Gay marriage impacts everyone

Congratulations to gays and the marriage equality movement for a major victory in New York. But rather than marching along in a pride parade, I need to be contrarian and point out one small but significant area in which the opponents of gay marriage actually have a point. It's not a decisive point by any means -- I still favor allowing gays to marry and so should you -- but it nags at me.

The pro-gay-marriage position is based on the idea of individual and equal rights, and a standard argument for it is that allowing gays to marriage cannot have any conceivable impact on heterosexual marriages (eg here or here). This seems very wrong to me. Despite this argument generally coming from the left, its underpinnings are identical to the libertarian/conservative dismissal of social reality, put in its starkest form by Margaret Thatcher's line "there is no society; there are only individuals". Well, no. Society is a real thing, we are all involved in it in one way or another, and it is involved with our lives. Marriage is a social institution, not merely something two individuals decide of their own free and independent wills to do. This is true of pretty much everything, but it's glaringly obvious in the case of marriage, which comes with a huge set of legal, social, and cultural baggage.

So extending the bounds of marriage to include same-sex couples is in fact a big change that impacts everyone, whether or not they themselves are going to get hitched to someone with similar genes and plumbing. Conservatives are right to sense this. Society works by means of norms and institutions, which are very real things (and sorry if I sound like a college freshman who has been bowled over by his Soc 101 course, but my naive and amateurish interest in the sociological won't be still) and changing them changes the world for everyone.

Now, that particular bit of truth is quite separate from the idea that such a change is necessarily pernicious. And even if it was, those theoretical harms would have to be balanced with the very real harms done to individuals by denying them equal rights.

But proponents of marriage equality should be careful in their arguments. Extending individual freedom is great, but pretending that it doesn't have any impact on society is a bad tactic because it isn't true, and people (including the people who need to be convinced in order to continue the legislative victories) know that it isn't true.

The issue is complicated by the fact that marriage generally has a religious and a secular component, but they are tightly interwoven. Proposals to split it up and get government out of the marriage business entirely and just have it manage the legal relationship of civil union made a lot of sense, but that's not the way things have been playing out. Marriage has remained a unified concept and that's where the battle is taking place, and if our side wins let's not pretend that there was a ground to fight over and the other side has not lost something.

The larger issue is that the left should not be in the business of making libertarian arguments and ceding the ground of society to conservatives.

Performing Ourselves

Sherry Turkle was on the Colbert show a few nights back, plugging her new book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. I'll reserve judgement on the book -- you really can't summarize any sort of serious thesis in that context, and I have to say you have to be pretty brave to go up against Colbert. But I found one remark jarring: she complained that "people are performing on a Facebook profile...adolescents suffer from performance exhaustion". I immediately thought about Erving Goffman, who pointed out that performance is characteristic of all social interaction. And Colbert called her on it as well, presumably without the benefit of a deep knowledge of sociology.

I don't know if it's marketing or something else, but pop-tech books all seem to get slotted into the "tech is going to make us unto gods" or "tech is killing our souls" buckets. I'm pretty sure Turkle's work is more subtle than that, but she certainly seems to fall in the latter category here. Other recent entrants in this genre include Jaron Lanier (reviewed here), Andrew Keen, and Nicholas Carr. I find this irritating and simplistic. Why do the effects of technology have to be good or bad? Can't they simply be different?

So, what is it about the performance aspect of Facebook that might be objectionable? Well, for one thing, it's a much less subtle, less rich medium than face-to-face communication. F2F performances can be improvised, adjusted to situations, respond to the performances of others in an intricate dance. Performing on Facebook or Twitter is by contrast a rather crude affair (for instance, there's no analog for eye contact), which tends to degenerate into trivia and naked self-advertisement. You have far less control over context -- most of the problems with Facebook seem to revolve around how it collapses social contexts into a formless blob, resulting either in embarassment (if you allow stuff to escape from its proper context) or repression (if you limit yourself to interaction that is appropriate for every possible audience)*. This however is not a new problem:

Socrates: Writing, you know, Phaedrus, has this strange quality about it, which makes it really like painting: the painter's products stand before us quite as though they were alive; but if you question them, they maintain a solemn silence. So, too, with written words: you might think they spoke as though they made sense, but if you ask them anything about what they are saying, if you wish an explanation, they go on telling you the same thing, over and over forever. Once a thing is put in writing, it rolls about all over the place, falling into the hands of those who have no concern with it just as easily as under the notice of those who comprehend; it has no notion of whom to address or whom to avoid. And when it is ill-treated or abused as illegitimate, it always needs its father to help it, being quite unable to protect or help itself.

Facebook and Twitter identities are a strange mix of oral and written communication styles. Frankly, it's way too early in the evolution of digital social networks, or whatever you want to call them, to say what they are ultimately going to do to our souls.

I give Turkle a lot of credit for being one of first humanist-type people to take the sociology of digital technology seriously. Now of course that's a whole industry, but she has been at it for decades. Unfortunately, getting old in this world may mean you can't keep current with what the kids are up to these days (as a youngish greybeard myself I am acutely aware of this problem). I'm pretty sure that the critics are right and the displacement of traditional media by the digital world entails the loss of some valuable things. But obviously it also creates a great many new and wonderful things, most of which have yet to be invented. The human soul and persona will adapt to them as it always does.

*[update: this was written before Google+ Circles came along to "solve" this problem. Why that don't actually seem to help will have to be a topic for another post.]

Philosophy bites, sociology sucks

I must be slow, because I've listened to the Philosophy Bites podcast for awhile now, and it just dawned on me that the name is a double entendre...their logo should have given it away:



I find it only sometimes of interest, but I appreciate the brevity, and it's a good test of a philosopher if they can make a sensible point in 15 minutes or so. The most recent episode (Joshua Knobe on experimental philosophy) was pretty good, particularly the "Knobe effect" which showed that people's models intentionality and of morality are all scrambled together in interesting ways. (My interpretation of the results is that people are just much more primed to assign blame, especially moral culpability, than they are to give credit).

I actually am kind of a fan of sociology these days, but there's an awful lot of fluff there, and the field has a bad reputation. Let's put it this way -- of any field, it has perhaps the highest gap between importance of subject matter and the intellectual tools available to grapple with it.

Personæ

My friend Amy Bruckman has been talking about her failed attempts to maintain separate online personalities for her personal and professional lives. Me too. I have a very vague and gauzy separation of the different facets of my online life, and those from my real life one. (see here also, and look, it's in the NY Times today).

It got me thinking about how I'd like to divide up my online life, assuming I had infinite time to maintain separate masks to different parts of the world:

- personal life: family, friends, real-world activities
- work life: computation, biology, hacking, the internet, business
- intellectual life: thoughts on economics, history, philosophy, polticial science, and other fields I take an amateur's interest in
- cultural life: books, movies, music, etc
- spiritual life: the deepest longings of the soul

Each of these spheres defines a separate imaginary audience, has separate conventions and separate rules for what constitutes an interesting or acceptable interaction. But the boundaries are blurry, the categories collapse into each other (and in some cases could be subdivided further). I can't keep these separate, yet they don't really fit together. I feel like my real self is something like the union of these sets, but discretion indicates I should only post material that is in the intersection of them, which is pretty close to empty.

Of course, the real irony is that the only reason to have a blog is to scream to the world, "me, me, look at me, I'm so interesting, I'm so great". If so, what's the point of hiding yourself behind a set of masks? But you could say something similar about human communication in general. We are always putting on a mask, staging an act, constructing a persona. The difference is that in the physical world we can use the structure of the physical environment to manage and cue the different roles we play.

The great sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a great deal about the techniques people use to stage their public life, in books like Interaction Ritual and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. For example, he talks about the distinction between front and back regions, based on the areas within theater. On stage, a certain performance takes place, back stage the artifice is relaxed, but other types of performance take place. Goffman identifies similar structures in work life, for example, a medical office, where certain rules of conduct apply in areas where patients are, and others where doctors and staff congregate behind the scenes (or a the seating area and kitchen of a restaurant, to take an even clearer example).

Goffman talks about how different roles are played out in different contexts and how the tension between front and back areas is exploited by (for example) shills, who are members of the team putting on a performance who pretend to be members of the audience to channel energies of the actual audience memebers. In the land of the internet, shills are sometimes called sock puppets, which doesn't quite capture the institutionalization of such activity as found in casinos and elsewhere. Lee Siegel got mocked and fired for his sock-puppetry (although he hasn't lost his pundit licensesince he still publishes thumbsucker books and essays in the NY Times), but could he plausibly claim that he was just giving vent to the separate personas that we all have. Would the offense have been the same if the New Republic hired an intern to post enthusiastic comments on his blog (eg, if there was a real separate person performing the role)?

The Internet erases all boundaries and cueing strategies, and as more social life is conducted through social media it is harder to know how to act. Are we onstage or backstage, and what is the nature of the show we are in? Random bits of banter that people exchange as teenagers come back to haunt them as adults, in job applications or other formalized situations. The deep structure of social life is dissolved; we're left putting on an act without knowing who it's for; whether at any particular time its supposed to be serious or funny, formal or informal.

The old-school internet didn't have these problems. "Social media" consisted of email lists; the archives of such things were generally private, and it was no problem to present one face to a list concerned with knowlege representation and another that dealt with anarcho-surrealist art, if those happened to be two of your interests. The advent of Google and Facebook has changed that. Is this some kind of unstoppable dynamic, sort of like how global capitalism flattens boundaries and winds up with everybody connected and competing? Or will there be a reaction, with people withdrawing and figuring out ways to put boundaries around parts of their lives?

Just in the last few weeks, Facebook has been subject to severe criticism for its increasingly cavalier approach to privacy. Durkheim (via Goffman) sums up why:

The human personality is a sacred thing; one does not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.

Goffman's work partly undermines this idea. In his detailed descriptions of social interaction, the persona is a carefully forged tool for getting a job done, a construct, a mask. The sacred part is hidden inside somewhere, occasionally shining through, protected by the concentric boundaries of social space. Because Facebook and other social media blithely destroy these boundaries, they are in effect desecrators.

[update: found an academic treatment of this problem: The problem of conflicting social spheres: effects of network structure on experienced tension in social network sites, by Jens Binder et al]

The Social Construction of Scientific Sausage

[updated below]

Bruno Latour is a sociologist of science best known for his insistence that scientific facts are constructed rather than discovered. He's widely reviled by scientists and critics of postmodernity; I rather like his work myself and feel that it's usually misinterpreted. Anyway, my guess is he's laughing his Gallic ass off right now at the so-called Climategate affair, which seems like a perfect test case for his point of view.

Thanks to the acts of some hackers, we got to see some politicized science construction in action. The scientific consensus around climate change is revealed to be the result of an ongoing human process, involving a variety of academic politics and a few somewhat shady-sounding practices, including:

• applying pressure to journals to keep conflicting articles out of press
• instructing people to delete emails, possibly in violation of the law
• applying fudge factors to data to make it conform to theory

It appears that at least in this case the making of science is like the making of laws or sausage: not for the squeamish. The import of any of this stuff is up for contention. Is it improper? Unusual, or just normal behind-the-scenes stuff? Does it imply anything at all about the physical facts of the matter? After a couple of hours of scanning the web and looking at some of the email and code that was stolen, I don't know. I have a couple of insights which I may post about later; for now I'm just interested in the sociology.

One thing is clear -- it's pretty clear that even a relatively science-literate layperson can't hope to have a reasonable opinion on this stuff which relies only on raw data and not its suspect interpretations. I suppose if I spent 2-3 months on this stuff I might understand it well enough to be useful, but without that much time to spend I am stuck relying on the judgement of others. And given that, my most important decision is deciding which others to trust. There have been some self-proclaimed experts diving into the material and proclaiming fraud; my impression is that while there is some suspicious stuff there it is impossible to tell exactly what they mean at this stage.

It's somewhat amazing to me how closely the opinions on AGW line up with people's political sensibilities, considering that this is presumably over a physical question which has a matter-of-fact answer (unlike, say, the definition of "conservatism"). But the climate of the past is something that cannot be measured directly, so there is plenty of room for variant interpretation (I suppose a proper sociologist of science would say that nothing is "measured directly"). Almost all the global warming sceptics I come across are also libertarians or right-wing cranks of one stripe or another, who have a vested ideological interest in the denial that there is a vast collective action problem to be solved. And of course, the scientists who support AGW have a vested interest in climate being a significant social problem because it affects their funding. There seems to be no light between the politics and the science, which of course is one of Latour's points.

There have been calls as a result of this for greater openness and transparency in the process of science. The Open Notebook Science movement is already on this. At first glance this seems like a great idea, but I'm somewhat sceptical about the workability, because science is no different than any other field in being a staged performance requiring a backstage zone where the performers can work on the non-public parts of the show (that's a link to Erwin Goffman, another favorite sociologist).

So, channeling my inelegant, Americanized version of Bruno Latour again: here's a situation where there is presumably a physical matter of fact (the actual state of the earth's climate in the past, and the various proxy measurements like tree-rings that we hope reflect it). There are scientists, journals, computer programs, datasets, and funding agencies which are all being deployed to construct competing theories. Only one gets to win, and the battle is enjoined on many levels with little regard for the supposedly neutral gentlemanly rules of combat that the Whig version of science history gives us. That's what the social construction of science is, only now it will occasionally get spread out all over the Internet for all to see. The rubes are shocked; scientists and sociologists are not.

Extras:

Full 61M of released materials.

A bunch of podcasts with a variety of philosophers of science.

Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics is a really interesting-sounding project by a bunch of European labs (including Latour's) to do just what it says.

[[update: I called Latour's attitude fairly accurately:

What I found so ironic in the hysterical reactions of scientists and the press was the almost complete agreement of opponents and proponents of the anthropogenic origin of climate change. They all seem to share the same idealistic view of Science (capital S): "If it slowly composed, it cannot be true" said the skeptics; "If we reveal how it is composed, said the proponents, it will be discussed, thus disputable, thus it cannot be true either!". After about thirty years of work in science studies, it is more than embarrassing to see that scientists had no better epistemology to rebut their adversaries. They kept using the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly constructed (or composed).

from An attempt at writing a "œCompositionist Manifesto" (pdf) ]]