Discourse Architecture and Very Large-scale Conversation

Mailing lists, newsgroups, and weblogs are just three examples of a large set of new discussion forums that are sited on the Internet. In these forums citizens across the world conduct a new form of many-to-many, cross-border relations. New forms of governance and collective action are taking place on the Internet and national and international governmental and non-governmental organizations propose to initiate additional forms of “cyber-democracy” or “e-government.” Unfortunately, no existing theories of discussion, dialogue or the “public sphere” are adequate to the task of articulating the form or significance of collective discussions that often involve hundreds or thousands of people. This chapter proposes a new name for these online, many-tomany exchanges: very large-scale conversation, or VLSC. A set of theoretical insights and computational tools are proposed for exploring VLSC. The hybrid practice of designing software and articulating theories of VLSC is described as discourse architecture. The Conversation Map -a software system for summarizing, visualizing and browsing VLSC -is presented and several, sample maps of VLSC are discussed. Introduction: What is Discourse Architecture? Historically, new spaces for public discussion have been invented every few centuries (e.g., the agora, plaza, town square, town hall, cafe, newspaper, etc.). The introduction of electrical and electronic technologies in the twentieth century accelerated the rate of change in public spaces to a pace measured in decades (e.g., film, radio, television). Now with the increasing ubiquity of computer networks new spaces for public discussion and exchange are invented, introduced, and updated on an almost continual basis (e.g., email, newsgroups, IRC, the weblogs, instant messaging, Napster, Gnutella, etc.). ♦ Appears in Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen, Editors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press/Social Science Research Council, 2005). This exponential increase in the rate of change has reached the escape velocity of the disciplines and professions normally accorded the responsibility to design, build and analyze public spaces. No longer is it only architects, civil engineers, and urban planners who design spaces for public discussion. Symptomatic of this transformation is a proliferation of new architectures of computers and networks that are not designed by traditional architects; e.g., computer architectures, network architectures, information architectures. Conversely traditional architecture has become increasingly involved in efforts to extend its methodologies to cover computer networks by rendering them as "cyberspaces." The gaps between discourse, code, and architecture have now been bridged to the extent that it is crucial for us to understand issues such as the legal ramifications of network architectures on free speech. Today public spaces for discussion include bits as well as bricks and boards. This convergence of language and architecture has frequently produced an assemblage that fails like the Tower of Babel. Discourse specialists (e.g., linguists, sociologists, legal scholars, political scientists, etc.) have not often enjoyed the reputation of great designers of spaces and architectures. On the other hand, artists, designers, engineers, and architects -renowned for their abilities to envision and execute the configuration and mixing of spaces and materials -have often been typified as inept in the skills of writing and speaking. But, we are now at a point in time when the future of the public space depends upon the ability to mix discourse and architecture in a new area of endeavor called discourse architecture. Network architecture is the computer science of connecting machines to machines. Information architecture is primarily practiced by librarians, database, and web designers to connect people to machines by making it easy for people to find information on networked machines. Discourse architecture is the practice of designing environments to connect people to people through networked computers. Or, more specifically, discourse architecture is the practice of designing networked environments to support conversation, discussion, and exchange between people. Prior work in this area includes that of the original Discourse Architecture Laboratory, a research group at Apple Computer. Closely related is a large variety of work in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Most recently a number of research groups have emerged to focus on what has been called social computing and social informatics. Groups of this sort now exist at a number of industry research labs, universities and non-profit organizations. Unlike many scholars who work in CSCW and CMC, researchers in the area of social computing have identified earlier work in architecture and urban design as useful and interesting for the design of networked spaces. Discourse architecture is an area of social computing in which environments for discussion are of primary importance. The practice of discourse architecture entails two kinds of work. One kind of work concerns the extension and use of methods from art and design. The second kind of work employs and further develops ideas from the humanities and social sciences: (1) As a practice of design, discourse architecture concerns the design and implementation of new computer network technologies for discourse; that is, the means to shape the conversation that takes place within a given system. Just as physical architecture facilitates certain activities and inhibits others (compare, for instance, the exchanges supported by amphitheaters versus those supported by cafes), so do system architectures facilitate certain types of conversations. For example, media architectures like television broadcasting facilitate one-to-many exchanges, but do not directly support a democratic, many-to-many exchange between people. In contrast, the Usenet newsgroup network protocol, for instance, does support many-to-many exchanges. Prior work exists in the fields of architecture, urban design, and the arts. (2) The criteria for evaluating any given discourse architecture depends upon some means to critique the form, character, content and extent of the supported discourse. Thus, discourse architecture is concerned with the structure of conversation itself; i.e., with how the utterances of a conversation interrelate and build upon one another. Discourse architects are interested in analytical techniques for identifying conversational structure and explicating the forces that shape it. Relatively little research has been done to understand how network architectures influence existing patterns of discourse or facilitate new patterns. Furthermore, the work that has been done is spread across a wide array of humanities and social science disciplines such as linguistics, literature, theater, philosophy, anthropology, communications, computer science, information science, political science, psychology, rhetoric, and sociology, and draws on diverse theories and methods. Consequently, the practice of discourse architecture entails the extension, synthesis, and production of new knowledge appropriate to disciplines of the social sciences, arts, and humanities. This chapter is an introduction to discourse architecture. It is an introduction by example. First a new area of discourse is identified; an area that will be referred to as very large-scale conversation (VLSC). It is usually conducted on the Internet through the exchange of email. VLSC facilitates many-to-many exchanges between citizens across international borders. I argue that VLSC poses a fundamental challenge to existing social science methodologies because it constitutes a different scale of conversational interaction, a scale that has not been previously addressed by social science. I propose a computationally-enabled means to understand and theorize VLSC and illustrate this proposal with a prototype piece of software, the Conversation Map. Finally, I argue that the Conversation Map is not just a tool, but is also a technology of the self, a means of self-reflection. Very Large-Scale Conversation On the Internet there are now very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) in which hundreds, even thousands, of people exchange messages across international borders in daily, many-to-many communications. VLSC is an emergent communication medium that engenders new social and linguistic connections between people. It poses fundamental challenges to the analytical tools and descriptive methodologies of social science previously developed to understand conversations of a much smaller scale. VLSC is both a well-known phenomenon but also, simultaneously, something as yet largely unexamined by designers and social scientists. On the one hand, VLSC is well known in the form of busy Usenet newsgroups and large, electronic mailing lists and weblogs. For participants and observers alike, VLSC manifests itself as huge lists of messages in a conventional email reader like RN, Eudora, or Netscape Messenger. Figure 1: Netscape Messenger – a typical, contemporary view of VLSC On the other hand, VLSC is largely unexamined. What does it mean to have a conversation that involves hundreds or thousands of people? Existing theories of conversation and discourse do not cover this scale of conversation. Moreover, very little design work for VLSC has been done. For example, why is VLSC usually represented as a long list of email messages? Isn't something better possible? In fact, with a better theory of VLSC, better software for navigating VLSCs can be designed. Detailed, micro-analyses of face-to-face conversation usually involve a very different kind of work and produce a very different type of research result – i.e., a very different type of knowledge -than do macro-scale analyses of discourses involving thousands or millions of people. This micro/macro divide is a recurrent one in many of the social sciences and has been widely discussed in, for example, economics and sociology. Bridging this divide for the analysis of VLSCs is necessary because, on the one hand, the phenomenon under examination is macro-scale by definition; but, on the other hand, one of the most ethically important motivations for analyzing VLSCs is to give participants a means to find their way and locate their position in a VLSC. Consequently, standard social scientific methods of dealing with macro-scale phenomenon by working with norms and averages are unworkable because they risk effacing the contributions of particular individuals. I will argue that a bridge can be found between micro and macro scale analyses of online conversations. This bridge is the lexicon or what might be called the “thesaurus” of a group conversation. On the micro-scale, contributions to a conversation are judged to be coherent and cohesive partially according to whether or not they are taken to be “on topic” by the participants. Knowledge of deviation or convergence with a given topic is based on knowledge of a lexicon; i.e., according to the relationships between and the definitions of words. But, over the course of the lifetime of a group, new (e.g., slang) words are coined, some words gain new meanings and others lose their currency, connotations, or the controversy that surrounds them. Thus, conversation both depends upon and changes the lexicon or “thesaurus” of a group. This conceptualization of VLSC -as the substrate and catalyst of community -is concordant with a large amount of work in sociolinguistics and the sociology of knowledge. Roughly speaking, what characterizes many of these sociolinguistic and sociological approach to conversation and discourse is this: through the production and reproduction of a way of speaking and/or writing about certain, pivotal subjects a group is formed and distinguishes itself from other groups. Thus, chemists in the eighteenth century distinguished themselves from alchemists by developing a new discourse that we now recognize as the science of chemistry. Rather than talking about water as an essential element, chemists talk of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen. So, a new way of speaking and writing simultaneously produces a new group (e.g., chemists) and unravels or divides itself from a preexisting group (e.g., alchemists). A way of speaking and writing (re)produces limits and possibilities for the way a subject can be spoken and/or written about and, simultaneously, (re)produces a social structure (e.g., a group or community). This way of thinking about the process and product of verbal interaction is well-known in, for instance, conversation analysis. This way of describing the product or production of written and conversational forms has been termed "a discourse" by various European “continental” theorists: ... continental discourse theorists such as Foucault, Lyotard, Donzelot, Pêcheux, and De Certeau tend to use the term "discourse" to refer to relatively well-bounded areas of social knowledge. So, at any given historical conjuncture, it is only possible to write, speak, or think about a given social object (madness, for example) in specific ways and not in others. "A discourse" would then be whatever constrains -but also enables -writing, speaking, and thinking within such specific historical limits. Thus while a discourse can be thought of as linguistic in one sense, it also has to be treated in terms of the conditions of possibility of knowing a specific social object (McHoul 1994: 944-945). From this continental perspective it is, therefore, possible to talk about, for instance, "the discourse of chemistry." This usage of the term "discourse" (i.e., the use of the term discourse preceded by a definite or indefinite article like "the" or "a") is sometimes at odds or appears more-or-less incomprehensible to practitioners of other sorts of Anglo-American forms of discourse analysis. In her book that compares and contrasts six different Anglo-American approaches to discourse analysis (speech act theory, pragmatics, ethnomethodology, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, and variation theory), Deborah Schiffrin states Discourse has often been viewed in two different ways: a structure, i.e., a unit of language that is larger than the sentence; and the realization of functions, i.e. as the use of language for social, expressive, and referential purposes (Schiffrin 1994: 339). In other words, from an Anglo-American perspective, "discourse" is a name for a sequence of sentences (a structure) or a certain kind of language use (a function). But, from a European, continental perspective, "discourse" is either the result of language use or the background conditions or context for a given sequence of sentences. Borrowing the trope of "figure/ground" from art history, one might say the difference between scholarly approaches to discourse analysis arise from the use of the term "discourse" to describe figure versus use of the term "discourse" to describe ground. Or, alternatively, the conflict involves the use of "discourse" as a name for text versus the use of "discourse" as a name for context. Rather than sort out this knotty conflation and conflict of terminology, I will try to find a way around it. From a continental perspective one might talk about how a VLSC produces or reproduces a given or new discourse. From an Anglo-American perspective one might say that a VLSC is a discourse. Instead, I will simply state that a VLSC produces, reproduces, and relies on a set of social and semantic relationships. In the language of mathematics, one might say that there exists a mutually recursive relationship between a VLSC and a set of social and semantic networks. Or, one might say, the coherence of a VLSC depends upon social and semantic background knowledge, but, this background knowledge is also, at least partly, a product of the VLSC. Three Dimensions of Conversational Commonsense For conversations of a smaller scale (i.e., smaller than VLSC) it is possible to see when the background knowledge of a conversation is being abused or flouted. Commonsense, conversational, background knowledge can be described in a variety of ways; e.g., as a set of common associations and common terms, as a set of social and semantic networks, or -as will be elaborated below -as a set of meta-functions named the interpersonal, the textual, and the ideational meta-functions by Michael Halliday (Halliday 1994: 179). Divergences or differences of routine, conversational, background knowledge can produce misunderstandings and conflict, but they can also produce comedy. Consider the following one-liner from comedian Stephen Wright: I was driving down the highway one morning and I saw a billboard advertising a restaurant that said "Breakfast any time" so I stopped and ordered French toast in the Renaissance. The social coherence of a group underwrites conversation and depends upon a number of things. Semantics is just one of these things, but Wright's joke illustrates how the production of common terms -a shared semantics -is important to conversation. If the terms of conversation are followed, but the conventional turn-taking "rules" are not, another sort of nonsense is produced. Lewis Carroll illustrates the "rules" of riddles when he has the characters of Wonderland violate them. “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again. “No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?” “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter. “Nor I,” said the March Hare. Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers” (Carroll 1960: 97). The common terms and rules of conversation are tightly coupled in the production of the cohesion of a conversation. When the cohesion is deliberately undone, the conversation is unhinged as this snippet from Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play The Bald Soprano illustrates. Suddenly, in this dialogue sequence, all of the people being discussed are named Bobby Watson: Mrs. Smith: "But who would take care of the children? You know very well that they have a boy and a girl. What are their names?" Mr. Smith: "Bobby and Bobby like their parents. Bobby Watson’s uncle, old Bobby Watson, is a rich man and very fond of the boy. He might very well pay for Bobby’s education." Mrs. Smith: "That would be proper. And Bobby Watson’s aunt, old Bobby Watson, might very well, in her turn, pay for the education of Bobby Watson, Bobby Watson’s daughter. That way Bobby, Bobby Watson’s mother, could remarry. Has she anyone in mind?" Mr. Smith: "Yes, a cousin of Bobby Watson’s." Mrs. Smith: "Who? Bobby Watson?" Mr. Smith: "Which Bobby Watson do you mean?" Mrs. Smith: "Why, Bobby Watson, the son of old Bobby Watson, the late Bobby Watson’s other uncle” (Ionesco 1958). Obviously, writers and comics know and bend the common terms and rules of conversation in order to produce these sorts of effects. Using insights of this sort, scholars like Roman Jakobsen have been able to explain the linguistic workings of avantgarde artistic literature (Jakobsen 1985), but the wittiness of more common performances also often depends upon an explicit understanding of how conversation engenders social cohesion and/or how the norms can be manipulated to reveal or break the underpinnings of social cohesion. It is equally as obvious that anyone who finds these manipulations funny or absurd has a set of well-developed intuitions about the rules and terms of conversation: the commonsense knowledge of conversation. Each of the comedic examples above illustrates a different meta-function of language. According to Michael Halliday, language has at least three meta-functions: (1) ideational: language can represent ideas; (2) interpersonal: language functions as a medium of exchange between people; and, (3) textual: language functions to organize, structure, and hold itself together; this function allows the various devices of cohesion, including citation, ellipsis, anaphoric reference, etc. to be used (Halliday 1994: 179). The Steven Wright joke shows what can happen when the ideational meta-function breaks down. The selection from Alice in Wonderland illustrates the breakdown of the interpersonal meta-function. And, in Ionesco's dialogue the textual meta-function is thwarted by a breakdown of lexical cohesion. The point of these examples is simply to give examples of what might be considered the three different dimensions of commonsense knowledge about conversations that must be in place for a conversation -and so, transitively, a group of interlocutors -to hold together. When one or all of these sorts of conversational background knowledge fall apart, the result can be funny. But, by only citing the absurd and the comedic it is difficult to picture what can be lost if the terms or rules of conversation are questioned or broken. While these questions and breaks can be funny, they can also arouse anger or mistrust. Harold Garfinkel asked his students to document this, the breakdown of common terms assumed in conversation; i.e., to document the breakdown of the ideational metafunction. In the course of everyday conversation, Garfinkel's students questioned the assumed, common terms. The results were graphic. In the following accounts Garfinkel's students play the role of the so-called "experimenter" (E). The subject was telling the experimenter, a member of the subject's car pool, about having had a flat tire while going to work the previous day. (S) I had a flat tire. (E) What do you mean, you had a flat tire? She appeared momentarily stunned. Then she answered in a hostile way: "What do you mean, 'What do you mean?' A flat tire is a flat tire. That is what I meant. Nothing special. What a crazy question!"