedia Foundation.48

However, the rule further states that the identity of editors should not be revealed against their wishes, so in many cases these conflicts of interest cannot be proven or even discovered. A likely example of the legitimate paid editors mentioned in the COI paragraph above is Thotso, who describes himself thus: “I’m a contract technical writer who has documented apps, APIs, servers, networks, and hardware for companies including Reuters, ETrade, and Disney since 2003. I’m currently under contract at Google, writing guides for software and hardware developers.”49 Thotso – as in “I thought so” – was not discovered on a prep school page, but on the page for one of Google’s products, the Tango platform, described as an augmented reality computing platform, developed and authored by Google. It uses computer vision to enable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. This allows application developers to create user experiences that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, physical space measurement, environmental recognition, augmented reality, and windows into a virtual world.50

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Whether Tango is the wave of the future remains very much in doubt, but it certainly deserves to be described in Wikipedia as one of the technological alternatives. Yet for much of its history Wikipedia rejected articles that did not cite a traditional published source, for example preventing novel social movements from promoting themselves on its pages.

5.4 Beyond the Final Frontier An excellent example of the vast number and diversity of wikis is Memory Alpha, one of a cluster of wikis devoted to the popular culture marvel, Star Trek. There are actually many Memory Alphas, as well as Memory Betas, Gammas and Deltas, but one came first, way back on January 31, 1969, in an episode of the original Star Trek television series titled “The Lights of Zetar.” The article for that episode on the regular Wikipedia describes Memory Alpha as “a planetoid where the Federation has set up a storehouse of computer databases containing all cultural history and scientific data it has acquired.”51 Players in the massively multiplayer game Star Trek Online used to be able to virtually visit that planetoid, and delivering information to it was an important mission, but that feature was removed from the game, perhaps only coincidentally after it was bought by a Chinese company named Perfect World International. The Wikipedia article for the version to be studied here says:  “Memory Alpha is a wiki encyclopedia for topics related to the Star Trek fictional universe. Conceived by Harry Doddema and Dan Carlson in September 2003 and officially launched on December 5 of that year, it uses the wiki model and is hosted by Wikia, Inc. on the MediaWiki software.”52 Wikia hosts thousands of wikis, including several devoted to the Star Trek culture. Researchers have just begun to study the sociocultural dynamics of the vast Wikia system, which describes itself thus: “The home of FANDOM – the largest entertainment fan site in the world. With more than 385,000 fan communities and a global audience of over 175 million monthly uniques, FANDOM is a global entertainment media brand that is for fans, by fans.”53 Jeremy Foote, Darren Gergel, and Aaron Shaw have recently started collecting very extensive Wikia data with the goal of studying “three central facets of peer production: (1) the relationship between participation equality and growth; (2) the extent to which community effectiveness is limited by competition for volunteer resources; and (3) the role of social interaction and coordination in productive collaboration.”54 Their early publication, “Motivation in Peer-Production Communities,” tabulated expressed motivations for creating wikis from a survey of a few hundred people who had done so in Wikia.55 They noted that during the relatively brief period of their research, 35,749 users had created fully 46,828 wikis, an indication that really extensive research is under way. On September 8, 2017, a Twitter tweet from the actor who had played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek, William Shatner, was posted at

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fandom.wikia.com, saying “Happy Anniversary @StarTrek! 51 years.” Indeed, the first episode was broadcast on September 8, 1966. The original 1969 Memory Alpha may have been decades before its time, but it expressed an idea that was already current in scientific and wider intellectual circles. Its classic expression was “As We May Think” by presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, published in Atlantic magazine in 1945, and widely read at the time.56 Searching today for a copy online reveals that this semi-sacred document exists in many forms, notably a PDF scan of the copy on which later information technology guru Doug Englebart had written comments around 1962.57 Englebart’s Wikipedia page calls him the pioneer of human–computer interaction, noting: “He and his team developed computer interface elements such as bitmapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and precursors to the graphical user interface.”58 Another Bush publication that was significant for Memory Alpha was Science, the Endless Frontier.59 Episodes of Star Trek began with a spoken narration, “space, the final frontier.” The implications of this metaphor are vast. Writing in the period 1894–1920, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had considered the significance of the wild American frontier for social structure.60 As people began to build farms and towns in previously open areas, social control was naturally weak, so settlers were free to create their own social structures. Their economic connections indirectly but powerfully strengthened democracy back not only in already settled parts of America, but even in Europe. The economic dynamism of a frontier also energizes innovations in social structure. Turner’s work encourages pessimism, because his first publications on the topic began with the observation that the frontier of the Wild West had officially closed. Bush effectively argues that scientific progress will never end and serves the same social functions as a geographic frontier. However, thoughtful critics of progress have suggested that many and perhaps all of the sciences are approaching their natural limits, for example John Horgan in his 1996 book, The End of Science:  Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.61 My own recent book, Dynamic Secularization, considers that thesis in the context of online social media and the conflict between science and religion.62 The relevance to Star Trek is obvious. If outer space is the final frontier, then it, too, has closed, because despite all the hype in the mass media, no serious program exists to take humans to Mars let alone establish an interplanetary civilization.63 Is it possible that a new frontier beckons online through computer-based information technologies? The most direct result of Science, the Endless Frontier was the establishment in 1950 of the NSF. While the Internet was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NSF took over management of it until shortly after the birth of the World Wide Web. From 1993 until 2004, NSF invested great energy in the Digital Library Initiative, a concerted attempt to support research at universities that would fulfill the vision expressed so much earlier in “As We

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May Think.” An unanswered question, which will be considered at length in Chapter 7, is the extent to which government efforts created the new internetbased social structures, versus merely being one of many factors enabling their natural development. For example, Michael Lesk, who managed the Digital Library Initiative, has expressed doubts about the commonly-uttered propaganda that Google was one of the direct results of his initiative, suggesting it would have arisen even if the graduate students who created it had not been supported by NSF, because its success was based on a plan to earn money through advertising, rather than upon the particular search algorithms it incorporated.64 The Memory Alpha that exists in the Wikia universe is a creation neither of the United Federation of Planets nor the United States of America, but of a few individuals who applied technologies that resulted from the opensource software movement. I  had been aware of it, and of an alternative called Memory Beta, for many years, often consulting them during my recent study Star Worlds, which concerned issues of freedom versus control in online communities oriented to the very different and competing Star Trek and Star Wars universes.65 The extensive Star Trek culture is much more closely associated with the intellectual themes of literary science fiction than is Star Wars, and many of its stories concern interactions between members of incompatible cultures, and strains afflicting one or another kind of social structure. After some exploration, a rather clear approach emerged for the following pilot study. Knowing that Wikia hosts thousands of wikis, and some fraction of them concern Star Trek, I decided to do an initial search for which other Star Trek wikis had editor interlocks with the main version of Memory Alpha. Given the focus of social science on social networks, a logical starting point was the team of fictional characters who were the most prominent members of the crew of the Starship Enterprise in the original 1966–69 television series. These were Captain James T.  Kirk, Commander Spock, Lieutenant Commander Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Lieutenant Commander Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, Ensign Pavel Chekov, Nurse Christine Chapel, and Yeoman Janice Rand.66 We shall meet some of them again in Chapter 8. In late December 2016, I checked the edits of the pages for these characters, for example finding 1,152 edits on the Spock page from December 5, 2003 through December 25, 2016. Altogether, 493 named editors had contributed to these pages, typically using pseudonyms. Their profile pages provide only modest real-world information they have chosen to make public. The system used by Wikia encourages people to have the same pseudonym on multiple wikis, and thus can be used for research on interlocks across these online communities. I  therefore checked the “favorite wikis” of all the contributors to the Memory Alpha pages for the crew of the Enterprise, specifically looking for other Star Trek wikis. Table  5.4 lists all the variants of Memory Alpha

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Table 5.4 Memory Alpha in eighteen languages Name Memory Alpha (English) Memory Alpha (German) Memory Alpha (Spanish) Memory Alpha (French) Memory Alpha (Dutch) Memory Alpha (Italian) Memory Alpha (Japanese) Memory Alpha (Polish) Memory Alpha (Czech) Memory Alpha (Swedish) Memory Alpha (Russian) Memory Alpha (Bulgarian) Memory Alpha (Portuguese) Memory Alpha (Serbian) Memory Alpha (Chinese) Memory Alpha (Catalan) Memory Alpha (Romanian) Memory Alpha (Esperanto)

Pages

WAM

Rank

42,014 29,470 11,583 10,143 7,716 3,078 2,994 1,751 1,733 1,378 988 729 660 286 217 177 95 80

98.86 92.95 12.58 43.57 – – 40.22 10.04 – – – – – – – – – –

39 268 4,268 2,566 – – 2,734 4,423 – – – – – – – – – –

in different languages that this procedure discovered, with data dating from December 28, 2016. Every wiki automatically publishes its current number of pages on its home page, and we see that the English, German, French, and Spanish versions of Memory Alpha all have over 10,000, while the artificial language Esperanto wiki has only 80. Of course, the fans of Star Trek creating versions of Memory Alpha in their own language may translate pages from the dominant English version, but they also express their own ideas and interests. This table may be considered a measure of cultural globalization, in which English leads all the other languages, but does not entirely replace them. The WAM and Rank columns report data from Wikia’s own popularity measures. At the present time, the company presents the wikis as components in what it calls fandom, a term that has been common within science fiction for very many decades but today is widely used to refer to communities of people oriented toward one or another popular culture mythos or franchise. This may seem insignificant to many scholars, especially those who disdain popular culture, but in our secular, postmodern world these genres are comparable to religions, if weaker in their social impact, providing symbol systems through which people organize their sense of ethics and transcendence.67 Wikia reports a WAM score for each of the 5,000 most highly rated wikis, so we see that the English version of Memory Alpha stood at position 39 among a vast number of wikis concerning all these reported categories: TV, movies, games, books,

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comics, lifestyle, music, and movies. Its high position proved rather stable, and on September 8, 2018, its score was 99.09, and its rank was 27. Wikia explains, Wiki Activity Monitor (WAM) Score is an indicator of the strength and momentum of a Fandom community. The WAM is calculated daily for the top 5,000 wiki sites and includes an overall rank, a vertical rank, and a score from 0 to 100. The WAM rankings are sensitive to real-world events and change frequently, capturing the latest trends from Fandom’s wikis.68

The vertical rank is the ranking within a particular genre, and there seemed no reason to report it here, but it could be used in cross-genre studies. On WAM’s FAQ page, Wikia declines to answer a question every social scientist would ask: “How is the WAM calculated? The WAM rank is a combination of traffic, engagement and growth. We are not able to provide the specifics because we do not want Wikis attempting to manipulate the rankings. But rest assured, we have included all the essential ingredients for a successful and thriving Wiki.”69 The search for wikis via interlocks from the original Memory Alpha quickly turned up Memory Beta, but also many other specialized Star Trek wikis, listed in Table 5.5. The distinction between Alpha and Beta is that Memory Alpha covers canon information, concerning all the commercially released television program and movies, but not all the rest of the vast commercial and amateur culture.70 [Memory Beta] is a place for any and all information from licensed Star Trek publications  – much of which would be deemed “inappropriate” on Memory Alpha, the “canon” Star Trek wiki. Books, games, comics, and technical guides are all fair game here  – we don’t discriminate! Please contribute an article from whatever Star Trek book you are reading! However, please do not add fan fiction … and cite all your contributions. Canon points are welcome, but only in context.71

Notice how the Alpha–Beta distinction relates to some of the issues that plague Wikipedia, by mapping a culture across multiple wikis such that their definitions of scope and thus of reality differ. If this principle of functional differentiation were applied to Wikipedia, it might split into multiple wikis, for example one for each religion or political persuasion. The Star Trek Expanded Universe wiki “was created to collect information on sourced fan-made Star Trek projects, such as RPGs [Role-Playing Games], fan fiction and fan films.”72 The two wikis that march forward across the Greek alphabet have similar ambitions: “Memory Gamma was created to collect and share all of your Star Trek ideas. Whether it’s characters, starships, planets, or fan fiction, the Star Trek universe is now yours to expand!”73 “Welcome to Memory Delta wiki, a community of fan authors writing stories set in the Star Trek galaxy. Dive in today and post all of your fan-created stories, characters, novels, and more!”74 The Starbase 23 wiki “is about all the characters, ships, locations, and events featured in the fiction hosted on Starbase23.net,” which is one of a network of more personal fan fiction sites.75

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Table 5.5 Specialized wikis in the Star Trek subculture Name Memory Beta (English) Memory Alpha Test Star Trek Answers Star Trek Expanded Universe Memory Delta (English) Memory Beta (German) Memory Gamma (English) Starbase 23 Memory Alfa Alpha Centauri Institute Memory Alpha Information Directorate Trek Initiative Husnock Database Memory Gamma (French) Star Trek: Dawn of the Federation The Final Frontier

Pages

WAM

Rank

48,566 37,294 13,488 13,043 4,060 2,729 2,052 741 659 271 213 103 42 40 12 7

92.38 – 59.22 62.83 60.45 41.87 12.69 – – – – – – – – –

285 – 1,789 1,620 1,725 2,653 4,259 – – – – – – – – –

Some of the other wikis do not justify close study, but the following illustrate the range of possibilities. Star Trek Answers is a forum where fans can ask and answer “specific questions about Star Trek content, both from canon Star Trek and non-canon.”76 Alpha Centauri Institute is an information resource for roleplayers in Star Trek Online.77 Trek Initiative is the point of linkage for a variety of Star Trek fan clubs.78 Memory Alpha Information Directorate considers the Star Trek universe from the perspective of the Klingons and Cardassians, two humanoid alien species who are often at war with the United Federation of Planets.79 Memory Alpha claims Memory Alfa is a parody, but Memory Alfa says it “is a multi-lateral quadrihedic collaborative project to create the most definitive, accurate, and accessible encyclopedia and reference for everything related to Star Trek that Memory Alpha won’t touch. Canon, shmanon, we say. Just try to be funny, though, and keep it close to science fiction. Or not.”80 Google gives only four hits for the word quadrihedic, all of them on Memory Alfa. Wikipedia seeks to achieve or impose a consensus, yet the Star Trek universe proclaims a principle it calls IDIC: “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock, said IDIC expressed “the Vulcan philosophy that many diverse life-forms can join together peaceably to create meaning and beauty. Simply put, it’s a statement against bigotry and hatred.”81 Perhaps it is ironic, but certainly profound, that he wrote these words in his second autobiography dating from 1995, titled I Am Spock, while his first autobiography from 1975 was titled I Am Not Spock.82 The Star Trek wikis collectively embrace diversity and relativism, in contrast to the totalitarianism of Wikipedia.

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5.5 Two Wikis Embedded in Social Structure Given the revolutionary power of the Internet to transform culture and perhaps even social structure, extreme examples may offer insights that will become more significant in the future, but already highlight truths that less extreme examples might obscure. If society is usually conceptualized in terms of stable structures, there are two especially obvious radical alternatives: (1) secessionist social groups that separate themselves from the wider society, and (2) conflict groups that criticize or even seek to destroy existing social structures. This concluding section of the chapter will offer a wiki-based example of each. First, we shall return for further consideration of A Tale in the Desert, introduced in Chapter  3, which is like a virtual utopian commune that employed a wiki as its primary tool of large-scale social organization. Second, we shall consider xFamily, a wiki created by ex-members of a radical religious group that was called either the Family International or the Children of God, as a critical tool for reevaluation of the original group. One technical feature that these two examples share is that the general public is not invited to edit the wiki, but only members of a special group, either players of Tale or the subset of former members of the Family who sought to express their anger in a methodical manner. Quite apart from any anarchist or collectivist political motivation, wikis are useful for many purposes simply because they are easy to set up and quick to update. I had created a wiki back on December 4, 2007, with the vague thought of using it in some project connected with the series of conferences that nanotechnology leader Mihail Roco and I had organized, concerning science and technology convergence, but only began really using it on April 5, 2008, when it became the organizational hub for a new conference I organized, to be held inside a virtual world. There turned out to be no real advantage in having the panelists for the three sessions of this conference edit the pages themselves, so they sent me material via email, which I then pasted into the appropriate pages. The internet host has not charged money for this small wiki, and may remove it at any time, but currently one page links to many others, with this introduction: “This page is the archive of the May 9–11, 2008 conference held in World of Warcraft. This is believed to have been the first really large scientific conference held inside a gameworld, with about 120 avatars attending each of the three plenary sessions. The proceedings were published as a conventional academic book.”83 Thus, wikis can be used as information infrastructure to support a particular social structure, even a very temporary one. Although marketed as game software, A Tale in the Desert does not really have an instruction manual, but relies upon a website that is the joint creation of the small company and the players. The very first information listed on the home page is a slightly psychedelic short story written by a player using the name Dnloreto, who had won

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a writing contest called “My Tale.” At one point he offers a utopian vision of virtual Egypt: I saw beautiful things. The sunset on a valley with a lake. A  couple that lived there watching the end of the day while talking and planning their next activities. I saw a woman walking alone into the heart of the desert, putting up a Tower and offering it to her husband, thus working to help him pass a Test. Thus showing her love and partnership. I saw two friends, one was playing a Tomb of Immortals, the other waiting for the feedback on her puzzle’s design. They discussed the design, flaws and strengths, in friendship helping the designer to come up with a better puzzle. I saw a large group of people at a dig telling jokes while digging for stones. A hard work under the sun, that could also be boring if not for all the joy and friendship shared at the “event.” I saw master and student changing roles while two strangers that had met on a road tried to teach each other their Acrobatic Movements. I saw people running into far places hiding Cicada cages. And other running too to find those same cages, on a hide and seek game that would balance out while distributing speed amongst the best at this Test. I saw love. I saw friendship. I saw sharing. I saw happiness.84

The second page of information concerns the political system, through which players can actually influence the design of the game and the rules governing social relations: 1. Achieve citizen status. 2. Go to the University of Leadership, click to create petition. Type your petition into the dialog box. 3. Walk around and talk to people, ask them to sign your petition. They can sign by clicking on you. You can also share the petition. 4. When you have enough signatures, go back to the University of Leadership, and turn in the petition. 5. The developers will now classify the petition: either it is a feature request, or a petition for a law. 6. If it is a feature request, the developers will put it into the feature request manager on atitd.info. 7. If it is a petition for a law, it will appear at the voting booth in the game. Players will begin voting on it. 8. After the voting, if the players achieve the necessary number of votes, the petition will become a law. 9. After a petition becomes a law, the developers reprogram the game to enforce the law.85 Another aspect of the political system involves elections of players for the status of demi-pharaoh. During the course of a telling, several highly respected players will be voted to this enduring position of great responsibility, through a rather complex, multistage political process. A key task is to serve as police, to deal with griefers, defined as players who seek to disrupt the experience for other players in a significantly aggravating manner. After a proper investigation any one of the demi-pharaohs may submit for voting a referendum of the

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following form: “[Name] stands accused of griefing and blatantly unacceptable behavior by [Demi-PharaohName]. [Name] shall hereby be immediately and automatically banned from Egypt, and all things built by [Name], regardless of who owns them, shall be immediately salvageable by anyone, with no materials returned.”86 Thus, Tale is not only aesthetically similar to a utopian society, but actually has a legal system supportive of its social structure. The major portions of the Tale website are a forum where players interact directly in discussions of any issue one of them wants to raise, and a wiki where they have developed and are constantly updating an extensive information resource guiding players in accomplishing all of their technical goals and many of their social goals. Each telling launches a new edition of the wiki, but the older ones are retained, so that researchers as well as players may learn about the larger history of Tale. One page of the wiki for the seventh telling lists all the users who have logged in as editors, a total of 738 of them.87 Again, each player account may have only one avatar, and very few if any players have more than one account, given that unlike most MMOs, Tale does not separate avatars into different classes. Here I will focus on the wiki pages that represent guilds, and every one of the 378 contributors to those pages used the same name in the wiki as in Tale itself. Not all Tale guilds by any means list themselves in the wiki, but all the ambitious public ones do, both because their guild’s wiki page can serve as an advertisement for new recruits, and because they often use the page for enduring communications with members, for example listing the locations of all their mines, factories, and storage facilities for shared virtual resources. Thus the following methodology seemed appropriate for studying the most important features of social structure, as well as being a coherent illustration for this chapter. I copied out of the wiki a list of all contributors to all of the guild pages, then entered Tale and used the system within it to look up each of the players in that list of 378. As I had imagined, in almost every case, at least one of the contributors to a guild’s page was also a member of that guild, which can been seen in that player’s profile available in Tale’s computer interface. Clicking on the name of a guild in that interface opens information about the guild itself, usually including both the location of its guild hall and a list of the members. As Tables  3.6 and 3.7 indicated, some of the most popular guilds were located in the River Plains area near the geographic center of virtual Egypt, and thirty-eight of the guilds having their own wiki pages were in River Plains. For this analysis, we will focus on the twenty-five guilds in that region having at least twenty members each; very small guilds tend to be false starts set up by individual players, or used by small groups of friends to share resources. On December 28–9, 2016, I sent my avatar to the guild halls of all thirty-eight, because that facilitated copying out the names of all members of the particular guild, and because some guilds did not have their membership totals available in the regular interface. Table  5.6 shows how it is possible to combine data from three different sources about the social structure of guilds: (1) the wiki,

zFree The Point Festivals The Hive zFree Aqueduct Guild Speedy Egyptian Travelers Shroomers of the Darkest Night Safari Club The Goods Public TWERKS GreenValleyFalls Good Grub Pub Herbalists Point Mega River Plains Research Twisted Thistle Zlopolis Alpha ZPheonix Fishing Cove The Wanderers Nomads in Central Egypt Weird Tales Radioactive Chemistry Zemples

Name of guild

4,496 774 1,450 494 3,911 15 363 567 2,406 304 2,206 4,592 7,999 1,423 2,503 2,955 1,877 1,055 567 356 185 680 611 231 7,235

visits 20 6 30 3 31 1 2 1 3 2 10 11 52 27 17 9 26 3 7 1 4 6 3 2 43

Editors

Wiki page

177 135 106 104 95 91 86 83 80 79 73 64 53 47 46 38 33 33 32 30 25 24 22 22 21

Guild members

Table 5.6 Largest guilds in the River Plains region of Virtual Egypt

177 54 72 43 64 48 46 44 31 28 38 31 30 20 14 20 30 11 31 15 6 5 15 11 21

zFree 54 135 35 29 25 27 22 29 18 16 24 16 20 33 12 13 5 5 8 9 4 6 18 9 7

Point

Shared with:

0 1,172 33 215 504 248 211 214 177 156 473 184 239 1,086 141 205 230 285 22 269 735 829 1,176 203 151

zFree

1,172 0 1,169 1,103 1,673 1,056 1,090 1,091 1,212 1,020 1,620 1,107 1,084 99 1,041 1,076 995 1,446 1,150 1,363 1,893 488 108 1,087 1,136

Point

Distance to:

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160

Alpha Beta Gamma Delta Epsilon Zeta Eta Theta Iota Kappa Lambda Mu

Research pseudonym

163 96 86 71 27 10 9 8 3 2 1 1

Edits

41 43 41 26 17 7 7 4 2 2 1 1

Pages 6 27 0 14 6 2 2 0 0 0 0 0

Starts

Work on the 57 practices

2005–9 2005–6 2005–9 2004–13 2005 2005 2005 2005 2010–12 2012 2005 2012

Period 3,626 1,355 5,060 2,277 704 211 55 287 219 118 24 1

Edits

Table 5.7 The small group that created the practices pages of the xFamily wiki

Feb. 4, 2005 Feb. 2, 2005 June 3, 2005 Feb. 2, 2005 Feb. 7, 2005 Feb. 2, 2005 Mar. 14, 2005 Feb. 4, 2005 Mar. 10, 2009 Dec. 26, 2011 Feb. 11, 2005 Sep. 10, 2012

First date

Jan. 30, 2012 Nov. 6, 2007 Dec. 10, 2011 Dec. 24, 2015 Mar. 27, 2008 Dec. 28, 2007 July 28, 2005 May 15, 2011 May 8, 2013 Oct. 16, 2016 Mar. 9, 2005 Sep. 10, 2012

Last date

Complete work for the wiki

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(2) the membership lists, and (3) the locations of the guild halls in the virtual geography. The guilds are listed in descending order by their memberships, and the preeminent regional guild, zFree, also had relatively large numbers of visits to its wiki page and editors, 4,496 and 20. The “shared with” columns of Table 5.6 report the number of member interlocks. Of course all 177 members of zFree by definition belong to zFree, but 54 of them also belong to the Point, the chief rival guild in River Plains, which has 135 members. Thus, 30.5 percent of the members of zFree belong to the Point, and 40.0 percent of the members of the Point belong to zFree, so we could focus on the average of these two fractions, which is 35.3  percent, as we have done in some earlier interlock tables. However, the raw numbers seem quite intelligible in this table, and the two “shared with” columns were extracted from a larger table that contains the numbers of members shared by all possible pairs of the twenty-five guilds. Because they are the most important guilds that share a region, zFree and the Point can best help us understand the larger social structure. While traveling inside the virtual world, a user may consult maps and other displays that report the equivalent of latitude and longitude numbers. There is a zero-zero point near the middle of the map of virtual Egypt, and the guild hall for zFree is 1,406 units to the east of that point, and 2,942 units north of it. The coordinates for the guild hall of the Point are 1,299 and 1,775, thus 1,172 units south-southwest of zFree. We don’t have an exact translation of this unit, but as I watched my avatar running across the landscape, it appeared that a unit was at least one subjective meter and perhaps two. It takes time to travel from one guild hall to another, so geography in Tale is subjectively realistic and may therefore influence social structure. Festivals, the third largest River Plains guild, is a good example of a special purpose organization, created well after the beginning of the seventh telling to coordinate one of the most complex cooperative endeavors in Tale that enables each avatar to gain an experience point by passing a test. It requires sacrifice of virtual objects, few of which are likely to belong to any one player, so they must help each other. Here is how the wiki explains it: The Test of Festivals is a group-oriented experience wherein players conduct sacrifices during scheduled “Festivals” in concert though not necessarily in proximity to each other. During the festival each player will sacrifice specific items for the chosen god of the festival. Each player’s items to be sacrificed are determined when the player performs a ritual (unrelated to the festival itself and not time specific) at an altar. The god will then make known what items are needed for the sacrifice. These items change after each festival you worship in. Worshiping at a festival for one god will reset the sacrifice items needed by you for ALL the gods. Be sure to check before each festival! When you sacrifice your items during the festival successfully, your percent satisfaction standing with that god will raise by a percentage relative to the number of people who participate in the festival Egypt-wide at the same time. Once you have raised your satisfaction standing with each god to 100%, you pass the test.88

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The Festivals guild hall is very near the one for zFree, and 40.7 percent of zFree members belong to Festivals, compared with 25.9  percent of the Point. The names of four other guilds in the list begin with the letter “z,” and all of them are special purpose satellite guilds of zFree. As its name clearly states, zFree Aqueduct Guild constructed a water delivery system:  We manage the aqueduct line in central River Plains. Although zFree is primarily responsible for creating and maintaining the aqueduct line, ZAQ had membership open to anyone who lives, works, plays, or at least thinks fondly of River Plains. Our guild hall is near the first tower at 1384, 3446. Membership is now closed. We have 97 towers constructed, with 3 reserved for members who have not built yet.89

Indeed, fully twenty-one of the twenty-five members of the Point who belong to the zFree Aqueduct Guild also belong to the main zFree guild, which indicates that zFree is their primary affiliation. Zlopolis built zFree’s megalopolis, “a 49-piece building, usually built as a regional group project,” in direct competition with Point Mega that coordinated construction of a megalopolis for the Point.90 ZPheonix is focused on organizing teams to construct statues for Test of Seven Phoenix, and Zemples shared information about colored tile supplies and ceramic ovens for constructing memorials in Test of Funerary Temple. Table  3.6 already included two special purpose guilds, the humorous HIVE and animal hunting Safari Club. Shroomers of the Darkest Night operate a chat channel where Egyptians report sightings of valuable mushrooms of exotic types, while Herbalists do the same for plants. Other guilds in Table  5.6 either represent groups of friends or perform lesser functions for the wider community. While we certainly cannot claim that players of Tale believe in the ancient gods of Egypt, or constitute a fully functional utopia, they do have some of the qualities of religiously oriented intentional community.91 In contrast, the Family or Children of God was an intense Christian religious movement that largely seceded from the wider society, while depending economically upon it. In the 1990s I studied this group ethnographically, through field observations at communes in three nations and many interviews, then administered a questionnaire based on the General Social Survey, and very recently studied the online presence of the group itself and the community of disappointed members called xFamily.92 Here is a summary of the historical background: Among the most famous American new religions of the period around 1970 was The Children of God. Part of the Jesus People Movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s, this group vanished from American consciousness by the mid-1970s, and some scholars wondered what had become of it. Then, around 1990, bands of members came in from all around the world, under the new name The Family. During their overseas sojourn, they had created an enduring communal way of life and an attractive expressive culture. Now, back in the States and around the world, they found new friends as well as old enemies, challenging the world’s one remaining superpower

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to recognize the depths of its own weakness and prepare for the endtime prophesied by the Bible.93

With something over 10,000 members at its peak around 1990, the Family was organized as a geographically dispersed collection of communes, coordinated by a flood of newsletters and other publications, as well as visits from leaders possessing some degree of charisma. Often living in low-cost temporary housing, they survived from donations of food, clothing, and money, avoiding regular employment and educating their children at home. Given that a central tenet of their doctrine was that Christ would soon return in the Second Coming, simultaneously with the collapse of wicked secular civilization, they did not invest much effort preparing the children to live ordinary lives as adults. Nonviolent and abstaining from the drugs that permeated the counterculture from which they had come, they nonetheless violated a number of laws, for example sometimes migrating from one nation to another without any legal permission. One feature of the 1960s counterculture they preserved and even amplified was sexual freedom. While the local communes varied in their customs and social structures, there was a general norm that the erotic needs of each member should be satisfied, even if that meant intercourse between a married member and an unmarried member. For the decade ending in 1987, the central organization and some of the nearby communes practiced “flirty fishing,” a recruitment and fund-raising method in which women members had sexual relations with numerous nonmember men. The central leadership was at Tenerife in the Canary Islands for much of the period of erotic outreach, but its exact location was always kept secret, to avoid being raided by the police as well as to preserve a sense of mystery among members. Only heterosexual relations were permitted with the Family, which fit conservative Christian norms, but one practice of the leadership commune and a few of the others was definitely not conservative, sexual relations between adults and children of all ages. Criminology and the sociology of deviance have always considered social structure to be closely connected to norms concerning interpersonal behavior. As Frederic Thrasher noted in 1927 for the gangs of Chicago, social disorganization on the large scale encourages social organization on the small scale.94 Here, a radical religious commune underwent a social implosion, intensifying social relations among members while breaking away from the larger society.95 In terms of the laws of the larger society, there was no excuse for sexual relations with children, and no sociological analysis should be mistaken for an excuse. The leader, David Berg who renamed himself Moses David, promulgated endless cartoon-illustrated scriptures asserting that heterosexual relations for people of all ages were sacred, even suggesting that Christ was the real sexual partner in each of these encounters. Whatever his psychopathological motives, that doctrine did support social implosion and separation from the society that Moses David prophesied would soon be destroyed. Moses David died in 1994, yet society survived.

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Progressively, the Family moderated its beliefs and practices. Probably most local communes did not involve their children in sexual relations, but we certainly have no statistics about this grim measure of deviance. On several occasions communes in one or another nation would be raided by the police, the children removed, then after legal disputation, the children would be returned to their communal parents. As they reached adulthood, many of the children drifted away from the Family, perhaps in part because they had not gone through the Great Disappointment of the 1960s, and had no personal reason for feeling alienated from society. Whether or not they themselves had been sexually abused, many of them came to resent the fact that their parents had poorly prepared them for life in the world outside the communes. Many defectors of all ages kept in communication with each other, and out of this extensive social network emerged a small organization of ex-members and interested outsiders, calling itself xFamily, and building a wiki: This website was created (2005-01-17) to preserve and provide information about the religious group “The Family” and employs the collaborative editing platform of “wiki” software in order to do so. Mission Statement: The purpose of this website is to exhaustively document information about The Family/Children of God objectively. This site does not hold a position for or against the cult. Note: Individuals who contribute information to xFamily.org may have their own opinion, either negative or positive, on The Family, but their content must pass peer review for objectivity.96

Despite this disclaimer, the net effect of the site is to discredit the surviving organization, currently calling itself the Family International, the website of which distances itself from its controversial history.97 For example, the home page of the wiki publicizes not only flirty fishing but also the murder-suicide by Davidito, the son of one of its transient unions whom Moses David thought might possibly be Christ reborn, linking to his gruesome farewell selfie video. Many examples in this book document how the Internet may contribute to cultural differentiation or even disintegration, yet it may also have the power to promote normative conformity. Claire Borowik has developed rather sophisticated analyses of how the Internet may have rendered the world far more hostile to radical religious groups, by publicizing flaws that may have been limited to the central organization of an otherwise benign community, especially through popular journalism that emphasizes particular deviant cases.98 Having established that the xFamily wiki is a reaction to a radical disruption in conventional social structures, we can consider the team largely responsible for the parts of the wiki most immediately useful for social scientists. As of January 15, 2017, the wiki had 4,787 articles, but 57 were in a section describing practices of the cult, in subcategories abuse, child abduction, discipline, education, finances, proselytization, and secrecy. Table 5.7 summarizes the editorial contributions to these pages, and to the wiki as a whole by those who edited the fifty-seven practices, up through December 26, 2016. The editors used pseudonyms, but for convenience as well as respect, the table uses new pseudonyms consisting of the first dozen letters of the Greek

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alphabet, organized in terms of how many edits each person had made on any of these fifty-seven articles. Clearly, the first four editors made the greatest contributions. Indeed, the eight editors Epsilon through Mu contributed to the whole wiki just 1,619 edits altogether, less than Alpha, Gamma, and Delta did individually. Within the four most active contributors, we see some division of labor. Perhaps because Gamma began contributing later than the other three, none of the fifty-seven articles about practices were started by Gamma, whose total of 5,060 edits on the whole wiki was greater than any of the other contributors. One of the classic social-scientific perspectives that immediately comes to mind looking at Table 5.7 is the interactive process analysis of Robert F. Bales, who in the late 1940s developed a method for observing the dynamics of small group interaction by means of information technology that was quite advanced for that day.99 In a laboratory setting, a small group would debate some issue while being observed by researchers. Each observer used a machine called the interaction chronograph, which moved graph paper steadily past a writing area, so the observer could mark exactly when each group member spoke and what category the words belonged to in a theoretical scheme that contrasted social-emotional communications from task-oriented ones. The record of edits to a wiki is quite comparable to the output of the interaction chronograph, merely requiring classification of the edits according to whatever theoretical ontology was appropriate for the particular research. Table 5.7 illustrates one of the standard results of the research by Bales, the fact that members of a group typically differ very much in terms of the magnitude of their contributions, which is one measure of stratification within the group’s social structure.

5.6 Conclusion There are many ways to conceptualize Wikipedia and the thousands of other wikis, but one of the more sociologically challenging is as a rebellion against the ossified social structures that enforce intellectual conformity in traditional society. Wikipedia aspired to be just as authoritative as all the academic encyclopedias, but based on radical democratic principles that did not require voters to register or editors to reveal their identities. The other wikis discussed in this chapter only begin to illustrate the cultural and social variety of Greater Wikidom. If we are recapitulating the history of television as a mass medium, perhaps the Great Wasteland stage for wikis will similarity end with a diversity of economic and social structures, as television today can be broadcast by local and networked stations supported by advertising, distributed via subscription to cable services, and as in YouTube through an enduring mixture of amateur and professional means. Wikis vary in how stable or connected to external society the individual identities of contributors are, but quantitative analysis of social structures are currently possible, and may become even more significant as the cultures mature.

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6 Citizen Social Science

Over the four centuries since Galileo, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, the social structure of science has become ever more organized, possibly rigid, and definitely expensive. In some of the sciences that emphasized direct observation of physical specimens, from paleontology to archaeology to ornithology, amateurs still played a valuable role, but in the past decade professional scientists have begun to enlist ordinary citizens as unpaid but respected assistants across several of the natural sciences. One model, illustrated by Zooniverse, simply uses low-pay or volunteer labor through online crowdsourcing, chiefly to annotate and classify already existing images and text data. Another model, illustrated by eBird, enlists volunteers to collect data out in the world, thus giving them a role somewhat more like collaborators rather than merely exploiting them as cheap labor. A huge body of information technology literature has studied social aspects of citizen science, yet with very little input from traditional social science. After examples including Zooniverse and eBird, and a brief survey of current knowledge about the social structure of existing citizen science projects, this chapter will consider very difficult topics related to a still rare variant, citizen social science.

6.1 Online Data Classification Projects On July 2, 2005, the first “stub” draft of a Wikipedia article said, in its entirety:  Citizen science is a term used for a project (or ongoing programme of work) which aims to make scientific discoveries, verify scientific hypotheses, or gather data which can be used for scientific purposes, and which involves large numbers of people, many of whom have no specific scientific training. Citizen science projects are often run by scientific institutions, research NGOs, or educational establishments; they usually attract participants through a combination of recruiting among their membership, advertisements and media coverage. The idea is most widespread in North America; 166

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citizen science projects take place in many other countries, for example in the UK, although the term is not in common usage there.1

A dozen years later, a very recent example best provides a clear introduction while introducing some of the potentially quite radical implications of citizen science. On July 13, 2017, thousands of people received this email message: The next phase of Project Discovery has arrived. As an EVE Online pilot, you now have the opportunity to search for real life exoplanets from within EVE’s virtual universe. By playing Project Discovery, you will directly contribute to science whilst earning rewards such as PLEX, ISK, SKINs and even blueprints for prestigious CONCORD ships like the Pacifier frigate and Enforcer cruiser. Access Project Discovery through the Neocom menu and help CONCORD’s Chief of Deep Space Research, Professor Michel Mayor, uncover the hidden worlds of our universe.

EVE Online is arguably the intellectually most sophisticated online game, encompassing a system of extremely complex social structures largely assembled by the players themselves, and created by a small group of visionaries in Reykjavík, Iceland.2 Launched in 2003, after a decade of innovation and slow growth, it achieved half a million dedicated subscribers, playing the role of colonists in a galaxy separate from our own. CONCORD is a fictional government of nonplayer characters that imposes peace on a small number of solar systems, even as the players create their own cosmic nations that compete for territory and resources, and often go to war across the wider galaxy. Espionage, sabotage, and deception are quite common, so EVE can be considered a laboratory on the limitations of online social order.3 ISK is the main currency in the exceedingly complex economy, Inter Stellar Kredits but using the same abbreviation as the Icelandic króna, the currency of EVE’s home country. Given that CONCORD is fictional, we might imagine that Michel Mayor is fictional as well, but in fact he is very real and so is Project Discovery. As Wikipedia reports, Michel G. E. Mayor (born 12 January 1942, Lausanne) is a Swiss astrophysicist and professor emeritus at the University of Geneva’s Department of Astronomy. He formally retired in 2007, but remains active as a researcher at the Observatory of Geneva. He is co-winner of the 2010 Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize, and the winner of the 2015 Kyoto Prize. Together with Didier Queloz in 1995 he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi.4

Project Discovery allows EVE players to serve as citizen scientists, analyzing real astronomical data in search of evidence of other planets outside our own solar system, using visualization and analysis software built into the EVE Online game. It is actually the second such research project; the first one asked players to analyze microbiology photographs inside EVE for the Human Protein Atlas.5 The exoplanet project is especially appropriate to discuss here because it connects directly to the major tradition of amateur astronomy. Because the stars are so far away, exoplanets orbiting one are nearly impossible to observe directly. They can be inferred chiefly from two different kinds of

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observation of the star itself: (1) very heavy planets, especially if they are close to their star, may through gravitational attraction cause the star’s movement around the galaxy to be very slightly irregular, moving side to side or toward or away from Earth, depending on the angle of the planet’s orbit; and (2) if the Earth is near the plane of the planet’s orbit, it may be possible to detect its shadow as it crosses the face of its star, and this is the method used by Project Discovery. This method also works better for large planets close to their stars, so astronomers are not getting a random sample of exoplanets, but still find data about them very interesting. Here is how the system works inside EVE Online. When not engaged in any other activity, the user may click an icon that opens up a window for Project Discovery. A tutorial runs the user through how to understand and operate it, beginning with a noisy graph of many readings of the light of a star, jumping slightly up and down around a 100 percent horizontal line, with this explanation: “This is a luminosity graph of a star far, far away. Your job is to identify planetary transit. A point in time where a planet passes in front of the star from our point of view. When this happens the luminosity of the star will decrease as a portion of its light is blocked.” The graph shows one such sudden drop in luminosity of about 6 percent, around day eight of a three-week data string. The rest of the tutorial concentrates on how to look at different segments of the data with magnification, how to use a detrending tool to adjust for periodic fluctuations in the star’s brightness, and fold the data in order to overlay multiple transits thereby providing convincing evidence that a planet was in orbit around the star. The data came from the CoRoT space telescope, which operated from 2006 to 2012, so some of the data had already been thoroughly analyzed, and could be used to test how well the EVE users were doing their citizen science.6 At the end of the tutorial, I especially took note of this message: “Most samples you will find will not include a transit. Even though planets are plentiful in our galaxy, the chance that they will align between the star and our telescope is pretty low.” When submitting an analysis, the user can select “No Transits,” but when I did this the system always told me I was wrong. Consulting the EVE Online player forums, I saw that many other people were having trouble with the system, posting comments like these: The transits are supposed to be rare but literally every slide I’ve done has been claiming there’s transits every where and there hasn’t been a single no transit slide. What I suspect is many of these slides (not all) are incorrectly marked and claiming there’s dips in light when there’s actually nothing there. If it turns out to have been as we believe to be “noise” and NOT transits, please tell us. I have been trying my absolute best, and every dataset seems to contain transits that even after showing just seem wrong, and randomly picked. If we believe this is representative of the more difficult levels, we may as well just give up now, as no human being could ever detect a pattern in these samples, no matter how experienced.

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Hang on … Are all those transits that I missed in the random noise really correct? Blimey. We need better tools because no matter what buttons I press it still looks like random noise. I’m not even sure starting out on easier samples are going to help. Even after I fail and spend some time examining the data where the transits have been highlighted for me, I still can’t see the transits.7

EVE Online told the forum that it was reorganizing the sequence in which the data would be offered, but did not acknowledge any fundamental problems. Rather than continue to observe Project Discovery, it seemed better to look at a more established exoplanet citizen science project, Planet Hunters, which launched at the end of 2010 to “enlist the public’s help to search data from the NASA’s Kepler spacecraft for the characteristic drop in light due to an orbiting extrasolar planets (exoplanets) crossing in front of their parent stars.”8 This project was part of the constantly expanding Zooniverse set of citizen science projects that had grown out of Galaxy Zoo, in which by 2011 citizen scientists had classified the structures of nearly 900,000 galaxies from telescope images.9 After a year of work by 40,000 volunteers, Planet Hunter was able to report probable discovery of two planets circling distant stars, and subsequent publications have reported a few additional candidates.10 The general Planet Hunter method is quite systematic. At random, several citizen scientists will examine the same segment of data from the same star. If several of them identify the same pattern that appears to be the transit of a planet, then scientists will look at the same data, and also analyze other data from that star over a different period of time. Consensus among experienced citizen scientists is an important step in the research process, but by no means conclusive, and researchers have begun exploring a range of techniques for estimating the quality of an individual’s data contributions.11 Extensive checking, both visual and mathematical, is required to confirm the probable existence of a planet. While many stars have planets, only a few have planets in orbits that transit the star from the perspective of Earth. Thus, one way to conceptualize the volunteers is as screeners who separate out a small portion of the total data for close examination by professional scientists. This is only one of many ways citizen scientists may contribute to research progress, but an important one. A new astronomical Zooniverse project of this general type, Gravity Spy, aims to improve the capabilities of aLIGO, a billion-dollar system that had already detected a couple of very distant collisions between black holes, described in the public abstract of the NSF grant: This innovative project will develop a citizen science system to support the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (aLIGO), the most complicated experiment ever undertaken in gravitational physics. Before the end of this decade it will open up the window of gravitational wave observations on the Universe. However, the high detector sensitivity needed for astrophysical discoveries makes aLIGO very susceptible to noncosmic artifacts and noise that must be identified and separated from cosmic signals. Teaching computers to identify and morphologically classify these artifacts in detector data is exceedingly difficult. Human eyesight is a proven tool for

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classification, but the aLIGO data streams from approximately 30,000 sensors and monitors easily overwhelm a single human. This research will address these problems by coupling human classification with a machine learning model that learns from the citizen scientists and also guides how information is provided to participants. A novel feature of this system will be its reliance on volunteers to discover new glitch classes, not just use existing ones. The project includes research on the human-centered computing aspects of this sociocomputational system, and thus can inspire future citizen science projects that do not merely exploit the labor of volunteers but engage them as partners in scientific discovery. Therefore, the project will have substantial educational benefits for the volunteers, who will gain a good understanding on how science works, and will be a part of the excitement of opening up a new window on the universe.12

On October 3, 2017, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in physics to three of the LIGO researchers, for work that had been completed before the technical improvements and associated citizen science of aLIGO.13 That same day, criticisms spread across the Internet, suggesting that the entire thousand-person aLIGO team should have received the award, for example in an article by Ed Young in the Atlantic titled “The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science,” which asserted: “They distort the nature of the scientific enterprise, rewrite its history, and overlook many of its most important contributors.” Young placed his criticism in the context of an understanding of the modern social structure of science: The wider problem, beyond who should have received the prize and who should not, is that the Nobels reward individuals – three at most, for each of the scientific prizes, in any given year. And modern science, as Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus write in Stat, is “the teamiest of team sports.” Yes, researchers sometimes make solo breakthroughs, but that’s increasingly rare. Even within a single research group, a platoon of postdocs, students, and technicians will typically be involved in a discovery that gets hitched to a single investigator’s name. And more often than not, many groups collaborate on a single project.14

When aLIGO makes newer discoveries, the team will have grown to several thousand, adding in the citizen scientists. However, this particular form of citizen science is not especially well designed to create social structures among the volunteers. Each individual need merely register with Zooniverse and log into Planet Hunter, take the tutorial, and begin contributing. The aLIGO project is exploring how better to engage volunteers as partners, but shortly we shall see other examples that more naturally do so. Whether Project Discovery in EVE Online improves its software performance and leads to new social structures within the game remains to be seen. On March 15, 2004, a player using the name Morning Maniac created a formal group called EVE University, with this goal:  “To be a neutral, nonprofit institution that specialises in teaching players about EVE Online.”15 It has 1,618 members as of September 10, 2017, whose combat performance statistics can be seen on a website called zKillboard, although most of the university’s activity really does consist of mentoring and providing courses for

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new players.16 Its wiki page for Project Discovery was posted July 13, 2017, receiving 5,274 views over its first two months, or about 1 percent of the player population. The page is very brief and merely notes that doing the work can earn a player both modest ISK money and “skins” that give their spaceships a different appearance but do not improve their functionality.17 One would predict that emergence of social structure around Project Discovery would require either increased rewards, redesign of the work so that it required cooperation, or both. Planet Hunter has a Facebook page, functioning like a website pushing information to visitors, but no Facebook group. When I  checked the page September 9, 2017, it had been “liked” by 475,792 people, and I was able to see the identities of 146 who happened to be my “friends.” While it proved feasible to check the lists of other public groups to which they belonged, the sample seemed so biased that this would not be worth doing, but researchers who had access to Facebook’s own internal list of all 475,792 could consider a research project along those lines. Planet Hunter has a forum for volunteers on its own website, but only a small fraction of the people who had looked for transits apparently posted, for example only 149 participating in forum threads where they introduced themselves to each other.18 A different way of looking at online Zooniverse social structure is to survey the information about the different projects, including Galaxy Zoo, Planet Hunter, and Gravity Spy. A page of the Zooniverse website provides links to publications that resulted from several of the projects, thus offering volunteers interesting if indirect feedback and honor for their own contributions.19 Below are descriptions of the nine currently active projects that already had at least two open-access publications listed for volunteers to read, as of September 10, 2017. • Galaxy Zoo (60 publications):  “To understand how galaxies formed we need your help to classify them according to their shapes.” • Planet Hunters (12):  “[W]e are enlisting the public’s help to inspect the Kepler light curves and find these planets missed by automated detection algorithms.” • Supernova Hunters (7): “By helping us filter each night’s data we can discover supernovae earlier. This allows us to alert other astronomers who can gather observations that cover the entire evolution of a supernova from explosion until it fades and disappears.” • Milky Way Project (5): “We hope to map out these objects and then use your discoveries to make future observations. You might even discover something we didn’t expect, something truly extraordinary!” • Snapshot Serengeti (5):  “[C]lassify all the different animals caught in millions of camera trap images.” • Gravity Spy (4): “Citizen scientists will sift through the enormous amount of LIGO data to produce a robust ‘gold standard’ glitch dataset that can be used to seed and train machine learning algorithms.”

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• Radio Galaxy Zoo (2):  “Help astronomers discover supermassive black holes observed by the KG Jansky Very Large Array (NRAO) and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (CSIRO).” • Disk Detective (2): “Planets form from vast clouds of gas, dust, and chunks of rock – clouds that take the shape of disks with stars in the center … you will help astronomers find these disks, homes for extrasolar planets.” • Season Spotter Questions (2):  “We have mounted hundreds of cameras around North America (and beyond) to record the timing of leafing out, flowering, seed making, and leaf drop across many types of ecosystems. While we can use automated algorithms to identify some of the vegetation changes in the photographs, we need your eyes and brain to figure out the changes that are harder to spot.” All of these projects ask volunteers to code or classify visual images, two of them concerning terrestrial animals and plants, and the others astronomical. The individual project websites list the universities involved in each, but other kinds of organizations are also involved, most significantly Adler Planetarium in Chicago, which has played a leadership role since the very beginning. The publications, of course, also give the authors’ affiliations. Therefore it would be quite straightforward to do a conventional sociometric analysis of institutions and authors that could map the social structure of Zooniverse leadership. Whether the volunteers have a social structure remains to be seen. Research on social structure is much easier to do, and probably more relevant, for citizen science projects in which volunteers do not merely code data online, but also collect data in the real world, which tends to encourage communication between them.

6.2 Online Data Collection Citizen Science Opportunities for rapid development of online citizen science communities depend both upon the nature of the work to be done in the particular area of research and upon the prior existence of social organizations, such as amateur clubs. This section will contrast two well-established activities that reveal significant differences in social organization, bird watching and fossil collecting. The Wikipedia page for birdwatching reports that the term birdwatcher was first used in 1891, to describe “a form of wildlife observation in which the observation of birds is a recreational activity.” Special terms are a good indication of the existence of a subculture, but as is often the case, this one encompasses variants: The terms birding and birdwatching are today used by some interchangeably, although some participants prefer birding, partly because it includes the auditory aspects of enjoying birds. In North America, many birders differentiate themselves from birdwatchers, and the term birder is unfamiliar to most lay people. At the most basic level, the distinction is perceived as one of dedication or intensity, though this is a

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subjective differentiation. Generally, self-described birders perceive themselves to be more versed in minutiae like identification (aural and visual), molt, distribution, migration timing, and habitat usage. Whereas these dedicated birders may often travel specifically in search of birds, birdwatchers have been described by some enthusiasts as having a more limited scope, perhaps not venturing far from their own yards or local parks to view birds.20

Birders can be conceptualized as amateur ornithologists, and these communities converged online in eBird.21 Its website proclaims: A real-time, online checklist program, eBird has revolutionized the way that the birding community reports and accesses information about birds. Launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, eBird provides rich data sources for basic information on bird abundance and distribution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. eBird’s goal is to maximize the utility and accessibility of the vast numbers of bird observations made each year by recreational and professional bird watchers. It is amassing one of the largest and fastest growing biodiversity data resources in existence. For example, in May 2015, participants reported more than 9.5 million bird observations across the world!22

eBird is the best early example of online citizen science in which the amateurs collect observational data, rather than merely coding existing data as in Galaxy Zoo and Project Discovery. In addition to building a huge community of participants, it has been a leader in developing information technology that can be adapted for other citizen science projects. For example at the beginning of August 2017 it distributed an improved application for birders’ mobile devices: eBird Mobile for Android took a big step forward this week: the ability to keep “tracks” of where you eBird. Every time you start a checklist on eBird Android, you now have the option to keep a GPS track of where you walk for your traveling counts. The “tracks” automatically calculate the distance traveled and time spent eBirding – all you have to do is watch birds! This is an important new chapter in eBird, opening the door for many exciting new future tools: improved research that can use the actual path you birded, eBird data outputs that can show the precise path of any given checklist, and much more. Plus, it makes your birding even easier.23

One expression of the eBird community is its Facebook group, the Facebook eBird Discussion Group, which had 6,637 members on August 9, 2017.24 Intended as a place “specifically for the discussion of issues, problems, suggestions, ideas and input for and about eBird” rather than sharing data and pictures, it discussed the new Android app extensively. Many birders asked questions about how to use the app, and they received answers from each other and from the eBird professional staff. This Facebook group proved to be a good case for a pilot study, and we can well imagine an excellent doctoral dissertation in sociology or a related field, entirely devoted to the culture and social structure of the online birder community of which eBird is a prominent part.

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When an information technology upgrade stimulates much discussion about how to use the new tools, researchers in human–computer interaction can gain insights from reading the spontaneous comments users post. But many other aspects of citizen science are frequently discussed, a few of which also relate to the timing of changes, for example interactions between eBird and the American Birding Association (ABA). Founded half a century ago, the ABA has published many bird-finding guides, and as Wikipedia notes, The ABA publishes a checklist of the more than 950 bird species found in the ABA Area (roughly, North America north of Mexico). Updates to the most recent print edition are available on line. The Checklist provides the common names used by a recent edition of the Peterson field guide, and it is one of the authorities consulted by the compilers of many popular bird identification guides in order to establish ranges and the status of populations.25

Both the ABA and eBird provide systems for listing bird species found in particular areas, and occasionally the eBird Facebook group discusses the relationships between them, as in this example: Birder A:  When will eBird include Hawaiian birds on the ABA area list? I  have seen this question asked in the past with no definitive answer. I have heard “sometime this year.” Birder B: eBird can’t do it before ABA releases an official list … Birder C: How so? “Area” relates to geography which is what it is. Birder D:  And eBird won’t care which Hawaii birds the ABA eventually accepts on its ABA area checklist. Birder B: You are right of course. It’s ABA area alerts that will need some thought after the ABA releases the list. The eBird group seems to have eight admins, but one of them is actually the Facebook page for eBird’s website. Facebook is constantly changing the details of its system, and recently allowed groups to include one or two such items in the list of members, to make prominent the link to them. This is not a case like Greenwich Wiffle Ball mentioned in Chapter 2, where a thing is misidentified as a person. The seven actual eBird group admins include three from Cornell University, including the eBird project leader and the project coordinator, as well as a zoologist representing the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. Given their level of organizational commitment, it seemed worthwhile to tabulate all the public Facebook groups to which these seven professional birders belonged, and 131 of the 159 total were birder groups. Three of the others were comparable to birder groups, but devoted to insects: Mothing and Moth-Watching (8,681 members), Moths of the Eastern United States (4,065), and Northeast Odonata (1,690) concerning observation of dragonflies. The eBird project coordinator belonged to a total of ninety-seven of these birder groups, and the admin in second place belonged to only twenty-one, which suggests a division of labor in which the coordinator is tasked with

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communicating with many comparable organizations that might cooperate with eBird. Here are the ten largest Facebook birder groups to which only the coordinator among the seven admins belongs, eight of them immediately demonstrating the international scope of birding: Birds Bangladesh (24,578 members) BirdLife South Africa (23,963) What’s This Bird? (18,945) Birds of Nepal (नेपालका चराहरु) (14,537) Critically Endangered Birds (10,847) Fotografía de AVES en libertad de la Península Ibérica, Baleares y Canarias (9,374) British Facebook Birders (8,734) RNOA (Red Nacional de Observadores de Aves de Colombia) (8,728) CORBIDI (Centro de Ornitología y Biodiversidad) (8,497) For this pilot study, it seemed worthwhile to focus on the other groups to which at least three of the eBird admins belonged, but not to use total overlapping membership as a measure of group interlock. It is a trivial matter to gain membership to a public Facebook group, but only a relatively small subset of members actually post messages in its online discussion. While we have seen that these gross membership interlocks are a valuable form of analysis, here I decided to focus just on the 100 nonadmins who had most recently posted in the discussion, which covered roughly the prior three weeks. Table 6.1 lists the eBird group followed by the others in order of descending joint membership of the active eBird discussion posters. Three of the ten Facebook groups linked to eBird belong to the American Birding Association, a general group and two groups where members post sightings of birds that are rare in their particular area, alerting other members to look for them. The Facebook Bird ID Group of the World has no apparent affiliation with a particular organization, but is managed by nine admins, the only one of whom having an obvious professional connection to birdwatching being a landscape artist. The page for this popular group says it is specifically for the concise, detailed discussion of bird ID issues of bird species from around the world, advanced discussions about field ID and related issues, the concise and detailed discussion of ID of unknown birds (photos included and encouraged) and for the purpose of providing ID tips on birds from around the world for those who want to learn and don’t mind scrounging through various discussions.

The Birding Apps group focuses on mobile information technology systems used by birders, and Bird Sounds concerns hearing and recording birds, rather than seeing them, which is an established research subfield.26 Many local groups other than the three listed at the bottom of the table exist, and their inclusion makes an important point. Birders are organized both locally and universally, something that is not true for fossil collectors.

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176 Table 6.1 Facebook groups most interlinked with eBird Group Facebook eBird Discussion Group ABA Rare Bird Alert American Birding Association (ABA) Facebook Bird ID Group of the World ABA Area Rare Birds Birding Apps Bird Sounds and Recording, by Xeno-Canto Hawaii Birdwatching Iowa Birding Massachusetts Rare Bird Alert

Members

eBird admins

Active eBird posters

6,637 13,689 7,879 19,141 2,149 1,223 2,915 1,968 2,503 1,729

7 6 4 5 3 3 3 3 4 3

100 65 55 51 25 24 12 11 9 3

As it happens, when I lived in central Illinois I joined the local fossil club, and that reactional activity in retrospect can be redefined as crude ethnography, providing some preparation for more recent online data collection. While there were monthly meetings, and occasional field trips to interesting fossil collection sites, the club was small and primarily functioned as an information resource preparing members to do solo collecting. The sites where I collected were of three kinds: stream beds (most prominently the world-famous Mazon Creek), quarries, and the ruins of abandoned open-pit coal mines. Often I needed permission from the owner of the land to collect fossils at a site, and one was even inside territory fenced off for a nuclear power plant. The open-pit coal mines offered some social-science insights, even though I explored them alone. When a vein of coal exists a few feet below the surface, miners can strip away the dirt and a thin stratum of rock, then very efficiently gather the coal in the open air, rather than an underground tunnel. Prior to today’s environmental regulations, when the coal had all been extracted, the site would be abandoned, without putting the dirt back where it belonged. Depending on the lay of the land, the result was often a set of man-made lakes surrounded by low hills of dirt that contained fossils, which would be progressively revealed over the years as rain slowly returned the dirt to its home. At the sites I visited, the fossils were generally inside siderite nodules of stone, which might or might not have naturally split open to reveal their contents. At one site, the nodules were very strong, so I had to carry them home and carefully open them using a light hammer and a very short piece of railroad track as an anvil, usually finding nothing, but often a plant fossil such as equisetum “horsetails,” or an animal like essexella jellyfish. Note that human use of the land for another purpose, under a set of obsolete environmental norms, had incidentally enabled this particular example of citizen science.

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A single day on Mazon Creek, with permission of the local landowner, did not allow me to find a Tully Monster, but I bought two from a local tourist shop, illustrating the connection of paleontology to a minor form of commerce. Wikipedia correctly reports:  Tullimonstrum, colloquially known as the Tully Monster, is an extinct genus of softbodied bilaterian that lived in shallow tropical coastal waters of muddy estuaries during the Pennsylvanian geological period, about 300  million years ago. A  single species, T. gregarium, is known. Examples of Tullimonstrum have been found only in the Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois, United States. Its classification has been the subject of controversy, and interpretations of the fossil likened it to molluscs, arthropods, conodonts, worms, and vertebrates.27

This scientifically very interesting species is named after Francis Tully, an amateur collector who discovered it in the 1950s and took it to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The Tully Monster illustrates a potential intellectual value of citizen paleontology, through discovery of specimens of very great significance for science. But it also illustrates the extremely localized nature of fossil collecting. This aquatic creature may have lived over a wide geographic range, but has been found only in Mazon Creek. The sites visited by collectors in that part of Illinois date from what is ironically called the Pennsylvanian period of time, also called Late Carboniferous because of its coal deposits. Outside coal-producing areas, the fossils will be of very different vintage and type. A significant social consequence of this fact of nature is that fossil clubs in different areas may not share much of the same knowledge or interests. Unlike the migratory birds, the fossils are localized, comparable to the localization of maker-movement facilities mentioned in the previous chapter. Communications between members of the club I belonged to and scientists tended to be limited to the Field Museum and the two universities in the area, Illinois State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, just an hour’s drive apart. Thus, the social structures of online communities of birders and fossil collectors may be very different, geographically dispersed versus concentrated. In 2013, the NSF made a grant to Bruce MacFadden and his team at the University of Florida, investing $1,970,124 “to derive and develop a network and community of practice (CoP) among amateur and professional paleontologists across the country.”28 The grant’s title spells out fossil: “Fostering Opportunities for Synergistic STEM with Informal Learners.” This grant was made through NSF’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, and thus tended to conceptualize citizen science as an educational tool, rather than a means to achieve progress in the particular area of science. STEM is a somewhat propagandistic acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, suggesting it is the main stem of the tree of knowledge, but with the problematic redundancy of technology and engineering.

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One sometimes sees STEAM, adding the arts, but variants adding the humanities are hard to find, perhaps because people conceptualize them as covered by any union of science and the arts. The National Science Board, NSF’s governing body, has advocated intensive investment in STEM education, even after school graduation:  “The condition of the U.S.  science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce figures prominently in discussions of national competitiveness, education policy, innovation, and even immigration.”29 In 2016, MacFadden’s team reported its early progress in Palaeontologia Electronica, an open-access, peer-reviewed electronic journal, providing a succinct definition of community of practice: “a theoretical term used to describe the social learning of a group of people through a shared practice related to a domain of knowledge.”30 Sociologists might be forgiven for believing that this term dating from the early 1990s is a synonym for subculture, but it does have the connotation of shared expertise. A Facebook page that disseminates news from the FOSSIL Project says its goal is “building a networked community in which fossil clubs and professional paleontologists collaborate in learning, science, and outreach.”31 As of August 29, 2017, 3,710 people had “liked” that page, but Facebook was not the medium used for communication within the community. Instead, they were referred to forums at the myFossil.org website, where there had been 1,411 posts on 191 threads. These are frankly small numbers, compared for example with the 21,989 posts on 3,419 threads on the forums of the esoteric Athen Paladins mentioned in Chapter 3, not to mention the hundreds of thousands on the forums of popular games.32 The myFossil website functioned as an organization with 997 members who had signed up while visiting, of whom 625 were “active,” meaning they had posted in the website’s discussion forums, uploaded a picture of a fossil, or joined one of the twentytwo public groups. Once becoming a member of myFossil, a collector could become a member of one of these groups, of which eight had at least 25 members; • Calvert Marine Museum Fossil Club (34 members, Solomons, Maryland): “Interested individuals in the Miocene fossils of Maryland.” • 2017 FOSSILs for Teachers Professional Development (31 members, Gainesville, Florida): “A group for the 2017 Fossils for Teachers Professional Development (PD) participants can collaborate prior and after the PD occurs. Information regarding the PD will be posted here including agenda, car pool lists and lessons completed.” • Bodacious Brachiopods (30, Gainesville, Florida):  “Interest group for collectors and enthusiasts alike.” • Eclectic Echinodermata (29, no location):  “For those interested in echinoderm diversity. This ranges from eocrinoids, crinoids, rhombiferans, blastoids, coronoids, diploporitans, parablastoids, echinoids, and all of the strange beautiful forms that came in between!”

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• Southwest Florida Fossil Society (29, Punta Gorda, Florida): “We are a group of people interested in fossils! Our non-profit society includes people from all walks of life … from professional paleontologists and avid collectors to those who are just beginning to discover the world of fossils – young and old alike. We teach from the scientific perspective in a fun family-learning environment. The society funds two scholarships each year for graduate students in paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL). We also have a grant fund for other projects, such as research, publications, larger donations, and related interests.” • K12 Teachers (26, Gainesville, Florida): “This group is …” [nothing follows]. • Shocking Shark Teeth (26, Gainesville, Florida): “Club dedicated to shark teeth.” • iDigFossils (25, Gainesville, Florida): “The goal of this Strategies project is to expand and extend our understanding of integrated STEM learning by designing and testing a model for K-12 STEM engagement using a highly relevant but unexplored educational pathway to K-12 STEM – paleontology.” The first three of these groups obviously possess different characters. The first is a local fossil club, in an area where the fossils are relatively recent, as indicated by Miocene in the name. The second is education oriented, while the third is devoted to a particular phylum of brachiopods, shelled sea creatures that evolved over 500 million years ago and still exist today, the word bodacious being a term of endearment rather than a technical designation. Table 6.2 looks at membership linkages between these three distinctive groups and all eight, using correlation coefficients to show how they sometimes may work satisfactorily in measuring online social structures. In Chapter  1 we noted that correlation coefficients can be problematic, because there is ambiguity about the number of cases in many datasets derived from online communities. The example of myFossil helps us see this more clearly, and suggests how the problem can be handled. A total of 125 people belonged to at least one of the eight groups, so they were arranged in a spreadsheet as 125 rows of data, with eight columns for the eight groups, a “1” indicating membership, and a “0” indicating that the person did not belong to the particular group. In the first column of Table 6.2, we see a rather solid 0.32 correlation between the two locally focused groups, Calvert Marine Museum Fossil Club and Southwest Florida Fossil Society. There are weaker but noticeably negative correlations with the three educational groups. Calvert also has a 0.22 correlation with the shark teeth group, suggesting the possibility that the Maryland and Florida people may become fossil tourists in each other’s areas. But why is 125 the correct number of cases? To provide a reasonable comparison, I added all the people who belonged only to other groups, bringing the total to 162 while adding only rows of zeros, and strengthening the 0.32 correlation to 0.37. Why not raise the N to the 625 active members of the

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Table 6.2 Linkages across citizen science paleontology groups Group

Calvert 2017 Bodacious Eclectic Southwest K12 Shocking iDigFossils

Correlations for N = 125

Correlations for N = 162

Calvert

2017 FOSSILs

Bodacious

Calvert

2017 FOSSILs

Bodacious

1.00 –0.14 0.08 0.05 0.32 –0.10 0.22 –0.22

–0.14 1.00 –0.19 0.08 –0.04 0.15 0.07 0.27

0.08 –0.19 1.00 0.18 0.10 –0.16 0.17 –0.23

1.00 –0.06 0.14 0.12 0.37 –0.03 0.27 –0.14

–0.06 1.00 –0.11 0.14 0.03 0.20 0.13 0.31

0.14 –0.11 1.00 0.23 0.16 –0.09 0.22 –0.16

website, or even all 997 who had at least registered on it? This is a judgment call, which may be difficult to make, and giving researchers some obligation to be especially clear about how they did their calculations. There is no natural definition of the population from which we are drawing a sample. A case can be made that 997 is the correct population size, because these people were probably aware that they could join a group. I tend to like 162, because these are people interested in joining a group, and who by joining particular groups are making a judgment about which ones harmonize with their own personal interests. That suggests there really is a correlation of 0.23 between Bodacious Brachiopods and Eclectic Echinodermata, but whether that is because both groups love primitive sea creatures, or both enjoy cute names, is unclear. A major question remains open: Does amateur fossil collecting really benefit from the artificial creation of an online community? As a research study, the FOSSIL Project may have been a good investment, even if the ultimate answer it arrives at is “No.” The number of people involved seems quite low, rather comparable to the Facebook statistics for the NSS reported in Chapter 2, and not at all comparable to those for eBird. Perhaps the development of an online community of paleontology enthusiasts will take time to develop, or it could prove that local offline fossil collecting groups are the natural social structure, given the topic and the geographic distribution of the specimens. Scientific paleontology itself has not yet fossilized, as illustrated by the recent discussions of a radical restructuring of the dinosaur family tree.33 Specimen collection from diverse locations, even lacking any formal research sampling plan, may contribute to scientific progress. We might well wonder whether the large number of birders are actually contributing much to fundamental science, rather than citizen science more generally being an educational rather than discovery activity. One study of eBird reported: “A significant aspect of the data that birders contribute to eBird is

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that each observation has an exact date and is linked to a point on the map. This provides the opportunity to link eBird data with a variety of covariate data that potentially influence bird occurrence, such as weather, climate, habitat, and human population density.”34 However, recently concern has been raised that any public reports of where a rare species might be found, could lead to its extinction as people rush to the location to harvest specimens, for personal gain or citizen science.35

6.3 The Social Structure of Citizen Science Classifying data about the fluctuating apparent brightness of distant stars is a very different kind of work from hiking through fields and forests to document the current behavior of wild birds, or to collect ancient fossils. Therefore, for many purposes it may be wise to classify the kind of labor involved, as one aspect of the role the citizen scientist plays. Since 2011, the website of the popular magazine, Scientific American, has classified projects into four types when reporting on them: observation, questionnaire, fieldwork, and data processing. It labels the Zooniverse Planet Hunters as data processing, and eBird as observation. Each project is assigned to only one type, so eBird is not counted as fieldwork, although Scientific American does happen to categorize several eBird-like insect projects as fieldwork, thus raising some doubts about the rigor of its classification system. As of August 24, 2017, 234 different citizen science projects were listed at Scientific American, each in the form of a brief blog article with a link so the reader could volunteer for the project, if it was still active.36 All the projects could be accessed through the education part of the magazine’s website, suggesting that informing the public about science was their primary role, but this sentence was at the top of each set of projects: “Help make science happen by volunteering for a real research project.” In addition to the education topic, the search tool on the Scientific American website has five other categories: health, mind, sustainability, tech, and the sciences. On average, the 234 projects were assigned to 2.2 of these categories, which were nonexclusive because the magazine was using them as suggestions to help readers find articles they were interested in reading. One category, the sciences, was nearly universal, because only 16 of the projects were not assigned to it, apparently in some cases simply by error. Table 6.3 shows the distribution across topics for each type of project. The distinction between observation and fieldwork is a matter of degree, but here is an example of fieldwork that may be especially interesting for social scientists, and even illustrative of possible future citizen social science projects, NYC Cyclist Air Quality Study:  Study participants wear air pollution monitors, a special shirt that monitors their heart rates, and an automatic blood pressure cuff for five 24-hour periods centered

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Table 6.3 Distribution of citizen science projects from a science publisher Topic

All types Observation

Questionnaire

Fieldwork

Data processing

Health Mind Sustainability Tech The sciences

17% 12% 59% 38% 93%

6% 3% 75% 22% 97%

55% 64% 9% 36% 73%

20% 6% 67% 32% 96%

18% 23% 34% 66% 87%

N of projects

234

77

11

85

61

around five morning bike commutes. Researchers will use this information to make recommendations about how NYC and other cities can design bicycle infrastructure to minimize the risks of air pollution exposure. The data will feed ongoing research at Columbia and contribute to cycling and public health in one of the most polluted cities in the U.S., according to the American Lung Association.37

A key feature of this study, and of the eleven questionnaire studies, is that the volunteers are research subjects, as well as research collaborators. When Andrea Wiggins and Kevin Crowston did a cluster analysis of citizen science projects, they explicitly excluded from consideration all the many projects in which data about the volunteers themselves was a major goal of the research. Within that boundary, they developed the following five-category typology: 1. action-oriented projects, which encourage participant intervention in local concerns, using scientific research as a tool to support civic agendas; 2. conservation projects, which support stewardship and natural resource management goals, primarily in the area of ecology; 3. investigation projects, which are focused on scientific research goals requiring data collection from the physical environment; 4. virtual projects, in which all activities are mediated by information and communication technologies, without direct investigation of physical elements; and 5. education projects, where education and outreach are the primary goals.38 In a 2016 chapter about citizen science, I considered the example of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a survey of American families since 1968, in which the same volunteers respond year after year.39 Respondent attrition and representative substitute recruitment have been key issues. I raised the possibility that respondents might spontaneously decide they are citizen scientists and start communicating with each other. Just now I  searched Facebook for “PSID” and found a few pages, but with a different meaning:  Persatuan Sepakbola Indonesia Djombang. It would be a simple matter for a respondent

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to the Panel Study to set up a Facebook group and start a snowball recruitment of other respondents, potentially transforming the scientific PSID from a representative sample of the general population into a cohesive group with a distinctive culture. Thus, two central issues for citizen science projects are what exact role the volunteers will play, and to what extent they function as research subjects. Jennifer Shirk and collaborators have suggested that projects can be classified in terms of the relationship between professional scientists and citizen scientists: • contractual projects, where communities ask professional researchers to conduct a specific scientific investigation and report on the results; • contributory projects, which are generally designed by scientists and for which members of the public primarily contribute data; • collaborative projects, which are generally designed by scientists and for which members of the public contribute data but also help to refine project design, analyze data, and/or disseminate findings; • co-created projects, which are designed by scientists and members of the public working together and for which at least some of the public participants are actively involved in most or all aspects of the research process; and • collegial contributions, where noncredentialed individuals conduct research independently with varying degrees of expected recognition by institutionalized science and/or professionals.40 It is possible, but worthy of debate, that some particular sciences need distinctive social structures for their citizen science projects. For example, an extensive 2009 report on the educational potential of citizen science, that included Shirk among the co-authors, identified nine different phases in a scientific research project where citizen scientists could be included: 1. choosing or defining questions for study; 2. gathering information and resources; 3. developing explanations (hypotheses) about possible answers to questions; 4. designing data collection methodologies (both experimental and observational); 5. collecting data; 6. analyzing data; 7. interpreting data and drawing conclusions; 8. disseminating conclusions; and 9. discussing results and asking new questions.41 Planet Hunter involves only a portion of phase 6 in this set of alternatives, and professionals have considerable control over the volunteer participants, who have no role in defining the project. eBird adds phase 5, and extensive social science research might be required to determine if birders today play more extensive roles. At the opposite extreme, and covering a broader area than

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citizen science, research has begun on how experts can be gracefully incorporated by means of information technology in the work and decision making of communities of ordinary people that already exist.42 Even projects that define the role of citizen scientists very narrowly pay serious attention to their crowdworkers, if they seriously hope to succeed. For example, Zooniverse asks for advice from the volunteers, when considering adding a new project that has been proposed. Over the six months from the beginning of December 2016, Zooniverse sent forty-four automatic email messages to its volunteers, including several seeking input about proposals, with this standard explanation: “This project has been built by the researchers themselves, using the Zooniverse Project Builder, so we need your help making sure it’s up to the standards of an official Zooniverse project.” Three of the projects submitted for review possessed social science qualities: • The Plastic Tide (March 14, 2017):  “Researchers need your help to spot plastics and marine litter in drone images of shorelines. They will use the data you give to train a machine algorithm to automatically detect the litter.” • Comics++ (April 25, 2017):  “The researchers behind the project want to identify comics elements and create an annotated corpus. The project’s usage is at least three fold:  enhance the creation of digital comics, boost comics research in Digital Humanities, and support the work of collectors, librarians and archivists.” • 1961 Census (May 9, 2017):  “Researchers transforming 1961 Census microfilm data tables into a comprehensive dataset structured in such a way to allow researchers to make further analyses. They’re currently looking at seven London Metropolitan Boroughs. They have transformed around 97% of the data using OCR techniques. But they need help with the final 3%. The task is to inspect images and let us know what you think the number is.” As of June 24, 2017, the Plastic Tide was indeed included among Zooniverse’s seventy-one active projects, assigned to the social science category with only one other project, but also to the nature category that had fully thirty-seven projects. The other two were not yet active, but often considerable work was required after approval, as suggested by this text on the website for Comics++:  To identify comics elements and create an annotated corpus. Its usage is at least three fold: enhance the creation of digital comics, boost comics research in Digital Humanities, and support the work of collectors, librarians and archivists. The current version of Comics++ is a beta version and features only a limited number of comic book stories. Keep an eye on our Bookshelf, for constant updates.43

The tutorial prior to doing the review presented one of the popular Archie comic strips, for example, asking the citizen scientist to select a character in a picture and identify “what emotion do they display,” with this suggested list:  anger, fear, joy surprise, deviousness, threat, or power. Entering hard-to-read data

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from the manuscript schedules of the 1961 British census would qualify as demography, but also as history.

6.4 Historical Citizen Social Science Social science research that seeks to understand our historical past is the ideal proving ground for more diverse forms of citizen social science that may focus on current conditions, including online communities like those described in earlier chapters and the rather dynamic social, political, and religious debates currently raging online. As the example of the Greenwich Library in Chapter 2 illustrates, oral history projects have existed in some communities for several years, often involving volunteer interviewers and well as interviewees. These projects come into being and are organized in a variety of ways, a topic itself worthy of sociological research. For example the University of Maine hosts the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History with a center whose “mission is to research, teach about, preserve, publish, provide public programming, and engage communities in the vernacular arts and culture of Maine and the Maritime Provinces.”44 Also, Maine Archives and Museums offered an introductory course about how to do oral histories, and this organization describes its more general mission thus:  “actively stimulates the flow of knowledge and support among organizations and individuals in Maine who identify, collect, interpret, and/or provide access to materials relating to history, living collections, and culture, in order to strengthen and promote all collecting institutions in Maine.”45 Many more specialized organizations are also active, and a search for oral histories connected with the town of Old Orchard Beach turned up three: the Old Orchard Beach Historical Society (and Harmon Museum), Documenting Maine Jewry (“A collaborative genealogy and history of Maine’s Jewish communities”), and Fort Williams Oral History Project (“video interviews with people who were connected with the Fort when it was an army base”).46 By September 2017, Zooniverse listed two projects in addition to the Plastic Tide as social science:  Scribes of the Cairo Genzia that categorizes ancient manuscripts prior to translation, and one concerning more recent historical military records: The Measuring the ANZACs project brings together an international team of researchers, community connections around New Zealand’s military history from the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the power of the Zooniverse community to explore, analyze, and digitize original World War I personnel files from Archives New Zealand. Data gathered from Measuring the ANZACs will be used for three main purposes: To create a complete and rich index of persons who served in the New Zealand military in World War I and the South African War (also called the Second Boer War).

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To support academic research on the health of New Zealanders led by a team of researchers at the Universities of Minnesota, Guelph and Waikato. To provide an ongoing platform for historical and genealogical research on NZ’s World War I soldiers by citizens and scientists around the world.47

Scribes of the Cairo Genzia and Measuring the ANZACs are also classified as among ten Zooniverse history projects, several of which would qualify as social science if theories were applied to the data, or if demographic statistics or other rigorous information about human beings were prominent in the research. Operation War Diary involves indexing the formal dayby-day detailed handwritten records of military groups: “The story of the British Army on the Western Front during the First World War is waiting to be discovered in 1.5  million pages of unit war diaries. We need your help to reveal the stories of those who fought in the global conflict that shaped the world we live in today.”48 About Shakespeare’s World concerns civilian life: In this project we’re inviting you to transcribe manuscripts created by thousands of men and women in and around Shakespeare’s lifetime, 1564–1616 … What was it like to live, work, or raise a family in early modern England? What did people eat, what did they wear, and what issues worried them? What were the hot topics of gossip? What did they do for fun? What did they read and how did they travel?49

Among the other history projects, Decoding the Civil War seems especially relevant for this book, because it concerns transcription and decoding of telegrams dating from the 1861–65 US Civil War, thus placing very early electronic communications in the context of formal social organization and conflict:  The transcription and decoding will contribute to national research, as each participant will become a “citizen archivist,” creating materials that will be of use and openly available to scholars interested in telegraphy, cryptography, communications during wartime, technology, civilian-military relations, and many other aspects of the Civil War or American history more generally. Perhaps the most meaningful outcome is that the collaborative will provide public access to previously unavailable historical records in a format that will lead to a better understanding of communications, technology, and the course of the Civil War.50

As of June 24, 2017, the project was 75 percent complete, based on 113,806 inputs from 4,927 volunteers.51 Highly relevant to this particular chapter is Science Gossip: In the Victorian period, just like today, scientists and members of the public worked together to further scientific discovery. Before computers and cameras they had to draw what they saw. Their drawings are locked away in the pages of Victorian periodicals, such as Science Gossip, Recreative Science and The Intellectual Observer. Help us to classify their drawings and map the origins of citizen science.52

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By June 24, 2017, pictures on 155,282 pages of these magazines had been classified by 9,508 volunteers. According to Wikipedia, Science Gossip was a sequence of two monthly popular-science magazines: “1865–1893: Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip: an illustrated medium of interchange and gossip for students and lovers of nature … 1894–1902:  Science-Gossip; an illustrated monthly record of nature and country-lore.”53 In a very real sense, this was the predecessor of eBird, a medium of communication where amateurs could report the diversity of creatures they observed in their local areas, frequently posting drawings that professional scientists could use in developing an expanded classification of birds and other denizens of nature. Are there any really prominent social history projects that, like eBird, have volunteers go out into the world to collect data, then post it in a systematic online archive? An example lacking much social theory, and largely ignored by academic social scientists, has proven useful in my own research and offers a template for many kinds of research on living social structure: Find A Grave. A rather active subarea in social computing concerns development and understanding of memorialization of deceased persons, and this online community links the social structure of the living to that of the dead.54 Launched in 1995 by Jim Tipton as an extension of his own hobby visiting the graves of celebrities, Find A Grave is now owned by the most significant online genealogy service, Ancestry.com.55 Following very simple instructions, volunteers visit graveyards, photograph the tombstones, and upload the pictures along with other information with a web page for each deceased person, organized within a site for the particular cemetery. Anybody may access the system for free, enter the name of a deceased relative, and with luck find a picture of that person’s tombstone, along with some information. Find A  Grave was initially useful in my research concerning nineteenthcentury religious communes that I  had earlier studied using the manuscript schedules of censuses, especially the Shakers and Oneida, which used to be available only in the original paper forms or a few government archives of microfilm copies.56 Today, Ancestry.com and other services make the census available online, and I  was asked to contribute a chapter about online research to a recent book edited by Roger Finke and Chris Bader, Faithful Measures: New Methods in the Measurement of Religion. The chapter focused on Oneida because it had been thoroughly studied by traditional methods, so the challenge was to show how online research could add something, as well as be used with familiar cases for educational purposes.57 One limitation to the traditional research is that it tends to focus on the charismatic leader of the religious commune, John Humphrey Noyes (1811– 86) in the case of Oneida, and on the utopian culture of the group, for example paying less attention to secondary leaders and rebels, even when they are sometimes mentioned. Much of the advantage of online research now is that one may access historical sources, such as old newspapers and books, which are not found in the local university’s library, thus facilitating an expansion of the

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empirical basis of the research rather than fully revolutionizing it. I  selected four individuals for online study. Two were “loyal,” a son of the leader named Pierrepont Noyes (1870–1959) who is well known for his memoir of childhood and for taking over its business after the commune dissolved, and the less welldocumented man who invented the animal traps that provided prosperity for Oneida, Sewell Newhouse (1806–88). A very “disloyal” member, Charles Guiteau (1841–82), is well known for having assassinated President James Garfield, but perhaps not well understood. I  found most fascinating James Towner (1823–1913), “loyal” to utopianism but “disloyal” to Noyes. One of the sins of Towner was his opposition to the group-marriage system of Oneida, not because it created a radical form of social structure, but because John Humphrey Noyes exploited it for his own advantage and produced thirteen children with thirteen different women of the community. Towner had earlier participated in other group-marriage experiments, and contributed to the mid-century discussion of alternative economic and social structures. Largely self-educated, he had skills as a lawyer, and he served bravely in the Civil War, losing an eye but returning to duty afterward. His attempt to reform Oneida failed, and the community abandoned its experimental social structure when local authorities began suspecting Noyes of sexual abuse of children. Apparently in disgust, Towner and some followers went out to California, where he became the first judge of Orange County and a leader in the Masonic movement. Reading an 1894 newspaper obituary for his wife, Cinderella Sweet Towner, I noticed she had been cremated at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, which at the time I thought was primarily done for deceased persons who would not be buried locally.58 So I checked Find A Grave and discovered she had been buried back at Oneida.59 What about James Towner himself? Here is what I reported: There is also a page indicating James W. Towner was buried at Oneida, with a portrait of him but no picture of his tombstone. However, Find A Grave also has a page for him at the Fairhaven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, California, where he died. My immediate assumption was that the Oneida information was wrong, but an entry in the RootsWeb blog at Ancestry.com indicated otherwise. A blogger had visited the California cemetery and discovered that the grave was for a different James W. Towner, who had died at the age of one in 1914 and whose tombstone bears the legend, “Our Darling Baby.” Near the baby’s tombstone is one for his father, H. Fred Towner, and the online information about Oneida genealogies shows that the baby’s grave belongs to the great-grandson of the James Towner featured here.60

Often, but of course not always, the place a dead person is buried says much about his or her life, and in the case of these two Towners, about their conception of their own place in society. Despite their success in California, and the location of friends and family, they felt that the Oneida utopian experiment was their true home. As a modest initial illustration of how Find A Grave can be useful in charting social structure, I here replicate the Towner finding with the thirteen children of John Humphrey Noyes and their mothers. For Oneida,

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Table 6.4 The children of John Humphrey Noyes and their mothers Child’s name

Birth Oneida grave year name

Mother’s name

Birth Oneida grave year name

Theodore Richard Noyes Victor Cragin Noyes

1841 Dr. Theodore R. Noyes

1808 Harriet Holton Noyes

Constance Bradley Noyes Jessie Catherine Baker Hatch

1849 C. B. Reeve

Harriet Ann Holton Noyes Mary Elizabeth Johnson Sarah Ann Summers

John Humphrey Noyes Pierrepont Burt Noyes Holton van Velzer Noyes Gertrude Hayes Noyes Irene Campbell Newhouse Godfrey Barron Noyes Dorothy Hendee Noyes Barron Miriam Trowbridge Noyes George Langstaff Noyes

1847 Victor Noyes Cragin

1858 Jessie Catherine Catherine wife of Myron E. Hobart H. Kinsley 1869 Noyes, John Charlotte Humphrey II Miller Leonard 1870 Pierrepont Harriet B. Noyes Maria Worden 1871 Holton van Mary Velzer Noyes Elizabeth van Velzer 1871 Gertrude Hayes Harriet Noyes Noyes Olds 1873 Irene Campbell Arabella Noyes Campbell Woolworth 1873 Godfrey Barron Maria Fanny Noyes Barron 1876 Dorothy Barron Beulah Foster Leonard Hendee 1877 Miriam T. Earl

Helen Campbell Miller 1879 George L. Noyes Leonora Hatch

1810 Mary E. Cragin 1827 Bradley: S. A. Summers his wife 1815 Catherine wife of James Baker 1846 Charlotte M. Leonard 1840 Harriet M. Noyes 1848 Mary E. Johnson 1849 Harriet N. Olds 1850 Arabella C. Newhouse 1842 Maria F. Barron 1847 Barron: Beulah Mary his wife 1847 Helen M. Barron 1858 Ellanor L. Noyes

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a very convenient source of genealogical data is a website by Laura WaylandSmith Hatch, named Salmon Creek Genealogy & Publishing.61 Table 6.4 gives the names and birth years of all twenty-six Oneidans, taken from Hatch’s site, with the often different name on each person’s headstone in the Oneida Community Cemetery. Checking again the Find A Grave page of James Towner, I find there is now a picture of his tombstone, good confirmation that his body is really there. The first point of interest is that all the children of John Humphrey Noyes, and their mothers, were indeed buried at Oneida, while we might have expected many to have wandered away in the years after the experiment’s end in 1879. Family names become problematic in group marriages, and when I  did ethnographic research in the modern Love Family in Seattle, they all used the last name Israel and first names like Logic and Love.62 The leader of Oneida had only one formalized marriage, with Harriet Holton Noyes, but we see the Noyes name in several places. The Find A Grave page for Ellanor L. Noyes reports she had two husbands, John Humphrey Noyes and Horatio T. Noyes, but only Horatio would have been a legal husband. Irene Campbell Noyes married George Wallingford Noyes, and Gertrude Hayes Noyes Noyes had this double name because she married Charles Rutherford Noyes. Harriet M.  Noyes is not listed as having married, and her page contradicts the picture of her tombstone, by correctly naming her Harriet Maria Worden. In his memoir, her son Pierrepont reported a poignant conversation he had with his mother, just as the group marriage was dissolving, in which she told him there was no man to marry her, even as other women were quickly pairing off with new husbands.63 Oneida is extremely famous, and one of the social science publications documenting it was actually written by Noyes himself, History of American Socialisms.64 After using it as a solid starting point, it seemed logical to take one step forward, to a cemetery that was historically significant in a less prominent way, and about which there was a little documentation. Chapter 2 noted the long life of the First Congregational Church of Greenwich, which has two cemeteries, the oldest being: “The Tomac Historic Burying Ground (aka Old Sound Beach Cemetery) is about one acre and has burials from 1718 to 1904. There were probably earlier burials, but there were no engraved headstones for these.”65 The church’s website offers a spreadsheet of people confidently believed to have been buried there, plus the manuscript of a research paper by John A. Buckland carefully documenting the cemetery.66 The point in looking at Tomac here is not to explore the history of Greenwich, but to reflect upon the community of people who contributed to its site on Find A Grave. As of September 10, 2017, it listed 289 interments, so I inspected each and copied into a spreadsheet the names of the deceased and the names of the people who had contributed either by setting up the memorial page or adding a photograph of the actual tombstone, in several cases one person having done both. Anonymizing the names to Person A through Person K, Table 6.5 lists

A B C D E F G H I J K

Person

17 14 26 16 3 34 11 158 0 0 0

Memorials

0 15 0 0 2 0 0 113 5 30 10

Photos

At Tomac

206,290 109,476 47,918 16,655 13,033 7,595 4,094 898 111 17 11

Memorials 306 79,289 8,392 5,232 21,440 1,530 955 812 2,411 118 44

Photos

Table 6.5 Main contributors for Tomac burying ground

21,763 921 25 22,573 65 3,419 0 506 1 0 2

Flowers 0 85 0 24 0 160 21 0 0 0 0

Sponsorships 31 44 35 32 0 0 0 0 0 0 2

Friends

Altogether in Find A Grave

3 16 9 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2

Virtual Cemeteries

6 17 15 9 11 15 3 11 9 5 9

Years

newgenrtpdf

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information for all those who made more than two such contributions. The numbers for memorial pages and tombstone photos at Tomac were my count, while the other columns come from the particular person’s contributor page in Find A Grave. The rows are arranged in descending order of the total number of memorials posted. Also, twenty-two photos of headstones were contributed by “Anonymous,” about whom we have no information, and we don’t even know if this was really one person. A sense of the varieties of contributor can be gained by looking closely at two, Person A and Person H. Since joining Find A Grave a little over six years ago, Person A has contributed a total of 206,290 memorials – yes, over 200,000 web pages! For people contributing fewer than 10,000 pages, Find A  Grave provides a list of link to all of them, but not in extreme cases like Person A. Googling Person A’s unusual name, which is a pseudonym although contributors generally reveal their true identities, with “site:findagrave.com,” generates “about 25,000 results,” confirming that Person A  put up many memorials, although not substantiating the exact number. A thoughtful citizenhistorian philosophy is expressed on Person A’s contributor profile page: I’ve been doing family research for over twenty years and it is still a favorite past-time … Find A  Grave has become a useful research tool, but has also been abused a bit. I try very hard not to connect any of my memorials to those that are labeled “burial unknown.” To many folks have gone out there and built hundreds and even thousands of memorials with “burial unknown” from someone’s family tree or a history book!

However, at Tomac at least, Person A does not seem to have followed a careful approach. None of Person A’s seventeen Tomac memorials have confirmatory tombstone photos, including this family of six: Merritt, Abigail Francis 159344284 b. Feb. 14, 1660 d. 1696 Merritt, Alice 159352494 b. Jan. 1, 1660 d. Jun. 10, 1680 Merritt, Jane Sherwood 159261799 b. Dec. 3, 1636 d. Jan. 4, 1685 Merritt, John, I 159332633 b. Oct. 10, 1657 d. Apr. 10, 1726 Merritt, Mary Ferris 159345827 b. Feb. 6, 1640 d. Jan. 31, 1708 Merritt, Thomas 159261570 b. May, 1634 d. Nov. 10, 1725 The numbers like 159344284 are the Find A Grave catalog number, and the birth (b.) and death (d.) dates are given. Note that four of the six died long before the 1718 year the church says the burials began at Tomac. The Merritt family lived in Rye, New York, and Person A comments for each: “At the time of this burial, Rye was part of the Connecticut Colony, bordering Greenwich, CT. Current day distance: Greenwich is about 5 miles from Rye.” Neither the spreadsheet posted by the church, nor the 1997 report by Buckland suggests that anyone named Merritt was actually buried at Tomac. Clearly, despite the protestation of good practice, Person A is not following Find A Grave’s norms, but instead is finding a plausible cemetery in which to place any deceased person whose name and general location are part of some historical record or

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other. Indeed, some of these Merritts are listed in a 1903 printed volume of the New York Genealogical and Biological Record, and on a page of WikiTree, an open access online genealogy archive, where pages were posted in 2012 by a living person with the last name Merritt.67 Person A’s postings on Find A Grave date from 2016. Person H could hardly be more different from Person A. She did her Tomac work in 2007, after others had posted only a few of the graves, and she took photos of many of the gravestones. We know her gender because she apparently gave her real name, even though her profile page provides no personal information, because someone with the same unusual name has a Facebook page, and lives in a town adjacent to Greenwich. Find A Grave provides links from her profile to each of the memorials she added, and most are in the same geographic area, including Darien, Norwalk, Redding, and Westport, Connecticut. Thus Person H was an energetic but not obsessive contributor who followed the Find A Grave norms. Control over the contributors is rather weak, and we could imagine that a citizen social science organization doing this kind of work might be able to achieve more consistent quality, whether by careful training of volunteers, consistently recruiting only reliable people like Person H, or by having trained moderators flag or remove dubious contributions. Visitors to a Find A Grave memorial page may add a little picture of flowers or some other prepared image, plus a brief note comparable in length to a Twitter tweet. Thus, one way to identify at least some of the meanings these memorials have for visitors is to read and compare these messages. Of the 289 Tomac pages, 148 lack flowers, even though there is no cost to add them. Fully 82 have only one, often added by the person who set up the memorial or added a tombstone picture. The memorial with the largest number, twentyeight, is for Jeffrey Ferris (1610–66) whose memorial was posted by a member of today’s Ferris family, which is rather active in honoring the several family members buried at Tomac, but the pictures do not show a personal tombstone for him. Rather, they show stained-glass windows in First Congregational Church, one specifically depicting him, and the other depicting Tomac Burial Ground. A comment on the page notes: “There is also the question of burial location. Agree the window shows Tomac Cemetery and a Ferris headstone, but there is no record of plot info or stone available. Tomac has been walked several times by different folks with negative results.”68 The case of Jeffrey Ferris illustrates two of the reasons why memorialization of a particular person may get unusual attention, which can be seen either as a methodological sampling problem for citizen social science, or a kind of legitimate finding. First, volunteer workers may devote an unusual fraction of their energy to topics they care personally about, in this case family membership. Here are some of the Jeffrey Ferris flower notes that explicitly make this connection:

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My 8th great grandfather. I hope to visit your burial site in the near future. Thank you for coming to the US safely. Jeffrey Ferris is my 9th great grandfather. RIP. My 9th Great Grand Father, Love ya. To my 8th Great Gramps. Remembering you! To my 9th great grandfather. From California. In memory of my red haired ancestor from your 9th great granddaughter. It is because of your spirit that we are here, Thank You. Second, some individuals, fairly or unfairly, become famous during life or prominent in history. The church website says that Ferris “was a builder and one of the first seven proprietors of the Town of Greenwich … He named our town Greenwich. It is not known where he is buried.”69 Another member of the family, James Ferris (1729–1812) was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, receiving eight flowers, including two from members of the Daughters of the American Revolution: “Thank you for your service for the USA, from a sister DAR. May you RIP with the Lord in Heaven.” “Honoring DAR Ancestor #A039479, son of James Ferris 1643–1739 and Mary Merritt 1666–1740.” Both men named James Ferris appear to be descendants of Jeffrey Ferris, but I  cannot confirm the obvious hypothesis that this Mary Merritt is closely related to the Mary Ferris Merritt added to Tomac by Person A.70 But clearly there was much endogamy in the Greenwich colony. The sponsorships listed in Table 6.5 refer to cases in which the volunteer has paid five dollars, as a page accessible only after a membership password says:  “Once a memorial is sponsored, the advertisements are permanently removed and you will be credited with a special link at the bottom of the memorial.” Thus, Find A Grave, like Facebook, is an advertising medium, including links to the other Ancestry.com services that require paid subscriptions. The total cost of the 290 sponsorships in Table 6.5 is $1,450, but only five of the Tomac memorials are sponsored, for a total cost of $25. The column for friends in Table  6.5 reports lists of the friends on a contributor’s profile page, who are all Find A Grave contributors, with links to their own profile pages and friends lists, so these data could be analyzed sociometrically. Person C’s friends list includes Person B and Person F, neither of whom lists Person C, and Persons F and D are relatives, belonging to one of the most prominent families buried at Tomac. Unlike Facebook in which friendships must be reciprocal, anyone may choose another contributor as a friend, without that person needing to agree. Thus, researchers need to know the technical system by which online social relationships are created, to avoid misinterpreting them. Virtual cemeteries are collections of memorial pages that are not connected to the same real-world graveyard. For example, one of the pair set up by Person K is his own genealogy, of ancestors buried in many different places. The three created by Person A are rather more eccentric, one devoted to otherwise random

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people who lived at least a century, and the other two devoted to deceased dogs and cats. We might have advised Person A to create a virtual cemetery for the seventeen people who did not really belong at Tomac. The number of years since a contributor registered with Find A Grave does not give us a good graph of the rate of contributions, but as with both Oneida and Tomac one gets a sense that the work on prominent cemeteries may have been essentially finished a decade ago. For example, Person H’s high-quality contributions seem almost all to have been made in 2007, but not recently. Many of the Zooniverse projects may soon reach completion, when all of the data have been analyzed thoroughly, although graves will continue to be added. Thus, Find A Grave may be evolving into a secondary form of memorial for recently deceased persons, and one component of a complex historical family archive. On both the plus and minus sides, Find A Grave may suggest a major type of future citizen social science project, one that documents human lives as they are lived rather than afterward. On the plus side, a huge amount of effort has been invested in the 162,000,000 grave records this online service currently holds. Person H, and most of the others, did their job well, presumably fitting it into their ordinary lives successfully, with some diversity of motivations, but little if any evidence of bias. Perhaps deceased people get a near-universal respect, but citizen social science may involve volunteers studying other people they disagree with, dislike, or even oppose. The recent political or ethical activism to remove statues of leaders of the confederacy from public spaces in the United States suggests that occasionally the reputations of deceased people suffer from reconsideration by the living, and the privacy of citizen scientists themselves is always at risk, but issues of privacy are much more serious when social scientists collect contemporary data in the field.71 This chapter cannot pretend to imagine all the kinds of citizen social science that may exist in future years, let  alone assess their dangers, but some issues do deserve to be raised now.

6.5 Problematic Aspects of Citizen Social Science In an exploratory pilot study that did not happen to be funded by any agency, Kingsley Purdam recruited volunteers to do field observation on street beggars. In his report published in Current Sociology, he recognizes privacy issues, even though a city’s streets are public spaces, but he also notes: “The idea of citizen social science and citizen volunteer observers collecting data for use in social science research of course raises a debate about validity and objectivity.”72 Given that many educated citizens disagree with many fairly standard socialscientific theories, a very intense debate could rage, if teams of volunteers coordinated through online systems like eBird, were aggressively observing fellow citizens.

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This section will raise some very difficult questions, concerning approaches to social science that conflict with those practiced by academics in the traditional departments of colleges and universities. The goal is to identify questions that need to be addressed in the coming years, if citizen science renders increasing fractions of the research independent from academic orthodoxies. Among the most problematic results of liberating social science from academia would be freeing it from current ethical restraints. These restraints are rather weak on the Internet, as leaks and tweets erode confidence in government leaders, and a vast storm of criminal hacks proceeds unhindered by much if any law enforcement. Obviously, online ethics is extremely problematic at present, and we shall see further evidence in the following chapter. It is worth remembering that ethical rules shifted a few decades ago. A classical example of pre-shift research was When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger, Henry W.  Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, which was a theoretically very rich study of a radical flying saucer cult, carried out by the classic sociological research method that Wikipedia calls infiltration.73 They and their students joined the group and handled the ethical issue of deceiving its leader by assigning a pseudonym to her in their book. The study was of great theoretical significance, being an early expression of cognitive dissonance theory, and probably would not have achieved valid results had the cult known it was being observed.74 Ethnomethodologist George Psathas considered it quite appropriate to record data during one’s ordinary experience of life, and a 2011 interview with him on YouTube refers to the common use of hidden tape recorders decades earlier.75 A common perspective in several branches of social science fifty years ago was that every researcher is a protagonist in the drama of life, with the full rights to do anything that anybody else could do. All humans always play roles, so everyone is an infiltrator all the time, and it is a good thing for researchers to take advantage of this fact in developing wisdom for mankind. At least, thus many sociologists then thought. Prior to the development of strict rules for sociological research with human subjects, it was common for ethnomethodologists to do disruption experiments in real-life settings, without warning anyone they would become research subjects. It was not uncommon for other kinds of social scientists to perform field experiments, without obtaining informed consent.76 Today these common practices of yesteryear stimulate concern, yet they are again becoming commonplace, merely outside universities, for example the controversial Facebook experiment mentioned early in Chapter 2. Wikipedia’s article on participant observation field research cites the multiple intellectual and ethical concerns raised even just by observational research, but aggravated the greater the degree of the researcher’s participation in the activities and groups under observation. It notes, “The American Anthropological Association and American Sociological Association both have comprehensive statements concerning the code of conduct for research.”77 Academics do not need to belong to such organizations, but often universities apply the government-defined Common Rule to any research done by their faculty, even outside of “work hours,” and despite the fact that the Common Rule applies

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only to academic research funded by any of a list of US government agencies.78 As it happens, I  served on one of the government committees updating that Common Rule, and personally find its terms very reasonable.79 However, the current version of the Common Rule specifically excludes oral histories from ethical review, and much ethnographic field research consists of oral histories and observations of public events, which also are not covered. The near-final text says that human subjects review is not required for “scholarly and journalistic activities (e.g., oral history, journalism, biography, literary criticism, legal research and historical scholarship), including the collection and use of information that focuses directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected.”80 To what extent is sociological field observation “slow journalism,” slow in the sense that publications are delayed and journalism in that it reports to a wide audience on the events and conditions of our world? To what extent is research about online games a modern form of literary criticism, as much of it in fact appears to be? I cannot answer such questions, but suggest that once some of the authority for a particular social science research project moves out of academia, other people may raise serious objections to any particular set of human subjects norms. Two principles limit the applicability of the ethical principles enshrined in the Common Rule and followed by academic institutional review boards. First of all, public money is funding the research, so the representatives of the public have the duty to make the work conform to a widely shared ethical system. Second, the research is conducted through educational institutions, thus relying upon public trust of those institutions, and therefore it must not sully their reputations. Research not funded by government or conducted by universities, lies outside that moral orbit. Two other principles may take the ethical quandary even further. First, research that is done by an individual or distinct community can ultimately be constrained only by the values of that individual or group, including their assessment of any legal risks the methodology may entail, and that group may be in conflict with the people it plans to study. Second, research conducted in the context of social conflict is likely to benefit one party or the other to the dispute, even when the researchers are objective, so moral principles may be suspended, more so when the conflict is especially harsh. This raises again the Parsons–Shils distinction between particularism and universalism. Universities, as their name implies, encourage universalism, but groups outside academia may be particularist, even considering morality to be limited to members of one’s own nation, political movement, or religion. Reflective humanistic literature about online research often discusses ethical  issues. For example, a book mentioned in Chapter  1, Internet Inquiry, includes a complex and illuminating debate on privacy, that notes the lack of a firm consensus on many issues.81 An equally humanistic chapter in The Sage Handbook of Online Research Methods observes: 

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Clearly, it will often be good practice – beyond legal requirements – to identify yourself as a researcher in the case of ethnographic or participant observation in a virtual environment. There may be a trade-off in this case between the advantages of covert observation which does not disturb the environment, and revealing one’s identify as a researcher – which ensures transparency, but may lead to changed behavior on the part of subjects.82

Thus, if one’s online research is not precisely constrained by legal regulations, the Institutional Review Board of one’s university, or the rules of a funding agency, ethics requires a good deal of personal judgment. Already by 2007, the National Research Council commented, Privacy is a growing concern in the United States, and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly unbounded options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries; online practices of businesses and government agencies present new ways to compromise privacy; and e-commerce and technologies that permit individuals to find personal information about each other only begin to hint at the possibilities.83

A decade later, anyone who distrusts government and major corporations might well argue that online privacy does not exist, since societal elites can read our email as well as Google searches, and therefore nonacademic activists have the right to ignore such a spurious concept. The large number of highly publicized hacks illustrate this point, such as the June 2015 discovery by the US government’s Office of Personnel Management “that sensitive information, including the Social Security Numbers (SSNs) of 21.5 million individuals, was stolen from the background investigation databases.”84 In a thoughtful article on the 2017 Equifax hack of extensive financial data about 143 million people, Gillian White commented, “For Americans who want to protect their personal information, there is no way, in our current system, to do so.”85 At this point the reader becomes the judge in this virtual courtroom, free to assert or deny that universal research ethics could exist and should be applied. A  big worry for all researchers should be that liberating social science from the universities is likely to involve us in many very serious conflicts, some of which will prove creative and generate new knowledge, and others of which will redound to the discredit of our disciplines. One perhaps painful fact is that other institutions in society, not to mention other societies, may not recognize the authority of secular universities. A good illustration is a July 10, 2017 report from the Pew Research Center, titled “Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions: Republicans Increasingly Say Colleges Have Negative Impact on U.S.”86 Among the summary findings, these stand out:  (1) 73  percent of Republicans believe the churches have a “positive effect on the way things are going in the country,” versus 50  percent of Democrats; and (2)  36  percent of Republicans believe the colleges and universities have a positive effect, compared with 72 percent of Democrats. Two of the “liberal media” expressed the Pew findings from

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their own perspective. The Washington Post titled its news article “The New Culture War Targeting American Universities Appears To Be Working.”87 The Atlantic was even more partisan in the title of its article: “Why Do Republicans Suddenly Hate College So Much?”88 A more balanced observation might be that indeed two strong, but loosely defined cultures compete in America today, one valuing liberal education over religious teachings, and the other rating the churches much higher than the universities. It is worth noting that Auguste Comte, arguably the founder of sociology, intended it to be a replacement for Christianity. His book title, The Catechism of Positive Religion, implied that social science should assume the function of sanctifying society, but with “positivistic” or “scientific” qualities.89 Again, the potential perspectives are numerous, and many are controversial. For present purposes it is worth noting a plausible perspective that might provide a framework for analyzing the context of citizen social science, and suggests that social science is a complex matrix of two very different kinds of activity: (1) systematic, rigorous collection and analysis of data related to the social behavior of human beings, of which sociometry is the most relevant example; and (2) humanistic interpretations of the meaning of social behavior framed in concepts that can be understood by nonexperts and only clarified by systematic analysis, not confirmed. It is the second kind of perspective in social science that obviously relates to Auguste Comte and the Pew study, and at the present time especially includes several schools of thought in social psychology. While sociometry may be considered a brand of social psychology, I prefer to see it as an objective research methodology that can illuminate, and in return, be illuminated, by a variety of mildly competing academic schools of thought loosely labeled “social psychology.” If social psychology is in fact a secular replacement for religion, providing a nonsupernatural perspective on human relations and ethical norms, how can it possibly be unified, as religion is not? As I  noted in a recent book, much rather severe methodological criticism has been leveled in recent years against psychological social psychology, for example in the pages of the journals Science and Nature, one reason being the fact that priming and demand characteristics can distort the results of laboratory experiments, especially if ethical rules prevent active research outside the laboratory, in which the research subjects are unaware they are being studied.90 Crosscutting the debate over how objective the quantitative methods of laboratory social psychology may be, is the debate over the extent to which quantification should dominate in social science, versus sensitive, qualitative interpretation.91 Whatever one thinks of the current situation in any of the social sciences, objective clarity is lacking, and people who think differently deserve respect. A  prominent case, which is very active today but not very obvious to the academic eye, is Christian social science. This is an example in which the practitioners may be even more strict in their ethics than secular researchers, but understand human behavior from a very different perspective. Consider the following finding by Julia Adams and Hannah Bruckner:

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Our own analysis of the 452 living “American Sociologists” listed on Wikipedia in August 2014 yields a mixture of notable academics (about 60%; although quite a few of them are actually active in adjacent disciplines), of social activists and social workers, the occasional motivational speaker, and a surprising number of not particularly notable sociologists of religion who teach in a very few schools in the United States. Surprising here is not so much that someone creates a page for people and objects that have little connection to the discipline; rather, that these creations seem to escape the scrutiny of the crowd, or pass the professor test uncontested.92

I beg to differ with Adams and Bruckner, if they imply that sociology and the other social sciences are objectively defined disciplines with indisputable stratification orders, unless of course by discipline they mean a doctrine dominating a subculture. Appropriately enough, in ethical terms, they did not list the sociologists of religion they disrespect, but I rather suspect I know many of them, either personally or from reading their publications, since the sociology of religion is one of my own main research areas. In a book about social structure, it is hard to ignore the social structures in which the author and reader are embedded, but they provide very powerful perspectives. The following paragraphs absolutely do not represent my own orientation to religion, but a recognition of competing subcultures whose structures deserve far more extensive study than can be offered here. As social sciences were developing in the nineteenth century, some competent, hard-working researchers operated from what today we might call an Evangelical perspective, believing that all non-Christian religions needed to fade away, and systematically studying how that might be accomplished, through basing missionary work on the most effective principles.93 Today, perhaps bowing to public pressures and the secularism of their academic colleagues, social scientists arguing the superiority of Christianity both to other religions and to secularism are more gentle in their writing style, but equally firm in their principles.94 A degree of alienation by politically conservative scholars has existed at least since William F. Buckley, Jr., published God and Man at Yale in 1951, and it will be interesting to see what kinds of research communities might emerge in that sector of our culture in the coming years.95 A rather distinctive subculture of social scientists, largely separate from academic departmental definitions, concerns post-Christian religions, not advocating any of them, but often enlisted to defend them against both secularists and Christian critics. A  distinctive organizational example is INFORM, the Information Network on Religious Movements, founded with support from the British government by Eileen Barker in 1988.96 Wikipedia says its mission is “to provide neutral, objective and up-to-date information on new religious movements (NRMs) to government officials, scholars, the media, and members of the general public, in particular to relatives of people who have joined a new religious movement, as well as religious or spiritual seekers.”97 Internationally, a loose-knit network of academic researchers on new religious movements has been represented by a number of independently

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produced anthologies of studies to which the author of this book has contributed, in recent years often emphasizing online research methods.98 A large faction of the NRMs, such as the Process cited in Chapter  2, were deviant social psychologies, with their own theories about human cognition and social interaction. Very recently, James Spickard has argued that every major religious tradition could create its own distinctive sociology of religion, and thus (pace Comte) its own sociology.99 As much as rigorous researchers may distrust speculation, we may indeed have entered a problematic period for some of the social sciences, in which online communities will play significant roles, for better or worse. One important factor is how easy it is for academics to access a greater diversity of publications that diverge from their own academic perspective, not merely via JSTOR without the need to visit a physical library, but also finding interesting publications through keyword searches. Suppose, for example, one searches the titles of sociology grants from the NSF that have “group solidarity” in their titles. This grant will be among the first hits: 9617490 Experimental Testing of a Theory of Group Solidarity, to sociologist Satoshi Kanazawa. Looking the principal investigator up in Wikipedia reveals: “Kanazawa has been very controversial. He attributes this to ‘political correctness’ and ‘censorship’, while his critics claim that what he does is ‘bad science’ and ‘racist.’”100 Yet he is responsible for one of the most challenging theoretical propositions of recent years, the Savanna Principle, which he has expressed in two different ways: (1) “A hypothesis about human behavior fails to the extent that its scope conditions and assumptions are inconsistent with what existed in the ancestral environment.”101 (2) “The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment.”102 The ancestral environment of the human species is the savanna of East Africa, hundreds of thousands of years ago, where people lived in small, hunter-gatherer bands, interacting occasionally and perhaps intermarrying with adjacent bands. Considering the past history of sociology, one can identify similar perspectives. For example, George Homans believed that human beings have always understood the principles of social behavior in small groups, and the most that academics can accomplish in a field such as social psychology is formalization of what is already known.103 However, the Internet is far from the first technology that transformed the terms on which social structures are built, from the invention of agriculture that permitted the birth of cities, to horses and ships that enabled the growth of huge empires.104 If the Savanna Principle is “true,” then many features of social psychology in the modern world are contingent upon the exact circumstances of people’s lives, adding “unnatural” processes to the human mind, that were absent on the savannah. This means that experimental social psychology would need to partner with sociometry, studying patterns of human behavior in the wider context of social relations, rather than assuming they are universal and can be studied in formal laboratory experiments with unspecified samples of the

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population. A much cited 2010 article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, provocatively titled “The Weirdest People in the World,” asserted that the subjects in experimental behavioral science laboratories are a poor sample of the human population, drawn from “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)” societies, not to mention that they are volunteers with motivations that may distort the findings of the research still further.105 I am not here suggesting that Kanazawa is correct, but that his ideas may have great current importance in a time of cultural conflict. One of the most profound areas of sophisticated disagreement is the tension between psychology and cognitive science. I know one very active cognitive scientist, much of whose work uses computerized brain scans to chart the structure of human memories, who believes we have not yet reached a sufficient level of understanding of the human brain for a rigorous social psychology to exist. Among the connections to computer science is an international, multiagency research program named Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS): Computational neuroscience provides a theoretical foundation and a rich set of technical approaches for understanding complex neurobiological systems, building on the theory, methods, and findings of computer science, neuroscience, and numerous other disciplines. Through the CRCNS program, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF), the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR), and the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) support collaborative activities that will advance the understanding of nervous system structure and function, mechanisms underlying nervous system disorders, and computational strategies used by the nervous system.106

The emergence of independent, multidisciplinary cognitive science late in the twentieth century, followed by advances such as those associated with fMRI brain scans, is probably one of the reasons why journals like Nature and Science see little value in traditional social psychology. This does not mean they are prejudiced against systematic, sociometric studies of social structure, just as they do not appear to be prejudiced against rigorous economics. The fact that most schools of social psychological thought use ordinary words like role or self may present them to biologists or computer scientists as among the humanities rather than sciences. However, if the Savannah Principle is true, then people today need a variety of humanistic theories of human nature, which have for them personally the qualities of beauty and justice that activity theory values, as mentioned in Chapter 1. Whether any theory can have truth, the third of the humanistic value triad, prior to full success in computational cognitive neuroscience, is uncertain.

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6.6 Conclusion There is much room to debate whether citizen science will primarily serve to educate a small fraction of the public, or can actually help science make major new discoveries. Less often discussed is the possibility that citizen science will become a powerful influence on the direction that scientific research takes, within government as well as academia. A host of issues like these are likely to be resolved in different ways in different fields of research, with perhaps the greatest variation within the social sciences. There is certainly room to argue that cultural relativism should not apply to social science itself, and to postulate that some strands of theory currently woven into the academic tapestry of conjecture will prove to be objective truth. Yet the cultural fragmentation of today’s world gives greater plausibility to the proposition behind the Savanna Principle: As a social construction, social science cannot be objective unless it develops within a society that is in fact organized according to rational, unified, stable principles that are the fundamental concepts of its theories. To the extent that government plays a central role in establishing moral norms, for example through the Common Rule for research with subjects, then government would need to be fair, thoughtful, and stable. Yet that is not the stereotype of government that citizens currently hold, and the following chapter will consider how the Internet may promise – or threaten – to transform government.

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7 Digital Government

As modern information and communications technologies emerged, something resembling a social movement arose that not merely sought to use them to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of traditional government, but also as a vehicle for hopes to transform governance.1 The common term for the movement, digital government, can be interpreted in different ways, including as a potentially tyrannical increase in the power of government over its citizens, but it was usually presented as a set of tools through which democratic governments could serve their citizens better. Thus, the consequences for social structure are uncertain, even before unintended consequences and spin-off applications are considered. This chapter will begin with relatively benign examples, then expand into some that are controversial and conflictridden. While the sociometric methods for studying social structure used in earlier chapters can also be applied to several forms of digital government, the emphasis here will be on surveying territory that is often wilder than it is structured. The author was directly involved in the examples described below concerning the NSF, but all the information here is from public sources, and nothing confidential is revealed.

7.1 An Ideal Vision Since the emergence of the World Wide Web atop the Internet, governments in technologically advanced nations have been imagining that it may give them greater power, or the ability to serve their populations better, even as some visionaries outside government have considered its revolutionary potential. Of course, governments have supported development of computer technology to serve their own purposes, at least since Herman Hollerith’s work with the 1890 US census, and the development of the ENIAC digital computer to calculate artillery trajectories in 1946.2 An historical revolution in the social structure of information systems was the Distant Early Warning Line of sixty-three radar bases set 204

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up across northern Canada in 1957, intended to detect a possible attack on North America by the Soviet air force.3 The Internet was an outgrowth of ARPAnet, which was developed in the 1960s through collaborations between universities and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department.4 Clearly, the Internet and the World Wide Web have had immense impacts on world culture and probably also on a diversity of kinds of social organization. Yet often they were co-opted to traditional social forms in pursuit of conventional goals. This chapter will sketch some possibilities associated with radical governmental applications of the new information and communication technologies, without much confidence concerning which of them will become significant realities. Therefore, this section will begin that discussion by contrasting a vision with a reality, the first promoted by the United Nations (UN), and the second achieved by the NSF. A few years ago it seemed that two forms of digital government work should be contrasted: (1) DG 1.0, which concerns the government use of information technology to perform its traditional jobs, including communicating information to the general public; and (2) DG 2.0, which adds systems through which the general public can inform government agencies about their needs and their perspectives on policies. However today, and in terms of an array of implications for social structure, it seems that there exist many more forms of digital government than just two, such as the following: 1. The internal use of sophisticated information technologies by government agencies. 2. Communications from government agencies to the general public. 3. Communications from the general public to government agencies. 4. Systems by which communities perform quasi-governmental functions for themselves, with only minor involvement by government agencies. 5. Social movements that seek to employ information technologies in the transformation of government. 6. Political movements that use modern information and communication technologies to oppose or replace existing governments. Rather early in its development, the second of the six rough categories was often called e-government. In the year 2001, a report from the UN offered what may then have seemed a visionary definition, but that today seems rather modest: “Broadly defined, e-government can include virtually all information and communication technology (ICT) platforms and applications in use by the public sector. For the purpose of this report however, e-government is defined as:  utilizing the internet and the world-wide-web for delivering government information and services to citizens.”5 Nations were roughly distributed across five stages in its development: 1. Emerging:  A government web presence is established through a few independent official sites. Information is limited, basic, and static. 2. Enhanced: Content and information is updated with greater regularity.

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3. Interactive:  Users can download forms, contact officials, and make appointments and requests. 4. Transactional: Users can actually pay for services or conduct financial transactions online. 5. Seamless: Total integration of efunctions and services across administrative and departmental boundaries.6 The reports assigned 169 nations to these categories: emerging (32 nations), enhanced (65), interactive (55), transactional (17), and seamless (0 nations).7 Among the core factors impeding the development of e-government, the UN analysts highlighted institutional weakness, manifested through insufficient planning with unclear objectives, and causing cost-overruns on inadequately designed systems. The 2001 UN report sought to measure the relative readiness of nations for e-government, with an Index of E-Gov Capacity that began with this web-presence measure and added measures of their information and communication infrastructures, such as the fraction of the population with online access, and their human capital, such as the percent of the population that lived in urban environments. Without looking deeply into how this measure was scored, we can note that the United States was at the top of the ranking with 3.11 points, and Uganda was at the bottom, with 0.46. Looking toward the future, the report sketched a more elaborate set of definitions: • E-government: inter-organizational relationships: ❍ policy coordination; ❍ policy implementation; ❍ public service delivery. Eadministration: intraorganizational relationships: • ❍ policy development; ❍ organizational activities; ❍ knowledge management. Egovernance:  interaction between citizens, government organizations, • public and elected officials: ❍ democratic process; ❍ open government; ❍ transparent decision-making.8 Since the 2001 report, the UN has published eight more surveys of the state of e-government in the nations that belong to it, notably in 2016 when it went further, connecting this somewhat narrow effort with its vast sustainable development hopes:  “Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions is an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. To this end, there must be promotion of sustainable, inclusive and equitable economic growth, creating greater opportunities for all, reducing inequalities, raising basic standards of living, fostering equitable social development and inclusion, and promoting integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems.”9 The obvious assumptions behind this connection are the ideas

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that well-designed information technology could improve government performance, facilitate progressive communications between governments and their citizens, and energize economic growth in a way that did not threaten environmental quality. Among the many interesting topics covered by the 2016 UN report is econsultation: “It means that people are consulted on a particular policy, service or project. Consultation however, does not mean that government has an obligation to use the inputs received in its policies or services. Rather, it can leverage the information received in order to better respond to the public’s sentiments on a particular subject.”10 In 2016, 66 of the 193 UN nations sought online input from their citizens about environmental issues, compared with 65 for education, 64 for health, 55 for finance, 49 for social welfare, and 45 for labor. Only 38 of them reported that “e-consultation outcomes have resulted in new policy decisions, regulation or service.”11 While “social welfare” is a vague label, we may well suspect that there was no online public input concerning changes to criminal laws, potential military actions, or indeed redesign of the political system. The subculture represented by academic computer scientists has not been particularly radical in its conceptualizations of digital government. Decades ago, Gerd Hortleder argued that engineers are deluded if they believe they are autonomous creative geniuses, because they are really the servants of industrial capitalists and government politicians.12 Whatever we may think of that analysis, academic computer scientists today depend upon funding from governments and corporations, and thus may avoid doing anything that would offend their funders. This leaves them making rather fine distinctions in their typology of digital government activities, as in this pair of definitions from the proceedings of the 2011 Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Studies of e-democracy generally focus on the ways that the Internet and its associated technologies may work to “amplify the political voice of ordinary citizens” in broad political processes. This happens by increasing the availability of information required for the development of policy preferences; by dislocating entrenched monopolies on information distribution by media elites in favor of other information providers; by encouraging political participation in campaigning, referenda and voting; interacting with elected representatives; and by engaging in deliberation over policy in the public venues. In contrast, the field of e-government has focused more squarely on the use of technology within the routine activities undertaken by public organizations: the provision of public services, the quality and cost-effectiveness of basic government operations, citizen engagement and consultation, the statutes and legislative mandates required to effect these processes, and the administrative and institutional reforms undertaken in pursuit of innovation.13

Governments themselves tend to cloak rather modest innovations in the florid rhetoric of the UN reports, or in references to popular culture. For example, here is the painfully conventional proclamation of the US government in 2017, after a year in which the entire political system was challenged by

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hacking, secrecy leaks, fake news, and other potentially pathological forms of internet activism: We live in a time when more pre-schoolers can use a smartphone app than can tie their shoes. How does government prepare to meet the information needs of these budding citizens? DigitalGov means providing information and services to the public anywhere and anytime. This site is a platform to help those in agencies working on providing digital services and information for the public. We’ll scour the innerwebs for digital info so you don’t have to. Expect posts on what government is doing in digital, general digital news, trends and issues on implementing digital for the public. This platform is brought to you by the Office of Products and Programs  – formerly known as the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT)  – in the Technology Transformation Service (TTS) of the U.S. General Services Administration. Our job here is to help agencies build a 21st century digital government.14

Developments in Europe were far more visionary, most visibly in a major effort by the European Commission to develop new legal structures for regulating social media and comparable forms of information technology that compromise personal privacy: Stronger rules on data protection mean people have more control over their personal data and businesses benefit from a level playing field … As of May 2018, with the entry into application of the General Data Protection Regulation, there is one set of data protection rules for all companies operating in the EU, wherever they are based. Stronger rules on data protection mean people have more control over their personal data, businesses benefit from a level playing field.15

The clear emphasis at that point in time was commercial companies that stored and used information about individual people – often but not always their customers or social media users  – for business purposes. However, the GDPR “regulates the processing by an individual, a company or an organisation of personal data relating to individuals in the EU… When an individual uses personal data outside the personal sphere, for socio-cultural or financial activities, for example, then the data protection law has to be respected.”16 To be in compliance, a company would need to inform each individual whose data they planned to collect, and in most cases the individual could withhold consent, thus preventing the company from processing the personal data. Worldwide, many social media updated their terms of service to be in compliance. In explaining its own response, Facebook noted:  While many of the principles of this regulation build on current EU data protection rules, the GDPR has a wider scope, more prescriptive standards and substantial fines. For example, it requires a higher standard of consent for using some types of data, and broadens the rights individuals have for accessing and transferring their data. Failure to comply with the GDPR can result in significant fines – up to 4% of global annual revenue for certain violations.17

On May 13, 2018, Google sent a message to users, and on May 23, 2018, the Fandom (Wikia) company that hosted the Star Trek wikis sent all its registered contributors a similar email:

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Google: This month, we’re updating our Privacy Policy to make it easier for you to understand what information we collect and why we collect it. We’ve also taken steps to improve our Privacy Checkup and other controls we provide to safeguard your data and protect your privacy. Nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed. Rather, we’ve improved the way we describe our practices and how we explain the options you have to update, manage, export, and delete your data. We’re making these updates as new data protection regulations come into effect in the European Union, and we’re taking the opportunity to make improvements for Google users around the world. Fandom: We are committed to protecting any of your personal information that we hold. We have updated our terms of use and privacy policy to make it easy for you to understand what information we have about you, what we do with it, and why. While we believe this updated policy will serve all of our users better, we are making these changes to make sure we are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), a new data protection law that takes effect across the European Union. For our European users, the updated privacy policy also explains our legal basis for using your data and lists your rights with respect to your data.

The current rather extensive language of the GDPR legislation repeately identifies situations in which “the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes” might apply more lenient control, often deferring to the laws of member nations.18 As in the case of the recently revised Common Rule cited in the previous chapter, much of the debate within professional circles has concerned medical and biological data, with little discussion of implications for social science, let alone journalism or the arts and humanities.19 The legislation is not limited to computerized databases, yet clearly the impetus was the heated debates that raged around non-EU companies like Facebook and Google, which resulted from digital government innovations already three decades old. The US NSF was largely responsible for the evolution of ARPAnet into the Internet, taking primary responsibility for creating the network of networks linking universities and early online information technology companies through NSFnet, which emerged in the period 1985–95, at a cost of $57,973,323.20 Its virtual social structure was a large-scale “backbone” network connecting smaller networks that totaled 50,766 in ninetythree countries of the world when NSF relinquished this great responsibility.21

7.2 A Concrete Example Social scientists have long recognized that early adopters play a crucial role in the establishment of new technologies.22 These are people uniquely prepared to be interested in a new technology and possessing the capabilities to use it effectively even if it is not yet fully perfected. Thus they often play the role of adapters, as well as adopters, shaping the final stages of technology implementation. For a new technology to become at all popular, the early adopters must also play the role of promoters, influencing other people in their social network to try the technology. In the post-NSFnet period 1995–2010, NSF illustrated the active role of early adopters in adapting a new technology to

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their specific needs, thereby contributing to a significant stage of innovation of the technology. This was primarily through the progressive development of online systems by which researchers could submit proposals, reviewers could evaluate them, the agency could provide the evaluations to all the submitters and funding to a subset of them, and the grants could be managed throughout their duration. The concept of peer review of scientific research proposals in the very word peer suggests social structure, a community of experts with the capability of evaluating each other’s work, yet avoiding conflicts of interest that would exist if reviewers had strong social ties to the submitters of the proposals.23 The exact details of the NSF review process have varied from year to year, and from one area of science to another, reflecting the diversity of scientific communities and the practical exigencies of different competitions.24 A  standard principle is that each distinct proposal deserves at least three reviews written by individuals having appropriate expertise, selected so as to avoid any conflict of interest. Reviews are primarily of two kinds, ad hoc reviews assigned to individuals who evaluate only one selected proposal, and panel reviews in which the reviewer first evaluates several proposals then participates in a discussion with other reviewers. These are two contrasting forms of temporary social structure. Some programs may have standing panels, with a consistent scope from meeting to meeting and even some stability in membership, about which a 2002 report to the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences said, “development of a standing panel will foster understanding of the program’s priorities and hence diminish variance.”25 In fields such as computer science and information technology, where rapid progress is taking place and the existing social structure is rather incoherent, a flood of proposals may be submitted, with changing content from year to year. Programs in such dynamic areas may be managed by multiple program officers, having diverse expertise, who collectively distribute each wave of proposals across a dynamic set of what might be called improvisational panels. While sociology is an intellectually complex field, and various small organizations exist within it, it seems rather more monolithic than computer science, for example represented by the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological Review journal, which publishes what seems to computer scientists an astonishingly small number of articles. In contrast, computer and information scientists get together in hordes at a vast number of highly specialized annual meetings, each of which may publish in its proceedings more articles than the American Sociological Review does in a decade, although admittedly rather shorter articles, often as brief as two or three pages. For example, among the annual meetings central to human-centered computing are the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the CSCW Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, both organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), CHI emphasizing

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individual interaction with computers, and CSCW emphasizing collective action using computers. The ACM’s website proclaims, “ACM’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) sponsor more than 170 computing conferences, workshops, and symposia around the world. These events, which mirror the state-of-the-art in their respective fields, attract renowned experts from a broad range of computing disciplines … ACM SIG events range in size from conferences with tens of thousands attendees to small workshops.”26 Many computer scientists belong to a rival organization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which claims to be “the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.”27 The social structure of the IEEE is, to say the least, complex: IEEE has a dual complementary regional and technical structure with organizational units based on geography and technical focus. It manages a separate organizational unit (IEEE-USA) which recommends policies and implements programs specifically intended to benefit the members, the profession, and the public in the United States. IEEE is organized into:

• • • • •

Local sections within geographic regions Chapters comprised of local members with similar technical interests Societies and technical councils that compose technical divisions Student branches at colleges and universities around the world Student branch chapters; and affinity groups.28

Traditionally, computer scientists had faith in a principle called Moore’s Law, first enunciated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, which asserted that computing power doubled about every eighteen months.29 Today, the field continues to believe that rapid technological revolution is in progress, which implies that some forms of social organization will be in constant flux. From one year to the next the nature of research proposals evolves, often rapidly, causing constant reorganization of the themes of the review panels. In a feedback loop, the changing technology alters the motivations defining social structures, so the structure of the review process requires flexible communication technologies. Prior to the 1990s, all NSF written reviews were handled through traditional paper-based methods, with only local use of information technology. A researcher would submit multiple paper copies of a proposal. Many programs had developed rich databases of reviewers, which had recently been transferred from file cards to a computer-based system that allowed keyword searches. However, review requests and proposals were mailed using the US Post Office. Prospective ad hoc reviewers would receive an envelope containing a request letter and a paper copy of the proposal. People who had agreed to be panelists would receive a large box containing all the proposals to be considered by the panel. When panels met, paper copies of all the reviews would be available for panelists to read.

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By the middle of the decade, NSF was aggressively developing the first components of a system called FastLane, through which researchers could formally submit their proposals, and NSF program directors could access them and send them to reviewers.30 In September 1998, the director of the NSF announced, “The NSF FastLane system, initiated in 1994, is helping to fulfill our vision of a fully-integrated electronic proposal and award system that will provide a quick, secure, paperless record and transaction mechanism for all NSF awards, from program announcement to award closeout, by October 2000.”31 A few bureaucratic steps in this revolutionary process were delayed, and as it happens, I was honored to manage the first NSF grant made entirely electronically, from submission to delivery of the money, in October 2009. But submission of proposals via FastLane progressed rapidly, just 4 percent in fiscal year 1997, 17 percent in 1998, 44 percent in 1999, 81 percent in 2000, and 99 percent in fiscal year 2001.32 Thus, the submission and review system worked technically in 1997, but colleges and universities were able to adopt its use only over a period of five years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a few programs at NSF participated in pilot projects, trying out new software systems and contributing the information needed to achieve good performance. The Foundation’s director commented in 2002: [M]ore than 99% of all proposals are now submitted electronically. But once proposals are received, our current processes still involve paper. Ultimately, we want to make our entire proposal and award process an electronic, or paperless, process. The pilot paperless project goal was intended to develop the technological capability to process electronically submitted proposals through the entire review process without generating paper within NSF.33

One of the specific pilots I participated in was a first trial of the interactive panel system groupware, in which half a dozen review panels were held in a challenging environment, a hotel at the Los Angeles airport but connected to NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, by Internet. Groupware not only supports the real-time collaboration of people who work together, but can enhance, reshape, and even define their social group. The current instruction manual for the interactive panel system explains, “The Interactive Panel System (IPS) is an electronic FastLane system that allows panelists to do the following: view a proposal, print a proposal, write a review comment, view review comments, print review comments, prepare reviews, prepare recommendations, write panel summaries, review panel summaries, approve panel summaries, and update personal information.”34 But this list fails to highlight the social interaction that knits these actions together. The same instructions are more sociological when they list the four social roles people may play: The Program Officer (PO) sets up the panel meeting and has many configuration options. Generally, a panel consists of at least three panelists; and they are divided into the following generally defined roles:

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• Scribe: the panelist who, in addition to reviewing the proposals, writes the panel’s summary of the proposal being reviewed for panel approval; • Lead panelist: the panelist who presents the proposal being reviewed by the panel to the panel; • Panelist:  panel members with nonadministrative functions who review proposals and panel summaries, as well as approve the panel summaries.35 Depending upon the customs of the particular program, the scribe may also function as lead panelist, while administrative staff, or support personnel, may also assist with some specific tasks. In typical panel meetings, all the participants will work together in a private room, sitting around a table, each with a laptop computer running the interactive panel system. It functions as a separate system, but is integrated with FastLane, so that panelists may access the text of a proposal inside it. All the written reviews are organized conveniently by proposal across the whole set being considered by that one panel. This groupware supports record keeping during the panel, especially writing a summary of the discussion for each proposal. The reviewer playing the role of scribe for a particular proposal will keep well-balanced and objective notes of the discussion. The groupware then allows other panelists to read the first draft of the summary, and to send written comments to the scribe, while the program directors running the panel can watch every detail of the process and offer guidance when necessary. However, it often happens that one or more panelists are unable to travel to the NSF headquarters, for example if bad weather grounds their airplane or they have family responsibilities that prevent them from leaving their home town. They can participate via telephone or video-teleconferencing, with the interactive panel system serving as the basis for group membership. Some panels are intentionally virtual, involving no travel for any participants. A commercial system like WebEx works very well.36 I have managed or assisted with panels having as many as nineteen participants, using the gamelike virtual environments for thirty panels in Second Life and three in VenueGen.37 As a system of roles and social interactions, such a panel exists only for typically two days, bringing together individual reviewers and their written evaluations for collective deliberation, then passing the responsibility for further evaluation to the program officers. The interactive panel system deserves consideration in the context of the classic high-tech approach to analysis of small group social structure, the interaction process analysis developed at Harvard in the late 1940s by Freed Bales and described in the previous chapter.38 A  general finding of the Bales-type research was that some people dominated discussions, speaking more often than others, as well as playing distinct roles. The interactive panel system does not record anything about what the panelists say, and the social organization of the meetings distributes roles absolutely equally among them. It was my impression that using an online virtual reality system actually strengthened equality

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of participants, because the technical nature of these systems encourage turntaking, for example requiring a panelist’s microphone to be turned off unless it was that panelist’s turn to speak. Another difference from the meetings Bales studied two-thirds of a century earlier is that communication takes place simultaneously through two media, spoken and written. When one panelist is summarizing aloud his or her review of one proposal, others who were not reviewers of it may be reading each other’s reviews of other proposals, or exchanging text-based comments about a panel summary draft. When panels are run virtually, additional channels of communication and optional features add to the complexity of interaction. For example, Second Life gives each participant the opportunity to open a private text channel with any of the others, which the program officer can use to give questions or instructions to individuals or the entire group, and each person may set the perceived volume of each other participant’s voice. Every day, program officers use a different but connected system, the electronic jacket – or “eJ” – that was developed to manage all the internal documentation for proposals and funded grants. The term “jacket” comes from the century-old habit in the US Navy of calling personnel files jackets, which may have been extended to scientific research proposal files when the Office of Naval Research was created in 1946, and the usage was picked up by the NSF when it was founded four years later. There the program director writes up a funding recommendation pro or con, and an abstract describing the project if a proposal is funded, having direct access to the reviews and panel summaries, as well as the annual reports or formal requests submitted by the principal investigators of grants. This system is social because admin staff and division directors use it when a proposal is funded, program officers may seek information relevant to their work by looking at jackets managed by their colleagues, and ownership of a jacket can be transferred, for example when rotator program officers return from temporary NSF duty to their university. Each step in the decade-long development of FastLane may seem rather simple today, but was an advance beyond what any other government agency had achieved in this area. Therefore it made perfect sense for Thomas Misa and Jeffrey Yost to receive a research grant to study FastLane’s history. The abstract describing it concludes: Evaluation of the development of FastLane, an early cyberinfrastructure (CI), will yield insights and lessons for contemporary designers, managers, and users of CI. The research will generate insights into the interaction of computing systems with complex cultural and organizational processes. The project will also develop novel research tools for collecting rich qualitative data on these processes, including a web-based interview platform, a Wiki-site designed for the FastLane community, and semi-automated oral-history transcription. The research is carefully designed to permit an evaluation of FastLane’s impact on the participation of diverse researchers and diverse educational institutions in the nation’s research infrastructure. This project will create, analyze,

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and archive important data on the research participation of several historically underrepresented groups, including HBCU institutions and EPSCoR states.39

The concluding paragraph of the fine book that resulted from this research begins with a key observation: “Computers change society, and it is because social, cultural, and institutional values can be embedded in them that the details of computing matter so deeply.”40 How far can technological values be extrapolated from FastLane? We can imagine a future time in which may kinds of public decisions are made not by politicians, but by experts selected for both the expertise they possess, and the conflicts of interest they lack. Ideas for projects, such as public parks or medical facilities, could be proposed and reviewed through the equivalent of FastLane. Questionnaires administered to a representative sample of the public could function as ad hoc reviews. Rather than public legislatures with two- to six-year terms and barraged by lobbyists, we would rely upon anonymous panels like the thousands that have now been held in FastLane. To be sure, this idea raises many questions, but it is worth noting that a central design feature of FastLane is that no one, except the NSF managers and panelists themselves, will know who served on any given review panel. Thus, we see again that one of the paramount questions concerning online communities is the particular ways in which they transform traditional notions of human identity.

7.3 Two Historical Cases Today many civic groups express concern about pathological effects of government secrecy, yet vast quantities of high-quality information can be accessed online by anyone interested in exploring digital government. Here two NSF examples will suggest some of the kinds of available data in the context of brief descriptions of the Digital Government Program and a brief subsequent initiative, Social-Computational Systems. On June 1, 1998, the NSF announced the first public stage of the Digital Government Program, after considerable behind-the-scenes preparation: The Federal government is a major user of information technologies, a collector and maintainer of very large data sets, and a provider of critical and often unique information services to individuals, states, businesses, and other customers. The goal of the Digital Government Program is to fund research at the intersection of the computer and information sciences research communities and the mid- to long-term research, development, and experimental deployment needs of the Federal information service communities. The Internet, which was created from a successful partnership between Government agencies and the information technologies research community, is a major motivating factor and context for this program.41

The announcement said that about $1,000,000 would be available to support workshops and planning grants, with the expectation that the budget for

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the next fiscal year would be greater. It cites some earlier workshop reports, beginning with Toward a Digital Government in the 21st Century, which had been published online the year before.42 The NSF announcement lists twelve contact people in other government agencies, such as the Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Housing and Urban development. Also listed are contact people in ten different fields, four of whom were NSF program directors:  Gary Strong (Universal Access or assistive technologies), Alan Gaines (Geographic Information Systems), William Sims Bainbridge (Social Sciences), and Lawrence E. Brandt with the obscure appellation “Others.” In 2003, Melvin Ciment published a very brief history of the program, written from his personal perspective, beginning: The NSF Digital Government Program has its roots (circa 1993)  in the NSF HighPerformance Computing and Communications Program, and NSF’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. It was the creation of NCSA’s Mosaic software suite of browsers and servers that prompted Larry Brandt, then a Program Manager for the NSF Supercomputer Centers Program, to start promoting a concept of driving innovative IT into government functions and services. At the time, I was Deputy Assistant Director for Computer Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) and Brandt invited me to look at a demo of Mosaic. I was amazed and felt privileged to gaze into the future of a new software paradigm – the genesis of the Web.43

Ciment and Brandt were key organizers of the initiative, as documented in Toward a Digital Government in the 21st Century. We cannot interview Brandt about his historical role, because he died on August 11, 2016. His obituary begins:  Larry originally established the “Digital Government research program” within NSF while serving as a NSF program director, and he supported many digital government research projects. With his colleague and dear friend at NSF, Valerie Gregg, he was a staunch supporter of advancing the digitization of government agencies, and of improving government agencies through technology, pursuing these goals for more than a decade, starting in the early 2000s.44

We cannot interview Valerie Gregg, either, because she died on February 12, 2009.45 However, we can get a sense of the social significance of deceased persons through their activities involving other people, and in the case of Larry Brandt that can be done by looking at the NSF grants he managed. The second Digital Government research grant announcement was published on July 15, 1999, and was an intense mixture of innovation and conservatism, following the traditional conception that information technology would improve government services rather than transform the structure and function of political institutions. Indeed, it seemed to express the view called technological determinism, that considered technological innovation to be the driver of history. Note that this paragraph from the announcement predicts more than it proposes:

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217

The coming decade will see the potential for nearly ubiquitous access to government information services by citizen/customers using highly capable digital information/entertainment appliances. Given the inexorable progress toward faster computer microprocessors, greater network bandwidth, and expanded storage and computing power at the desktop, citizens will expect a government that responds quickly and accurately while ensuring the privacy rights of individuals and the integrity of provided information. Enhancements derived from new information technology-based services are expected to contribute to reinvented efficient, and economical government services, and more productive government employees. As society relies more and more on network technologies, it is essential that government make the most effective use of these improvements.46

This announcement lists Brandt as the cognizant program officer, so he managed review of all the proposals submitted. Anyone may access information about all the grants managed by Brandt through the NSF Awards Advanced Search utility by simply putting “Brandt” into the Program Officer search field and checking a box to include Expired Awards.47 Once a grant has been completed – the meaning of “expired” – the name of the last cognizant program officer becomes the permanent one, and any others who managed the grant earlier in its history are not mentioned. One optional result of such a search is a downloaded spreadsheet, which can be copied in multiple versions to facilitate different kinds of analysis. According to this online historical database, Larry Brandt managed 227 grants totaling $80,477,653, the first dating from February 1, 1997 and funding the exploratory Workshop on Research & Development (R&D) Opportunities in Federal Information Services. Of these 227 grants, 132 list Digital Government as the primary program for a total of $45,473,668, and another 18 list it as secondary, usually to a general initiative called Information Technology Research. There are many ways the data in the spreadsheet can be analyzed, even before linking to related data from other sources such as the publications that resulted from the grants, or the academic websites of the researchers. For example, one may tabulate words in the texts of the grant abstracts, finding thirty-nine cases of “political,” one of “politics, and none of “politician.” Table 7.1 offers a hint of how more systematic research on social structure could be done, listing the twenty-four organizations that received at least $1,000,000 from grants administered by Larry Brandt. In terms of social structure, this table can be read in at least three ways, but each of them has a certain degree of ambiguity under the conditions of government support of information technology research. First, most of the two dozen organizations are state-related universities, thus arguably government agencies, although they function somewhat autonomously and several have seen their state funding decrease in recent years. Second, given that most of the grants relate to digital government, the institutions and their researchers were part of an emerging scientific subculture that connected them to some degree

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218 Table 7.1 Major digital government grants Organization University of Southern California University of Washington University of Arizona University of Maryland, College Park Carnegie-Mellon University Ohio State University University of California-San Diego Stanford University University of Massachusetts, Amherst Columbia University Harvard University University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Virginia Polytechnic Institute Iowa State University University of Florida Rutgers University, New Brunswick University of North Carolina at Charlotte Council for Excellence in Government West Virginia University University of Nebraska-Lincoln Oregon Health and Science University Pennsylvania State University State University of New York at Buffalo University of Pennsylvania

Cost ($)

Researchers

Grants

7,948,327 6,849,018 5,162,133 5,013,980 3,780,773 2,845,238 2,793,576 2,778,805 2,327,420 2,249,530 2,074,032 2,071,363 2,051,978 1,935,804 1,841,994 1,746,981 1,688,852 1,338,313 1,158,294 1,131,914 1,090,964 1,063,097 1,061,440 1,050,000

13 10 5 17 9 6 16 8 10 9 5 10 8 6 1 3 9 3 3 8 6 3 10 2

13 3 7 10 5 3 8 6 8 7 7 7 3 3 3 3 4 1 1 2 3 2 4 1

with each other, for example through the workshops and publications that the researchers shared. Third, all twenty-four institutions and 180 researchers were tied to Larry Brandt, communicating with him repeatedly in connection with their grants, but under conflict-of-interest rules that prohibited him from benefiting materially from their relationship. The last NSF grant administered by Larry Brandt at the time of its conclusion ended on September 1, 2006, but as Wikipedia reports, this was not the end of the legacy, because the Digital Government Society “grew out of the US National Science Foundation’s CISE-based Digital Government Program. The founding members include Yigal Arens at USI/Information Sciences Institute, Eduard Hovy at CMU (at USC/ISI formerly), Sharon Dawes at University at Albany, Larry Brandt (NSF) and Valerie Gregg (NSF).”48 The conception this academic organization has of its topic is rather narrow: “Digital government fosters the use of information and technology to support and improve public policies and government operations, engage citizens, and provide comprehensive and timely government services.”49

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Later research initiatives have explored a broader range of alternatives, including examining the interactions between information systems and social communities, which by transforming society might provide a basis for new forms of government. For example, on April 29, 2009, NSF announced SoCS: The Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program seeks to reveal new understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess, and to develop theoretical and practical understandings of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing. By better characterizing, understanding, and eventually designing for desired behaviors arising from computationally mediated groups of people at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation, new models of computation, new forms of culture, and new types of interaction will result. Further, the investigation of such systems and their emergent behaviors and desired properties will inform the design of future systems.50

During its brief lifetime, the SoCS program invested about $26,000,000 in forty-one research projects and five workshop meetings, as documented on the grant abstract search utility on the NSF website. It was possible to find information online about the highest academic degrees earned by all 107 principal investigators (PIs) and co-PIs, and they showed a pattern comparable to that of the Brandt PIs. Fully 33 of these 107 had degrees strictly defined as “computer science,” while a total of 42 began with the word “computer,” in such combinations as four cases of “computer and information science” and two each of “computer engineering” and “computer sciences” implying a plural set of computer fields. Two other people had degrees in “electrical engineering and computer science,” and four belonged to pure “electrical engineering.” Another eight held doctorates named “information,” “information systems,” “information science,” “information technology” (singular), or “information technologies” (plural). The three with degrees in “mathematics,” and the one in “industrial engineering,” could be added to produce a total of sixty, or 56 percent, who were trained on the technology side of the human-technology divide. The human category was more fragmented. Simple, standard names were not well represented, including just four sociologists, three political scientists, three psychologists, and one each with degrees in communication, law, and philosophy. There were zero economists. In contrast, there was a bewildering range of psychological specialties, one person each having a degree in one of these:  clinical psychology, counseling psychology, educational psychology, experimental psychology, human experimental psychology, learning and developmental and cognitive psychology, psychological and brain sciences, social and cognitive psychology, social and organizational psychology, and social psychology. Given the rise to prominence it was a little surprising there was only one researcher with a degree labeled cognitive science, but there were two in cognitive psychology, one in the quantitative cognitive psychology specialty, and one each in cognition and perception, cognitive science and psychology, cognitive and social psychology, and cognitive science and social psychology.

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The remaining sixteen doctorates were in fields that were probably relevant only to a particular project, from American literature to technology management and quality systems. For purposes of illustration, we can focus briefly on the SoCS grants that included the four sociologists and three political scientists as investigators. These seven people are among the authors of only a few of the many publications that quickly resulted, because the grants typically supported graduate students who took responsibility for subprojects, and often colleagues not among the co-PIs also participated. For example, both David Hachen and Omar Lizardo, two sociologists at University of Notre Dame, were among the co-PIs on the grant titled “Explorations on the Effects of Pervasive Networking on Social Relationships and Resource Planning,” on which their computer engineer colleague Aaron Striegel was PI.51 But only Striegel was a co-author on a study published in Computational Social Networks, the other two authors being graduate students who did indeed earn their doctorates subsequently.52 The research methodology was a combination of experiment and observation. Called NetSense, it gave free wireless smartphones to 200 Notre Dame students at the beginning of the 2011–12 academic year and documented their communication patterns for two years. An award-winning retrospective article put the research questions in layman’s language: “How do the alwayson networks afforded by wireless impact how we make and keep friends? Specifically, how does the digital world (Facebook, SMS, e-mail, phone call) impact how we make (tie creation) and keep (tie persistence) friends?”53 The six authors included the two sociologists, their two engineer colleagues, and the two graduate students who were in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Sociologist Joanne Cohoon at the University of Virginia was PI of her part of a three-institution collaborative grant, the others being computer engineer Michela Taufer at University of Delaware and Gary Zoppetti at Millersville University who holds a degree in computer and information sciences. Their project was in the citizen science area, titled “ExSciTecH:  An Interactive, Easy-to-Use Volunteer Computing System to Explore Science, Technology and Health.” The online abstract identifies a focus that could readily be called social structural:  Volunteer Computing (VC) uses the computational resources of volunteers with internet-connected PCs to address fundamental problems in science. Unfortunately, the largely white-male volunteers are not representative of the general population, and their involvement typically consists of nothing more than contributing idle computing resources. The demonstrated benefits to scientific discovery and the opportunity to engage a broad population motivate this project’s radical transformation of VC systems.54

Now deceased, the sociologist on the team had great dedication to progress in this area, as mentioned in her online obituary:

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Joanne McGrath Cohoon believed that one of the most critical challenges for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics was in the area of computing, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the demand is going to be many times more than the number of qualified workers. That is one reason why Cohoon dedicated her career to removing barriers and encouraging women to join the field.55

Sociologist Alan Neustadtl was co-PI on a grant headed by the highly influential computer scientist Ben Shneiderman, the founder of the Human– Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL).56 Titled “Supporting a Nation of Neighbors with Community Analysis Visualization Environment,” it could be described as a project to expand the definition of digital government.57 At the same time, it was research on social structures, as its website explains:  Nation of Neighbors is Neighborhood Watch for the 21st century. It facilitates realtime collaboration within communities and between community members and Law Enforcement. Their mission is to enable Citizens and Law Enforcement to work together to fight and deter crime and improve our communities. This project is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Computer Science, HCIL, and Sociology at the University of Maryland. The goal is to design and develop visualization and analytic tools to facilitate the study of social networks. We also hope to increase Nation of Neighbors’ effectiveness in facilitating community engagement and reducing crime.58

The website lists four graduate students in the team, two sociologists and two computer scientists. While relevant to digital government, the three SoCS projects involving political scientists all developed new methods for studying political ideologies and the wider problems of public discussion. Walter Lance Bennett was the coPI with senior computer scientist PI Alan Borning on “Socio-Computational Systems to Support Public Engagement and Deliberation,” a project with the clear digital government goal to “strengthen democratic process by facilitating effective citizen participation and deliberation.”59 David Redlawsk was PI of the Rutgers half of a collaborative project with computer scientist William Cohen at Carnegie-Mellon, having a quite self-explanatory title: “Analysis of Social Media Driven By Theories of Political Psychology.”60 Amber Boydstun led one of the parts of a four-university collaborative, “Data-Driven, Computational Models for Discovery and Analysis of Framing,” a concept and methodology that very much harmonizes with the theme of the following chapter on culture and social structure: This project studies framing, a central concept in political communication that refers to portraying an issue from one perspective with corresponding de-emphasis of competing perspectives. Framing is known to significantly influence public attitudes toward policy issues and policy outcomes. As social media allow greater citizen engagement in political discourse, scientific study of the political world requires reliable analysis of how issues are framed, not only by traditional media and elites but by citizens participating in public discourse. Yet conventional content analysis for frame discovery and classification is complex and labor-intensive. Additionally, existing methods are

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ill-equipped to capture those many instances when one frame evolves into another frame over time.61

Late in fiscal year 2012, the following announcement appeared online: The NSF is no longer accepting proposals for the Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) Program. However, the NSF continues to welcome proposals on SoCS-related topics. Such proposals may be submitted to the program in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) or the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) that is most closely related to the proposal topic.62

7.4 Two Futuristic Cases A recent social experiment facilitated by the Internet is time banking, a system in which people contribute labor to other members of the community, earning hours in return, which they may use to pay other members to work for them.63 Participants’ work hours are paid equally, with a heritage reaching back at least to Robert Owen’s utopian experiments in the early 1830s.64 In 2012 an NSF research grant, “Socio-Technical Issues in Mobile Time Banking,” was made to John Carroll at Pennsylvania State University. Its online abstract begins with this definition: Time banking refers to community-based volunteering in which participants provide and receive services; for example, one neighbor might be a competent handyman, another has a heavy-duty pickup truck. Each can provide community service doing what he/ she can do for other members. For this, they receive time credits that can be exchanged for other services, say, gardening. A  community brokering entity, a time bank, keeps track of time credits earned and redeemed. Time banks have pervasive implications for conceptions of work, citizenship, volunteering, community engagement, and social inclusion. Time banking has spread rapidly in recent years throughout the world.65

Two years later Carroll was joined by Victoria Bellotti at the Palo Alto Research Center and Anind Dey at Carnegie-Mellon University in a related three-way collaborative grant, “Intelligent Context-Aware Peer-to-Peer Transaction Brokering.”66 There were two sides to the research that resulted:  (1) considering how improvement of interfaces on mobile devices and other technological advances could encourage people to collaborate with their communities; and (2) understanding a range of alternatives to conventional economic markets, comparable to the issues raised by Thorsten Veblen in his classic book of essays, The Engineers and the Price System.67 Central to the project was empirical research on the motivations that inspired people to participate in specific, already-organized online communities.68 For social scientists, the most notable example is time banks, which is based on well-developed social theory and is accessible at timebanks.org where this introduction is offered: Timebanking is a time-based currency that helps to build circles and network of mutual support. With timebanking, you give one hour of service to another, and receive one

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time credit … Timebanks are formed when people come together to use time credits to achieve a shared goal. Many choose to focus on community building. But timebanks have also focused on tutoring in schools, health and wellness efforts, hospital discharge support, juvenile justice, helping seniors to age in community, civic engagement and more. Timebanks can be local, regional, national or international in scope. They can vary in size from as few as 20 people to tens of thousands. Most (but not all) timebanks use timebanking software, which helps them keep track of member activity. Because timebanks are self-organized, we cannot know precisely how many there are, but in the United States we can guesstimate there are around 500 local and regional timebanks, totaling around 40,000–50,000 members.69

On the evening of June 16, 2017, I downloaded the public data on 281 locally based projects from timebanks.org, 213 in the United States, 35 in New Zealand, 16 in Canada, 2 in the United Kingdom, and 1 each in: Argentina, Australia, Bermuda, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Israel, Monaco, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, and Uruguay. Assuming no duplications, 21,285 people had signed up. The data included how many work exchanges there had been since the beginning of the group, and how many hours had been involved. It is never wise to take such data for granted, given that we do not really know how they were collected, and there were some obvious anomalies. In one group with seven members there had been only one labor exchange, four years and forty-four weeks ago, lasting a reported 960 hours. The page for this particular group was listed as “offline,” had a message explaining how members could reactivate it, and reported: “This site was using an old version of the Community Weaver online timebanking software which is no longer supported.” With a few other cases like this, statistical analysis of the entire dataset might be unwise. The biggest group, with 785 members, was the Lyttelton Time Bank in Canterbury, New Zealand. Wikipedia describes the location, which is Lyttelton Harbour: “The harbour’s main population centre is Lyttelton, which serves the city of Christchurch, linked with Christchurch by the single-track Lyttelton rail tunnel (opened 1867), a two lane road tunnel (opened 1964) and two roads over the Port Hills.”70 The page for this group on timebanks.org offered a few examples of the kind of work involved.71 Recent requests for help included “dog walking,” “anyone got a laptop to give away?” “puppeteers needed for parade,” and “house to house-sit for mother in law.” Recent offers included “house-sitting over Christmas,” “house-sitting/pet-sitting,” “retro fabrics,” “native tree seedlings,” and “upholstery foam.” Some of these examples sound more like exchange of goods rather than labor, and it seems feasible for these online groups to handle both. Serious research would require formal cooperation with timebanks.org and the individual groups, because most of the data are not public and require password sign-in. However, for illustrative purposes, a brief look at some of the public New Zealand data will be worthwhile. Table 7.2 summarizes activity on the fourteen New Zealand groups with at least 100 members.

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224 Table 7.2 Activity in large New Zealand time-bank groups Name

Members

Most recent exchange

Exchanges

Hours

Hours per exchange

Lyttelton Time Bank Wellington Time Bank Addington Time Bank Eastbay Time Bank Taranaki Time Bank Time Bank Hurunui Waikato Time Bank The Hutt Time Bank Time Bank Raglan Otaki Time Bank Kapiti Time Bank

785

10,525

136,312

13.0

6,647

16,142

2.4

862

4,571

5.3

4,180

13,453

3.2

986

2,393

2.4

2,270

9,222

4.1

1,810

4,367

2.4

1,973

6,245

3.2

1,080

2,240

2.1

2,667 190

7,173 486

2.7 2.6

Tauranga Time Bank Bridge2Rocks Time Bank Time Bank Upper Hutt

150

1 day 9 hours ago 9 hours 46 mins. ago 1 week 3 days ago 18 hours 17 mins. ago 13 hours 59 mins. ago 13 hours 42 mins. ago 3 weeks 17 hours ago 15 hours 19 mins. ago 13 hours 22 mins. ago 1 week 1 day ago 2 years 2 weeks ago 1 year 33 weeks ago 1 day 18 hours ago 3 days 10 hours ago

192

899

4.7

742

5,056

6.8

1,474

7,379

5.0

653 268 255 254 254 244 217 215 191 163

128 100

Over the total of 3,877 members, there were 35,598 exchanges totaling 215,938 hours, which is objectively a lot of work. However this is about nine exchanges per person and 55.7 hours on average, which seems moderate given that many of these groups have been operating for years. Two of them, in fact, seem to have failed a year or two earlier, Kapiti Time Bank and Tauranga Time Bank, as that much time has passed since their most recent exchange. The hours per exchange is far higher for Lyttelton than any of the others, suggesting perhaps that more house-sitting is done in that unusual community. At a much higher level of analysis, the full dataset suggests that time banking is having difficulty achieving popularity, and that unusual sociocultural conditions might be favorable to it. Of the 281 groups, 23 were just starting up and had not operated yet, or were the result of an incomplete registration process that had stalled. An ominous result was that nothing at all had happened in 161 of the

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groups during the past year. Two of the groups, both incidentally in Houston, Texas, had experienced a few exchanges before stalling over eight years ago, suggesting that the entire timebank.org system has been around long enough to gain much wider popularity than it has in fact achieved. Among the values listed on the timebanks.org home page, two especially relate to social structure: Reciprocity Helping, that works as a two-way street empowers everyone involved – the receiver as well as the giver. The question: “How can I help you?” needs to change so we ask: “Will you help someone too?” Paying it forward ensures that, together, we help each other build the world we all will live in. Social Networks Helping each other, we reweave communities of support, strength & trust. Community is built by sinking roots, building trust, creating networks. By using timebanking, we can strengthen and support these activities.72 The reciprocity statement includes an especially interesting phrase, paying it forward. As Wikipedia reports, “Pay it forward is an expression for describing the beneficiary of a good deed repaying it to others instead of to the original benefactor.”73 Wikipedia notes several historical examples of the idea, but correctly reports that it became popular only when Robert A. Heinlein promoted it in his 1951 science fiction novel Between Planets.74 This may seem to be an insignificant historical footnote, but actually indicates a very important point: Intellectual subcultures, of which science fiction is the prominent modern example, may assemble novel ideological perspectives that have exceedingly different structure and content from the surrounding culture. Superficially, time banking looks like a subset of Communism, in which each person’s rewards are equal to those of everybody else. Yet Heinlein is very well known for having been politically right wing, not conservative but a radical survivalist.75 Among his other mottos was one that directly opposes government welfare programs: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.76 While time banking treats people equally, it does not provide rewards to people who do not contribute. The affinity between science fiction and modern information technology should be obvious, and will be considered in the final chapter. This does not suggest that we must read authors like Heinlein to learn about our real future, but that the social structures that emerge from the Internet may be significantly different from traditional ones. The timebanks.org statement about social networks asserts that this new technology will create new relationships in the real world, yet sociologists might wonder if it should be reversed in its statement of causation: The social structure of online communities will be shaped largely by the structures to which the participants already belong.77 It is perhaps too easy to imagine that the social structure of New Zealand is insular, yet there is something remarkable about the fact that this particular time-banking movement has been relatively successful in that environment.

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Other time-banking systems exist, such as hOurworld with 44,964 members in 705 communities having already exchanged 2,279,000 hours of service by early July 2017.78 In 2015, Carroll and Bellotti noted that in addition to hour banking several other forms of virtual currency had become popular, from Bitcoins to the simulated gold in WoW.79 Time-banking pioneer Edgar Cahn argued that one of the advantages of hours was that they could not be taxed by governments as income.80 In 2011 the World Bank published an extensive report on the huge implications of virtual currencies, of which the problem of taxing them was but one of many.81 An even more radical wing of the digital government movement is Pirate Parties International, which shares some similarities with time banking but seeks to replace current forms of democracy with a new one, which we may call fluid democracy. The remainder of this section is adapted from a chapter I published in the first English-language book published by the US Pirate Party, under an agreement that did not give the party ownership of this intellectual property, but did have the effect of validating that my analysis of their position was at least somewhat correct.82 The goals and structures of the various Pirate Parties are constantly evolving, and this brief examination of one aspect cannot substitute for systematic examination by historians and social scientists of this remarkable internet-related phenomenon. As Wikipedia notes, at its birth the party was focused narrowly on abolishing intellectual property rights, as dramatically suggested by the name Pirate: The first Pirate Party to be established was the Pirate Party of Sweden (SwedisPiratpartiet), whose website was launched on 1 January 2006 by Rickard Falkvinge. Falkvinge was inspired to found the party after he found that Swedish politicians were generally unresponsive to Sweden’s debate over changes to copyright law in 2005. The United States Pirate Party was founded on 6 June 2006 by University of Georgia graduate student Brent Allison. The party’s concerns were abolishing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, reducing the length of copyrights from 95 years after publication or 70 years after the author’s death to 14 years, and the expiry of patents that do not result in significant progress after four years, as opposed to 20 years.83

A good starting point is the statement by the Liquid Democracy Squad of the Berlin Pirate Party, a group of about two dozen members who discussed the possibilities from September 30, 2009, until March 24, 2010. Especially popular in Germany in its early days, the English terminology they employed is a bit awkward. The automatic translation website FreeTranslation.com renders liquid democracy into German as flüssige demokratie, and flüssige demokratie into English as fluid democracy. Liquid metaphors are quite common in electronics and computer talk, such as streaming video, electric current, wave. I prefer the term fluid democracy because it makes clear that the fluctuating property of liquids is most salient for the discussion. Their key idea was this: “Each participant can decide how far he wants to shoulder his own interests, or how far he wants to be represented by others. In particular, he may at any time

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reclaim his delegated voting right, and this does not have to wait until a new election period. This results in a network of delegations that is constantly in flux.”84 As conceptualized by the Berlin group, an individual has considerable liberty to determine how he or she would be represented. In its mature form fluid democracy would not require periodic elections of representatives to a legislature. Thus fluid means both rapidly changing and unconstrained by formalized social structures. With respect to tax law, the person may select political Party A as the representative, while for environmental policy selecting Party B. Instead of a party, the person may select another individual. And these decisions can be changed at any time. It is easy to imagine how this could be handled online. Each person would have a private page inside a password-protected governmental database. It would list some moderate number of areas of government decision-making, with the option after each to select registered political parties from a dropdown menu, or to insert the name and unique ID number of another individual person. The database would constantly tabulate support for each party in each topic area, calculating weighting variables to calibrate the relative power of that party to decide the next specific vote in that area. Thus, in a moderate conception assuming legislatures still existed, a party’s strength in Parliament would be decided not by how many of its politicians had won seats in the most recent election, but by the momentary fraction of the electorate that had selected it to represent them on the particular issue at hand. In cases when Voter A delegated to Voter B, there are two possibilities. First, Voter A’s party choice could copy Voter B’s party choice, changing whenever Voter B changed a party selection. Second, if Voter B achieves some threshold number of delegations from other voters, Voter B could become in effect an independent member of Parliament. The balance between party influence in Parliament, versus the influence of individual delegates representing many people but without a party organization, could change over time and across issues. In addition, each voter might have several selection pages in the secure online database, one for local government, one for regional government, one for national government, and ideally even one for world government. Presumably, each political party, and each unaligned individual delegate, would have a public web page listing positions on the various general issues. It is conceivable that some party or solo delegate might choose to communicate privately, even in secret, with individual voters, and no technical barrier prohibits this. However, democracy generally benefits from broad public discussion, and this system assumes that some kind of public debate has identified what the distinct issue areas are. It is one thing to say that tax policy is logically separate from environmental policy, but when a decision must be made about taxing emissions from a polluting industry, the picture becomes complex. If such a system were ever implemented, there would be a host of very specific technical questions, including many about the processes used to identify opinion leaders and topic areas. The simple idea just presented of a government

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database with a private page for each voter is only one of many possible ways to proceed, and a modern political system may require combining several of them. Furthermore, we have not considered yet how a political party would develop its platform, or how advanced information technology might manage that difficult process. It may seem implausible for the Pirate Parties ever to gain power, given the established laws and vested interests that oppose such a revolution, yet it occasionally has achieved some influence in specific nations, notably Iceland. Wikipedia notes that the various national parties are highly diverse and constantly changing, but lists these common themes: • Defend the freedom of expression, communication, education; respect the privacy of citizens and civil rights in general. • Defend the free flow of ideas, knowledge, and culture. • Support politically the reform of copyright and patent laws. • Have a commitment to work collaboratively, and participate with maximum transparency. • Do not support actions that involve violence. • Use free software, free hardware, DIY, and open protocols whenever possible. • Politically defend an open, participative, and collaborative construction of any public policy. • Direct democracy. • Open access. • Open data.85 So far, radical solutions like time banking and fluid democracy have garnered only minor support, yet they and comparable innovations deserve study by social scientists, for at least two reasons. First, they provide research opportunities for studying many classic questions about human interaction, because they exist largely online and the communication flows are technically capable of many forms of analysis. Second, if traditional institutions erode in power and legitimacy, as we may well believe they are doing today, and just the right organizational preconditions happen to be in place, one of these radical movements might in future become highly influential. An alternate possibility, which could affect all existing forms of online community, would be a government program, perhaps represented as an anti-hacking and anti-terrorism crusade, which imposed strict controls over online communications. One of the most interesting and significant current illustrations of this possibility is the greater control by the Chinese government over the Internet in its nation. This topic is far beyond our capacity to examine here, but a body of literature is slowly aggregating, on various aspects of censorship and intellectual property rights in China.86 It is worth noting that the conception of intellectual property rights is culture dependent, and today’s notions of copyright arose as publication industries became profitable, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. There has been much debate, not limited to partisans of the Pirate Parties, about whether copyright is

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still relevant now that information technology permits copying and sharing of any art and communication forms.87 If so, such modern social structures as the dominance of celebrities in the popular music industry, may gradually vanish as every local performer gains an audience.88

7.5 Political Conflict in the Digital Era Obviously, digital government is open to the criticism that it promotes some political ideologies and systems rather than others, and it may be by its very nature dictatorial. This section will combine two very specific examples, presented in some detail so that the many connections to social structure will be clear, plus data on an attempt to counter government priorities in the funding of science and engineering. The first example is especially apt, because it concerns research on social media. On August 25, 2014, an online news service named the Washington Free Beacon reported: The federal government is spending nearly $1  million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.”89

A link in the article went to the “about” page on “truthy.indiana.edu,” the website of the project, which explicitly said one of its goals was to understand how social media can be abused to manipulate public opinion. We were the first group to uncover evidence of systematic, orchestrated, and widely spread misinformation campaigns based on “astroturf” (fake grassroots movements) and social bots. Some social bots are created to deceive and harm social media users. They have been used to infiltrate political discourse, manipulate the stock market, steal personal information, and spread misinformation.90

According to Wikipedia, the Washington Free Beacon itself is a source of controversial communications, being a “conservative political journalism website.”91 Its article on the Truthy project asserted that its leader was biased in the opposite direction, linking from his academic website to “numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority.”92 Such links do not exist on the leader’s website in mid-2017, but may have been there in 2014. On October 17, 2014, an anti-Truthy opinion piece in the Washington Post by Ajit Pai, remarkably identified as “a member of the Federal Communications Commission” noted: “Some possible hints as to Truthy’s real motives emerge in a 2012 paper by the project’s leaders, in which they wrote ominously of a

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‘highly-active, densely-interconnected constituency of right-leaning users using [Twitter] to further their political views.’ ”93 The abstract of that 2012 article not only reveals the political sensitivity of the research, but also makes totally clear why the study is reported in this book: We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American online political landscape. Analysis of a network defined by the communication activity of these users in proximity to the 2010 midterm congressional elections reveals a highly segregated, well clustered, partisan community structure. Using cluster membership as a high-fidelity (87% accuracy) proxy for political affiliation, we characterize a wide range of differences in the behavior, communication and social connectivity of left- and rightleaning Twitter users. We find that in contrast to the online political dynamics of the 2008 campaign, right-leaning Twitter users exhibit greater levels of political activity, a more tightly interconnected social structure, and a communication network topology that facilitates the rapid and broad dissemination of political information.94

Over the years, political science research has come under special criticism from conservative politicians, who view it as having a left-wing bias, and it certainly is true that scientific research on the political system may influence the very system it studies.95 In 2013, funding for the NSF Political Science program was temporarily suspended, in response to demands by the US Congress, although the Truthy study had been funded two years earlier and not by Political Science but by a computer science program, and had not yet faced public criticism.96 When the journal Nature reported on the funding pause, it displayed a picture of Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican who “helped to insert language in a law that restricts federal political science research funding.”97 Coburn was the originator of the annual online Wastebook report, each issue of which claimed to have identified 100 wasteful projects funded by the US government. It was inherited by Senator Jeff Flake when Coburn retired, then discontinued when Flake also retired. Wastebook was aimed at the general public, often with a populist theme and extravagant artwork. For example the final edition in 2017 was subtitled PORKémon Go after the Pokémon Go augmented reality game played on mobile devices, and the cover of the previous year’s Wastebook highlighted Coburn’s retirement by depicting him as Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, with the subtitle, The Farce Awakens.98 A  good fraction of the supposed cases of wasteful spending are scientific research projects, presented not as politically biased but as frivolous, in tune with the sarcastic style of Wastebook. To get a sense of the kinds of science being attacked, and the organizational consequences, I tabulated all the NSF grants criticized in the seven editions of Wastebook, summarized in Table 7.3. Again, as in all my NSF references, all the information is already public, and I am merely analyzing some of it here,

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Table 7.3 NSF research projects congressionally condemned online Directorate

Projects Games, social media

Cost of grants ($)

Fraction Fraction Ratio of total of 2012 cost (%) budget (%)

Biological sciences Computer and information science and engineering Education and human resources Engineering Geosciences Mathematical and physical sciences Social, behavioral, and economic sciences

10 14

0 10

6,390,510 14,377,168

5.5 12.3

11.5 15.1

0.48 0.81

17

7

40,002,647

34.3

13.4

2.56

6 10 16

4 0 0

2,207,714 4,916,367 7,124,081

1.9 4.2 6.1

13.3 21.4 21.1

0.14 0.20 0.29

20

4

41,532,944

35.6

4.1

8.68

TOTAL

93

25

116,551,431

100.0

100.0

1.00

as anybody has a right to do. A total of ninety-three projects were criticized in the seven editions of Wastebook, making NSF 13.3 percent of the total, rather much considering that the agency’s funding is rather less than 1  percent of the federal government’s “discretionary” spending.99 I suspect that one reason for this overemphasis is how easy it is to search the public online abstracts of all the research projects, and swiftly link over to the researchers’ academic websites. Of the ninety-three projects, twenty-five concerned research on computer games or online communities, so in a sense the two Senators were prematurely criticizing this book. In an earlier book, I  suggested that one of the reasons why conservative politicians are critical of computer games is that many of them satirize religion, WoW among them, or present religious alternatives to Christianity.100 For example, in another recent book, a chapter explored the Taoist game, Perfect World, created by a Chinese company of the same name and promoted worldwide.101 Increasingly, online games resemble gambling, with a “pay-to-win” design, although usually not permitting players to convert their virtual gains into real money. By definition, we might expect “conservatives” to want to preserve conservative social structures, rather than venturing into the unreal territory of online communities. Table 7.3 divides the projects by the host directorate – major organizational unit within NSF  – each containing divisions that contain programs, as well as sponsoring temporary initiatives that cross organizational boundaries. The

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three directorates focusing on the so-called natural sciences, were not criticized for sponsoring research on games or online communities. One might imagine that political conservatives would criticize the biological sciences directorate for funding evolution-related research, and the geosciences directorate for supporting climate change research, but in fact most of the criticized projects in those two directorates were studying animal behavior, which the senators thought is a silly topic. The total cost of the ninety-three projects was $116,551,431, of which over a third went to each of the two directorates that some Republican politicians in the past wanted to shut down, education and human resources (34.3 percent) and social, behavioral, and economic sciences (35.6 percent).102 A column of the table shows that social science’s share of NSF funding for a typical year in the middle of the range of ninety-three projects, 2012, was vastly lower than its share of the criticized grants. The final column gives the ratio of the two previous columns, indicating that in dollar terms the social, behavioral, and economic sciences directorate is overrepresented by a factor of more than eight. The computer and information science and engineering directorate seems closest to a fair share, 0.81 compared with 1.00, but this is only because ten of its fourteen target projects concern computer games and online communities, detested by the two senators. The conflict within government about online communities deserves to be balanced by consideration of conflict between citizen and government, and unexpectedly a striking example appeared in the national news while this chapter was being drafted. This was the remarkable case of Reality Winner, which required looking rather more closely at the public behavior of otherwise private individuals than is traditional in social science, in a pilot project to see what could be discovered about online social interactions in a single hectic week, then continuing to observe over the following year. On June 5, 2017, a web-based news publication called the Intercept reported: Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light. While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A  U.S.  intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.103

Wikiepdia provides this background:

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The Intercept is an online publication launched in February 2014 by First Look Media, the news organization created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The editors are Betsy Reed, Glenn Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill … The publication serves as a platform to report on the documents released by Edward Snowden in the short term, and to “produce aggressive, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues” in the long term.104

Wikipedia’s page on Snowdon reminds us:  Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983)  is an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former contractor for the United States government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 without authorization. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.105

On June 8, 2017 this paragraph was added to the Intercept page: In June 2017, The Intercept released documents that had been leaked from the NSA, purporting to illustrate the hacking efforts by Russian military intelligence against several state and local government agencies during the 2016 United States elections. One hour later, the leaker, a 25-year-old NSA contractor named Reality Leigh Winner, was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 after The Intercept told the NSA where the document was mailed from and shared with it a copy of the original. Security ink allows official documents to be linked to the federal staffer who accessed the document, thus the NSA were able to quickly identify the leaker of the documents.106

Soon after the story hit the news on June 6, an experienced Wikipedia editor put up a place-holder page titled “Reality Leigh Winner” but lacking text and merely redirecting to the existing page “Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.” By the end of the day, eighteen editors had made thirty-eight edits, producing a 8,148-byte article, removing her middle name from the title and citing online news articles from CNN, U.S. News & World Report, Fox News, and the Guardian. The next day, the article was marked for possible deletion, because Reality Winner did not seem to be a sufficiently notable person, and editors began voting pro and con on an associated deletion page, which very quickly grew bigger than the main page, because some editors offered complex arguments. The early consensus seemed to be to keep the page for the time being, with the plan to consider later what set of pages would best record the important public aspects of the event. Checking back on August 21, 2018, the page was well established and had received 294,006 views. Other debates concerned whether Reality Winner really qualified as a whistle-blower, one editor commenting, “The mere fact someone is suspected of illegally leaking intelligence, does not automatically afford them the status of a whistleblower.”107 On June 7 she was indeed added to a different Wikipedia page that listed whistle-blowers.108 That day, an editor removed text, saying

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that the possibly false information in it came from “a news and opinion website with an extreme right wing bias.” That text was: On Winner’s Twitter page she responded to a tweet by Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif, pledging her support to the Iranian government in the event of a future war between Iran and the United States: “There are many Americans protesting US govt aggression towards Iran. If our Tangerine in Chief declares war, we stand with you!” Winner also tweeted her support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the concept of white guilt: “being white is terrorism.”109

On June 9, someone briefly changed the name of the page to Reality Loser, before being barred from Wikipedia with the explanation, “You have been blocked indefinitely from editing because your account is only being used for vandalism.”110 As Chapter  5 of this book documented, Wikipedia faces many issues concerning the identity and status of individual human beings, and achieved at best only moderate success in its attempt to avoid becoming merely a platform for advertising and ideological conflict. The Reality Winner case is especially interesting because it illustrates the importance of political action conducted through online communities, of which the Intercept is a prime example. One advantage of Wikipedia is the persistence of the data, yet for social science it may often be crucial to collect data in real time, with the expectation that it may soon vanish. Immediately after seeing a news report about Reality Winner, I logged into Facebook, visited her page, and began frantically copying as much of the material there as I could, nearly completing the job when her page was suddenly removed. Thus, at the same time that Wikipedia and the wider news media were recognizing that Reality was a public figure, Facebook blocked access to her public expressions. As soon as I could no longer access her page, I began searching for related pages, and over the next week documented the development of the most relevant Facebook-centered actions by other people and groups in response to her case. For example, her page revealed her membership in five public Facebook groups, but as soon as her page vanished, she was erased, apparently automatically, from their membership lists. The groups were not political splinter groups, and none had anything to do with information security. For example, one was a martial arts group, appropriate given that she had served in the US military 2010–17 and is a physical fitness enthusiast: Krav Maga Maryland (544 members) dedicated to “a military self-defense system developed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli security forces (Shin Bet and Mossad).”111 For readers who imagine that martial arts enthusiasts and members of the US military are “bloodthirsty,” that may seem a contradiction with the fact that another of her public groups was vegetarian: Vegan Recipes for Everyone (3,877 members):  This is a community to share *vegan* recipes, please do not post recipes with any animal products in them … All people, vegan or not, are welcome in this group. Please

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be respectful. We are not here to argue the merits of a vegan diet; we are here only to share our recipes. Intentionally sharing nonvegan recipes will result in being removed from the group.112

I checked Reality Winner’s Facebook page for “vegan” and saw that she used “#veganlifters” as a hashtag for an Instagram message she had posted at 6:10 a.m. on May 22, 2017: “Those days when you remind yourself the sacrifices you made to be here, now, every day. Fasted and volume training Monday 35 mins HIIT cycling Backsquats 10x5 @ 75% C2b unbroken 10x5.” Most likely, HIIT means “High-intensity interval training,” C2B refers to chest-tobar pullups, and the picture associated with the Instagram text shows Reality Winner performing a C2B.113 The three other groups were fitness encouragement communities, the largest being GB Handstand Challenge (9,731 members), in which GB stands for Gymnastic Bodies, which announced, “We will be posting a handstand challenge throughout the month on this group page. Keep up and have fun!”114 CrossFitters of Augusta (528 members) and CF 10-10 Members Group (169 members) were local chapters of CrossFit: Promoted as both a physical exercise philosophy and also as a competitive fitness sport, CrossFit workouts incorporate elements from high-intensity interval training, Olympic weightlifting, plyometrics, powerlifting, gymnastics, girevoy sport, calisthenics, strongman, and other exercises. It is practiced by members of over 13,000 affiliated gyms, roughly half of which are located in the United States, and by individuals who complete daily workouts (otherwise known as “WODs” or “workouts of the day”).115

On June 5 a nonmember posted on the CF 10-10 page: “Does everyone there know that their fellow member, Reality Winner, is the traitor just arrested? She should have been caught sooner as a vegan-yoga-supporter of Bernie Sanders, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert. She even likes ‘I Stand With Muslims.’ ” By the time I began copying her own page on June 6, there already were many comments there, some of them rather hostile: “Enjoy prison time … REALITY LOSER.” “May God have mercy on your soul … Because America will not.” “I hope you love Prison and having a permanent record that will forever preclude you from ever working for our government.” “I hope you ROT in prison you traitor bitch!” “I’m so glad you have been exposed as a traitor. People like you are what’s wrong with our country. Enjoy your new home in prison.” “This lady just committed the worst crime against her Country that you could. If you are on here supporting her you have a severe mental illness.” Many of the others who posted on the page supported her or tried to analyze the situation, although at times the posters descended into hurling obscene insults at each other. Sensing I did not have much time before Reality Winner’s Facebook page vanished, I  noted the June 2 motto she had posted at the top:  “You are what you love, not who loves you.” I was not in fact able to copy the 3,419 comments people had added, but was able to complete getting information

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from the “like” votes that 524 cast. Of these, 308 said they liked it, 116 loved it, 78 gave the amused “haha” rating, 17 were angry, 3 gave the “wow” rating, and 2 were sad. The way I “scraped” these data gave me the Facebook page addresses for all the voters, so I  could try to understand the perceptions of the 17 who were angry. For example, one of them belonged to nine Facebook groups that supported Donald Trump and to two groups of people who felt insulted by the claim by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton that many of her opponent’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables,” the Deplorables (463,653 members) and the American Deplorables (27,878 members).116 At the time, most Facebook users allowed anyone to see the public and closed groups they belonged to, but a year later Facebook removed the groups option from the Manage Sections control panel, thus providing greater privacy but without giving the users any option. During the brief hours when Reality Winner’s Facebook page still existed, it contained public family links to members of her family. Aware of the tremendously difficult ethical challenges of doing sociological research on such a controversial yet person-centered topic, I  developed reciprocal Facebook friendships with them, giving them the opportunity to check me out, and they gave me permission to publish about her situation.117 Naturally, I  looked at their Facebook pages, saw links to other family members, and immediately contemplated the challenge that Reality’s arrest presented for them, and the challenge for researchers of such events to chart the most ethical course through the vast public data about the family and friends available online. Immediately, they had begun defending their daughter in public, for example in a June 6 CNN interview: “Winner was a linguist in the US Air Force and speaks Pashto, Farsi and Dari, said her mother, Billie Winner-Davis. ‘She served her country; she is a veteran,’ her stepfather, Gary Davis, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday: ‘She’s a patriot, and to see her maligned and slandered in the media is very disheartening.’ ”118 Thus, both Billie and Gary had become public figures, and Billie became the de facto leader of the online social movement to support her daughter. Billie Winner-Davis started to set up a GoFundMe account, to raise funds for her daughter’s legal defense, but was initially prevented from doing so. The GoFundMe rules prohibit collecting funds for “the defense or support of anyone alleged to be involved in criminal activity,” which is phrased so vaguely that I suspect it is one of the common online system rules designed merely to protect a company from liability for actions taken by its users.119 Wikipedia describes this online service, which functions somewhat as a specialized social medium as well as a fund raiser: GoFundMe allows users to create their own website to describe what they are raising money for. During this process, members can describe their fundraising cause, the amount they hope to raise, and upload photos or video. Once the website is created, GoFundMe allows users to share their project with people through integrated social network links (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and email. People can then donate to a user’s

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cause through the website using only a debit card or credit card (no PayPal) and track the progress of their funding. Those who donate can also leave comments on the website in support of the project. GoFundMe generates revenue by automatically deducting a 5% fee from each donation users receive. If the user receives no donations, then no charge is made.120

In earlier research on A Tale in the Desert, I and many other members of the guild Helping Hands of Friends had contributed to a GoFundMe campaign for some of the medical expenses of the most beloved guild leader, so it was already clear that GoFundMe exists at the intersection of real and virtual worlds, deserving of notice by social scientists. Starting June 7, a website called GoFraudMe posted an article listing several dubious GoFundMe campaigns, saying, “You Probably Don’t Want to Donate to These Sketchy Reality Winner GoFundMe Campaigns.”121 However, after being temporarily banned, an apparently legitimate GoFundMe account received $35,815 from 837 donors during its first five days. Rather quickly, a number of individuals and social movement organizations launched communication campaigns in social media. Already on June 5, an activist in Oregon created a Facebook group called Pardon Reality Leigh Winner, with this statement: “Standing by Reality Winner who is accused of espionage for mailing a leaked document detailing Russian GRU cyber military meddling and/or hacking US election companies during the 2016 presidential election cycle. #resist #standbyher.”122 On June 6, another activist created Friends of Reality Leigh Winner: “This is a group about a whistleblower who has been arrested. She revealed more information about Russia’s involvement in Trump’s election, information the Trump administration wanted to keep secret.”123 On June 9 I noticed that an opposing group had been created, with the harsh name “Reality Leigh Winner Is a Dumb Bitch Spy,” subsequently renamed more moderately, “Reality Leigh Winner AKA Not Really a Winner,” then later morphing into “A Group of Folks That Dislike Stupid People.” Linking to the GoFundMe Campaign, on June 8 an online project called Courage to Resist posted a petition urging that the legal charges against Reality Winner be dropped, with a place where anyone could electronically become a signatory. Its website explains that it “supports the troops who refuse to fight, or who face consequences for acting on conscience, in opposition to illegal wars, occupations, the policies of empire abroad and martial law at home.”124 It appears to be an online manifestation of the Center on Conscience and War, which Wikipedia reports is “a United States non-profit anti-war organization located in Washington, D.C. dedicated to defending and extending the rights of conscientious objectors,” established in 1940 in reaction to the “first peacetime draft in the United States.”125 Maria Santelli, Executive Director of the Center, wrote the justification for the petition, including this argument: Reality allegedly leaked information regarding attempted interference in an election, tampering that many believe assisted in Donald Trump’s presidential win  – despite earning nearly four million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The documents published

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by The Intercept only confirm earlier accounts of US election hacking attempts and, given the current administration’s extreme antagonisms against facts, the release of these documents was clearly in the public interest. Like the vast majority of government documents that are hidden from public view, these reports should have been declassified by now anyway. Now Trump’s own Department of Justice has targeted Reality. It’s a sinister move, but on the other hand, simply a continuation [of] Obama’s unprecedented zeal in prosecuting whistle-blowers. Trump inherited an atrocious War on Leaks, and Reality is the latest victim of that war. Her arrest is a signal to the world, and the four million other Americans with access to classified information:  Only sanctioned leaks benefiting the government will be tolerated.126

Online research can often be both inspiring and frustrating, as hints of social structure may be difficult to verify, and the significance of ideologically motivated actions can be very difficult to weigh. A Facebook events page advertised a three-hour rally to be held at Union Square Park in New York City, on June 7:  Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old federal contractor from Georgia was charged in Federal Court on Monday with allegedly sharing documents highlighting Russia’s interference in the 2016 election with a news outlet. Reality faces serious charges and deserves our support. Please join us at Union Square (on the south steps), in showing your solidarity with Reality Leigh Winner. Bring a sign, bring a friend, and bring your voice!127

The one video of the event I could find online indicated that it had occurred but with few people in attendance.128 The page had allowed people to click one button to say they planned to attend, and another to indicate they were interested but perhaps lived too far away. The day after the event, the page said that 45 “went,” 291 had indicated they were “interested,” and fully 1,356 had been “invited.” Five organizations sponsored the event: 1. The People For Bernie Sanders (political organization): “We are activists and organizers building a broad, effective movement for democratic change. Internet Mom of #FeelTheBern.”129 2. Courage Foundation (nonprofit organization):  “We defend Snowden, Hammond, Brown and other truthtellers risking their lives for the public record. We fight for source protection & the right to know.”130 3. act.tv (media/news company):  “Rise up and Resist! Your home for movement-oriented video from a grassroots network of activists. Join us to #ResistTrump and fight for a political revolution.”131 4. The Sparrow Project (nonprofit organization):  “Amplifying Voices for Social Change.”132 5. Democrats.com (political organization): “The ‘Aggressive Progressives’ since 2000. 4 Million strong and growing. Defeat ALL Republicans, and change the world!”133 Obviously, we can examine the membership interlocks between the relevant Facebook groups, but this is true also for those 534 people who rated the motto on Reality Winner’s own page, and the 336 people who either attended the rally in New York City, or expressed an interest in doing so. In fact, however,

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Table 7.4 Membership interlocks among five Facebook groups Facebook groups Friends of Reality Leigh Winner Pardon Reality Leigh Winner Impeach Shitler Resistance Against Trump I Watch Rachel Maddow and MSNBC

Friends of Pardon Reality Reality

Impeach Resistance Rachel Shitler Against Trump Maddow

895

35.7%

13.2%

2.7%

0.3%

80

128

2.7%

0.8%

1.3%

114 31

6 2

835 52

4.7% 1,642

0.5% 1.0%

3

3

6

16

1,680

the number of interlocks connecting these two sets of people is exactly zero. The structure of the two pro-Reality Facebook groups is more complex. As of March 10, 2018, Friends had 895 identifiable members, while Pardon had only 128. Both had been founded immediately after the news of Reality’s arrest by people apparently not closely linked with her. Both were very responsible in adjusting to the situation as interpreted by Reality’s family and attorneys, and Pardon came to be seen as a back-up group, since built into its name was the assumption that Reality could be found guilty. Table 7.4 reports the membership interlocks for these two groups and three others. The table reports that 80 people belong to both Friends and Pardon. That is about 8.94 percent of the 895 membership of Friends and 62.5 percent of the 128 members of Pardon. The average of these two percentages is about 35.7, and in the table that number represents the mean interlock statistic for those two groups. In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the founder of Friends had already created a group currently called Impeach Shitler, with the goal of removing President Trump from office, and there is a highlighted link to it from Friends. However, he has agreed that Friends should not be used as an anti-Trump group, but must be a pure pro-Reality group. Of the 895 members of Reality, just 114 belong to Impeach. The two other groups in the table are ones that the founder of Friends and Impeach belongs to, Resistance Against Trump and I Watch Rachel Maddow and MSNBC, Maddow being a popular Liberal television news commentator. The connections from Friends to those two groups are quite weak, indicating that the small social movement supporting Reality Winner is not functionally a wing of the anti-Trump movement. The full story of the case of Reality Winner cannot be written now, but her defense was not permitted to make a strong case that she deserved immunity as a whistle-blower, nor that the Espionage Act of 1917 had been over-interpreted by the US government over the century following its wartime enactment to discourage public criticism of its secret misbehaviors. Reality acknowledged that she had provided the document to the Intercept, thus accepting imprisonment

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for over a year before her five-year prison sentence was made official on August 23, 2018. Two days earlier, Billie Winner-Davis shared an icon of her daughter framed by “Stand with Reality: Free Reality Winner, standwithreality. org”: “Friends, on Thursday my daughter Reality Winner will be sentenced for the crime of an unauthorized leak of information on the Russian attack on our election system. I ask that all who support her use the attached logo as their Facebook profile picture for that one day. Let’s stand with Reality Winner and be seen. Thank you.” Among the many questions raised by the case of Reality Winner is whether social media are powerful, or impotent.

7.6 Conclusion Unless civilization collapses, it seems likely that digital government in all its contradictory forms will persist and evolve in unpredictable directions. Economist Timur Kuran suggested that a prime source of unpredictability in politicized areas of life is the fact that people often conceal their true preferences, for example being unwilling to express their opposition to oppressive regimes.134 Yet, it seems that the Internet’s ability to liberate selfexpression could increase rather than decrease unpredictability, if the result is a vast number of competing subcultures that may enter into unstable coalitions with each other. Immediately before the burst of interest in digital government in the mid-1990s, Bruce Tonn and David Feldman predicted that the Internet would detach governance from geography, suggesting that people should vote on the basis of shared interests, not on the basis of where they lived.135 Some day Italian archaeologists will discover the ruins of the Imperial Roman Science Foundation, reminding us that all social structures have limited lifespans. Yet from NSF’s Digital Government Program, to Wastebook, to Friends of Reality Leigh Winner, examples in this chapter seem rather ephemeral, suggesting we need to consider whether in the modern age cultural structures might be more stable than social structures.

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8 Cultural Science

The emergence of online communities provides a platform where a new multidisciplinary field of science can be assembled from portions of many existing disciplines:  cultural science. The analogy is with cognitive science, which emerged over recent decades, and it contains several rather accurate metaphors. If cognitive science concerns how the individual mind works, on the basis of the structure and dynamics of the brain, then cultural science will concern how social structures create and sustain shared concepts, genres of art or literature, and technologies. If neural networks are the primary mechanism by which the individual mind works, then social networks serve the same role for culture, and sociometric methods are fundamental for cultural science. At the current moment in history, many of the essential components of cultural science already exist, but often separated from each other in different college departments, or in various computer-related industries or informal online communities.

8.1 The Culture of Culture The term culture has connotations of intellectual sophistication and artistic aesthetics, yet is obscure in meaning. The word’s disambiguation page in Wikipedia distinguishes two main spheres of application:  (1) science, and (2) entertainment and literature.1 It further divides the scientific meanings into two subcategories: (1) biological culture, and (2) social sciences. It also gives two subcategories on the entertainment side: (1) literature, and (2) music. The biological meanings come from agriculture, in which farmers (Latin: agricolae) cultivate (Latin:  cultus  =  plantation) their crops. In the case of cultivated people, the farmer role was played by teachers, mainly in the humanities. Despite the scientific goal of attaining objectivity, for many years intellectuals have argued that each of the sciences is culture bound to a significant extent, some more than others.2 The question then arises to what extent technologies 241

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are also culture bound, and all such questions are framed to some extent in the context of our own personal interests, whether inside or outside the ambient culture. It is a fact of no significance that in 2008 the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association awarded me the William F. Ogburn Career Achievement Award. Yet this fact would predict that I would agree with Ogburn’s theory of cultural lag, that technological progress is caused by an impersonal series of innovations, diffusions, and adoptions, which force culture to adapt, but culture is slow to do so.3 This theory clearly states that culture is highly subordinate to technology. Yet in fact, I tend to think that culture has considerable power to shape technology, perhaps only partially subordinate to technology. Indeed, it may be said that technologies are embodied cultures. Consider computer technology. Yes, computers follow inexorable mathematical laws, and incorporate hardware components designed by electrical engineers in conformity with the natural laws of physics. Yet many standard design features are conventions that may be advantageous but are somewhat arbitrary. A byte consists of 8 bits of memory, and each bit is a binary number, 1 or 0. Thus, computers do not primarily employ the decimal system based on the number 10, not to mention the ancient Babylonian system of mathematics based on 60 that seems guilty for giving us 60 minutes in an hour and 360 (60 x 6) degrees in a circle. We can imagine other electronic systems of data storage, for example the use of ternary operators rather than binary bits, perhaps storing a negative charge, or electrically neutral, or a positive charge. But before considering such radical alternatives, we should note that for a time some Apple computer “geeks” spoke of 4-bit nibbles rather than 8-bit bytes, and more broadly nibbles are still a way of conceptualizing the hexadecimal system based on the number 16. In recent years, key structures in the central processing units of personal computers have shifted from 32 bits to 64. Computers are highly complex artifacts, assembled from many smaller artifacts like bytes, mice, and icons. Artifacts are important not merely in archaeology, but really throughout the social sciences, although often not fully appreciated by the practitioners in a particular field. A classic example is the school of thought in cultural anthropology represented by Franz Boas, literally illustrated by his 1901 book-length journal article, “The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay,” which contains 172 drawings of objects these Eskimo employed for a variety of purposes in their everyday lives, thus integrated with the other dimensions of their culture.4 As Wikipedia notes, Boas “introduced the ideology of cultural relativism which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms.”5 There is much room to debate whether these words exactly express the complex views that Boas actually held, not to mention the question of the extent to which this theory is true.

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A standard viewpoint decades ago, within sociology but more broadly within the cluster of social sciences represented by the Department of Social Relations that existed at Harvard University between 1946 and 1970, was that cultures are functional.6 That is to say that all societies do their best to adapt to their immediate natural environment, which means that cultural differences often reflect environmental differences and thus do not indicate the objective superiority of one society over another. As this book illustrates, we may legitimately argue that cultures do differ in terms of their level of technological development, defining that level in terms of the practical goals the society is able to achieve, including outcompeting other societies, whether in economic, demographic, or military terms. Yet a third observation, highly relevant to the work of Boas himself, is that societies at roughly the same level of technological development may differ significantly from each other, selecting different sets of compatible norms including the style of physical artifacts. The remarkable example highlighted by Boas himself was Alaskan needlecases, which possessed fundamental design features unique to the culture, with variations distinctive to their individual owners. Some of the design features represented external influences, for example textures that matched the pattern of tattoos the users had on their own bodies, or resembling the form of an animal. In an article published in a 1903 issue of the magazine, Popular Science Monthly, he had discussed a complex theory about how cultures develop artistic design conventions, in a dynamic balance between decorative values and accurate description of natural objects.7 In a 1908 article that focused on Alaskan needlecases, he wrote: I have suggested before that in many cases these forms seem to compel us to assume that the interpretations of many simple forms are entirely secondary; that often the forms have been borrowed; and that later on, according to their use in the life of the people, they have been given a fitting interpretation. I think evidence can be brought forward also to show that the tendency to play, and the play of the imagination with existing forms, have deeply influenced the decorative art of primitive tribes as we find it at the present time.8

This line of thought suggests that at least four factors combine in the design of a cultural artifact: (1) the technical function of the object, such as containing and protecting a needle; (2) a somewhat abstract cultural archetype giving contemporary symbolic significance to general features of the object; (3) the attenuated influence of a historical conception of the proper design of such objects; and (4) playful innovations in details of the object, expressing interests of the individual person who created it. Applying such ideas to cultural objects more generally, we infer that often artifacts may group rather clearly into distinct styles, but within each there will be historical, local, and individual groupings as well. It may seldom be possible to predict the scale and complexity of cultural structures, prior to a full analysis of extensive data describing a large collection of artifacts.

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As we saw in Chapter 4, the languages in which amateurs and professionals alike program software differ from each other, in grammar as well as vocabulary. Complex online software systems support distinctive social structures, such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and WoW. Their rapid invention and adoption constitute a culture shock to traditional social structures, the ultimate significance of which remains unknown. Scholars of human-centered computing are quite aware of the fact that multiple software cultures exist, and Václav Rajlich has placed them in the same conceptual framework as more traditional human creations: Human culture is a shared set of experiences, knowledge, and customs within a specific human community. The unity of the culture facilitates dialogue among members of the culture because it allows people to build on shared assumptions without explicitly formulating and communicating them. Whenever there is a lack of shared culture, resulting cultural differences make dialogue difficult. There are no longer shared assumptions and shared experiences, and communication has to start on a more basic level, becomes more tedious, and the probability of misunderstanding increases. Culture shock is a common term that describes the situation of people who suddenly find themselves surrounded by an alien and unfamiliar culture, without clues to help them decipher the signals and symbols that the culture contains.9

Sociologist George Homans was very critical of the social-scientific use of culture, in his 1967 book The Nature of Social Science, accusing his colleagues of pretending to explain differences across societies as the result of culture, without specifying exactly how those differences arose or how they were maintained.10 At that time, it was still common for cultural anthropologists to assert that each society had a distinctive, coherent culture, but some studies had begun to be published indicating that so-called primitive societies varied greatly in terms of how uniformly the members shared beliefs and norms with each other.11 Homans was frequently described as a leading behaviorist among sociologists, and his personal social structure included B. F. Skinner among his best friends, author of the 1938 classic, The Behavior of Organisms.12 However, from today’s perspective, Homans could be described as an early cognitive scientist, for example in the emphasis he gave to social exchange of advice and approval in Social Behavior:  Its Elementary Forms.13 Building on the work of Homans, Rodney Stark and I developed a theoretical structure to understand human culture, focusing primarily on religious culture but employing concepts that here can be applied to many forms of online culture, and also emphasizing social interaction and structure. We drew upon an extensive literature across the social sciences, and our own research background had paid close attention to the dynamic relationship between religious cognitions and social structure. For example, Stark had co-authored an influential article with John Lofland about recruitment to radical groups by means of social bond development.14 Inspired by their work, I  had examined the

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evolution of social structure in a particular group I studied ethnographically, the Process revisited in Chapter 2, suggesting a dynamic that could liberate a group from broader social control and thereby prepare for cultural radicalization:  “In a social implosion, part of an extended social network collapses as social ties within it strengthen and, reciprocally, those to persons outside it weaken.”15 I am not implying that our theory is superior to others that the reader might prefer, but it can help illuminate the changing dynamics of culture in the digital age, and the need for reformulations of culture theory and research more generally. Given his belief that academic social theory would at best formalize principles humans already understood intuitively, Homans’ final version in the 1974 edition of Social Behavior began with a small set of axioms he called propositions: 1. For all actions taken by persons, the more often a particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to perform that action. 2. If in the past the occurrence of a particular stimulus, or set of stimuli has been the occasion on which a person’s action has been rewarded, then the more similar the present stimuli are to the past ones, the more likely the person is to perform the action, or some similar action, now. 3. The more valuable to a person is the result of his action, the more likely he is to perform the action. 4. The more often in the recent past a person has received a particular reward, the less valuable any further unit of that reward becomes for him. 5a. When a person’s action does not receive the reward he expected, or receives punishment he did not expect, he will be angry; he becomes more likely to perform aggressive behavior, and the results of such behavior become more valuable to him. 5b. When a person’s action receives reward he expected, especially a greater reward than he expected, or does not receive punishment he expected, he will be pleased; he becomes more likely to perform approving behavior, and the results of such behavior become more valuable to him. The first proposition came directly from Skinner’s book, The Behavior of Organisms, and proposition 5a was directly inspired by the 1939 book Frustration and Aggression, by John Dollard, Neal Miller, and their colleagues.16 The direct connection to cognitive science is the single word similar in proposition 2, because judgment of similarity is a cognitive process.17 Homans’ 1950 book, The Human Group, had postulated that people who interact rewardingly with each other repeatedly will come both to value each other and to become more similar to each other.18 The exchange of advice for approval emphasized in Social Behavior stresses the importance of information exchange, which

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became central to the work Stark and I did. We began with a slightly different set of axioms: 1. Human perception and action take place through time, from the past into the future. 2. Humans seek what they perceive to be rewards and avoid what they believe to be costs. 3. Rewards vary in kind, value, and generality. 4. Human action is directed by a complex but finite information-processing system that functions to identity problems and identify solutions to them. 5. Some desired rewards are limited in supply, including some that simply do not exist. 6. Most rewards sought by humans are destroyed when they are used. 7. Individual and social attributes that determine power are unequally distributed among persons and groups in any society.19 We reserved the term proposition for more specific theorems that could, at least in principle, be deduced from the axioms. The first three axioms invoke the behaviorist tradition, and the final three note the limits of human existence that prevent people from easily achieving desired goals. Axiom 4 is the key turning point, invoking cognitive science by making “a complex but finite information-processing system” pivotal to human action. This is an exchange theory that stressed not only that humans trade material rewards, but also valuable information that the original theory called explanations, because they explain how to obtain other rewards. In later publications, I  used the computational term algorithm, rather than explanation.20 This passage in a book on secularization efficiently summarizes the much longer statement in the original work: Humans are complex, social animals that have evolved powerful brains capable of processing information in many ways, and communicating it through language. Like other animals, humans seek rewards (such as food) and want to avoid costs (such as danger). In pursuit of rewards, humans use their complex brains and language to frame plans, what was originally called explanations in the exchange theory of religion, but I  now prefer to call algorithms. In computer science jargon, an algorithm is a set of instructions for achieving a goal. Each individual learns his or her own distinctive set of algorithms for solving problems, big and small, but we often encounter problems that are difficult to solve. Through language, humans share algorithms designed to achieve goals that otherwise might be hard to reach. Algorithms to gain remote or non-existent goals are hard to evaluate, so they spread like rumors through the human population. A principle underlying many effective algorithms is that rewards which individuals cannot find for themselves can often be obtained from other humans. Indeed, much human interaction consists of the exchange of rewards between exchange partners. Religion is the attempt to exchange with supernatural beings, who are believed to have the power to provide otherwise unobtainable rewards.21

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In my study of the Process religious group, I  wrote, “Cult is culture writ small.”22 Indeed, religious communities can be conceptualized as subcultures, in which culture ideally maps onto local social organization, at the very least because formal religious organizations promote relatively standard sets of beliefs, attitudes, and norms. In modern cosmopolitan societies, religious life is multicultural, and secularization has been eroding the influence of religious organizations. Yet the sociology of religion is such a well-developed subfield that its theories and methods can be used effectively to study the relationships between cultural elements and social structure, identifying factors that may be significant for other forms of culture, online as well as off. Notably, much past research has examined a range of questions about how social structure and culture relate in the religious sphere, such as conversion to a faith via social influence, the comparative psychological benefits of belief versus group activities, and the extent to which sectarian religion compensates disadvantaged groups in a stratified society.23 This raises a very difficult question, to which only very preliminary answers can be suggested: What is common across all forms of culture? The exchange theory outlined above does indeed suggest that some fundamental principles apply across language, religion, technology, science, the arts, and even sports. Language is the medium through which much communication of information takes place, with the only obvious alternative being direct observation of how another human being obtains a reward and learning by imitation. The example of needlecases analyzed by Franz Boas is quite instructional, because the cases were technological devices but also works of art. Traditionally, really sophisticated forms of art were found almost exclusively in religious settings, such as the Hallelujah chorus in The Messiah by Handel, or the Sistine Ceiling painted by Michelangelo.24 But there may be a natural socio-cognitive affinity between religion and the arts, even applying as well to athletic sports and to new applications online. There is great merit in the two-centuries-old cognitive perspective of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that the arts and literature require “suspension of disbelief.”25 In a 2013 book on religion in role-playing games I suggested that there was little difference between belief and suspension of disbelief, perhaps only that social control in religious groups demands profession of faith – given that a faithful person is a loyal person.26 A  similar formulation in humanistic research on computer games is “magic circle,” proposed as an academic concept by cultural historian Johan Huizinga in 1949, but for centuries applied in Ritual Magick esoteric groups.27 Wikipedia defines suspension of disbelief as “a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment,” and the magic circle as “the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world.”28 Naturally, we could cite very similar concepts in sociological phenomenology and the social construction of

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reality.29 Yet finding the exact boundary between the sacred and secular worlds is not an easy task.30 The exchange theory of religion employed somewhat different terminology that did not depend upon the existence of an orthodoxy promoted by a wellorganized social group, specifically compensator: Explanations are statements about how and why rewards may be obtained and costs are incurred. In the absence of a desired reward, explanations often will be accepted that posit attainment of the reward in the distant future or in some other nonverifiable context. Compensators are postulations of reward according to explanations that are not readily susceptible to unambiguous evaluation. Compensators are treated by humans as if they were rewards. Many of the theory’s implications went beyond the sacred boundaries of religion into secular realms, where genres of art and forms of play could provide psychological compensation for the limitations of the material world, with consequences for social structure: “This model describes how people can progressively commit each other to a set of compensators they simultaneously construct. Thus it sketches mutual conversion that assembles a compensator system while accomplishing a social implosion that results in a cohesive, closed group broken away from the rest of society.”31 The emergence of a new style of art or political ideology may involve somewhat milder forms of mutual conversion and social implosion, than the rather complete rupture from the wider culture and social structure experienced at the formation of many religious cults. Religious conversion does not take place primarily through impersonal disembodied appeals, but through intimate social networks, and the same can be said for humanistic schools of thought within social science, and of many forms of creative art.32 A really successful compensator system provides many real rewards, even if it is fundamentally fictional. Churches explicitly engage in praiseworthy charitable actions, as well as implicitly providing a social network of well-established people who can help parishioners find secular jobs.33 Sports and games exercise body and mind, rendering players more able to achieve rewards in other contexts, while the subjective status of winning can become objective, if there is a real-world audience for one’s virtual accomplishments.34 To the extent that culture moves online, it may become remote from enduring social structures, with a mixture of four consequences: (1) new forms of social structure may visibly emerge online; (2) invisible structures may come into being that require special effort to see; (3) structure will be imposed by the software, data ontologies, and the elite members of society that dominate the information technology industry; or (4) social disorganization will ensue, with many negative consequences, often hidden by false beliefs in imaginary social structures that are nothing more than compensators. Much of this book has considered the first and third alternatives, with the second and fourth lurking in the background. This chapter will seek a basis for uniting or transcending this perplexing quartet.

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8.2 Building Upon Traditional Research Cognitive science emerged under the influence of artificial intelligence experts in computer science, in partnership with cognitive psychologists who were more rigorous than many of their noncognitive psychologist colleagues. Or, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures.”35 When I published a book on the use of artificial intelligence models of cognition and social influence in religion, based on the theory outlined above and employing both neural nets and multi-agent systems, it was in a series on cognitive science of religion.36 So, nothing has prevented scientists in many disciplines from aligning themselves with cognitive science, yet two of the most cognitive sciences have largely been absent: political science and sociology. It should be obvious that political science is largely the study of the complex interaction between political culture and social structure, as parties articulate ideologies, and constituencies within the voting public attach to particular parties and candidates. For example, beginning with a pilot study in 1948, the American National Election Studies (ANES) has exemplified unbiased, methodologically rigorous survey research on the dynamic culture and structure of US voting patterns.37 Its website emphasizes that it not only reports scientific results involving social structures, but has a constituency of relatively welldefined but varied groups:  “To serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists, the ANES produces high quality data from its own surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation. Central to this mission is the active involvement of the ANES research community in all phases of the project.”38 The previous chapter indicated how political activity and government projects were moving online, but by its very nature political science would be a major component of cultural science. Many subfields and schools of thought within sociology focus on social cognition, from humanistic studies of role-playing to sociometric studies of information flow across social networks. The sociological equivalent of the ANES, and of the PSID mentioned in Chapter 6, is the General Social Survey (GSS), which for two decades has offered an online archive where anyone may not only download the raw data but carry out rather sophisticated real-time analysis.39 The ANES, PSID, and GSS have been largely funded by the US government through the NSF, and it is worth noting that funding from private foundations has supported the main archive of survey datasets in the sociology of religion, the Association of Religion Data Archives.40 The reluctance of the US government to explicitly support research on religion is only one of many

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examples suggesting that government research on common forms of culture can be problematic, especially when the political elite is itself culturally diverse. As cultural anthropology has been reinventing itself after the end of British and French colonialism, and members of the previously dominated cultures can become anthropologists themselves, a few have been attracted to cognitive science. But one especially rigorous tradition in cultural anthropology is especially well prepared to join cultural science, the Human Relations Area File (HRAF) project at Yale. From his 1949 book Social Structure, George Murdock worked to develop The Ethnographic Atlas, tabulating large numbers of cultural features across all the societies anthropologists had studied.41 Today, Yale University sponsors eHRAF World Cultures online, emphasizing quantitative cross-cultural research that can be comparable to a questionnaire in which each “respondent” is a culture that had been reported in anthropological ethnographies, and each variable is a feature that each culture might or might not possess.42 In 1971, Melvin Ember raised the issue of whether datasets like HRAF suffer from Galton’s Problem, the error of assuming that each of the cases in a dataset is completely independent of the others, for example running the correlation coefficients with simplistic tests of statistical significance.43 Of course that is exactly the kind of error that sociometry would not commit, especially in an online context where individual and group identities are problematic, given that social influence is a key research theme. Linguistics is often mentioned as one of the founding fields of cognitive science, although it could equally well contribute to cultural science, and subfields of linguistics differ rather significantly in terms of theory and methods. A striking example of linguistic cultural science is the online archive of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, which has greatly influenced my own thinking since I first visited the center in 1957 as a teenager, since it was founded five years earlier by my uncle, whose name it now bears.44 Geographic distribution of dialectical variations connects culture to social structure in several ways, because words describing different aspects of life may be associated with different communication patterns. For example, economic terms may follow trade routes, while the exact form of religious terms may be shaped by differential assignment of clergy from regional cathedrals or monasteries. Among its several major datasets, now available online, is A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME): LALME pioneered the systematic application of modern dialectological methods to over 1,000 mediaeval texts. The atlas displays the continuum of linguistic variation in written English across England and part of Scotland in the late mediaeval period (ca 1325–1450). Analysis of the language of individual scribal texts was carried out by means of a large-scale questionnaire (of over 300 main items). Linguistic Profiles (LPs) were produced from the results of the questionnaire analysis. These list the orthographic forms found in each text which correspond to a questionnaire item. Some texts – mainly local documents  – were localisable on non-linguistic evidence. The scribal languages

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of these witnesses could therefore be mapped. Using these mapped data, it was then possible to “fit” the scribal languages of other texts – mainly literary – not otherwise localisable. In this way the dialectal patterns of the mediaeval texts were progressively established.45

The fact that the sociology of religion and related communities in religious studies are organizationally and culturally somewhat separate from “core” sociology has been mentioned more than once here, to illustrate potential conflicts related to such topics as citizen science and digital government, but it also suggests that this scholarly subculture may serve as a bridge between rigorous social science and the culturally rich humanities. As in the case of dialectology, social influence may operate across different pathways for different aspects of culture. Here is an admittedly modest and apparently antique example. In 1979 I  administered a linked-respondent survey to students in a huge introductory sociology class at the University of Washington.46 Each student received a packet of four questionnaires with instructions to fill one out and have the three others filled out by two close friends and an acquaintance. Here we shall look back on the results from 424 students and their first close friend, because the study provides a good conceptual basis for thinking about fundamental connections between culture and social structure. At the time, a very visible Evangelical movement, in both the mass media and local group activities, was the born-again movement, so it became a special focus of the research. Linked-respondent data can be analyzed in many ways, and the publications that resulted employed simple interpersonal correlations, measured as gammas. Among the students in the class, 26  percent considered themselves born again, and the number was almost identical for their first friends, 24  percent. But the born agains among the students chose close friends 55  percent of whom were also born again. The gamma calculated on the raw data across the 424 pairs was 0.59, rather high even for gamma that tends to give higher numbers than some other correlation coefficients. We can call this 0.59 the concordance between the members of the pairs for the variable of being born again. Table 8.1 reports that the concordance for frequency of church attendance is somewhat smaller, but still significant, 0.34. Calculating just for the 219 pairs in which neither member is born again, reduces the concordance to 0.14. Four questionnaire items about attitudes and beliefs that explicitly relate to religion show modest correlations for the whole sample, but hardly any once the born agains have been removed. This should not be surprising, because if you use statistical methods to control for one measure of a variable, correlations with another measure of the same variable should reduce. We do not actually know the extent to which each student is a member of a cohesive born-again religious group, versus having learned from the mass media to express their personal faith using this term. This point is highly salient here, because it reminds us that it can be hard to decide whether many questionnaire items measure culture or social structure, or a blend of both.

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252 Table 8.1 Concordances (gamma) across best-friend pairs Questionnaire items Frequency of church attendance Attitudes and beliefs: I definitely believe in God God or some other supernatural force has a very strong influence on my life Suffering often comes about because people don’t obey God Miracles actually happened just as the Bible said they did It is all right for an unmarried couple to have sexual relations The potential dangers of nuclear energy are outweighed by its potential benefits Preferences: Religious books and articles Hymns and spirituals Tobacco cigarettes Marijuana Beer Diet soda Rock music Physical sciences Social sciences

424 closefriend pairs

219 pairs not born again

0.34

0.14

0.22 0.29

0.07 0.06

0.25

0.12

0.34

0.18

0.57

0.44

0.06

0.05

0.25 0.22 0.50 0.45 0.32 0.27 0.25 0.01 0.04

0.03 0.07 0.44 0.41 0.33 0.28 0.22 0.00 –0.02

Very high concordances are shown for:  “It is all right for an unmarried couple to have sexual relations.” Despite being a “mere attitude” rather than a direct measure of behavior, it clearly relates to a form of social relations highly salient for college students. While the gamma drops somewhat when the born agains are removed from the sample, 0.44 remains quite high. There happens to be a very high concordance for gender among the 424 pairs, fully 0.79, probably reflecting the fact that many students lived on campus and had samesex roommates, selecting a roommate as a convenient target for the first goodfriend questionnaire respondent, and students may have selected roommates who were similar with respect to relations with the opposite gender. The final attitude item, about nuclear energy, illustrates what the findings are when an issue is not salient either for close social relationships, or for respondents’ religious culture. The first two preference items concern two kinds of religious culture, literature and music, showing some concordance before the born agains are removed, and essentially none after. The relatively high numbers for tobacco

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cigarettes and marijuana may reflect the fact that the university asks new students whether they are smokers when making initial rooming assignments. We may imagine that a gender effect produces the concordances on beer (males?) and diet soda (females?). Apparently the historical connection of Evangelical Protestantism with prohibition of alcohol is not effective for this group of respondents, because removing the born agains does not reduce the beer coefficient.47 The preference for rock music does not seem much affected by religion, and could reflect any of a host of other concordance variables, including gender, social class, and urban versus rural origins. The absolutely insignificant concordances for the physical and social sciences suggest that their cultures are not salient for college friendships, but it is worth recalling that the primary respondents were all students in a class in introductory sociology. Students who intended to major in social science had alternative ways to begin, and probably most of the students were simply satisfying a distribution requirement for degrees in other subjects. The concordance on year in school was rather high, 0.59. Thus, however aggressively we might want to interpret data from this rather antique pilot study using linkedrespondent questionnaires, we should remember that the respondents were recruited because of their current and quite temporary position in the social structure of their university, namely presence in a particular course. The critiques that can most obviously be raised concerning the validity and reliability of this modest study are not very different from those we have raised about online research on social relations. What does it mean for someone to be a “friend?” How reliably can sociological results be if the research subjects are interacting in a highly volatile context, whether the intense confusion of undergraduate college or the multiple ambiguities of online social media? But the most striking result is worthy of notice: Different areas of culture have very different relationships with social structure. Another factor worthy of note but not nearly so obvious is the fact that the organization was the preeminent university near the northern end of the Pacific region of the United States, where cultural-structural factors differed from those in other parts of the country. The Pacific region has much higher rates of geographic migration than other areas, which implies less stable social networks, and weakens voluntary institutions such as churches. It also illustrates a very important principle I like to call the Stark effect. In the late 1960s, criminologist Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark published an influential study, “Hellfire and Delinquency,” reporting that religion had no power to deter juvenile delinquency.48 In the following years, some studies replicated this finding, and others contradicted it. Stark began to suspect that powerful regional factors were at work, and with two of his graduate students analyzed a large national dataset that allowed comparing results from different regions of the country. The title of the resulting publication suggests a general principle: “Religion and Delinquency: The Ecology of a ‘Lost’ Relationship.”49 In areas of the country where church membership was high, individual religiosity

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did correlate negatively with juvenile delinquency of individual teenagers. In areas where church membership was low, such as Seattle where the University of Washington is located, individual religious faith and social involvement did not deter delinquent behavior. Here is how Stark himself expressed the principle named after him: “Religious individuals will be less likely than those who are not religious to commit delinquent acts, but only in communities where the majority of people are actively religious.”50 Thus research on religion and social structure among young Americans indicates that the connections between variables measuring attitudes and behavior are complex and dynamic, dependent upon but also shaping social structure, which suggests that development of rigorous cultural science will not be an easy task.

8.3 The Science of Fiction A subfield within computer science of great value for cultural science is currently called recommender systems, although an earlier term, collaborative filtering, gave more emphasis to the fact that this method provides advice to one person based on data provided by many other people.51 A recommender system is a database and statistical analysis engine that recommends future actions to the user – such as what movies to rent or books to buy – based on the user’s prior behavior or expressed preferences.52 These systems are widely used in internet advertising, in order to customize the sales effort to fit the interests of the audience, including Google that is fundamentally based on a website recommender system.53 Recommender systems have existed for decades, yet they are used far less as a method for studying the structure and dynamics of culture than they might be. Indeed, they can be seen as an extension of traditional questionnaire survey methods, although current discussion within computer science usually fails to do so. To get a sense of the potential, we can consider two datasets relevant to science fiction literature, one old and one new, given that science fiction is the genre of popular culture most relevant to new forms of society based on technological innovation, such as online communities. After a pilot study administered to members of the New England Science Fiction Association, I administered a questionnaire at the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona.54 As described in Chapter 4, the central section was a set of 138 preference items asking respondents to rate individual science fiction writers. A series of exploratory factor analyses zeroed in on a four-factor solution that identified three clusters of living authors plus a time dimension. The factors were interpreted not merely by reading the works of highly loaded authors, but by correlating factor scores with preference items concerning a number of familiar terms used by reviewers and fans alike. The factor analysis results given here are for the 276 respondents who rated at least 75 authors without rating either of the two “fake authors” in the full

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140-author preference list, while other analyses include the other respondents. Here are the factor score correlations most efficiently describing the four factors: Factor 1: 0.54 Hard Science fiction 0.48 Golden Age science fiction 0.45 Fiction based on the physical sciences 0.43 Science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s Factor 2: 0.61 New Wave science fiction 0.39 Fiction based on the social sciences 0.33 Science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s Factor 3: 0.60 Sword and sorcery 0.57 Fantasy 0.53 Stories about magic Factor 4: 0.36 Horror and weird 0.32 Science fiction of the 1920s and 1930s 0.26 Classic science fiction from the early days of SF The last factor, as is often the case with factor analysis, was somewhat diffuse, but clearly represents the historical roots of the genre, since all six of the most highly loaded authors were already deceased by 1978, in descending order of their loadings from 0.71 to 0.45:  H.  G. Wells (1866–1946), Jules Verne (1828–1905), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), H.  P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), George Orwell (1903–50), and Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), recalling that Doyle wrote the classic science fiction novel, The Lost World, as well as the Sherlock Holmes stories.55 Factor 3 is a cluster of styles of fantasy, a genre that at the time was somewhat subordinate to science fiction in the specialized publishing industry, although J. R. R. Tolkien’s works had begun to earn popularity among adults. Today, the best example is the television series Game of Thrones, described in Chapter 2. It is worth noting that its author, George R. R. Martin, was among the science fiction writers included in the 1978 questionnaire study, but did not show strong correlations with the four dimensions. The crucial map of science fiction itself had really two main dimensions in 1978, Hard Science and New Wave. Table  8.2 shows the factor loadings and other data for the eight authors most strongly defined by one dimension (N = 276), their correlations with their subgenre’s Hard Science or New Wave descriptor (N = 409), and two measures of their popularity (N = 595). Given that the questionnaire data are four decades old, it was revealing to see that all sixteen of these authors have rather complete Wikipedia pages today. The table includes counts of edits and editors from mid-July 2017, and the number

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Hard Science: Isaac Asimov Murray Leinster Gordon R. Dickson Jack Williamson Harry Harrison A. E. van Vogt Hal Clement Mack Reynolds New Wave: Harlan Ellison Robert Silverberg Damon Knight Joanna Russ Philip K. Dick Kate Wilhelm Theodore Sturgeon Barry Malzberg 0.28 0.33 0.22 0.38 0.23 0.26 0.38 0.19 0.52 0.39 0.26 0.35 0.37 0.40 0.15 0.41

0.64 0.57 0.56 0.55 0.55 0.55 0.53 0.53

Correlation with type

0.60 0.60 0.59 0.58 0.57 0.57 0.57 0.56

Factor loading

4.01 4.52 3.97 3.02 4.64 4.19 4.69 2.64

5.08 4.10 4.64 4.13 4.21 4.10 4.18 3.47

Mean rating

1978 questionnaire

Table 8.2 Two clusters of science fiction authors

93.6 84.7 74.1 56.5 79.5 63.0 86.6 53.9

97.3 59.5 79.5 64.5 76.0 81.5 71.9 55.6

Percent rated (%)

2,281 583 286 354 3,246 238 557 153

4,965 257 273 460 585 617 250 285

Edits

1,093 317 170 168 1,643 124 348 94

2,445 166 181 233 328 333 167 113

Editors

2017 Wikipedia

512,402 51,793 23,145 23,503 1,461,454 22,182 58,445 5,128

1,051,571 17,202 20,960 20,034 54,806 41,643 11,889 6,718

2017–18 Wikipedia views

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of views the author’s main Wikipedia page received during the year prior to August 23, 2018. The term “Golden Age” connected to Hard Science refers to a period in which this dimension was paramount. Note that Wikipedia mentions Isaac Asimov, prominent in the table, in its history: “One leading influence on the creation of the Golden age was John W. Campbell, who became legendary in the genre as an editor and publisher of science fiction magazines, including Astounding Science Fiction, to the point where Isaac Asimov stated that ‘in the 1940s, (Campbell) dominated the field to the point where to many seemed all of science fiction.’ ”56 This observation introduces social structure into the picture. Several of Asimov’s influential early stories arose from conversations with Campbell, who also served as editor for the other Hard Science authors in the table. Lest we think that the works of these authors are obsolete today, because technology has moved onward, a single example can refute this false assumption: Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun, serialized in Astounding in 1956, concerned the complex future relationship between online communities and real life.57 The New Wave was an expression of the intellectual radicalization of the 1960s, with an emphasis on social science ideas, as well as psychological and literary trends. Among its key expressions was a 1967 anthology edited by Harlan Ellison, titled Dangerous Visions.58 Asimov contributed to it, as did many of the New Wave writers, including Silverberg, Knight, Dick, and Sturgeon. Both Asimov and Ellison have been given more attention by today’s Wikipedia editors, but Philip K.  Dick has, as well, and his Wikipedia page lists many of the general New Wave themes in writing about his work: “Dick explored philosophical, social, and political themes in novels with plots dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, alternate universes, and altered states of consciousness. His work reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology, and often drew upon his life experiences in addressing the nature of reality, identity, drug abuse, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences.”59 His 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “explores the issue of what it is to be human. Unlike humans, the androids are said to possess no sense of empathy.”60 It was made into the spectacular 1982 movie, Blade Runner, and two other tremendously influential movies were based on Dick’s stories, Total Recall and Minority Report. Blade Runner provides a good segue to research using modern recommender system data, in this case the Netflix “data set of 100,480,507 ratings that 480,189 users gave to 17,770 movies,” shared in 2006 with the public in a contest to see who could develop algorithms better than those already in use.61 After people rented a movie from Netflix, they were encouraged to rate it on a preference scale from 1 to 5, and their responses were used to determine which movies Netflix will recommend they should rent next. The criterion of success in the contest was to predict how someone would rate a movie on the equivalent of a preference scale, on the basis of that person’s ratings of other

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Table 8.3 Fifteen movies about advanced information technology Title

Year

Netflix raters

Mean rating (1–5)

Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor 4

Blade Runner The Matrix The Terminator Tron Westworld RoboCop eXistenZ Star Trek: The Motion Picture The Thirteenth Floor Bicentennial Man A.I. Artificial Intelligence I, Robot Cyborg Johnny Mnemonic 2001: A Space Odyssey

1982 1999 1984 1982 1973 1987 1999 1979

6,313 6,523 6,468 5,563 3,173 5,914 2,498 5,321

4.18 4.56 4.25 3.58 3.50 3.55 3.07 3.46

0.84 0.70 0.70 0.62 0.54 0.46 – –

– – – – 0.55 0.46 0.77 0.70

– – – – – – – –

1999

2,524

3.31

–

0.60

0.51

1999

4,658

3.27

–

–

0.83

–

2001

5,990

3.14

–

–

0.69

–

2004 1989 1995

6,047 2,068 4,189

3.81 2.79 3.03

– – –

– – –

0.41 – –

0.56 0.66 0.52

1968

5,920

3.81

–

–

–

–0.75

– – – – – – – –

films, and their ratings by other people with preferences similar to the individual. Table 8.3 shows a factor analysis of fifteen films concerning artificial intelligence or virtual realities, focusing on 6,551 respondents who had rated at least ten of the fifteen, only 110 of whom had rated all fifteen. Blade Runner happened to be most highly loaded on Factor 1, and all factor loadings above 0.40 are reported. Four factors resulted, which may be considered four dimensions of variation across the films, noting that some films are loaded on two factors, or conceptualized as somewhat unfocused clusters that group together films with much in common. Note the negative loading for 2001: A Space Odyssey in the last column, implying it has a quality opposite to that of the three other films in the category. Two hypotheses come immediately to mind: (1) 2001 is much older than the three other films in the factor, thus having an older audience; and (2) 2001 represents artificial intelligence as totally inhuman, abstract, distant, while the others concern integration of artificial and natural intelligence. The first factor seems to have clear meaning, grouping together very high-quality, popular films with considerable intellectual depth.

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While we cannot confidently label the first factor as New Wave, several of its films do testify to endurance of issues that were well established by the time the 1978 survey data were collected. The Matrix was partly inspired by the book Simulacra and Simulation by social philosopher Jean Baudrillard, using the metaphor that our world is itself a computer simulation to explore the illusory nature of social conventions, exploitation of workers by capitalists through imposition of false consciousness, and existential doubts about the reality of the physical world.62 The Matrix can also be seen as the descendent of the original Tron, which depicts integration of real and virtual realities, and Westworld, which has recently been revived as reported in Chapter 2. To illustrate the significance of recommender systems in the online world, we can report that a second dataset exists that could replicate the Netflix analysis: MovieLens helps you find movies you will like. Rate movies to build a custom taste profile, then MovieLens recommends other movies for you to watch … MovieLens is run by GroupLens, a research lab at the University of Minnesota. By using MovieLens, you will help GroupLens develop new experimental tools and interfaces for data exploration and recommendation. MovieLens is non-commercial, and free of advertisements.63

To get the information for Table 8.4, all I had to do was register as an ordinary user on June 1, 2017, and rate a few films, so the system would have a profile for me, on the basis of which to make recommendations to me. Academics can collaborate with the MovieLens team, use the full quantitative dataset, and develop their own map of the movie genres, but Table 8.4 reports the classifications reported to ordinary users. The following section will consider the practice of assigning cultural items to categories, but first a little more insight into the methodology of recommender systems is needed. Table  8.3 implicitly assumes that all the respondents belong to a single culture, even though the authors and readers may prefer one or the other of the two factors, Hard Science or New Wave. But there also may exist competing conceptualizations of the “sci-fi” universe, which may or may not map onto the two factors. This issue directly connects cultural structure to social structure, at least in many cases, as each distinctive school of thought tends to have its own communication network, as for example represented by Astounding Science Fiction versus Dangerous Visions. Therefore, several of the most successful recommender system algorithms do not perform anything like factor analysis on movie preferences across the entire dataset, but take each respondent, hunt for the neighborhood of similar people, and use only their data to make the recommendations.64 At the present time, these systems do not seem to incorporate data about the customers’ social ties with each other, but use “neighborhood” merely as a metaphor. That integration of social bonds and cultural preferences could be achieved within a comprehensive cultural science.

260 Average rating 4.12 4.15 3.89 3.31 3.42 3.32 3.34 3.09 3.31 3.10 3.25 3.46 2.28 2.75 3.97

Ratings

36,825 76,693 39,862 11,955 4,574 16,345 6,130 11,521 4,622 4,661 13,911 15,419 606 14,236 29,756

Title

Blade Runner The Matrix The Terminator Tron Westworld RoboCop eXistenZ Star Trek: The Motion Picture The Thirteenth Floor Bicentennial Man A.I. Artificial Intelligence I, Robot Cyborg Johnny Mnemonic 2001: A Space Odyssey

Table 8.4 A second look at fifteen movies

– Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes – – – – Yes Yes Yes –

Action – – – Yes Yes – – Yes – – Yes – – Yes Yes

Adventure

– – Yes – – Yes –

Yes – – – Yes – –

Drama – – – – – – – Yes Yes – – – – – Yes

Mystery

Yes Yes Yes – Yes – – – – Yes –

Yes

Yes

Thriller

– – Comedy – – – – –

Horror

– – – – Horror, Western

Other

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8.4 Genres of Communities At the current point in the parallel histories of social science and information technology, studies of the social and cultural shape of online communities will need to employ multiple methodologies, including some that give the researcher direct, personal experience with the phenomena under study. For example, if we were studying the social structure of the networks of online reviewers, we would need to read a good sample of their reviews, and experience some of the things they were reviewing. The popular site Metacritic offers thousands of professional and nonprofessional reviews of movies, games, television programs, and music recordings.65 As of July 2017, it hosted reviews of 12 movies, 352 games, 4 TV programs, 2 music items, and 39 other things in the Star Wars franchise. The multiplayer game SWTOR, examined in Chapter 3, had reviews by seventy-three professional critics, usually identified with their publications, plus ratings by 2,664 users of the Metacritic website. The critics ratings ranged from 70 to 100 on the standard Metacritic 100-point scale, with a mean or Metascore of 85. It is possible to go into each review and then see a list of all the games reviewed by that critic – usually an online publisher rather than an individual person – and create a huge matrix of game by game, showing how many of the seventy-three critics reviewed each possible pair. Bruggeman, Traag, and Uitermark have argued that negative social ties must be distinguished from positive ones, in charting social networks, and the same logically would be true for cultural ties.66 For example, of the five reviews giving a 70 low score, the two most recent were done by games™ on February 28, 2012 and GameCritics on March 31, 2012. We could imagine that one is politically left wing, the other right wing, and they dislike the politically irrelevant Star Wars for equal but opposite reasons, thus belonging to different “neighborhoods” of critics. In this pair, games™ had done 2,971 reviews with an average 7.5 points lower than other critics, while GameCritics had done 2,140 reviews with an average 7.2 points lower than other critics. This high level of statistical similarity is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that their values are very different, because we have not looked into their pattern of ratings or the two specific reviews themselves. As it happens, both of these usually low-rating reviewers rated one of the Mass Effect games among the few they awarded 100 points. These games take place in our own galaxy – not the “galaxy far, far away” of Star Wars, with much attention to scientific detail, which is totally lacking in Star Wars, and they contain very sophisticated references to social psychology and cultural anthropology. This increases the probability that games™and GameCritics operate within similar cultural frameworks. Indeed, we can learn much about the cultural structure of games in the year 2012 simply by reading all five of the brief summaries of 70-point SWTOR reviews posted in Metacritic: GameCritics: “I wound up bailing out on Star Wars: The Old Republic well before hitting the level cap, but not before digging into it more so than

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any other MMO I’ve played. Even if it is an unhappy marriage between two wildly different game types, the fact that it kept me hooked for so long at least counts for something.” games™:  “There’s little doubt that The Old Republic could have been a groundbreaking release, but it instead chooses to hew closely to the MMO formula, relying too much on the grind and outdated mechanics that don’t gel with the Star Wars license.” Game Over Online: “It’s essentially the same game that’s been around for over a decade, with slightly prettier window-dressing.” Game Revolution: “Still, if you’re not really one for MMOs or you won’t have the time to level up a character, please move along. The Force is strong with this one, but not so strong that you should throw away your console and invest in a beefy PC.” Level7.nu:  “A MMORPG that doesn’t differentiate itself very much from other popular MMORPG titles (like World of Warcraft), but with a greater focus on story, companions and of course the Star Wars setting, The Old Republic is still a solid game.”67 While clear enough in their phraseology, even the complete reviews will not reveal their full meaning, unless the reader has a good deal of background knowledge. Richard Naik, the GameCritics reviewer, titled his essay “You Got Your MMO in My KOTOR,” which experienced gamers could decode as suggesting that SWTOR was an imitation of WoW, the dominant MMO, while being a sequel to the sophisticated 2003 solo-player game Knights of the Old Republic or KOTOR. A  key feature of KOTOR that was expected in SWTOR was that the player’s choices would have ethical implications and lasting consequences. But Naik reported this virtue was lacking in SWTOR: Instead of following through on this promise of unique existence and empowerment, it quickly became clear that I was having very little effect on the world, if any at all. My story was not my own, and my character felt like a tiny speck in what was a very static universe. In a way it felt like a bizarre acknowledgement that rarely do a player’s decisions have any meaningful effect on a game world as a whole, even in something like Mass Effect or The Witcher. However, there’s usually a strong illusion present to convince the player that he is important, usually through story or world-building. In The Old Republic any such illusion was shattered whenever I encountered other players that shared my quest path.68

Most of the other reviewers, including games™, express similar if not identical concerns about whether Star Wars really fit the MMO genre, while Game Over Online simply saw SWTOR as too similar to KOTOR. Thus, it seems clear that these five reviewers share very much the same general perspective, however they may differ in details. The specific complaint in the quotation from Naik’s raises a highly significant question that has been widely discussed over the following years in the gaming communities, but also relates to online social communities more generally: To what extent do we gain freedom from dominance by other

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people, if we accept a degree of symbiosis with computers?69 Both the four Mass Effect games and the three Witcher games are primarily played solo, but with artificially intelligent nonplayer characters providing sophisticated social relations and offering moral choices. Other sources of categorization data permit different analytical methodologies than could be used with Metacritic. MMORPG.com is a blogsite that offers information, reviews, and reader forums concerning 1,263 social games, as of mid-July, 2017. While they differ greatly in technical design and cultural content, all presumably represent player communities and thus collectively map the social structure of a huge subculture. The majority of the games, 817 or 64.7 percent, are classified as MMORPGs, thus exactly fitting the definition of the blogsite, MMORPG.com. While there has always been some controversy about the scope of the genre, developments in recent years have blurred the boundaries. As mentioned above, increased sophistication in the behavior of nonplayer characters has in several cases eroded the barrier between social and nonsocial games, but also a number of the most recent popular games are weak in stories and role-playing, rather more like virtual sports. Here are the other categories applied by MMORPG.com: • MUD (8 games): Multi-user dungeons are the classic predecessors of online role-playing games, lacking computer graphics and based entirely on text communications. • RPG (87 games): Role-playing games that are not massive, usually because the numbers of players interacting directly with each other are low. • Action RPG (76 games):  Stressing often violent action more than ordinary RPGs. • Action MMO (29 games): Like action RPGs but minimizing role-playing. • MMOFPS (32 games):  Massively multiplayer online first-person shooters are combat oriented, like Action MMOs, but “first-person shooter” specifies that the player’s viewpoint is through the eyes of the avatar, typically firing a gun and even looking through its sights. • MMOTPS (16 games): Massively multiplayer online third-person shooters are like MMOFPS, except that the player views the scene from some distance, usually above and behind the avatar. • MOBA (37 games):  Multiplayer online battle arena games are like violent sports contests, in which small matched teams of avatars fight each other with a minimum of story and role-playing. This subgenre has recently evolved into eSports, even in some very popular cases organized like professional athletics with paid players and large spectator audiences. • CORPG (12 games):  Competitive online role-playing games, which have common areas like MMORPGs where large numbers of players may meet, but place most action in instances that separate each team from all the other players during most of the action.

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• CCG (8 games): Collectable card games in which players compete within a fictional lore to collect virtual cards from decks that may contain thousands of different cards. • TCG (2 games): Trading card games, similar to CCGs but in principle with more emphasis on trading between players. • MMOG (59 games): A somewhat ambiguous term that can refer generally to any massively multiplayer online game, but recently has been used to refer to games that blend the real world with virtual reality, or employ augmented reality to give new meaning to actions in the real world. • MMORTS (79 games): Massively multiplayer real-time strategy games tend not to use avatars for the player, but to put the player in the role of a god or military commander directing the actions of simulated groups of agents. One of the 1,263 games, The Black Watchmen, did not fit in any of these categories and was the only representative of a possible MMOPARG category. Normally we might dismiss the rhetoric associated with such outliers as mere propaganda from the developers, but occasionally a deviant case can suggest new ideas that are worthy of consideration. This game was a spin-off from a somewhat unpopular MMORPG game of high intellectual quality, The Secret World, which is an alternative version of our own world created by the same Norwegian company that created Anarchy Online. One of its features was the creation of websites that presented parts of the fiction as fact, such as realistic home pages for imaginary towns. Also, while the first version of The Black Watchmen did not sell many copies, it was reviewed favorably by players on Steam, the game distribution site, 289 favorable ratings out of 318 or 90.9 percent. Thus, whatever the quality and future fate of this game, its self-description might hint at possible developments in the future of online game communities: The Black Watchmen is a Massively Multiplayer Online Permanent Alternate Reality Game (MMOPARG) where players join the Black Watchmen forces in a series of challenges involving real world and in-game puzzles, geo-caching, research and hacking. Based on the “authorization” level you give, your real life becomes part of the storyline, from simple text messages to a black SUV parked in front of your house. The gameplay includes a companion app which expands the game to your region of the world, adding playfield every time a player joins in. You can be stalked by a virtual sniper or currently helping a player eradicating enemies in his little town up in Siberia. Missions range from single player to large-scale raid of 4,000 players.70

MMORPGs.com also classifies each of the games in terms of a typology of genres. For example, The Black Watchman and The Secret World are both classified as real-life games, a category containing fifty-nine games altogether. About the latter, MMORPG.com says, “It blends elements of mythological and modern day civilizations, along with a mix of dark fantasy and the supernatural, and has no character classes. In The Secret World, where urban legends, myths, and conspiracy theories are all true, the only question is: what do you do now?”71 We might well wonder why The Secret World was not placed in

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Table 8.5 MMORPG.com’s classification of its three main genres Status Development Alpha Beta testing Early access Final Cancelled TOTAL

Historical

Fantasy

Sci-fi

4.5% 1.1% 5.7% 5.7% 65.9% 17.0% 100.0%

7.4% 0.5% 4.3% 3.1% 59.9% 24.9% 100.0%

8.7% 1.4% 5.5% 5.0% 49.5% 29.8% 100.0%

88

816

218

the fantasy category, where the largest number of games, 816, are placed. This may be a case in which the most heavily populated category in an ontology is differentiated into more classes. Notably, there are 24 games in a horror category, which also could be counted as fantasy, as could the 25 games in a “super-hero” category. Other small categories are sports (27 games), and anime (6 games) that could be defined as Japanese style comic book fantasy. Two other categories are reasonably well populated, historical (88 games) and sci-fi (218 games). Exactly 50.0  percent of the historical games, 44, are MMORPGs. Of the fantasy games, fully 568 or 69.6 percent are MMORPGs, compared with 123 or 56.4 percent of the sci-fi games. While we can imagine various explanations for these differences, I  tend to suspect they reflect the greater popularity of fantasy games, and the fact that a successful MMORPG requires large numbers of players. Table 8.5 compares these three categories in terms of a very different variable, the status of the game in the marketplace. The status terms are those used by MMORPG.com, and a critique of their meanings reveals much about the dynamic organization of the game industry. The most populated status, final, means that a complete version of the game had become available, but without checking each one online we cannot be sure it still exists. A solo game may work on the user’s computer many years after the company that produced it went bankrupt, but social games require live internet servers and a properly maintained shared database. In a few cases it is possible for the players themselves to operate the equivalent of servers, but that is not common in the current state of the industry. The higher rate of final status for the historical games may reflect the fact that many of them are simpler, given their tendency to be designed for fewer players. However, many of the final games no longer exist but have not been marked as cancelled, simply because nobody bothered to tell MMORPG.com about their demise. The cancelled category includes many games that were never fully completed, as well as ones that went out of business after a complete launch. The four rare statuses are a bit ambiguous in meaning, and reflect the changing nature of the industry. To say that a game is in development means

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only that the people developing it have publicized their intention to create the game. That may be more common now that many game developers are seeking funding through Kickstarter and other crowdfunding systems.72 Years ago, alpha and beta had definite meanings. A  game that had reached alpha testing was more-or-less playable but had many bugs and lacked some key features, so it underwent debugging and other testing by paid employees. After alpha testing had helped bring the game close to completion, a small number of volunteer beta testers were enlisted to play through the game and report any problems. In that period I  served as an unpaid beta tester, notably for three games I admired but that failed, the ancient Roman historical game Gods and Heroes and the fantasy games Seven Souls Online and Faxion Online, all three of which are now in the cancelled category. More recently, game companies began releasing some beta test games to earn the final money they need to complete them, some so incomplete they would have been described as alpha in yesteryear, and now the games in the early access category are very unfinished but require payment to play. It is not clear how “natural” the categories within any genre of art really are, rather than being the result of a feedback loop in which the creators of the art aim for a particular market segment, and the customers align their personal preferences with the emerging segmentation, thereby solidifying a somewhat random process. Another way of phrasing this issue is to ask: To what extent would people be comfortable becoming multicultural? Effort would be involved, in some cases learning a second language, but certainly investing in attainment of familiarity with each culture. An unusual example from MMO gaming helps frame the question without precisely answering it. Classified by MMORPG.com as a fantasy game, rather than historical, as mentioned in Chapter 3, Dark Age of Camelot incorporates much of the legendary culture of three large ethnicities of the European Dark Ages:  Albion (English), Hibernia (Irish), and Midgard (Norse).73 The most respected realmversus-realm virtual world, DAoC gives each of the three ethnicities considerable territory where players could develop their characters and become saturated with the local culture. MMORPG.com blogger William Murphy has called it the best MMO of all time that stresses player-versus-player combat.74 After gaining expertise and social solidarity, the three factions compete for significant other territory, even using siege engines against the enemy’s fortresses. Each character and guild is locked into one of the three cultures, and vulnerable to attack from either of the others. However, one of DAoC’s servers operates under different rules, not forcing the three cultures to be enemies, a “cooperative server” named Gaheris.75 So in the second week of July, 2017, on the basis of some weeks of ethnographic exploration, I downloaded membership data from the largest set of guild organizations in Gaheris, summarized in Table 8.6.76 The striking thing about Table  8.6 is precisely that we do not see a clear pattern of ethnic segregation! Survivors, the largest guild that served as the

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Table 8.6 Membership in a cluster of multicultural guilds Guild name

Members

Albion (%)

Hibernia (%)

Midgard (%)

Survivors [Leader] Grace Too Dangerous to Be Good Legendary Mercenaries Knights of Caledonia Deadly Intentions Oblivion The Jaded Ones Angels of War Faithful Friends Keepers of the Light Sealed by Fate Demon Crusadors Novus Aera The Motley Crew Tyr’s Hand Danish Huscarls Knights of Fayte Dominatio Incendium Ultima Legione Hounds of Hell TOTAL

3,248 1,679 1,421 1,357 1,328 996 881 655 449 304 289 254 253 213 200 178 165 105 86 57 22 14,140

36.9 36.2 34.6 35.1 35.9 42.4 35.9 40.3 35.4 31.6 28.7 35.8 41.5 35.2 37.0 38.8 37.6 41.9 34.9 40.4 40.9 36.6

32.8 32.7 29.8 36.3 33.1 31.2 33.6 32.5 29.0 35.2 30.8 36.2 24.9 23.9 33.5 26.4 24.2 29.5 32.6 28.1 27.3 32.2

30.4 31.1 35.6 28.7 30.9 26.4 30.5 27.2 35.6 33.2 40.5 28.0 33.6 40.8 29.5 34.8 38.2 28.6 32.6 31.6 31.8 31.2

coordinator to assemble this partnership of twenty-one guilds, has 3,248 member avatars, 36.9% of them ethnically Albion, 32.8% Hibernia, and 30.4% Midgard. It may be worth noting that the three guilds with the greatest concentration of members in one faction have rather aggressive names, two of which are spelled in an unconventional manner: Deadly Intentions (42.4 percent Albion), Knights of Fayte (41.9 percent), and Demon Crusadors (41.5 percent). But even those high fractions are not majorities. Having run characters in all three factions, I know that each culture offers fascinating missions and attractive aesthetic features, so practically every experienced player would want to do the same, thus becoming multicultural in Gaheris, or having multiple characters separately belonging to ethnocentric guilds in another server. The social organization in the table deserves brief explanation. Had this been any other DAoC server than Gaheris, the members of each guild would have been 100  percent in one faction. Each guild is an independent organization, but they can cluster into larger social structures, here twenty guilds recognizing the leadership of Survivors while retaining a high degree of autonomy. Each guild will have a guild home or fortress, where it can

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purchase and place a device to teleport a character to a safe location in any desired realm. I  found it practically impossible to walk my character from its home in Hibernia to Midgard alone, through the dangerous territory between, but as a member of the guild named Too Dangerous to Be Good, it was a simple matter to travel safely by way of the Guild House. Dating from 2001, and depicting a year around 550, we cannot be confident that Dark Age of Camelot foretells our future, yet the online cultural convergence seen in Gaheris hints this is possible.

8.5 The Final Frontier While admitting the risk of becoming too rhetorical in the concluding section of a book, we end here with the notion that computer-supported communities may be humanity’s Final Frontier. Somewhat simplistically, we can say there are three different social-structural conceptions of this concept: (1) a frontier is territory where social structures and cultural norms are chaotic, with great implications for conditions in more stable areas; (2) a frontier is the borderland between two competing civilizations, each defined by a somewhat coherent culture and social structure; and (3)  a frontier is a moment in history when fundamental conditions of human life change in some significant way, usually as the result of a technological revolution. We already considered the first definition of frontier back in Chapter  5, noting that both the NSF and Star Trek had argued that innovation in science and technology could take over the frontier role-played by the long-gone Wild West. Many examples through this book imply that the World Wide Web may be similar to the Wild West, and not merely in their use of monosyllabic worlds beginning with W. A very recent example of how frontiers may challenge conformity is the support given to Reality Winner by online activists. On August 1, 2017, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), David Greene, expressed strong support for her, and linked to an online group, Stand with Reality.77 The EFF is highly critical of the way traditional laws are applied in the postmodern internet era: As we wrote on the 100th anniversary of the Act’s passage, the Espionage Act was designed to prosecute spies who disclosed military secrets to foreign nations, not sources who disclose newsworthy information to the press. Unfortunately, the Espionage Act has been misused throughout its existence, from silencing left-wing speech during the Red Scare days of its origin to the indictments of whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.78

Researchers studying the social significance of new technologies would do well to read not only relevant social science publications and the publications of people producing the particular technology, but also high-quality science fiction. Authors in this cultural genre often think deeply, considering sociocultural issues long before anyone else has done so, thus providing hypotheses

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even as they are not positioned to produce scientific findings. For example, Wikipedia says this of William Gibson:  Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans – a “combination of lowlife and high tech” – and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson notably coined the term “cyberspace” in his short story “Burning Chrome” (1982) and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works have been credited with “renovating” science fiction literature after it had fallen largely into insignificance in the 1970s.79

His conception of cyberspace considered it to be both real and a chaotic frontier that could significantly affect human life. Gibson’s apparent successor, Neal Stephanson, presented an updated version of the cuberpunk frontier image of a world transformed by computing in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, and then in 1995 published The Diamond Age, which offers a profound theory about the human future. Computer technology is creating a new elite, and without some unexpected disruption, it will consolidate an upper-class culture that embodies symbols of power and innovation, but in a period of history when progress has stopped, frozen in time and space like the carbon atoms in a diamond, the same chemical element essential for life but lifeless. Ordinary people are poor and powerless, living in fragmented tribes, or indeed often in cults, hopeless, isolated, and uncreative. The elite culture has consciously revived Victorian England, proud but lacking any frontiers to explore. As troubling as this conception of the future may be, it is not entirely implausible. A far milder version of Stephanson’s theory might be a future in which human civilization as a whole has ceased progressing, largely because each of the sciences has reached its natural limits, so people retreat into a myriad of cultures, some of which support quite satisfying lives, and some of which are revivals of historical cultures that had died years before. In one of the chapters I contributed to the anthology Leadership in Science and Technology, I considered the social-structural lessons we might learn from the history of harpsichord building, and its revival after having been extinct for a century: This example of centuries-old technology remains relevant today because it illustrates the functioning of small workshops within an international marketplace and artistic culture, not unlike the situation with computer game developers today. The original lifespan of the harpsichord, a period of three or four centuries during which it evolved slowly, entailed a complex system of relationships between musicians, instrument builders, and the suppliers of materials, in which evolution in one of these components affected and was affected by the others. The replacement of the harpsichord by the piano in the eighteenth century, and the revival of the harpsichord in the twentieth century, document the sometimes unexpected interactions between technology and culture.80

Today, an online community of harpsichord enthusiasts exists, manifested for example by specialized Facebook groups. Over the first week of August

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2017, I briefly explored it, beginning with a fairly large Facebook group called Harpsichord – Cembalo – Clavecin – Klavecymbel (HCCK), which are simply the names given by different languages to the same keyboard instrument technology, in which thin metal strings are gently plucked, unlike the hammering of thick strings in the later piano. Here is how HCCK describes itself: “An international group for harpsichordists, friends, likers & lovers of this instrument – historically well-enough informed, good-spirited, unpretentious, sufficiently knowledgeable, no-nonsensical people of good taste – players & listeners.” To find related groups I  searched through those to which HCCK’s two admins belonged, using my knowledge of the culture to identify ten other groups that were relevant. Using just the two admins to identify linked groups would not be ideal for a major study, even though it is adequate for a brief pilot study. Yet preliminary research provides opportunities to consider alternative details of methodology, including sampling. When the harpsichord data were collected, the largest group’s page said it had 6,801 members, but only 6,450 were found in the membership list. Probably those not found on the list had taken the option to conceal their group memberships. There could conceivably have been a rounding error in Facebook’s data display system, but the lists for the ten other groups were similarly reduced, without ending in numbers that appeared to have been rounded. We could guess that 6,450 was the total population of those with public membership in the group, but a slightly biased 94.8 percent sample of the total membership. In the list there were twenty-two pairs with the same name. I checked all of their personal Facebook pages and concluded with good confidence that in seventeen cases one person was operating two Facebook personas with the same name, while in five cases it seemed but was not certain that two different people were represented. This suggested that the best course was to remove one name in all cases where two were identical, thus reducing the number of members to 6,428. Several of the seventeen duplicates seemed to reflect two different aspects of a person, usually professional work versus private life, but in one case using the second identity to express political opinions. Although double identities are rare, and forbidden under Facebook rules, they might deserve scientific study, and are easy to find. Table 8.7 lists ten groups having at least 100 members, to which a HCCK admin belonged, and that appeared interesting for this pilot study. Both of the admins belonged to Harpsichord Addicts, but only one each to Viola da Gamba and Clavichord. The viola da gamba is similar to a modern cello, if the word “modern” applies to a centuries-old musical instrument, but differs in design details, also in how the bow is held while playing the instrument. Clavichords are very quiet keyboard instruments, simpler than harpsichords but comparable in the materials from which they are made, striking the string as in the piano, rather than plucking it, but with a tiny metal piece called a tangent, which remains in contact with the string as long as the note sounds, rather than the complex release and damper mechanism of a piano.

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Table 8.7 A specialized harpsichord subculture in Facebook Group Harpsichord Addicts Clavichord Viola da Gamba Ruckers Harpsichords, Virginals, Keyboards, and Spinets Cembalo – German Harpsichord – Clavicembalo – Spinetta – Organ Harpsichord – Clavichord – Fortepiano Technique Discussion Group Pascal Taskin and the French Harpsichord – Organ Scandinavian Harpsichords The Second International Volkonsky Harpsichord Competition Moscow Shudi and Broadwood Fans

Public members

HCCK linked (%)

1,631 679 571 322 321

56.2 59.6 20.6 53.3 50.3

305

72.3

258 94 64

46.8 75.8 59.3

51

50.0

Table 8.7 reveals that a significant fraction of the members of each Facebook group belongs to HCCK, 56.2 percent in the case of Harpsichord Addicts. The fraction is similar for Clavichord, but much lower for Viola da Gamba. The viola da gamba belongs to about the same period in the history of European classical instrument as the harpsichord, but is quite different in nature. The clavichord often served as a private practice instrument, because it was so much quieter than its big brother, the harpsichord. At advanced skill levels, the technique of playing a clavichord is a bit different from the technique for the harpsichord, but anyone with the skill to play one can also play the other. We see geographic references in four of the names:  German, French, Scandinavian, and Moscow. The references to Ruckers and Shudi are to classical harpsichord makers. The Ruckers family operated the most prominent harpsichord workshop in Antwerp for many years. Born in Switzerland, Burkat Shudi was a prominent harpsichord maker in London, whose son-in-law John Broadwood transformed the family business into a major piano manufacturer. The word fortepiano in the name of the discussion group, refers to an early but enduring type of piano that is lighter, typically quieter, and operating with a simpler mechanism than later pianos. We see that substantial fractions of the members of the smaller groups, even majorities, also belong to the large HCCK group. So they constitute a cohesive subculture composed of a network of sub-subcultures. Especially important to note is that harpsichords were exceedingly complex technology that could not have been built in ancient days. For example, the strings are very thin steel or brass wire that required high-precision methods of manufacture, and the keyboard and jack mechanism that plucked them was mechanically complex. Yet the social organization of manufacture was not

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mass production. Rather, small independent workshops existed in cities that served as economic and cultural centers, building instruments largely to order for particular customers, following design principles reminiscent of Alaskan needlecases in their combination of universal and local design standards. Individuals learned their craft as apprentices, rather than in colleges. That form of pre-industrial work organization has become feasible again, as in the opensource software and maker movement areas described in Chapter 4. When Chapter  5 introduced the frontier theories, it quoted the Star Trek “final frontier” appellation for space travel, and yet the last trip to the Moon took place in 1972, more recent than the Ruckers and Shudi harpsichords, but rather long ago. Online, Star Trek represents a very different frontier with potentially revolutionary implications, the de-commercialization of culture. Unlike the Star Wars franchise, which apparently forced shutting down the beloved MMO Star Wars Galaxies to make room in the marketplace for SWTOR, Star Trek has encouraged fans to create and publish their own creations within the mythos of the franchise. For example, in an earlier book I saw good reason to praise the novel, 451, by Devorah Quinn, which was accessible either directly from the WordPress blogsite or indirectly through an online community called Trek Fiction.81 This was an outgrowth of the Trek Writer’s Guild, which was created around 1997 by amateurs who wanted to write scripts for the current TV program: “As time went on the purpose of the Guild widened, and instead of simply being a forum for speculative scripts, it also grew to encompass fan fiction, parodies, and general discussion of both TV and original series.”82 At the end of September 2017, its site hosted 454 works of fanfic (fan fiction) in the Star Trek mythos, with links to another 464 offsite stories, but Quinn’s marvelous novel has vanished, and I do not know the real-world identity of the author. As of September 25, 2017, a very different site, Archive of Our Own, offered fully 46,069 stories of Star Trek fanfic, and had a search tool that made it an excellent dataset for a pilot research project.83 The archive reports its origins in a way that argues against copyright prohibitions: “The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization, established by fans in 2007, to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.”84 In fact, the site held or linked to more Star Wars fanfic, fully 55,904 stories, so it will be interesting to see whether the more restrictive approach to intellectual property rights of the Star Wars franchise leads to courtroom battles. The OTW bears some similarity to the original anti-copyright activism of the Pirate Parties International, considered in Chapter 7, but I am not aware of a social connection. Wikipedia notes: “OTW advocates for the transformative, legal, and legitimate nature of fan labor activities, including fan fiction, fan vids, fan art, anime music videos, podfic (audio recordings of fan fiction), and real person fiction. Its

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vision is to nurture fans and fan culture, and to protect fans’ transformative work from legal snafus and commercial exploitation.”85 There are many ways sociometric research could be done using the archive’s data, including charting connections between different fanfic topics, for example what fractions of the authors who contributed Star Trek stories also contributed Star Wars stories, but here we can focus on sociometric analysis of fictional people, reminiscent of the portion of Chapter 5 about Publius and Bourbaki. Authors who enter a story into the archive are asked to identify with which of the various Star Trek TV series or movies their story connects, to list which standard characters are included in their story, and even to identify when the story focuses on a relationship between two particular characters. For Table  8.8, I  downloaded data on co-presence of the most popular ten characters, as the best way to initiate a sociometric study of these culturally influential but physically nonexistent people. One minor methodological point illustrates the general principle that one must experiment with any new kind of data before having confidence: The site’s search engine starts with the most popular characters, but will change the list of characters and search criteria on the basis of the most recent search, so it was necessary to separate data collection searches with blank ones to clear the memory. Of the total 46,069 fanfic stories set in the Star Trek universe, fully 21,130 or 45.9 percent included James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise. He and the next six characters were featured in the original TV series, seventynine episodes broadcast September 8, 1966 through June 3, 1969, thus ending shortly before the first human beings landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969. It is worth noting that the scriptwriters included professional science fiction authors, and the program had a very strong conceptual basis, emphasizing contact between different cultures and personalities. Kirk was rather like the protagonist or main viewpoint character, while Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy and Spock interacted most significantly with him in many of the episodes. I believe they represented two ideal type relationships between humans and science. McCoy was highly emotional, often challenging Kirk with questions about social relations, and his medical specialty directly served human well-being. Spock was totally abstract and emotionless, analyzing the conceptual structure of any problem, in almost mathematical terms. The dynamic of the triad is clearly represented by the interlocks between the characters:  Kirk–McCoy equals 75.8  percent, Kirk–Spock equals an almost identical 74.9 percent, and the McCoy–Spock interlock is lower at 59.3 percent but higher than most of the interlocks involving the four other crew members. The other main crew members in the original series represented different cultural groups: Uhura was African American and her name “comes from the Swahili word uhuru, meaning ‘freedom,’ ” according to Wikipedia.86 Sulu was Asian, Chekov was Russian, and Scott was unsurprisingly Scottish. The high 75.4  percent interlock between Sulu and Chekov may not reflect a personal relationship in all the stories that include both, but may come from the parallel

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Kirk McCoy Spock Uhura Chekov Sulu Scott Janeway Chakotay Pike

McCoy

75.8% 16,731 9,859 4,920 3,687 3,349 3,302 8 8 1,622

Kirk

21,130 14,152 13,902 5,434 3,688 3,565 3,414 19 10 1,847 74.9% 59.3% 16,529 5,624 3,281 3,260 3,138 17 11 1,243

Spock 52.8% 50.9% 58.4% 6,799 2,940 3,006 2,752 11 6 965

Uhura

Table 8.8 Sociometry of ten characters from Star Trek

47.2% 49.5% 44.2% 52.3% 4,791 3,441 2,485 4 4 673

Chekov 49.3% 48.4% 47.2% 56.6% 75.4% 4,362 2,351 3 2 688

Sulu 51.0% 51.4% 49.0% 54.9% 57.2% 56.5% 3,973 3 3 588

Scott 0.4% 0.2% 0.3% 0.3% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 3,106 2,141 2

Janeway

0.2% 0.2% 0.3% 0.2% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1% 77.5% 2,485 1

Chakotay

43.9% 39.6% 30.4% 27.8% 21.4% 22.6% 20.0% 0.1% 0.0% 2,334

Pike

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functions they served. Sulu was the pilot or helmsman of the Enterprise, while Chekov was the navigator and operated the defensive shields and weapons. Thus both were bridge officers, partners in operating the Enterprise. Uhura’s function was communication beyond the skin of the Enterprise, while Scott worked in the rather distant engine room that powered the ship. The remarkably low interlocks between any of the Enterprise crew and either Janeway and Chakotay would make perfect sense to any Star Trek fan, because this pair of characters were the leaders in a different series, Star Trek: Voyager, of fully 172 episodes, broadcast 1995–2001. Their interlock of 77.5 percent reflects the fact that Kathryn Janeway was commanding officer of the USS Voyager, and Chakotay was the ship’s first officer. Janeway was the first female ship commander, and Chakotay was the first Native American officer. He was also a former member of a radical group called Maquis, which added an additional dynamic to their relationship. Christopher Pike was the central character of an unsuccessful pilot for the original Star Trek series, replaced by Kirk when the show actually began, but added later as Kirk’s mentor, especially in recent films set a few years earlier in time than the original series. As the legends of pre-industrial societies demonstrate, the personalities and social relationships of largely fictional characters serve as archetypes to guide members of the culture in their real lives, at the very least offering folk social psychology that personifies the main concepts. While it seems unlikely that any social psychologist would want to read all 46,069 fanfic stories, more efficient forms of analysis of a wider selection of amateur fiction could perform a very significant analysis of current popular culture, highlighting public perceptions of social relationships and organizational structures. Chapter  1 referred to the apparently curvilinear development of kinship structures over human history, most complex during the great agricultural empires, but today possibly returning to the fluidity and simplicity of humanity’s hunter-gatherer origins. Is it possible that other forms of culture, such as religion and the arts, are also curvilinear over time? If so, secularization may be comparable to re-paganization, returning to small groups and indistinct social networks, given that pagan derives from Latin pagus referring to a small, geographically defined locality, perhaps centered on a shrine or natural source of holy spring water.87 For those arts that can be distributed online, there may be no long-term advantage to commercial publishers. It would take a lifetime to read all 46,069 Star Trek stories, but at zero cost in money beyond having internet access. In ancient days, natural storytellers fascinated the members of their immediate community, telling tales around the campfire. Internet-facilitated decommercialization of culture could return ownership of the arts to amateurs. However, for a century or more, popular culture has been largely shaped by advertising, which remains in the hands of large commercial firms.88 Google, Facebook, and dozens of lesser near-monopolies seem to retain great power, while Netflix and HBO overshadow more traditional Hollywood mass media

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companies, even as Disney has taken over Star Wars. We might expect journalism to inform the public objectively about the extent to which current large-scale social structures are dominated by a high-tech elite, yet journalism is undergoing huge transformations, marked by loss of income and direct involvement in destructive political conflicts. Writing in the Atlantic, among the most durable popular publications, Franklin Foer asserts: Over the past generation, journalism has been slowly swallowed. The ascendant media companies of our era don’t think of themselves as heirs to a great ink-stained tradition. Some like to compare themselves to technology firms. This redefinition isn’t just a bit of fashionable branding. As Silicon Valley has infiltrated the profession, journalism has come to unhealthily depend on the big tech companies, which now supply journalism with an enormous percentage of its audience – and, therefore, a big chunk of its revenue. Dependence generates desperation – a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fastloading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.89

Thus, the Diamond Age scenario has some plausibility, and deserves to be kept in mind as we develop the methodologies for research about the structures of online communities. However intellectually satisfying it might feel to contemplate emergence of cultural science as the sibling of cognitive science, with sociometric studies of social structure absolutely central to its success, it may also be practically necessary. Policy makers and the general public need to possess and to share an accurate understanding of the changing nature of social and cultural structures, as they are increasingly coming to exist online, and as online communities reflect or contradict real-world experiences.

8.6 Conclusion Whether or not a distinct university major called cultural science emerges over the coming years, online research can explore the dynamic relations between cultural and social structures, in many ways relevant to human understanding of ourselves, and providing valuable information for the planning of collective actions in politics, commerce, and human lives. One dimension of methodological variation is between ideographic and nomothetic research, focused on small-scale details versus general analytical principles, but this book has found that both are required. Similarly, each specific research project may be relatively more normative versus descriptive, and this book has tended toward the latter, even as it occasionally advocated studying rather controversial topics. Yet the field as a whole must serve multiple stakeholders, each having a complex pattern of normative and descriptive needs. Among the most problematic

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relevant dichotomies is that between freedom and control, with much evidence that the software supporting online communities demands a good deal of control over the users, even as it enhances their freedom to engage in new kinds of activities. We may hope, and sociometric research may contribute to the future reality, that the tension between freedom and control is resolved through a very social process: cooperation.

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1 Introduction 1 Manju K. Ahuja and Kathleen M. Carley, “Network Structure in Virtual Organizations,” Organizational Science, 1999, 10(6): 741–757. 2 Mihail C. Roco, William Sims Bainbridge, Bruce Tonn, and George Whitesides, Convergence of Knowledge, Technology and Society (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2013). 3 William Sims Bainbridge, “The Convergence of Sociology and Computer Science,” pp. 257–275 in Integrating the Sciences and Society, edited by Harriet Hartman (Bingley, UK: JAI Press, 2008). 4 Christine Hine, “Multi-Sited Ethnography as a Middle Range Methodology for Contemporary STS,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 2007, 32(6): 652–671. 5 William Sims Bainbridge, “Shaker Demographics: An Example of the Use of U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1982, 21:  352–365; William Sims Bainbridge, “The Decline of the Shakers:  Evidence from the United States Census,” Communal Societies, 1984, 4:  19–34; William Sims Bainbridge, The Endtime Family: Children of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 6 Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999). 7 Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999); James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web was Born (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8 Claude S. Fischer and Greggor Mattson, “Is America Fragmenting?” Annual Review of Sociology, 2009, 35: 435–455. 9 Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New  York:  C. Scribner’s Sons, 2002), p. 131. 10 Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William John Dickson, Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 501–509. 279

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11 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony), accessed August 31, 2019. 12 Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William John Dickson, Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 543. 13 George Caspar Homans, The Human Group (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950), p. 40. 14 Jacob L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive? (Washington, DC:  Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company, 1934), p. 13. 15 J. G. Franz, “The Psychodrama and Interviewing,” American Sociological Review, 1942, 7(1): 27–33; Edgar F. Borgatta, Robert Boguslaw, and Martin R. Haskell, “On the Work of Jacob L.  Moreno,” Sociometry, 1975, 38(1):  148–161; A. Paul Hare and June Rabson Hare, J. L. Moreno (London: Sage, 1996); Edgar F. Borgatta, “Jacob L.  Moreno and ‘Sociometry’:  A Mid-Century Reminiscence,” Social Psychology Quarterly, 2007, 70(4):  330–332; René F. Marineau, “The Birth and Development of Sociometry:  The Work and Legacy of Jacob Moreno (1889–1974),” Social Psychology Quarterly, 2007, 70(4): 322–325; Peter Howie, “Philosophy of Life:  J.  L. Moreno’s Revolutionary Philosophical Underpinnings of Psychodrama, and Group Psychotherapy,” Group: The Journal of the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, 2012, 36(2): 135–146. 16 Jacob L. Moreno and Zerka Toeman, “The Group Approach in Psychodrama,” Sociometry, 1942, 5(2): 191–195; Jacob Moreno, “Psychodrama and Therapeutic Motion Pictures,” Sociometry, 1944, 7(2):  230–244, “Psychodrama and Group Therapy,” Sociometry, 1946, 9(2/3): 249; Abraham Lionel Umansky, “Psychodrama and the Audience,” Sociometry, 1944, 7(2): 179–189; Joseph I. Meiers, “Origins and Development of Group Therapy,” Sociometry, 1945, 8(3/4): 261–296; Gerald W. Lawler, “Psychodrama in Group Therapy,” Sociometry, 1946, 9(2/3): 275–281. 17 Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares (New York: Routledge, 1964). 18 Emory S. Bogardus, “Measuring Social Distance,” Journal of Applied Sociology, 1925, 9: 299–308. 19 Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 278. 20 Allen L. Edwards, “The Social Desirability: A Review of the Evidence,” pp. 48–70 in Response Set in Personality Assessment, edited by Irwin A. Berg (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), p. 69. 21 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect, accessed November 6, 2016. 22 Ryan Olson, Jessica Verley, Lindsey Santos, and Coresta Salas, “What We Teach Students About the Hawthorne Studies:  A Review of Content Within a Sample of Introductory I-O and OB Textbooks,” Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 2004, 41(3): 23–39. 23 implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/pimh/index.jsp, accessed August 18, 2016. 24 Mahzarin R. Banaji, Brian A. Nosek, and Anthony G. Greenwald, “No Place for Nostalgia in Science:  A Response to Arkes and Tetlock,” Psychological Inquiry, 2004, 15(4):  279–289; Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte, 2013). 25 Carl Gustav Jung, Studies in Word-Association (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1919). 26 William Sims Bainbridge, Dynamic Secularization (London: Springer, 2017).

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48 Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson, The Nature of the Machine and The Collapse of Cybernetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 49 Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi, Activity Theory in HCI: Fundamentals and Reflections (San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool, 2012), p. 2. 50 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_theory, accessed October 2017. 51 Edwin H. Sutherland, Principles of Criminology (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1947); Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: Wiley, 1958). 52 Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi, Activity Theory in HCI: Fundamentals and Reflections (San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool), p. ix. 53 E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 54 H. Porter Abbott, “Unnarratable Knowledge:  The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution by Natural Selection,” pp. 143–162 in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, edited by David Herman (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003). 55 Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915). 56 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 76. 57 William James, Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 222. 58 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New  York:  Basic Books, 1973); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 59 Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978); Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 60 William Sims Bainbridge, Survey Research:  A Computer-Assisted Introduction (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989). 61 William Sims Bainbridge, “Religious Ethnography on the World Wide Web,” pp. 55–80 in Religion on the Internet, edited by Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas Cowan (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 2000). 62 William Sims Bainbridge, Goals in Space:  American Values and the Future of Technology (Albany:  State University of New  York Press, 1991); William Sims Bainbridge, The Meaning and Value of Spaceflight (Berlin: Springer, 2015). 63 James C. Witte, Lisa M. Amoroso, and Philip E.  N. Howard, “Method and Representation in Internet-Based Survey Tools: Mobility, Community, and Cultural Identity in Survey2000,” Social Science Computer Review, 2000, 18: 179–195. 64 James C. Witte, “The Case for Multimethod Design,” pp. xv–xxxiv in Society Online, edited by Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), p. xv. 65 William Sims Bainbridge, “The Future of the Internet,” pp. 307–324 in Society Online, edited by Philip N. Howard and Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). 66 Orville Vernon Burton, Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 67 nosh.northwestern.edu/bookchapters/2001Contractor-2.pdf, accessed August 31, 2019. 68 Michael A. DeVito, Darren Gergle, and Jeremy Birnholtz, “ ‘Algorithms Ruin Everything,’ #RIPTwitter, Folk Theories, and Resistance to Algorithmic Change in Social Media,” in Proceedings of CHI2017 (New York: ACM, 2017). 69 Megan French and Jeff Hancock, “What’s the Folk Theory? Reasoning About CyberSocial Systems” (February 2, 2017), SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=2910571, p. 22.

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37 Michael Patrick Allen, “The Structure of Interorganizational Elite Cooptation: Interlocking Corporate Directorates,” American Sociological Review, 1974, 39(3): 393–406; Mark S. Mizruchi and David Bunting, “Influence in Corporate Networks:  An Examination of Four Measures,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1981, 26(3):  475–489; William G. Roy, “The Unfolding of the Interlocking Directorate Structure of the United States,” American Sociological Review, 1983, 48(2):  248–257; Edward J. Zajac, “Interlocking Directorates as an Interorganizational Strategy:  A Test of Critical Assumptions,” Academy of Management Journal, 1988, 31(2):  428–438; Mark S. Mizruchi, “What Do Interlocks Do? An Analysis, Critique, and Assessment of Research on Interlocking Directorates,” Annual Review of Sociology, 1996, 22: 271–298. 38 William Sims Bainbridge, “Space: The Final Frontier,” Futures, 2009, 41: 511–513. 39 www.nss.org/about, accessed July 31, 2016. 40 William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New  York:  B. W.  Huebsch, 1922); Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture (New  York:  McGraw-Hill, 1959); Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 41 Amitai Etzioni, The Moon-Doggle:  Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1964); John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 42 William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1976). 43 Walter A. McDougall, “Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Age – Toward the History of a Saltation,” American Historical Review, 1982, 87(4):  1010–1040; Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New  York:  Basic Books, 1985); Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995). 44 Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel (New York: Viking Press, 1951). 45 William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1976); “Beyond Bureaucratic Policy: The Spaceflight Movement,” pp. 153–163 in People in Space, edited by James Everett Katz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1985); William Sims Bainbridge, “The Spaceflight Revolution Revisited,” pp. 39– 64 in Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Forty Year of U.S. Human Spaceflight Symposium, edited by Stephen J. Garber (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2002). 46 William Sims Bainbridge, “Collective Behavior and Social Movements,” pp. 492– 523 in Sociology by Rodney Stark (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1985). 47 Vernon van Dyke, Pride and Power:  The Rationale of the Space Program (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Frank Gibney and George J. Feldman, The Reluctant Space-Farers (New York: New American Library, 1965); John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 48 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Space_Society, accessed September 2, 2019. 49 Gerard K. O’Neill, The High Frontier:  Human Colonies in Space (New  York: Morrow, 1976). 50 William Sims Bainbridge, “Public Support for the Space Program,” Astronautics and Aeronautics, 16 (June 1978): 60–61, 76; William Sims Bainbridge, Goals in

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3 Virtual Worlds 1 William Sims Bainbridge, “Virtual Worlds as Cultural Models,” ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2010, 1(1): 3/1–21. 2 Bonnie A. Nardi, Stella Ly, and Justin Harris, “Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft,” in Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, 2007), n.p. 3 Bonnie Nardi and Justin Harris, “Strangers and Friends:  Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft,” pp. 149–158 in Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New York: ACM, 2006). 4 Diane J. Schiano, Bonnie Nardi, Thomas Debeauvais, Nicolas Ducheneaut, and Nicholas Yee, “A New Look at World of Warcraft’s Social Landscape,” pp. 174– 179 in Proceedings of FDG ‘11 (New York: ACM, 2011). 5 Nicolas Ducheneaut, Ming-Hui Wen, Nicholas Yee, and Greg Wadley, “Body and Mind:  A Study of Avatar Personalization in Three Virtual Worlds,” pp. 1151– 1160 in Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2009); Ian J. Livingston, Carl Gutwin, Regan L. Mandryk, and Max Birk, “How Players Value Their Characters in World of Warcraft,” pp. 1333–1343 in Proceedings of CSCW 2014 (New York: ACM, 2014). 6 Robert Michels, Political Parties (New  York:  Hearst’s International Library, 1915); William Sims Bainbridge, Star Worlds: Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

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7 Shaowen Bardzell, Jeffrey Bardzell, Tyler Pace, and Kayce Reed, “Blissfully Productive: Grouping and Cooperation in World of Warcraft Instance Runs,” pp. 357–360 in Proceedings of the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New York: ACM, 2008). 8 Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Duchenaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell, “From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture, 2006, 1:  338–361; Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “The Life and Death of Online Gaming Communities: A Look at Guilds in World of Warcraft,” pp. 839–848 in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2007); Chien-Hsun Chen, Chuen-Tsai Sun, and Jilung Hsieh, “Player Guild Dynamics and Evolution in Massively Multiplayer Online Games,” CyberPsychology and Behavior, 2008, 11:  293–301; Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Zoheb Borbora, Cuihua Shen, Jaideep Srivastava, and Dmitri Williams, “Guilds Play in MMOs:  Rethinking Common Group Dynamics Models,” in Proceedings of SocInfo 2011: Third International Conference on Social Informatics, dmitriwilliams.com/soc_info_Ahmad_pre_print.pdf, accessed December 25, 2016. 9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Thomas Schweitzer and Douglas R. White (eds.), Kinship, Networks, and Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 10 Adan Ruch, “World of Warcraft: Service or Space?” Game Studies, 2009, 9(2): 1–15. 11 Celia Pearce and Artemesia [her avatar], Communities of Play (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 20. 12 Michael Lummis and Edwin Kern, World of Warcraft Master Guide (Indianapolis, IN:  BradyGAMES/DK, 2006); Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore, “Building an MMO with Mass Appeal: A Look at Gameplay in World of Warcraft,” Games and Culture, 2006, 1: 281–317; Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg (eds.), Digital Culture, Play and Identity:  A World of Warcraft Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 13 Faltin Karlsen, “Quests in Context:  A Comparative Analysis of Discworld and World of Warcraft,” Game Studies, 2008, 8(1): 1–18. 14 William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization:  Social Science in a Virtual World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); William Sims Bainbridge (ed.), Online Worlds:  Convergence of the Real and the Virtual (London:  Springer, 2010); William Sims Bainbridge, “World of Warcraft,” International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, edited by Robin Mansell and Peng Hwa Ang (New  York:  Wiley, 2015), n.p.; William Sims Bainbridge, “Online Ethnographic Research: Avatars in Virtual Worlds,” pp. 147–157 in Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion, edited by Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Suha Shakkour (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015); William Sims Bainbridge, Virtual Sociocultural Convergence: Human Sciences of Computer Games (London: Springer, 2016). 15 wow.gamepedia.com/Wowpedia:About, accessed July 21, 2016. 16 Jooyeon Kim, Brian C. Keegan, Sungjoon Park, and Alice Oh, “The ProficiencyCongruency Dilemma: Virtual Team Design and Performace in Multiplayer Online Games,” pp. 4351–4365 in Proceedings of CHI ‘16 (New York: ACM, 2016). 17 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bartle, accessed December 25, 2016. 18 Gary Gygax, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide (New York: TSR/Random House, 1979).

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38 William Sims Bainbridge, Computer Simulations of Space Societies (Cham, Switzerland: Springer: 2018), p. 225. 39 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Metzen, accessed September 2017. 40 Chris Metzen, “Of Blood and Honor,” pp. 545–613 in Warcraft Archive (New York: Pocket Books, 2002). 41 William Sims Bainbridge, “Online Ethnographic Research:  Avatars in Virtual Worlds,” pp. 147–157 in Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion, edited by Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Suha Shakkour (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 42 William Sims Bainbridge (ed.), Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual (London: Springer, 2010). 43 William Sims Bainbridge, An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion: The Veneration of Deceased Family Members in Online Games (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 44 William Sims Bainbridge, Virtual Sociocultural Convergence: Human Sciences of Computer Games (London: Springer, 2016). 45 Searle Huh and Dmitri Williams, “Dude Looks Like a Lady: Gender Swapping in an Online Game,” pp. 161–174 in Online Worlds, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Guildford, UK:  Springer, 2010); Dmitri Williams, Tracy L.  M. Kennedy, and Robert J. Moore, “Behind the Avatar:  The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs,” Games and Culture, 2011, 6(2): 171–200; Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Brian Keegan, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava, and Noshir Contractor, “Trust Amongst Rogues? A  Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs,” pp. 10–17 in Proceedings of the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (Palo Alto, CA: AAAI, 2011). 46 Yeng-Ting Lee, Kuan-Ta Chien, Yun-Maw Cheng, and Hin-Laung Lei, “World of Warcraft Avatar History Dataset,” pp. 123–128 in Proceedings of MMSys ‘11 (New York: ACM, 2011). 47 wow.gamepedia.com/Race, accessed November 2, 2016. 48 warcraftrealms.com/census.php, accessed December 2, 2016. 49 realmpop.com, accessed July 30, 2016. 50 wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Auction_House; wow.gamepedia.com/Auction_House, both accessed December 25, 2016. 51 Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 52 us.battle.net/wow/en/guild/earthen-ring/Science/roster?sort=lvl&dir=a, accessed July 30, 2016. 53 us.battle.net/wow/en/character/earthen-ring/Scaphis/simple, accessed July 30, 2016. 54 wow.gamepedia.com/Death_knight, accessed December 10, 2016. 55 aie-guild.org/wow, accessed December 2, 2016. 56 Kara A. Behnke, “Ladies of Warcraft:  Changing Perceptions of Women and Technology through Productive Play,” pp. 288–289 in Proceedings of FDG’12 (New York: ACM, 2012); Courtner Loder, “Sculpting that ‘WoW’ Body: Constructing Gender Identity in World of Warcraft,” pp. 482–483 in Proceedings of iConference 2012 (New York: ACM, 2012). 57 wow.gamepedia.com/Druid, accessed December 10, 2016.

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58 www.llts.org/Games.php; www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=851032, both accessed January 13, 2017. 59 William Sims Bainbridge, Dimensions of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Mike Gold, “Flash Gordon,” Flash Gordon, June 1988, 1:  25; Robert R. Barrett, “How John Carter Became Flash Gordon,” Burroughs Bulletin, 2004, 60: 19–26, www.erbzine.com/mag33/3393.html; J. W. Rinzer, The Making of Star Wars (New York: Ballantine, 2007). 60 Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Chessmen of Mars (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1922). 61 Gary Gygax, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide (New York: TSR/Random House, 1979). 62 Nick Yee, “Beyond 50/50:  Breaking Down the Percentage of Female Gamers by Genre,” Quantic Foundry, January 19, 2017, quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/ female-gamers-by-genre. 63 William Sims Bainbridge, Star Worlds:  Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 64 www.swtorprogress.com/faq.php, accessed December 11, 2016. 65 William Sims Bainbridge, Virtual Sociocultural Convergence: Human Sciences of Computer Games (London: Springer, 2016), pp. 187–209. 66 William Sims Bainbridge, Star Worlds:  Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), p. 118. 67 Andrew Burn and Diane Carr, “Signs from a Strange Planet: Roleplay and Social Performance in Anarchy Online,” pp. 14–21 in Proceedings of Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media (Middlesbrough, UK: University of Teesside, 2003); Andreas Petlund, Pål Halvorsen, Pål Frogner Hansen, Torbjörn Lindgren, Rui Casais, and Carsten Griwodz, “Network Traffic from Anarchy Online: Analysis, Statistics and Applications: A Server-side Traffic Trace,” pp. 95–100 in Proceedings of the 3rd Multimedia Systems Conference (New York: ACM, 2012). 68 William Sims Bainbridge, The Virtual Future (London: Springer, 2011). 69 Ragnar Tørnquist, Prophet Without Honour (Oslo, Norway: Funcom, 2001). 70 E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, UK:  Manchester University press, 1959); Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Daniel Chirot, Social Change in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). 71 people.anarchy-online.com/org/stats/d/5/name/4736, accessed October 23, 2016. 72 www.athenpaladins.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=0&t=10343&p=73725&hilit= West+Athen+watchtower#p73725, accessed October 23, 2016. 73 wiki.aodb.us/wiki/Organisations, accessed October 23, 2016. 74 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy_Online, accessed December 26, 2016. 75 wiki.aodb.us/wiki/Atlantean_Organisations; wiki.aodb.us/wiki/Rimor_Organisations, both accessed December 26, 2016. 76 John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott 1870); Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States (New York: Harper, 1875). 77 William Sims Bainbridge, “A Simulated Utopia:  The Social System of a Virtual Ancient Egypt,” pp. 253–287 in Social Interaction in Virtual Worlds, edited by Kiran Lakkaraju, Gita Sukthankar, and Rolf T. Wigand (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge

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4 Open-Source Software 1 George A. Kelly, A Theory of Personality (New York: Norton, 1963). 2 Julian Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour:  Modders and the Digital Games Industry,” Fiberculture Journal, 2005, 5:  FCJ–025, five.fibreculturejournal.org/ fcj-025-precarious-playbour-modders-and-the-digital-games-industry. 3 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software, accessed December 2016. 4 Stefan Haefliger, Georg von Krogh, and Sebastian Spaeth, “Code Reuse in Open Source Software,” Management Science, 2008, 54(1): 180–193. 5 Kari Alho and Reijo Sulonen, “Supporting Virtual Software Projects on the Web,” pp. 10–14 in Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Enabling Technologies (Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, 1998). 6 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card, accessed December 2016. 7 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_card_sorter, accessed December 2016. 8 William Sims Bainbridge, Dimensions of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 9 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc, accessed December 2016. 10 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe, accessed December 2016. 11 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC, accessed December 2016. 12 William Sims Bainbridge, Experiments in Sociology (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1985; 2nd ed., 1987), with software for both Apple II and IBM-PC. 13 Jef Raskin, Apple II BASIC Programming Manual (Cupertino, CA: Apple, 1978); Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, and David Bunnell, TRS-80 Level III Basic (Sunnyvale, CA: GRT Corporation, 1979). 14 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibble_(magazine); apple2history.org/history/ah21, archive. org/details/incidermagazine, both accessed December 2016. 15 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rainbow_(magazine), accessed December 2016. 16 Joseph M. Urbas, “CoCo Bell,” The Rainbow, December 1985, 5(5):  36–42; archive.org/ stream/ rainbowmagazine- 1985- 12/ The_ Rainbow_ Magazine_ 12_ 1985#page/n37/mode/2up, accessed December 2016. 17 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII, accessed December 2016. 18 Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, and Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham, Second Life: The Official Guide (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007).

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38 us.battle.net/wow/en/character/windrunner/Sutorix/statistic#132:178, accessed December 2016. 39 mods.curse.com/members/Sutorix, accessed December 2016. 40 Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. 150–151. 41 William Sims Bainbridge, Virtual Sociocultural Convergence: Human Sciences of Computer Games (London: Springer, 2016). 42 Nardi, Bonnie and Justin Harris, “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft,” pp. 149–158 in Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Computersupported Cooperative Work (New  York:  ACM, 2006); Silvia Lindtner, Bonnie Nardi, Yang Wang, Scott Mainwaring, He Jing, and Wenjing Liang, “A Hybrid Cultural Ecology: World of Warcraft in China,” pp. 371–382 in Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (New York: ACM, 2008); Yong Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi, “Culture and Creativity:  World of Warcraft Modding in China and the U.S.” pp. 21–42 in Online Worlds, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Guildford, UK:  Springer, 2010); Yong Ming Kow and Bonnie Nardi, “Who Owns the Mods?” First Monday, May 3, 2010, 15(3): 1–18. 43 www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info921-Poetical.html, accessed October 2016. 44 William Sims Bainbridge, Virtual Sociocultural Convergence (London:  Springer, 2016), pp. 141–164. 45 William Sims Bainbridge, An Information Technology Surrogate for Religion: The Veneration of Deceased Family Members in Online Games (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 120–133. 46 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_notation, accessed October 2016. 47 www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info380-Songbook.html, accessed December 2016. 48 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (New York: Ballantine, 1982), The Lord of the Rings (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955). 49 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_of_Daniel, accessed January 2017. 50 Humphrey Carpenter, J. R.  R. Tolkien:  A Biography (Boston, MA:  Houghton Mifflin, 1977). 51 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbine_(company); www.lotro.com/forums/showthread. php?649786-Standing-Stone-Games-Transition-FAQ, both accessed January 2017. 52 Rumilisoun, “Rebirth of Worlds,” Communications of the ACM, 2010, 53(12): 128. 53 Richard P. Bagozzi and Utpal M. Dholakia, “Open Source Software User Communities:  A Study of Participation in Linux User Groups,” Management Science, 2006, 52(7): 1099–1115. 54 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel, accessed January 2017. 55 Gwendolyn K. Lee and Robert E. Cole, “From a Firm-Based to a CommunityBased Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development,” Organization Science, 2003, 14: 633–649. 56 Kevin Crowston and Ivan Shamshurin, “Core-Periphery Communication and the Success of Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects,” pp. 45–56 in Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems (New  York: Springer, 2016). 57 Gwendolyn K. Lee and Robert E. Cole, “From a Firm-Based to a CommunityBased Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development,” Organization Science, 2003, 14: 635.

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58 Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pankaj Ghemawat, “Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows,” Management Science, 2006, 52(7): 1072–1084. 59 Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh, “Open Source Software and the ‘PrivateCollective’ Innovation Model:  Issues for Organization Science,” Organization Science, 2003,14(2): 209–223, at 210. 60 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft, accessed January 2017. 61 Siobhán O’Mahony, “Guarding the Commons:  How Community Managed Software Projects Protect Their Work,” Research Policy, 2003, 32: 1179–1198. 62 www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, accessed January 2017. 63 Pär J. Ågerfalk and Brian Fitzgerald, “Outsourcing to an Unknown Workforce: Exploring Opensourcing as a Global Sourcing Strategy,” MIS Quarterly, 2008, 32(2): 385–409. 64 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation, accessed January 2017. 65 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation_of_India, accessed January 2017. 66 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Movement_of_India, accessed January 2017. 67 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swecha, accessed January 2017. 68 fsftn.org, accessed December 2016. 69 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages, accessed December 2016. 70 Gary M. Olson and Judith S. Olson, “Distance Matters,” Human-Computer Interaction, 2000, 15: 139–178, at 139. 71 Gary M. Olson and Judith S. Olson, “Distance Matters,” Human-Computer Interaction, 2000, 15: 139–178, at 157. 72 Gary M. Olson and Judith S. Olson, “Distance Matters,” Human-Computer Interaction, 2000, 15: 139–178, at 162. 73 Michael Boyer O’Leary and Jonathon N. Cummings, “The Spatial, Temporal, and Configurational Characteristics of Geographic Dispersion in Teams,” MIS Quarterly, 2007, 31(3): 433–452. 74 Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 1973, 78: 1360–1380; Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 75 Brian Fitzgerald, “The Transformation of Open Source Software,” MIS Quarterly, 2006, 30(3):  587–598; Klaas-Jan Stol, Paris Avgeriou, Muhammad Ali Babar, Yan Lucas, and Brian Fitzgerald, “Key Factors for Adopting Inner Source,”ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2014, 23(2) art. 18: 1–35. 76 Andrea Bonaccorsi, Silvia Giannangeli, and Cristina Rossi, “Entry Strategies Under Competing Standards:  Hybrid Business Models in the Open Source Software Industry,” Management Science, 2006, 52(7):  1085–1098; Nicholas Economides and Evangelos Katsamakas, “Two-Sided Competition of Proprietary vs. Open Source Technology Platforms and the Implications for the Software Industry,” Management Science, 2006, 52(7):  1057–1071; Joachim Henkel, “Selective Revealing in Open Innovation Processes: The Case of Embedded Linux,” Research Policy, 2006, 35 (7):  953–969; Josh Lerner, Parag A. Pathak, and Jean Tirole, “The Dynamics of Open-Source Contributor,” American Economic Review, 2006, 96(2): 114–118. 77 Siobhán O’mahony and Fabrizio Ferraro, “The Emergence of Governance in an Open Source Community,” Academy of Management Journal, 2007, 50(5): 1079–1106.

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78 Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak, and Carliss Y. Baldwin, “Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code,” Management Science, 2006, 52(7): 1015–1030. 79 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware), accessed January 5, 2017; Brady Dale, “Hack Attack on Drudge Report a Sign of Chaos to Come,” Observer, January 3, 2017, observer.com/2017/01/ddos-drudge-report-cloudflare-protonmail, accessed January 5, 2017. 80 obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/316486, accessed September 2017. 81 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture, accessed September 2017. 82 Mark Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto (New  York:  McGraw-Hill Education, 2014), p. 1. 83 makerspace.rutgers.edu, accessed September 2017. 84 rumakerspaceclub.org, accessed September 2017. 85 Harris Kyriakou, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, and Gaurav Sabnis, “Knowledge Reuse for Customization: Metamodels in an Open Design Community for 3D Printing,” MISQ, special issue: IT and Innovation, 2017, 41: 315–322. 86 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosplay, accessed October 2017. 87 reprap.org, accessed September 2017. 88 fablabbcn.org/about_us.html, accessed September 2017. 89 www.minifablab.nl, accessed September 2017. 90 Tory Shepherd and Jamie Seidel, “Elon Musk Unveils Lofty Vision at International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide to Pay his Way to Mars,” Advertiser, September 29, 2017, www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/elon-musk-to-detailhis-mission-to-mars-at-international-astronautical-congress-in-adelaide-on-friday/ news-story/53708c3d16e4070a66aab3d0b8b7477a, accessed October 2017. 91 Jian Cao, Kornel F. Ehmann, and Shiv Kapoor, “Distributed Manufacturing,” pp. 441–453 in Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence, edited by William Sims Bainbridge and Mihail C. Roco (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2016). 92 Silvia Lindtner, “Hackerspaces and Internet of Things in China: How Makers reinvent Industrial Production, Innovation, and the Self,” China Information, 2014, 28(2):  145–167; Silvia Lindtner, “Hacking with Chinese Characteristics:  The Promises of the Maker Movement Against Chinese Manufacturing,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 2015, 40(5): 854–879; Silvia Lindtner, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell, “Reconstituting the Utopian Vision of Making: HCI After Technosolutionism,” pp. 1390–1402 in Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016 (New  York: ACM, 2016). 93 Hidekazu Saegusa, Thomas Tran, and Daniela K. Rosner, “Mimetic Machines: Collaborative Interventions in Digital Fabrication with Arc,” in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: ACM, 2016). 94 James Howison and James D. Herbsleb, “Collaboration and Sharing in Scientific Work,” pp. 459–470 in Proceedings of CSCW ‘13 (New York: ACM, 2013). 95 Kevin Crowston, “Open Source Technology Development,” pp. 475–548 in Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence, edited by William Sims Bainbridge and Mihail C. Roco (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2016). 96 Mary Beth Watson-Manheim, Kevin Crowston, and Katherine M. Chudoba, “Discontinuities and Continuities:  A New Way to Understand Virtual Work,” Information, Technology, and People, 2003, 15(3): 191–209; Luis L. Martins, Lucy

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5 Wikis 1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki, accessed December 31, 2016. 2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia, accessed December 31, 2016; Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015). 3 Jim Giles, “Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head,” Nature, 2005, 438: 900–901. 4 Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Hearst’s International Library, 1915); Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill, “Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production,” Journal of Communication, 2014, 64(2): 215–238. 5 Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw, “Consider the Redirect:  A Missing Dimension of Wikipedia Research,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (New  York:  ACM, 2014), n.p.; Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw, “Page Protection:  Another Missing Dimension of Wikipedia Research,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (New York: ACM, 2015), n.p. 6 Reid Priedhorsky and Loren Terveen, “Wiki Grows Up:  Arbitrary Data Models, Access Control, and Beyond,” pp. 63–71 in Proceedings of WikiSym ‘11 (New York: ACM, 2011). 7 Aniket Kittur and Robert E. Kraut, “Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Wikipedia:  Quality through Coordination,” pp. 37–46 in Proceedings of CSCW (New York: ACM, 2008); Rosta Farzan, Robert E. Kraut, Aditya Pal, and Joseph Konstan, “Socializing Volunteers in an Online Community: A Field Experiment,” pp. 325–334 in Proceedings of CSCW (New  York:  ACM, 2012); Haiyi Zhu, Robert Kraut, and Aniket Kittur, “Effectiveness of Shared Leadership in Online Communities,” pp. 407–416 in Proceedings of CSCW (New York: ACM, 2012); Rosta Farzan and Robert E. Kraut, “Wikipedia Classroom Experiment: Bidirectional Benefits of Students’ Engagement in Online Production Communities,” pp. 783– 792 in Proceedings of CHI (New York: ACM, 2013). 8 Aaron Halfaker, R. Stuart Geiger, Jonathan T. Morgan, and John Riedl, “The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s Reaction to Popularity is Causing its Decline,” American Behavioral Scientist, 2012, 57(5):  664–688; Morten Warncke-Wang, Vladislav R. Ayukaev, Brent Hecht, and Loren G. Terveen, “The Success and Failure of Quality Improvement Projects in Peer Production Communities,” pp. 743–756 in Proceedings of CSCW (New York: ACM, 2015). 9 Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence (New York: Free Press, 1955). 10 This describes the first TV set of the author’s family. 11 Newton N. Minow, “Television and the Public Interest,” May 9, 1961, National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, DC, www.americanrhetoric.com/ speeches/newtonminow.htm, accessed January 16, 2017. 12 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New  York:  Toronto/Lang, 1987); Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, Religion, Deviance and Social Control (New York: Routledge, 1996); William Sims Bainbridge, The Sociology of Religious Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997).

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13 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers, accessed November 1, 2016. 14 R. Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker, “Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia,” pp. 861–870 in Proceedings of CSCW (New York: ACM, 2013). 15 wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy#introduction, accessed November 1, 2016. 16 Andrea Forte, Nazanin Andalibi, and Rachel Greenstadt, “Privicy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration:  A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians,” p. 1 in Proceedings of CSCW 2017 (New York: ACM, 2017). 17 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiScanner, accessed November 1, 2016. 18 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Adair, accessed November 1, 2016. 19 Edward Gaylord Bourne, “The Authorship of the Federalist,” American Historical Review, 1897, 2(3): 443–460, at 444. 20 Douglass Adair, “The Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers,” William and Mary Quarterly, 1944, 1(2): 97–122 and 1(3): 235–264. 21 Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, “Inference in an Authorship Problem,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1963, 58(302): 275–309; Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1964). 22 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory, accessed October 29, 2016. 23 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_set; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_set, both accessed October 29, 2016. 24 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki, accessed December 18, 2016. 25 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Schools_Association, accessed January 7, 2017. 26 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choate_Rosemary_Hall, accessed January 7, 2017. 27 Steffan Antonas, “Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard?” ReadWrite, May 10, 2009, readwrite.com/2009/05/10/mark_ zuckerberg_inspiration_for_facebook_before_harvard; the identity of the author is reported on Zyckerberg’s Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_ Zuckerberg#cite_note-rww051009-38, both accessed January 7, 2017. 28 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andover%E2%80%93Exeter_rivalry, accessed January 7, 2017. 29 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Paul%27s_School_(New_Hampshire), accessed January 7, 2017. 30 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Phillips_(educator), accessed December 31, 2016. 31 J.  A. Tufts (ed.), General Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Philips Exeter Academy 1783–1903 (Exeter, NH: News-Letter Press, 1903). 32 David L. Browman and Stephen Williams, Anthropology at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 2013), pp. 251–252. 33 Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 5. 34 Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality (London:  Thames & Hudson, 1958); I  should mention that I  had the privilege of working with Lord Young, who assisted me in administering a questionnaire study. 35 Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 204. 36 Paul Cowan, An Orphan in History:  Retrieving a Jewish Legacy (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1982); Katherine Kurs (ed.), Searching for Your

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61 John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996). 62 William Sims Bainbridge, Dynamic Secularization (London: Springer, 2017). 63 William Sims Bainbridge, Goals in Space: American Values and the Future of Technology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991); William Sims Bainbridge, The Meaning and Value of Spaceflight (New York: Springer, 2015). 64 Michael Lesk, “The Digital Library Initiative,” pp. 703–711 in Leadership in Science and Technology, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012). 65 William Sims Bainbridge, Star Worlds:  Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 66 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series, accessed January 14, 2017. 67 William Sims Bainbridge, eGods:  Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 68 www.wikia.com/WAM, accessed January 14, 2017. 69 www.wikia.com/WAM/FAQ, accessed January 14, 2017. 70 memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Canon, accessed January 14, 2017. 71 memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Memory_Beta:Introduction, accessed January 14, 2017. 72 stexpanded.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, accessed January 14, 2017. 73 memory-gamma.wikia.com/wiki/Portal:Main, accessed January 14, 2017. 74 memorydelta.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, accessed January 14, 2017. 75 starbase-23.wikia.com/wiki/Starbase_23_Wiki; starbase23.net/Frameset.htm, both accessed January 14, 2017. 76 star-trek.answers.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek_Answers:About, accessed January 14, 2017. 77 aci.wikia.com/wiki/Alpha_Centauri_Institute_Wiki, accessed January 14, 2017. 78 trekinitiative.wikia.com, accessed January 14, 2017. 79 mu.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, accessed January 14, 2017. 80 memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:%22Memory_Alfa%22_as_a_parody_of_ Memory_Alpha, malf.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page, accessed January 14, 2017. 81 Leonard Nimoy, I Am Spock (New York: Hyperion, 1995), pp. 122–123; cf. William Shatner, Star Trek Memories (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 287–290. 82 Leonard Nimoy, I Am Not Spock (Milbrae, CA: Celestial Arts, 1975). 83 convergentsystems.pbworks.com/ w/ page/ 16444397/ May%202008%20 Conference, accessed January 8, 2017. 84 www.atitd.com/life.html, accessed January 1, 2017. 85 www.atitd.com/lawmaking.html, accessed January 1, 2017. 86 www.atitd.org/wiki/tale7/Laws/Anti-Griefer_Law, accessed January 1, 2017. 87 www.atitd.org/wiki/tale7/Special:ListUsers, accessed January 2, 2017. 88 www.atitd.org/wiki/tale7/Test_of_Festivals, accessed January 15, 2017. 89 www.atitd.org/wiki/tale7/Guilds/ZAQ, accessed January 15, 2017. 90 www.atitd.org/wiki/tale7/Megalopoli, accessed January 15, 2017. 91 Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Karen H. Stephan and G. Edward Stephan, “Religion and the Survival of Utopian Communities,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1973, 12: 89–100.

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92 William Sims Bainbridge, The Endtime Family:  Children of God (Albany:  State University of New  York Press, 2002); William Sims Bainbridge, Dynamic Secularization (London: Springer, 2017). 93 William Sims Bainbridge, The Sociology of Religious Movements (New  York: Routledge, 1997), p. 208. 94 Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927). 95 William Sims Bainbridge, Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 50–53. 96 www.xfamily.org/index.php/XFamily_-_Children_of_God:About, accessed January 15, 2017. 97 www.thefamilyinternational.org/en/about, accessed January 15, 2017. 98 Claire Borowik, “Courts, Crusaders and the Media: The Family International,” pp. 3– 24 in Legal Cases, New Religious Movements, and Minority Faiths, edited by François Bellanger and James T. Richardson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014); Claire Borowik, “The Family International: Rebooting for the Future,” pp. 15–30 in Revisionism and Diversification in New Religious Movements, edited by Eileen Barker (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016); Claire Borowik, “The Family International: The Emergence of a Virtual New Religious Community,” pp. 108–102 in “Cult Wars” in Historical Perspective: New and Minority Religions, edited by Eugene V. Gallagher (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). 99 Robert F. Bales, Interaction Process Analysis:  A Method for the Study of Small Groups (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1950).

6 Citizen Social Science 1 en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Citizen_science&oldid=18009197, accessed August 2017. 2 Wu-hang Feng, David Brandt, and Debanjan Saha, “A Long-Term Study of a Popular MMORPG,” pp. 19–24 in Proceedings of NetGames (New  York:  ACM, 2007); Marcus Carter, Kelly Bergstrom, and Darryl Woodford (eds.), Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business: An Introduction to Eve Online (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 3 Catherine Goodfellow, “Russian Overlords, Vodka, and Logoffski:  Russianand English-Language Discourse About Anti-Russian Xenophobia in the EVE Online community,” Games and Culture, 2015, 10(4): 343–364; Marcus Carter, Martin Gibbs, and Michael Arnold, “The Demarcation Problem in Multiplayer Games: Boundry-Work in EVE Online’s eSport,” International Journal of Computer Game Research, 2015, 15(1): 1–21. 4 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Mayor, accessed August 2017. 5 www.proteinatlas.org, accessed August 2017. 6 community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/exoplanets-the-next-phase-of-projectdiscovery; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COROT, both accessed August 2017. 7 forums.eveonline.com/t/2017-07-11-issue-with-project-discovery-evaluation-set/ 9765/23, accessed August 2017. 8 www.planethunters.org/ ?_ ga=2.151588473.1947141451.15049910222033340880.1503184721#/about, accessed August 2017.

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9 Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, Steven Bamford, Anze Slosar, Kate Land, Daniel Thomas, Edd Edmondson, Karen Masters, Robert Nichol, Jordan Raddick, Alex Szalay, Dan Andreescu, Phil Murray, and Jan Vandenberg, “Galaxy Zoo 1: Data Release of Morphological Classifications for Nearly 900 000 Galaxies,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2011, 410(1): 166–178. 10 Debra A. Fischer et al., “Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public Using the Kepler Public Archive Data,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2012, 419(4): 2900–2911. 11 Steve Kelling et  al., “Can Observation Skills of Citizen Scientists Be Estimated Using Species Accumulation Curves?” Public Library of Science (PLoS One), 2015, 10(10): 1–14. 12 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1547880, accessed September 2017. 13 www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2017/press.html, accessed October 2017. 14 Ed Young, “The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science,” Atlantic, October 3, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/the-absurdity-of-the-nobelprizes-in-science/541863, accessed September 2017. 15 www.eveuniversity.org, accessed September 10, 2017. 16 zkillboard.com/corporation/917701062/stats, accessed September 10, 2017. 17 wiki.eveuniversity.org/Project_Discovery, accessed September 10, 2017. 18 talk.planethunters.org/?_ga=2.7273458.1958698446.1504991052-1079967806. 1503604051#/boards, accessed September 9, 2017. 19 www.zooniverse.org/about/publications, accessed September 2017. 20 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdwatching, accessed August 2017. 21 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBird, accessed August 2017. 22 ebird.org/content/ebird/about, accessed August 2017. 23 ebird.org/content/ebird, accessed August 2017. 24 www.facebook.com/groups/288737854555183, accessed August 2017. 25 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Birding_Association, accessed September 2017. 26 Justin Salamon et al., “Towards the Automatic Classification of Avian Flight Calls for Microacoustic Monitoring,” Public Library of Science (PLoS One), 2016, 11(11): 1–26. 27 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullimonstrum, accessed August 2017. 28 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1322725, accessed September 2017. 29 National Science Board (NSB), Revisiting the STEM Workforce (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2015), p. 1. 30 Bruce MacFadden, Lisa Lundgren, Kent Crippen, Betty A. Dunckel, and Shari Ellis, “Amateur Paleontological Societies and Fossil Clubs, Interactions with Professional Paleontologists, and Social Paleontology in the United States,” Palaeontologia Electronica, 2016, 19(2): 1–19. 31 www.facebook.com/TheFossilProject, accessed August 9, 2017. 32 www.athenpaladins.org/forums, accessed August 9, 2017. 33 Matthew G. Baron, David B. Norman, and Paul M. Barrett, “A New Hypothesis of Dinosaur Relationships and Early Dinosaur Evolution,” Nature, 2017, (543): 501–506. 34 Chris Wood, Brian Sullivan, Daniel Fink, and Steve Kelling, “eBird:  Engaging Birders in Science and Conservation,” Public Library of Science (PLoS Biology), 2011, 9(12): 1–5.

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35 David Lindenmayer and Ben Scheele, “Do Not Publish:  Limiting Open-Access Information on Rare and Endangered Species Will Help to Protect Them,” Science, 2017, 356(6340): 800–801. 36 www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science, accessed August 24, 2017. 37 www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/nyc-cyclist-air-quality-study, accessed August 24, 2017. 38 Andrea Wiggins and Kevin Crowston, “From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science,” in Proceedings of the Forty-fourth Hawai’i International Conference on System Science (New York: IEEE, 2011), n.p. 39 William Sims Bainbridge, “Citizen Science,” pp. 377–390 in Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence, edited by William Sims Bainbridge and Mihail C. Roco (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2016). 40 Jennifer L. Shirk et al., “Public Participation in Scientific Research: a Framework for Deliberate Design,” Ecology and Society, 2012, 17(2): 29, at 4. 41 Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education, Public Participation in Scientific Research:  Defining the Field and Assessing Its Potential for Informal Science Education, p. 11, www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit/publications/CAISEPPSR-report-2009.pdf, accessed September 2017. 42 Joel Chan, Steven Dang, and Steven P. Dow, “Improving Crowd Innovation with Expert Facilitation,” in Proceedings of CSCW 2016 (New  York:  ACM, 2016), n.p.; Alvin Yuan, Kurt Luther, Sophie Vennix, Markus Krause, Steven P. Dow, and Björn Hartmann, “Almost an Expert:  The Effects of Rubrics and Expertise on Perceived Value of Crowdsourced Design Critiques,” in Proceedings of CSCW 2016 (New York: ACM, 2016), n.p. 43 dissimilitudes.lip6.fr:8182/#/intro, accessed June 24, 2017. 44 umaine.edu/folklife/archives, accessed September 2017. 45 www.mainemuseums.org/event-2497468; www.mainemuseums.org/Mission, both accessed September 2017. 46 www.harmonmuseum.org/news.htm; www.mainejews.org/LocalHomePageMaster3. php?city=OOB; fortwilliams.org/oral-history-project, all accessed September 2017. 47 www.measuringtheanzacs.org/#/about, accessed September 2017. 48 www.operationwardiary.org, accessed September 2017. 49 www.shakespearesworld.org/#!/about, accessed September 2017. 50 www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/ decoding-the- civil- war/about/research, accessed September 2017. 51 www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/decoding-the-civil-war, accessed June 24, 2017. 52 www.sciencegossip.org., accessed June 24, 2017. 53 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science-Gossip, accessed June 24, 2017. 54 Christopher M. Moreman and R. David Lewis (eds.), Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Digital Age (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014). 55 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Find_a_Grave, accessed September 2017. 56 William Sims Bainbridge, “The Decline of the Shakers: Evidence from the United States Census,” Communal Societies, 1984, 4:  19–34; William Sims Bainbridge, The Sociology of Religious Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997). 57 William Sims Bainbridge, “Historical Research: Oneida Online,” pp. 227–259 in Faithful Measures: New Methods in the Measurement of Religion, edited by Roger Finke and Chris Bader (New York: New York University Press, 2017). 58 “Santa Ana,” Los Angeles Herald, May 21, 1894, p. 3.

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59 www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=49870821, accessed April 19, 2015. 60 William Sims Bainbridge, “Historical Research: Oneida Online,” pp. 227–259 in Faithful Measures: New Methods in the Measurement of Religion, edited by Roger Finke and Chris Bader (New York: New York University Press, 2017), p. 243. 61 www.laurahatch.com/ Oneida%20Community%20Web/ wc01/ wc01_ 054.htm, accessed January 25, 2015. 62 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Family, accessed September 2017. 63 Pierrepont Noyes, My Father’s House: An Oneida Boyhood (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937) p. 165. 64 John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870). 65 www.fccog.org/about-us/our-building/our-cemeteries, accessed September 2017. 66 John A. Buckland, “Tomac Historic Burying Ground, Tomac Avenue at Roosevelt Avenue, Greenwich, Connecticut,” 1997, www.fccog.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2012/10/Tomac-Research-Paper-v2.pdf, accessed September 2017. 67 The New York Genealogical and Biological Record, 1903, XXXIV, p. 66; www. wikitree.com/wiki/Francis-898, accessed September 2017. 68 www.findagrave.com/ cgi- bin/ fg.cgi?page=gr&GSsr=41&GScid=103763&G Rid=88266774&, accessed September 2017. 69 www.fccog.org/2011/10/chapel-window-2-the-1676-and-1691-windows, accessed September 2017. 70 www.wikitree.com/genealogy/Merritt-Descendants-49, dvance.tripod.com/Ferris. html, accessed September 2017. 71 Anne Bowser, Katie Shilton, Jenny Preece, and Elizabeth Warrick, “Accounting for Privacy in Citizen Science: Ethical Research in a Context of Openness,” pp. 2124– 2136 in Proceedings of CSCW ‘17 (New York: ACM, 2017). 72 Kingsley Purdam, “Citizen Social Science and Citizen? Methodological and Ethical Challenges for Social Research,” Current Sociology, 2014, 62(3): 374–392, at 387. 73 Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956); en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_ Prophecy_Fails, accessed September 2017. 74 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957). 75 George Psathas on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, www.youtube. com/watch?v=8mMJiV3ieNk, accessed September 2017. 76 Samuel E. Miller and Milton Rokeach, “Psychology Experiments without Subjects’ Consent,” Science, 1966, 152(3718): 15. 77 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation, accessed September 2017. 78 www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-19/html/2017-01058.htm, accessed September 2017. 79 “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects,” Federal Register, January 19, 2017, 82(12): 7149–7274. 80 “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects,” Federal Register, January 19, 2017, 82(12), p. 7240. 81 Annette N. Markham and Nancy K. Baym (eds.), Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009), pp. 69–98.

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82 Rebecca Eynon, Jenny Fry, and Ralph Schroeder, “The Ethics of Internet Research,” pp. 23–41 in The Sage Handbook of Online Research Methods, edited by Nigel Fielding, Raymond M. Lee, and Grant Blank (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), p. 31. 83 National Research Council, Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007), p. vii. 84 www.opm.gov/cybersecurity/cybersecurity-incidents, accessed September 2017. 85 Gillian B. White, “A Cybersecurity Breach at Equifax Left Pretty Much Everyone’s Financial Data Vulnerable,” Atlantic, September 7, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/ business/archive/2017/09/equifax-cybersecurity-breach/539178, accessed September 2017. 86 www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-nationalinstitutions, accessed September 2017. 87 Philip Bump, “The New Culture War Targeting American Universities Appears too Be Working,” Washington Post, July 10, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/ politics/ wp/ 2017/ 07/ 10/ the- new- culture- war- targeting- american- universitiesappears-to-be-working, accessed September 2017. 88 David A. Graham, “Why Do Republicans Suddenly Hate College So Much?” Atlantic, July 13, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/why-dorepublicans-suddenly-hate-colleges-so-much/533130, accessed September 2017. 89 Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion (London: Trübner, 1883). 90 William Sims Bainbridge, Dynamic Secularization (London: Springer, 2017). 91 Nigel G. Fielding, “Qualitative Research and Our Digital Futures,” Qualitative Inquiry, 2014, 20(9): 1064–1073. 92 Julia Adams and Hannah Bruckner. “Wikipedia, Sociology, and the Promise and Pitfalls of Big Data,” Big Data and Society, 2015, 2, p. 3. 93 William Folwell Bainbridge, Around the World Tour of Christian Missions, (New York:, C. R. Blackall, 1882); William Folwell Bainbridge, Along the Lines at the Front (Philadelphia, American Baptist Publication Society, 1882). 94 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 95 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale:  The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago, Regnery, 1951). 96 www.inform.ac, accessed September 2017. 97 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INFORM, accessed September 2017. 98 William Sims Bainbridge, “New Religions, Science and Secularization,” pp. 277–292 in The Handbook of Cults and Sects in America, edited by David G. Bromley and Jeffrey K. Hadden (Greenwich, CT:  JAI, 1993); William Sims Bainbridge, “Religious Ethnography on the World Wide Web,” in Religion on the Internet, edited by Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas Cowan (Greenwich, CT:  JAI Press, 2000); William Sims Bainbridge, “New Religious Movements:  A Bibliographic Essay,” pp. 331–355 in Teaching New Religious Movements, edited by David Bromley (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2006); William Sims Bainbridge, “Online Ethnographic Research: Avatars in Virtual Worlds,” pp. 147–157 in Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion, edited by Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Suha Shakkour (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); William Sims Bainbridge, “Online Ethnographic Research:  Avatars in Virtual Worlds,”

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99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106

pp. 147–157 in Digital Methodologies in the Sociology of Religion, edited by Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Suha Shakkour (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); William Sims Bainbridge, “Beyond Belief: Revival in Virtual Worlds,” pp. 226–240 in Fiction, Invention, and Hyper-Reality: From Popular Culture to Religion, edited by Carole M. Cusack and Pavol Kosnáč (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2017). James V. Spickard, Alternative Sociologies of Religion:  Through Non-Western Eyes (New York: New York University Press, 2017). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kanazawa, accessed September 2017. Satoshi Kanazawa, “The Savanna Principle,” Managerial and Decision Economics, 2004, 25(1): 41–54. Satoshi Kanazawa, “Evolutionary Psychological Foundations of Civil Wars,” Journal of Politics, 2009, 71(1): 25–34. George Caspar Homans, Social Behavior:  Its Elementary Forms (New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); George Caspar Homans, Coming to My Senses:  The Autobiography of a Sociologist (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1984). V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library, 1951). Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World,” Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 2010, 1–75, www2.psych.ubc.ca/ ~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf, accessed October 2016. www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16607/nsf16607.htm, accessed September 2017.

7 Digital Government 1 Sharon S. Dawes, Peter A. Bloniarz, Kristine L. Kelly, and Patricia D. Fletcher (eds.), Some Assembly Required:  Building a Digital Government for the 21st Century (Albany, NY:  Center for Technology in Government, 1999); Francesco Amoretti (ed.), Electronic Constitution: Social, Cultural, and Political Implications (Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2009). 2 William Sims Bainbridge, “Hollerith Card,” pp. 326–328 in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2004); William Sims Bainbridge, “ENIAC,” pp. 220–222 in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2004). 3 G. Lindsey, “Four Good Decades of OR in the Canadian Department of National Defence,” Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1998, 49: 327–335. 4 Amy Kruse, Dylan Schmorrow, and J. Allen Sears, “ARPANET,” pp. 37–40 in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2004); Wenhong Chen, Phuoc Tran, and Barry Wellman, “Internet: Worldwide Diffusion,” pp. 384–389 in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Great Barrington, MA:  Berkshire, 2004); Barry Wellman and Bernie Hogan, “Internet in Everyday Life,” pp. 389–397 in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2004).

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5 United Nations and the American Society for Public Administration, Benchmarking E-Government:  A Global Perspective (New  York:  United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration, 2001), p. 1 (italics in original). 6 United Nations and the American Society for Public Administration, Benchmarking E-Government:  A Global Perspective (New  York:  United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration, 2001), p. 10. 7 United Nations and the American Society for Public Administration, Benchmarking E-Government:  A Global Perspective (New  York:  United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration, 2001), p. 12. 8 United Nations and the American Society for Public Administration, Benchmarking E-Government:  A Global Perspective (New  York:  United Nations Division for Public Economics and Public Administration, 2001), p. 54. 9 www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda, accessed June 2017. 10 Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations E-Government Survey 2016: E-Government in Support of Sustainable Development (New York: United Nations, 2016), p. 65. 11 Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations E-Government Survey 2016: E-Government in Support of Sustainable Development (New York: United Nations, 2016), pp. 67–68. 12 Gerd Hortleder, Das Gesellschaftsbild des Ingenieurs (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1970), Ingenieure in der Industriegesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1970). 13 Teresa M. Harrison, Santiago Guerrero, G. Brian Burke, Meghan Cook, Anthony Cresswell, Natalie Helbig, Jana Hrdinová, and Theresa Pardo, “Open Government and E-Government:  Democratic Challenges from a Public Value Perspective,” Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (New York: ACM, 2011), p. 246. 14 www.digitalgov.gov/about, accessed August 2017. 15 ec.europa.eu/ commission/ priorities/ justice- and- fundamental- rights/ dataprotection/2018-reform-eu-data-protection-rules_en, accessed August 2017. 16 ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/what-does-general-dataprotection-regulation-gdpr-govern_en, accessed August 2017. 17 www.facebook.com/business/gdpr, accessed August 2017. 18 eur- lex.europa.eu/ legal- content/ EN/ TXT/ PDF/ ?uri=CELEX:32016R0679& from=EN, accessed August 2017. 19 Luca Marelli and Giuseppe Testa, “Scrutinizing the EU General Data Protection Regulation,” Science, 2018, 360(6388): 496–498. 20 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8720904, accessed August 2017. 21 Karen D. Frazer, NSFNET:  A Partnership for High-Speed Networking Final Report 1987–1995 (Ann Arbor, MI:  Merit Network, 1995); Will A. Foster, Anthony M. Rutkowski, and Seymour E. Goodman, “Who Governs the Internet?” Communications of the ACM, 1997, 40(8): 15–20. 22 Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence:  The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955); Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962).

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23 William Sims Bainbridge, “Peer Review,” pp. 389–396 in Leadership in Science and Technology, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012). 24 Stephen Cole, Leonard Rubin, and Jonathan R. Cole, Peer Review in the National Science Foundation (Washington, DC:  National Academy of Sciences, 1978); Daryl E. Chubin and Edward J. Hackett, Peerless Science: Peer Review and U.S. Science Policy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Seth Hettich and Michael J. Pazzani, “Mining for Proposal Reviewers: Lessons Learned at the National Science Foundation,” pp. 862–871 in Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (New York: ACM, 2006); William Sims Bainbridge, “Peer Review,” pp. 389–396 in Leadership in Science and Technology, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011). 25 Susan Steele (ed.), “NSF Committee of Visitors Report, Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Cognitive, Psychological and Language Sciences Cluster,” April 4, 2002, p.  11, www.nsf.gov/od/iia/activities/cov/sbe/2003/BCS_CPL_COVRpt. doc, accessed August 2017. 26 www.acm.org/conferences/about-conferences, accessed August 2017. 27 www.ieee.org/about/index.html, accessed August 2017. 28 www.ieee.org/about/organizations/index_ieeeorganization.html, accessed August 2017. 29 Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, 1965, 38(8): 114–117. 30 Jeffrey Mervis, “NSF Moves into Fastlane to Manage Flow of Grants,” Science, 1995, 267:  166–167; William Schulz, “NSF’s FastLane Gets Rosier Reviews,” Chemical and Engineering News, 1999, 77 (44): 24–25. 31 Rita R. Colwell, “Important Notice:  Working Toward a Paperless Proposal and Award System,” NSF Notice 123, September 3, 1998, www.nsf.gov/pubs/issuances/ in123.txt, accessed August 2017. 32 Rita R. Colwell, “FY 2001 GPRA Performance Report” (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2002), p. 72. 33 Rita R. Colwell, “FY 2001 GPRA Performance Report” (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2002), p. 74. 34 www.nsf.gov/cise/iis/panelist/interactivePanelSystem.pdf, accessed August 2017. 35 www.nsf.gov/cise/iis/panelist/interactivePanelSystem.pdf, accessed August 2017. 36 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebEx, accessed August 2017. 37 secondlife.com; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VenueGen, accessed August 2017.; Michael Rymaszewski, Wagner James Au, Mark Wallace, Catherine Winters, Cory Ondrejka, and Benjamin Batstone-Cunningham, Second Life: The Official Guide (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2007); William Sims Bainbridge, “The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds,” Science, 2007, 317: 472–476; John Bohannon, “Meeting for Peer Review at a Resort That’s Virtually Free,” Science, 2011, 331: 27. 38 Robert F. Bales, Interaction Process Analysis:  A Method for the Study of Small Groups (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1950); William Sims Bainbridge, Social Research Methods and Statistics:  A Computer-Assisted Introduction (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1992), pp. 44–47. 39 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0811988, accessed August 2017. 40 Thomas J. Misa and Jeffrey R. Yost, FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2016), p. 162.

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41 Program Announcement – Digital Government – NSF98-121, www.nsf.gov/pubs/ 1998/nsf98121/nsf98121.htm, accessed August 2017. 42 Herbert Schorr and Salvatore J. Stolfo (eds.), Toward a Digital Government in the 21st Century (Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, 1997). 43 Melvyn Ciment, “A Personal History of the NSF Digital Government Program,” Communications of the ACM, 2003, 46(1): 69–70, p. 69. 44 larrybrandt.blogspot.com/2016/08/post-comment-on-larry-brandts-tribute.html, accessed August 2017. 45 www.ctg.albany.edu/homephotos, accessed August 2017. 46 Digital Government Program Announcement, NSF 99–103, www.nsf.gov/pubs/ 1999/nsf99103/nsf99103.pdf, accessed August 2017. 47 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp, accessed August 2017. 48 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Government_Society, accessed August 2017. 49 dgsociety.org/about/mission, accessed August 2017. 50 www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503406, accessed August 2017. 51 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0968529, accessed August 2017. 52 Lei Meng, Shu Liu, and Aaron Striegel, “Analyzing the Longitudinal Impact of Proximity, Location, and Personality on Smartphone Usage,” Computational Social Networks, 2014, 1: 6. 53 Aaron Striegel, Shu Liu, Lei Meng, Christian Poellabauer, David Hachen, and Omar Lizardo, “Lessons Learned from the NetSense Smartphone Study,” pp. 51– 56 in Proceedings of ACM HotPlanet (New York: ACM, 2013), p. 52. 54 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0968503; www.nsf.gov/award search/showAward?AWD_ID=0968350; www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward? AWD_ID=0968368, all accessed August 2017. 55 news.virginia.edu/ content/ memoriam- joanne- cohoon- advocate- womencomputing-and-it, accessed August 2017. 56 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman, accessed August 2017. 57 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0968521, accessed August 2017. 58 www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/NON, accessed August 2017. 59 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0966929, accessed August 2017. 60 www.nsf.gov/ awardsearch/ showAward?AWD_ ID=0968295; www.nsf.gov/ awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0968481, all accessed August 2017. 61 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1211266; www.nsf.gov/award search/showAward?AWD_ID=1211153; www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward? AWD_ID=1211201; www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1211277, all accessed August 2017. 62 www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12580/nsf12580.pdf, accessed August 2017. 63 Edgar S. Cahn and Christine Gray, “The Time Bank Solution,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2015, Summer: 41–45. 64 W.  H. Oliver, “The Labour Exchange Phase of the Co-Operative Movement,” Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 1858, 10(3): 355–367. 65 www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1218544, accessed August 2017. 66 www.nsf.gov/ awardsearch/ showAward?AWD_ ID=1406858; www.nsf.gov/ awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1407630; www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show Award?AWD_ID=1404698, all accessed August 2017. 67 Thorsten Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Huebsch, 1921).

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68 Patrick C. Shih, Victoria Bellotti, Kyungsik Han, and John M. Carroll, “Unequal Time for Unequal Value:  Motivations as Design Space for Timebanking,” pp. 1075–1085 in Proceedings of CHI 2015 (New  York:  ACM, 2015); Victoria Bellotti, Alexander Ambard, Daniel Turner, Christina Gossmann, Kamila Demková, and John M. Carroll, “A Muddle of Models of Motivation For Using Peer-to-Peer Economy Systems,” pp. 1085–1094 in Proceedings of CHI 2015 (New York: ACM, 2015). 69 timebanks.org/timebankingabout, accessed August 2017. 70 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyttelton_Harbour, accessed August 2017. 71 lyttelton.timebanks.org, accessed August 2017. 72 timebanks.org, accessed August 2017. 73 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward, accessed August 2017. 74 Robert A. Heinlein, Between Planets (New York, Scribner, 1951). 75 Alexei Panshin, Heinlein in Dimension (Chicago: Advent, 1968). 76 Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (New York: Tor, 1996). 77 Gary Alan Fine, “The Hinge:  Civil Society, Group Culture, and the Interaction Order,” Social Psychology Quarterly, 2014, 77(1): 5–26. 78 www.hourworld.org, accessed August 2017. 79 John M. Carroll and Victoria Bellotti, “Creating Value Together: The Emerging Design Space of Peer-to-Peer Currency and Exchange,” pp. 1500–1510 in Proceedings of CSCW 2015 (New York: ACM, 2015). 80 timebanks.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/What-about-taxes_-Edgar-Cahn.pdf, accessed August 2017. 81 Vili Lehdonvirta and Mirko Ernkvist, Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011). 82 William Sims Bainbridge, “Fluid democracy,” pp. 31–62 in No Safe Harbor, edited by Brad Hall (United States Pirate Party, no place, 2012). 83 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party, accessed August 2017. 84 wiki.piratenpartei.de/Liquid_Democracy, accessed and translated October 21, 2011, accessed August 2017. 85 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party, accessed August 2017. 86 Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang, “The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China,” American Journal of Sociology, 2013, 118(6): 1475–1508; Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review, 2013, 107(2):  326– 343; Xue “Snow” Dong and Krishna Jayakar, “The Baidu Music Settlement:  A Turning Point for Copyright Reform In China?” Journal of Information Policy, 2013, 3:  77–103; Peter Lorentzen, “China’s Strategic Censorship,” American Journal of Political Science, 2014, 58(2): 402–414; Yong Tang, “ ‘Feeling for Rocks While Crossing the River’: An Analysis of the Statutory Language of China’s First Freedom of Information Law,” Journal of Information Policy, 2014, 4: 342–376. 87 Carole Ganz-Brown,“Electronic Networks for International Research Collaboration: Implications for Intellectual Property Protection in the Early Twenty-First Century,” pp. 159–182 in Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities, edited by Orville Vernon Burton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 88 William Sims Bainbridge “Privacy and Property on the Net: Research Questions,” Science, 2003, 302:  1686–1687; “Intellectual Property Rights,” pp. 833–846

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89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

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314

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112 www.facebook.com/groups/VeganRecipesForEveryone, accessed August 2017. 113 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training; perpetualfitnesscle.com/tag/ c2b, both accessed August 2017. 114 www.facebook.com/groups/handstandchallenge; www.gymnasticbodies.com/ handstand-challenge, both accessed August 2017. 115 www.facebook.com/groups/261385094022785; www.facebook.com/groups/183 554465062851; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossFit, all accessed August 2017. 116 www.facebook.com/groups/TheOriginalDeplorables; www.facebook.com/ groups/1794192330837450; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables, all accessed August 2017. 117 William Sims Bainbridge, “Is Reality Winner ‘One of Us?’ ” Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, July 14, 2017, ieet.org/index.php/IEET2/more/ Bainbridge20170714, accessed August 2017. 118 www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/reality-winner-who-is-accused-leaker/index. html, accessed August 2017. 119 www.gofundme.com/terms, accessed August 2017. 120 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoFundMe, accessed August 2017. 121 gofraudme.com/probably-dont-want-donate-sketchy-reality-winner-gofundmecampaigns, accessed August 2017. 122 www.facebook.com/groups/724753174363840, accessed August 2017. 123 www.facebook.com/groups/446098169092627, accessed August 2017. 124 couragetoresist.org/about-courage-to-resist, accessed August 2017. 125 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_on_Conscience_%26_War; www.centeronconscience .org, both accessed August 2017. 126 couragetoresist.org/drop-charges-reality-winner, accessed August 2017. 127 www.facebook.com/events/179791585886643, accessed August 2017. 128 www.ny1.com/ nyc/ all- boroughs/ news/ 2017/ 06/ 7/ supporters- stage- rally- foraccused-nsa-leaker-reality-winner-at-union-square.html, accessed August 2017. 129 www.facebook.com/PeopleForBernie, accessed August 2017. 130 www.facebook.com/Courage-Foundation-255561524782320, accessed August 2017. 131 www.facebook.com/actdottv, accessed August 2017. 132 www.facebook.com/TheSparrowProject, accessed August 2017. 133 www.facebook.com/democratscom, accessed August 2017. 134 Timur Kuran, “The Inevitability of Future Revolutionary Surprises,” American Journal of Sociology, 1995, 100(6): 1528–1551. 135 Bruce E. Tonn and David Feldman, “Non-Spatial Government,” Futures, 1995, 27: 11–36.

8 Cultural Science 1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_(disambiguation), accessed September 2017. 2 Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (Lakeville, CT: International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1948); David Bloor, “Can there Be an Alternative Mathematics?” pp. 107– 130 in Knowledge and Social Imagery, edited by David Bloor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 3 William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922).

315

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4 Franz Boas, “The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 1901, 15(1): 4–374. 5 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas, accessed June 2017. 6 William Sims Bainbridge, “The Harvard Department of Social Relations,” pp. 496– 503 in Leadership in Science and Technology, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012). 7 Franz Boas, “The Decorative Art of the North American Indians,” Popular Science Monthly, October 1903, 63: 481–498. 8 Franz Boas, “Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A Study in the History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in the U.  S. National Museum,” Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum, 1908, 34(1616): 321–353, at 339. 9 Václav Rajlich, “Software Cultures,” pp. 659–663 in Encyclopedia of HumanComputer Interaction, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire, 2004), p. 659. 10 George Caspar Homans, The Nature of Social Science (New  York:  Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). 11 Robert B. Edgerton, “Conceptions of Psychosis in Four East African Societies,” American Anthropologist, 1966, 68: 408–425. 12 B.  F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms (New  York:  Appleton-Century Company, 1938). 13 George C. Homans, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). 14 John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver:  A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review, 1965, 30(6): 862–875. 15 William Sims Bainbridge, Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 51–52. 16 John Dollard, Neil E. Miller, Leonard W. Doob, O.  H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939). 17 William Sims Bainbridge, “The Future of an Illusion: Cognitive Theories,” vol. 3, pp. 253–279 in Science and the World’s Religions, edited by Patrick McNamara and Wesley J. Wildman (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012). 18 George Caspar Homans, The Human Group (New  York:  Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950). 19 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New  York: Toronto/Lang, 1978), p.  325, cf. “Towards a Theory of Religion:  Religious Commitment,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1980, 19: 114–128. 20 William Sims Bainbridge, “Sacred Algorithms:  Exchange Theory of Religious Claims,” pp. 21–37 in Defining Religion, edited by David Bromley and Arthur L. Greil (Amsterdam: JAI Elsevier, 2003), “Cognitive Science and the New Atheism,” pp. 79–96 in Religion and the New Atheism, edited by Amarnath Amarasingam (Leiden: Brill, 2010), “Artificial Intelligence Modes of Religious Cognition,” pp. 219–237 in Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science, edited by Fraser Watts and Leon Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 21 William Sims Bainbridge, Across the Secular Abyss (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007), pp. 16–17. 22 William Sims Bainbridge, Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 14.

316

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23 Chaeyoon Lim and Robert D. Putnam, “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction,” American Sociological Review, 2010, 75(6): 914–933; William Sims Bainbridge, The Sociology of Religious Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997). 24 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(Handel); en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel_ ceiling, both accessed September 2017. 25 Samuel Taylor Colleridge, Biographia Literaria (New York: Kirk & Merein, 1817). 26 William Sims Bainbridge, eGods:  Faith Versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 27 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949). 28 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_ (virtual_worlds), both accessed September 2017. 29 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967); Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality:  A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY:  Doubleday, 1966); Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). 30 David Bromley and Larry Greil (eds.), Defining Religion (Amsterdam:  JAI Elsevier, 2003). 31 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New  York: Toronto/Lang, 1987), 180. 32 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London:  Allen & Unwin, 1915); John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review, 1965, 30:  862–875; Anson D. Shupe, “ ‘Disembodied Access’ and Technological Constraints on Organizational Development,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1976, 15:  177–185; Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, “Networks of Faith,” American Journal of Sociology, 1980, 86: 1376–1395. 33 Mark S. Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 34 Neil B. Niman, “The Allure of Games: Toward an Updated Theory of the Leisure Class,” Games and Culture, 2013, 8(1): 26–42. 35 “Cognitive Science,” 2014, plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science, accessed September 2017. 36 William Sims Bainbridge, God from the Machine:  Artificial Intelligence Models of Religious Cognition (Walnut Grove, CA: AltaMira, 2006); William Sims Bainbridge, “Artificial Intelligence Models of Religious Evolution,” pp. 219–237 in Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science, edited by Fraser Watts and Leon Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 37 Nancy Burns, “The Michigan, Then National, Then American National Election Studies,” 2006, www.electionstudies.org/history/20060815Burns_ANES_history. pdf, accessed September 2017. 38 www.electionstudies.org, accessed September 2017. 39 sda.berkeley.edu, accessed September 2017. 40 www.thearda.com, accessed September 2017. 41 George P. Murdock, Social Structure (New York: MacMillan, 1949), Ethnographic Atlas: A Summary (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967). 42 ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/ehrafe, accessed September 2017.

317

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43 Melvin Ember, “An Empirical Test of Galton’s Problem,” Ethnology, 1971, 10: 98–106. 44 www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk, accessed September 2017. 45 www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=490, accessed September 2017. 46 William Sims Bainbridge, Survey Research:  A Computer-Assisted Introduction (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), pp. 302–308. 47 Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). 48 Travis Hirschi and Rodney Stark, “Hellfire and Delinquency,” Social Problems, 1969, 17: 202–213. 49 Rodney Stark, Lori Kent, and Daniel Doyle, “Religion and Delinquency:  The Ecology of a ‘Lost’ Relationship,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 1982, 18: 4–24; Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, Religion, Deviance and Social Control (New York: Routledge, 1996). 50 Rodney Stark, “Religion as Context: Hellfire and delinquency One More Time,” Sociology of Religion, 1996, 57(2): 163–173, at 164. 51 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item-item_collaborative_filtering, accessed September 2017; David Goldberg, David Nichols, Brian M. Oki, and Douglas Terry, “Using Collaborative Filtering to Weave an Information Tapestry,” Communications of the ACM, 1992, 35: 61–70. 52 Paul Resnick and Hal R. Varian, “Recommender Systems,” Communications of the ACM, 1997, 40:  56–58; Chumki Basu, Haym Hirsh, and William Cohen, “Recommendation as Classification: Using Social and Content-Based Information in Recommendation,” in Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Palo Alto, CA: Association for the Advancement of Artifical Intelligence, 1998), n.p.; John Canny, “Collaborative Filtering with Privacy via Factor Analysis,” pp. 238–245 in Proceedings of the 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (New  York:  ACM, 2002); Jonathan L. Herlocker, Joseph A. Konstan, Loren G. Terveen, and John T. Riedl, “Evaluating Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 2004, 22: 5–53. 53 Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd, “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web,” technical report 1999-66, Stanford Digital Libraries, 1999, dbpubs.stanford.edu/pub/2003-17. 54 William Sims Bainbridge, Dimensions of Science Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 55 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (New York, A. L. Burt, 1912). 56 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Science_Fiction, accessed September 2017. 57 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun, accessed September 2017. 58 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Visions, accessed September 2017. 59 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick, accessed September 2017. 60 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep%3F, accessed September 2017. 61 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize, accessed September 2017. 62 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); William Sims Bainbridge, Online Multiplayer Games (San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool, 2010), The Virtual Future (London: Springer, 2011). 63 movielens.org, accessed September 2017.

318

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64 Paul Resnick, Neophytos Iacovou, Mitesh Suchak, Peter Bergstrom, and John Riedl, “GroupLens: An Open Architecture for Collaborative Filtering of Netnews,” pp. 175–186 in Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW ‘94 (New York: ACM, 1994); William Hill, Larry Stead, Mark Rosenstein, and George Furnas, “Recommending and Evaluating Choices in a Virtual Community of Use,” pp. 194–201 in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ‘95 (New York: ACM, 1995); Badrul Sarwar, George Karypis, Joseph Konstan, and John Riedl, “ItemBased Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms,” pp. 285–295 in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW ‘01 (New York: ACM, 2001); Jonathan Herlocker, Joseph A Konstan, and John Riedl, “An Empirical Analysis of Design Choices in Neighborhood-Based Collaborative Filtering Algorithms, Information Retrieval, 2002, 5(4): 287–310. 65 www.metacritic.com, accessed September 2017. 66 Jeroen Bruggeman, V.  A. Traag, and Justus Uitermark, “Detecting Communities through Network Data,” American Sociological Review, 2012, 77(6): 1050–1063. 67 www.metacritic.com/game/pc/star-wars-the-old-republic/critic-reviews, accessed September 2017. 68 Richard Naik, “You Got Your MMO in My KOTOR,” GameCritics, March 31, 2012, gamecritics.com/richard-naik/star-wars-the-old-republic-review, accessed September 2017. 69 William Sims Bainbridge, Star Worlds:  Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016). 70 www.mmorpg.com/the-black-watchmen, accessed September 2017. 71 www.mmorpg.com/secret-world-legends, accessed September 2017. 72 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstarter, accessed September 2017. 73 Eric Mylonas, Dark Age of Camelot: Epic Edition (Roseville, CA: Prima Games, 2005). 74 William Murphy, “The List: The 10 Best PVP MMOs of All Time,” MMORPG. com, September 28, 2017, www.mmorpg.com/columns/the-10-best-pvp-mmos-ofall-time-1000012080, accessed September 2017. 75 darkageofcamelot.com/content/rvr-server-types, accessed September 2017. 76 search.camelotherald.com/#/guild/QolY3X36ST8, accessed September 2017. 77 standwithreality.org, accessed September 2017. 78 David Greene, “Misused Espionage Act Targets Government Whistleblowers,” August 1, 2017, www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/misused-espionage-act-targetsgovernnent-whistleblowers, accessed September 2017. 79 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson, accessed September 2017. 80 William Sims Bainbridge, “Harpsichord Makers,” pp. 746–753 in Leadership in Science and Technology, edited by William Sims Bainbridge (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012), at p. 746. 81 wearefourfiftyone.wordpress.com; www.trekfiction.com/directory/author-562_1.html, both accessed September 2017. 82 www.trekfiction.com/help.html, accessed September 2017. 83 archiveofourown.org/tags/Star%20Trek/works, accessed September 2017. 84 archiveofourown.org/about, accessed September 2017. 85 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Transformative_Works, accessed September 2017.

319

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319

86 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhura, accessed September 2017. 87 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagus; www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:tex t:1999.04.0063:entry=pagus-cn, both accessed September 2017. 88 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_advertising, accessed September 2017. 89 Franklin Foer, “When Silicon Valley Took Over Journalism,” Atlantic, September 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-silicon-valley-tookover-journalism/534195, accessed September 2017.

320

321

Index

3D printers, 128, 130 Abbott, H. Porter, 16 ABC notation, 120 academic orthodoxies, 196 activism, 5 activity theory, 15, 67, 202 Adair, Douglas, 139 Adams, Julia, 199 adapters, 209 addons, 112 Adler Planetarium, 172 administrators, 23, 33, 37, 112, 149 Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, 169 advertising, 27, 31, 46, 133, 194, 259 agriculture, 241 Alea Iacta Est, 78, 82, 84 algorithm auditing, 28 algorithms, 246 alternative social theories, 57 amateur fiction, 275 American Anthropological Association, 196 American Birding Association, 174 American Civil Liberties Union, 29 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 36 American National Election Studies, 249 American Social Science Association, 12 American Sociological Association, 8, 196, 210 American Sociological Review, 210 Anarchy Online, 87 Ancestry.com, 187

Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, 250 anti-Semitism, 146 archaeology, 242 ArcheAge, 71, 118 archetypes, 275 Archive of Our Own, 272 ARPAnet, 205 artifacts, 242 artificial intelligence, 6 Asheron’s Call, 122 Association for Computing Machinery, 29, 210 Association of Religion Data Archives, 249 attitudes, 9 auction houses, 75, 113, 114 augmented reality, 230 avatars, 62, 71, 107 axioms, 246 backstory, 68 Bader, Christopher, 187 balance theory, 16 Bales, Robert F., 165, 213 Banaji, Mahzarin, 10 bank alts, 81, 90 bank wiring room, 7 Barker, Eileen, 200 Bartle, Richard, 66 BASIC, 101 Battle.net, 75 battlegrounds, 72 Baudrillard, Jean, 259 Baym, Nancy, 14

321

322

Index

322 Bell, Daniel, 16 Bellotti, Victoria, 226 Berlin Pirate Party, 226 beta testers, 266 birdwatching, 172 Bitcoins, 226 Blizzard Entertainment, 65 Boas, Franz, 242 Bogardus, Emory, 9 born agains, 251 Borowik, Claire, 163 bots, 138 Bourbaki, 137, 273 Bourne, Edward Gaylord, 139 Brandt, Lawrence E., 216 Brignal, Thomas, 69 British Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 12 British census, 185 British Interplanetary Society, 35, 43 Browman, David, 146 browser, 22 Bruckner, Hannah, 199 Bruggeman, Jeroen, 261 Buckley, William F., 200 Burgess, Ernest W., 45 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 82 Burton, Orville Vernon, 18 Bush, Vannevar, 151 bytes, 242 canon, 154 capitalism, 12, 147, 228 Carroll, John M., 226 Castells, Manuel, 16 celebrity, 146 census, 71 CensusPlus, 73 character, 71 Chessmen of Mars, 82 Children of God, 3, 4, 161 China, 228 Christian social science, 199 Ciment, Melvin, 216 citizen science, 4, 42, 99, 166–203, 251 citizen technology, 4 Civil War, 186, 188 clans, 87 class, 63 climate change, 232 cognitive dissonance theory, 196 cognitive science, 202, 219, 241, 249, 276

Cole, Robert, 123 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 247 collaboration, 99 collaborative filtering, 254 collaborators, 166 collective behavior, 35 comics, 184 common ground, 127 Common Rule, 196, 203, 209 communes, 162, 187 community of practice, 178 compensators, 248 competing civilizations, 268 computational neuroscience, 202 Computational Social Networks, 220 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 29 computer games, 231 computer science, 3 computer simulations, 17 computing magazines, 101 Comte, Auguste, 199 concordance, 251 Concordia sailboats, 50 conflicts of interest, 149, 218 consensus, 155 conservative politicians, 231 continuous deployment, 32 Contractor, Noshir S., 19 contributors, 193 controversy, 28 convergence, 1, 12 convergence movement, 1 Cooley, Charles Horton, 6 copyleft, 123 copyright, 123, 228 copyright laws, 55 core and periphery, 123 correlation coefficients, 25, 141, 179, 250 cosplay, 131 Cowan, Paul, 147 Crichton, Michael, 57 criminology, 162 cross-cultural research, 140 crowdfunding, 266 crowdsourcing, 166 crowdworkers, 4 Crowston, Kevin, 182 cults, 59 cultural archetypes, 5 cultural conflict, 202 cultural frameworks, 261

323

Index cultural lag, 242 cultural objects, 243 cultural relativism, 135, 203, 242 cultural science, 5, 241, 276 cultural structures, 240 cultural trends, 61 culture, 241 culture shock, 244 culture wars, 62 Cunningham, Ward, 134 Curse, 114 curvilinearity, 11 cutscenes, 83 cyberattacks, 128 Cybernetics, 15 Dalton, Melville, 45 Dark Age of Camelot, 88, 266 Daughters of the American Revolution, 194 Daybreak Game Company, 73 decommercialization of culture, 272, 275 defectors, 163 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 151 delinquency, 253 demand characteristics, 199 democratic governments, 204 denial of service attacks, 128 deplorables, 236 deviance, 163 Diakopoulos, Nicholas, 29 dialectology, 251 Diamond Age, 269, 276 Dickson, William John, 7 differential association theory, 16 digital government, 4, 204–240, 251 Digital Government Program, 215 Digital Library Initiative, 14, 151 disembodied appeals, 248 distributed manufacturing, 133 divergence, 1 documentation, 108 Dollard, John, 245 Dungeons and Dragons, 66, 82 Dungeons and Dragons Online, 69, 122 Durkheim, Emile, 12, 147 early access, 266 early adopters, 136, 209 eBird, 4, 166, 173, 183 economic dynamism, 151 economics, 202

323 e-consultation, 207 Edelstein, Alan, 147 editors, 137, 149 e-government, 205 Egypt, 93, 158 elections, 157 electorate, 227 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 268 electronic jacket, 214 elite movements, 41 embodied cultures, 242 Englebart, Doug, 151 Entropia Universe, 75 environmentalism, 69 Espionage Act of 1917, 239 ethical issues, 19 ethics, 29, 70, 153, 196, 236, 262 ethnicities, 266 ethnography, 2, 59 ethnomethodologists, 196 European Commission, 208 European Space Agency, 43 EVE Online, 167 EverQuest, 122 EverQuest II, 73 evolution, 232 evolutionary universals, 11 exchange theory, 246 exoplanets, 167 expansions, 77 experience levels, 77, 90 explanations, 246 fab labs, 129 Facebook, 2, 5, 21, 22, 27–61, 62, 125, 129, 143, 171, 178, 234, 269 faction, 63 factor analysis, 254 factor scores, 254 fake news, 208 Fallen Earth, 71 Fallout, 117 Family International, 163 family names, 190 Family, the, 161 fandom, 153 Fandom, the , 150, 209 fandoms, 57 fantasy, 58, 82 Farage, Nigel, 30 FastLane, 212 Federal Communications Commission, 229

324

Index

324 Federalist Papers, 137 feedback loops, 142 Feldman, David, 240 Fermi Paradox, 44 Festinger Leon, 196 feudalism, 228 field experiments, 196 Field Museum of Natural History, 177 fieldwork, 181 Final Fantasy XIV, 71, 86 Find A Grave, 4, 48, 187 Finke, Roger, 187 First Congregational Church of Greenwich, 48, 51, 190 Flash Gordon, 83 fluid democracy, 226 Foer, Franklin, 276 Foote, Jeremy, 150 FORTRAN, 100 fossils, 176 Free Software Foundation, 124 free speech, 31 French, 140 French, Megan, 19 Freud, Sigmund, 10 friendships, 28, 39, 236, 253 frontier, 14, 35, 151, 268 Funcom, 87 Galaxy Zoo, 169 game industry, 265 Game of Thrones, 57, 255 games, 248 gender, 252 gender distribution, 79 genealogy, 187 General Data Protection Regulation, 208 General Social Survey, 161 genres, 264 GeoCities, 21 Gergel, Darren, 150 globalization, 45, 153 Glock, Charles, 9 GoFundMe, 236 Golden Age, 257 Google, 14, 29, 47, 152, 209 Google Maps, 47 government secrecy, 215 government welfare programs, 225 Granovetter, Mark, 6, 21, 33 gravitational waves, 169 Gravity Spy, 169 Great Disappointment, 163

Greenwald, Anthony, 10 Greenwich Library Oral History Project, 47 Greenwich, Connecticut, 44–52 Gregg, Valerie, 216 griefers, 157 Griswold, Wendy, 18 groupware, 212 Guild Wars, 84 guilds, 63, 65, 82, 89, 94, 158, 266 hacker ethic, 20 hacking, 118, 128, 208, 233 Hancock, Jeff, 19 Hard Science, 255, 259 harpsichords, 269 Hatch, Mark, 129 Hawthorne effect, 10 Heine, Steven J., 201 Heinlein, Robert A., 225 Henrich, Josep, 201 hierarchical organizations, 89 Hine, Christine, 2 Hirschi, Travis, 253 Hobbes, Thomas, 69 Hollerith cards, 100 Hollerith, Herman, 204 Hollingshead, August B., 13 Homans, George, 8, 201, 244 Horgan, John, 151 Hortleder, Gerd, 207 Howard, Philip N., 18 Huizinga, Johan, 247 Human Relations Area Files, 250 human subjects, 196 humanities, 15, 129, 241 hunter-gatherer bands, 201 Huntsville, Alabama, 39 ideal types, 12, 273 ideological conflict, 31 Implicit Association Test, 10 improvisation, 20 InCider, 102 Index of E-Gov Capacity, 206 India, 124 infiltration, 196 information infrastructure, 156 Information Network on Religious Movements, 200 instances, 72 Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, 52

325

Index

325

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 211 institutional review boards, 28 intellectual property, 226 interaction chronograph, 165 interaction process analysis, 165, 213 interactive panel system, 212 Intercept, 232 interlocking directorates, 21, 34 interlocks, 21, 25, 40, 52–56, 58, 60, 95, 109, 126, 154, 175, 238 internet revolution, 1 interpreted languages, 101 interviewer effect, 33 IP address, 139 Iron Law of Oligarchy, 16, 63, 135

literary criticism, 197 literature, 252 Lloyd’s Register, 50 load balancing, 72 lobbyists, 215 local workshops, 133 Long Island Sound, 50 Lord of the Rings Online, 69, 71, 88, 118 LotRO, see Lord of the Rings Online Lovecraft, H. P., 57 Lua scripting language, 115 Lucas, George, 82 Lynd, Helen, 45 Lynd, Robert, 45

James, Andrew, 148 James, William, 16 Jarvis, Edward, 12 jetan, 82 Johnson, Scott, 78 Jones, Steve, 18 journalism, 209, 233, 276 Jung, Carl Gustav, 10, 59

MacFadden, Bruce, 177 machine learning, 170 magic circle, 247 maker movement, 3, 128, 129 makerspaces, 129 Malthus, Thomas, 69 malware, 128 Management and the Worker, 7 Markham, Annette, 14 Mars Society, 35 martial arts, 234 Martin, George R. R., 57 Marxism, 16 massively multiplayer online role-playing games, see MMORPGs; MMOs mass media, 27, 35 mass production, 272 mathematics, 140 McDougall, Walter, 36 measurement errors, 24 Mechanical Turk, 19 Memory Alpha, 150 meritocracy, 146 Metacritic, 261 method acting, 9 Metzen, Chris, 70 Michels, Robert, 16, 63, 135 Middletown, 45 Miller, Neal, 245 Minow, Newton, 136 Mirai, 128 misinformation, 229 mixed methods, 52 MMORPG.com, 263 MMORPGs, 63 MMOs, 63

Kanazawa, Satoshi, 201 Kaptelinin, Victor, 15 Karabel, Jerome, 146 Kelly, George, 99 Kennedy Space Center, 39 Kickstarter, 266 kludges, 107 knowledge networks, 14 Kraut, Robert, 135 Kuran, Timur, 240 L5 Society, 36 lag, 72 latency of response, 10 League of Legends, 3 Lee, Gwendolyn, 123 Lesk, Michael, 152 Leveque, Carolyn, 19 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 11 Ley, Willy, 36 liability, 236 Linden Labs, 104, 112 Linden Scripting Language, 101, 105, 107, 112, 115 linguistics, 250 linked-respondent surveys, 251 Linux, 122, 128

326

Index

326 mobile devices, 173, 230 modders, 117 modernity, 12 mods, 112 monopolies, 34 Moore’s Law, 211 Moreno, Jacob, 8, 17 Mosaic browser, 13 Mosteller, Frederick, 140 MovieLens, 259 movies, 23, 257 multi-agent systems, 17 multiboxing, 71 multiculturalism, 147 multiple regression, 25 Murdock, George, 250 music, 119–122, 252 musical groups, 60 musical instruments, 119 Musk, Elon, 44, 133 mutual conversion, 248

norms, 135, 162, 176, 243, 244 Nosek, Brian, 10 nostalgia groups, 46 notable alumni, 145 Noyes, John Humphrey, 91, 187 NSF, see National Science Foundation NSS, see National Space Society

Nardi, Bonnie, 15, 67, 117 National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 36, 43 National Geographic Society, 18 National Register of Historic Places, 48 National Research Council, 198 National Science Foundation, 1, 4, 13, 19, 107, 151, 177, 201, 204, 209, 268 National Security Agency, 232 National Space Institute, 36 National Space Society, 35–44, 180 natural sciences, 232 Nature, 199, 202, 230 needlecases, 243, 272 neighborhoods, 259 nerf, 83 Netflix, 5, 23, 257 New England Science Fiction Association, 254 new religious movements, 59 New Wave, 255, 259 New Zealand, 223 news media, 14 Nibble, 102 nibbles, 242 Nobel Prize, 170 nonplayer characters, 63 Nordhoff, Charles, 91 Norenzayan, Ara, 201 norm, 147 normative theory, 16

Paik, Anthony, 33 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 182 parallel behavior, 36 Park, Robert, 45 Parsons, Talcott, 11 participant observation, 81 participant observation research, 53 party lines, 7 path analysis, 25 pattern variables, 11, 70 pay it forward, 225 Pearce, Celia, 64 Peenemünde, 36 peer production, 150 peer review, 210 Perfect World, 231 Perfect World International, 150 persistent worlds, 62 personal data, 208 personal science, 99 Peterson, Richard A., 18 petitions, 157, 237 pets, 79 Pew Research Center, 198 phenomenology, 247 pick-up groups, 63 pilot projects, 212 pilot studies, 5, 26, 27, 270 Pirate Parties, 55 Pirate Parties International, 5

O’Neill, Gerard K., 36 Office of Naval Research, 214 Oneida, 187 online communities, 27, 201, 222, 231, 262, 276 online encyclopedias, 134 online forums, 111 open hardware, 125 open-source politics, 55 open-source software, 3, 99, 108, 134, 272 opinion leaders, 227 oral histories, 47, 185, 197 organizational boundaries, 127

327

Index Planet Hunters, 169, 183 playbour, 99 plugins, 119 pluralistic search, 31 Pokémon Go, 230 political advertisements, 30 political conflict, 32 political ideologies, 35, 221, 229 political movements, 205 political parties, 227 political science, 230 political systems, 157 popular culture, 58, 153, 207 Popular Science Monthly, 243 populist movements, 41 prep schools, 142 Priedhorsky, Reid, 135 priming, 199 primitive rebels, 87 prims, 105 privacy, 51, 108, 139, 195, 197 Process, the, 59, 245 professionalism, 99 Project Discovery, 167 promoters, 209 propaganda, 34, 264 Protestantism, 147 Psathas, George, 196 pseudonyms, 108, 117, 140, 152, 163 psychodrama, 8 public figures, 53, 236 public spaces, 195 Publius, 137, 273 Purdam, Kingsley, 195 PvE, 72 PvP, 72, 78 qualitative methods, 15, 71 quantitative methods, 59, 71 questionnaires, 103 quests, 65 race, 63, 68, 73 racial homophily, 33 Rajlich, Václav, 244 random samples, 168 Realm Pop, 75 reciprocity, 225 recommender systems, 5, 254, 259 recruitment, 52 redirects, 135 Redlich, Frederick C., 13

327 religion, 136, 153, 200, 231, 246, 253 religious cognition, 244 religious movements, 57, 161 repaganization, 275 research subjects, 183 research with human subjects, 28 Riecken, Henry W., 196 Riverside Yacht Club, 51 Roco, Mihail, 1, 156 Roethlisberger, Fritz J., 7 role-playing, 2, 3, 60, 131 Roper, Elmo, 45 Roy, William G., 22 Ryan John, 18 same-name pairs, 24 Sanchagrin, Kenneth, 33 Sandvig, Christian, 28 Savanna Principle, 201, 202 Schachter, Stanley, 196 Schwartz, Barry, 51 science, 17 Science, 199, 202 science fiction, 2, 82, 87, 153, 254, 268 Science Gossip, 186 Scientific American, 181 scraping, 21 screenshots, 117 search engines, 134 Second Life, 3, 85, 104, 136, 213, 214 Secret World, The, 88 sects, 136 secularization, 147, 246, 275 security, 51 self-expression, 240 Semuels, Alan, 45 server system, 72 set theory, 140 shadow banning, 31 shared membership, 25 sharing, 129 Shaw, Aaron, 150 Shils, Edward A., 11 Shirk, Jennifer, 183 Singer, Larry, 135 Skinner, B. F., 244 slavery, 137 social class inequality, 45 social cohesion, 51 social conflict, 197 social disorganization, 162, 248 social distance, 9

328

Index

328 social dynamics, 108 social history, 187 social implosion, 162, 248 social media, 6, 32, 33, 61, 135, 146, 208, 237, 240 social movements, 15, 26, 33, 35, 44, 52, 61, 150, 205 social networks, 15, 25, 152, 241 social order, 167 social psychology, 199, 201, 202, 219 social relations, 11, 243 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 15 social separation, 51 social status, 51 social structure, 2, 10, 27, 49, 107, 122, 241 Social-Computational Systems Program, 219 Socialism, 12 socially intelligent computing, 219 societal elites, 198 sociogram, 8, 15, 25, 40 sociometry, 8, 10, 12, 199, 250, 273, 276 solo play, 79 Sony Online Entertainment, 73 Sorokin, Pitirim, 69, 93 source code, 101 Soviet Union, 36 space opera, 82 space telescope, 168 SpaceX, 40, 43 Spengler, Oswald, 69 Spickard, James, 201 sports, 248 Sputnik, 36 stakeholders, 276 Stallman, Richard, 123 Stanislavski, Constantin, 9, 71 Star Trek, 4, 150, 152, 268, 273 Star Trek Online, 84, 150 Star Wars, 152, 230, 261 Star Wars: The Old Republic, 82, 118 Stark effect, 253 Stark, Rodney, 9, 17, 244, 253 statistical measures, 59 status competition, 143 STEM, 177 stigmergy, 51, 108 stratification, 59 Striegel, Aaron, 220 structural anthropology, 11 structural functionalism, 11 subcultures, 58, 178, 247

Summer Youth Festival, 48 surrealism, 57 survey methods, 254 Survey2000, 18 suspension of disbelief, 247 sustainability, 181 SWTOR, see Star Wars: The Old Republic Tale in the Desert, 2, 3, 93, 118, 156, 237 technological determinism, 35, 216 technological revolution, 268 telephone, 7 teleport, 106 television, 136, 165 tension with the sociocultural environment, 136 Terra Nova, 97 Terveen, Loren, 135 Thrasher, Frederic, 162 time banking, 5, 222 timeline, 32 Tolkien, J. R. R., 57, 69, 119 Tonn, Bruce, 240 topic areas, 227 Tørnquist, Ragnar, 87 Torvalds, Linus, 122 Traag, V. A., 261 transcendence, 153 transhumanism, 2, 57 tribalism, 69 trinity, 70 Trump, Donald, 236, 237, 239 truth, 16 Truthy, 229 Tully Monsters, 177 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 151 Turning Point USA, 30 Uitermark, Justus, 261 unconventional ideas, 30 undercounts, 85 unified social science, 12 unit of analysis, 6–10 United Nations, 205 United States Constitution, 137 United States Pirate Party, 226 universalism, 197 upper-class life, 50 Urbas, Joseph M., 102 user experience, 30 username, 138 utopia, 93, 158, 187, 222

329

Index values, 9 van Valey, Thomas, 69 vandalism, 234 Vanguard, 71 vast wasteland, 136, 165 Veblen, Thorsten, 222 VenueGen, 213 Verein für Raumschiffahrt, 36 virtual cemeteries, 194 virtual world database, 72 virtual worlds, 62–98, 136, 160, 237 von Braun, Wernher, 36 von Hippel, Eric, 123 von Krogh, Georg, 123 Wales, Jimmy, 135 Wallace, David L., 140 Warcraft Realms, 73 Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, 69 Wastebook, 230 Weber, Max, 12, 147 webring, 20 Western Electric Company, 7 Westworld, 22, 57 whistleblower, 239 Wiggins, Andrea, 182 Wikia, 150 Wikipedia, 3, 134, 165, 233 wikis, 134–165

329 WikiScanner, 139 Williams, Stephen, 146 Wilson, Christopher, 29 Winner, Reality, 5, 232, 268 Winnicott, Donald Woods, 67 Witte, James, 18 workshops, 272 World of Warcraft, 3, 65–82, 112, 156, 226, 231 World Science Fiction Convention, 100, 254 World War I, 186 World War II, 15, 36 WoW, see World of Warcraft Wowhead, 66 Wowpedia, 66, 113 WoWWiki, 66 Wright, Nathan, 18 xFamily, 161 Xsyon, 71 yacht clubs, 49, 61 yachts, 45, 50 Yee, Nick, 67, 83 Young, Michael, 146 YouTube, 165 Zooniverse, 4, 166, 169, 184 Zuckerberg, Mark, 27, 32, 143

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STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES (continued from page iii) Mariela Szwarcberg, Mobilizing Poor Voters Luke M. Gerdes, ed., Illuminating Dark Networks Silvia Domínguez and Betina Hollstein, eds., Mixed Methods in Studying Social Networks Dean Lusher, Johan Koskinen, and Garry Robins, eds., Exponential Random Graph Models for Social Networks: Theory, Methods, and Applications Sean F. Everton, Disrupting Dark Networks Wouter de Nooy, Andrej Mrvar, and Vladimir Batagelj, Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek Noah E. Friedkin and Eugene C. Johnsen, Social Influence Network Theory Zeev Maoz, The Networks of Nations: The Evolution and Structure of International Networks, 1816–2001 Martin Kilduff and David Krackhardt, Interpersonal Networks in Organizations Ari Adut, On Scandal: Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art Robert C. Feenstra and Gary G. Hamilton, Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility:  Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture Peter Carrington, John Scott, and Stanley Wasserman, Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis Patrick Doreian, Vladimir Batagelj, and Anujka Ferligoj, Generalized Blockmodeling James Lincoln and Michael Gerlach, Japan’s Network Economy Robert Franzosi, From Words to Numbers Sean O’Riain, The Politics of High-Tech Growth Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Second Edition)

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