(45)It is difficult for me to read these commentators without a certain incredulity. Have not we heard this all before in the writings of Evans (1979) Toffler (1980; 1990), Levy (1980) or Naisbitt (1982). Is there some reason why we choose to uncritically accept the myth of the information society and the dream of limitless wealth and ease proposed by Bell’s (1973) classic analysis of the shift from goods to a information producing service economy. Well if the truth be told, sociologists and some others generally don’t accept these myths (Noble, 1979; Menzies, 1981: 1882; Siegal and Markoff, 1985; Traber, 1986; Cockburn, 1988; Lyon, 1988; Mosco, 1989; Schumacker, 1973; Hayes, 1990; Schenk and Anderson, 1995). Instead, our preference has been to mount critical assaults on the millenial type predictions normally associated with discourse on information technology. We are not, in the words of Rothschild (1993) advocaters of the “tech-fix.”
There is certainly a potential ugliness about information technology that isn’t being considered in the extant literature on electronic publication. We don’t have to go far afield to find it. Boyett and Conn (1990), for example, describe in loving terms the lean, mean aggressive and panoptic workplace made possible by the new information technologies. They paint a picture of an environment “revolutionized” by information technology beyond recognition. Their workplace 2000 has fewer opportunities for advancement, decreased job security, decreased remuneration (a pat on the back and a word of praise – legacies of decades of research into reinforcement techniques in psychology – suffice), remuneration packages tied to productivity and performance, incentive and piecework schemes, increased pressure to perform for those still with jobs, harder and longer hours, and an almost Orwellian emphasis on coordinating one’s psyche to the organizational mind set and being part of the team. In this new workplace 2000, middle management is gone because the technology performs the functions they used to (collecting, collating and synthesizing information for upper management). Karake (1992) cites a long list of organizations (including Hewlett Packard – famous for its progressive labour policies) using IT to recentralize control.
This is specifically pronounced in the widespread use by management personnel of personal computers that can tap into large centralized data bases and that are linked together as part of a larger computer network. The result is a wider span of control, fewer levels in the hierarchy, and lower complexity. Information technology may also lead to less formalization in organizations. The reason is that management information systems can substitute computer rules and decision discretion. Since computer technology can rapidly warn top management of the effects of any decision, however, it enables them to take corrective action if the decision is not to their liking. From the foregoing, we can conclude that even through information technology helps in the decentralization of the decision-making process, it does so with no commensurate loss of control by top management. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as the centralized-decentralized structure (Karake, 1992: 18).
At this point you might be asking yourself why any of this is relevant. Its simply to show the dark side of information technology and to demonstrate the need to look behind the myths about electronic publication being currently propagated on the net in order to shed some light on those corners of the world systematically ignored by proponents of technology and electronic communication. And there is certainly a need to turn the lights on. After all, when you think about it, anybody writing about electronic publication is likely to come from the upper echelons of the academic and management world. As a result, they are likely to bring with them certain values and attitudes that do not necessarily predispose them towards a critical examination of the projects they endorse.
In next two sections we’ll take a critical look at some of the issues and predictions of those who support the wholesale transformation of the scholarly enterprise. We’ll begin with a look at the future of traditional publishers and end with an examination of Harnad’s predictions for the transformation of the scholarly enterprise and the scholar’s mindset. These next two sections amount to nothing more than an attempt to identify the sociological issues and point to questions that need empirical attention. In this process there will be much that I will miss and that others will need to fill in.
The Demise of Traditional Journals
One qualitative change that some are hoping for is a shift in the locus of the publication effort. As Ginsparg (1994) notes, the whole purpose of a journal is to a) communicate research info, and b) to validate this information for the purpose of job and grant allocation. In the realm of paper, fulfilling the twin purpose of publication has been best carried out by the intermediate publishing industry which has performed the essential functions of collecting and distributing material (traditional publishers of course have always relied on scholars for peer review and quality control). However, with the advent of electronic publication, there is less of a need for an intermediary publisher. This, and the reduction in the cost of publishing material, makes free scholarly communication and publication for extremely small and specialized audiences a distinct possibility.
(50)As we noted earlier, most (if not all) of the value added work provided to journals is performed by the editor, board, and peer reviewers. Because these functions are traditionally provided free of charge to journals it is reasonable to expect that journals also be provided free of charge. Ginsparg (1994) provides us with the strongest statement.
So the essential point is now self-evident: if we the researchers are not writing with the expectation of making money directly from our efforts, then there is no earthly reason why anyone else should make money in the process (except for a fair return on any non-trivial “value-added” they may provide; or except if, as was formerly the case in the paper-only era, the true costs of making our documents publicly available are sufficiently high to require that they be sold for a fee).
Up until quite recently the only innovators have been private scholars conducting personal experiments into the potential of electronic publication. However as should be now apparent, there is a definite threat here to the hegemonic control exerted by traditional paper publishers over scholarly communication. And it has some of them worried. R.A. Shoaf, President of the Council of Elders of Learned Journals (CELJ) made the following comments at the CEJL panel at the MLA in Toronto in 1993. (Shoaf, 1994).
If we consider the rather remarkable fact that the era of the PC (the personal computer) is barely fifteen years old today and look, in that light, at the revolution it has effected, then I think it is easy for us to predict that within the first few decades of the 21st century, even more revolutionary changes will occur at every level of our profession. There is, then, a sense in which all of us are already very far behind. And although we perhaps do not want to embrace the ethos of the current joke in the marketplace, all of us in academic publishing need to wake up to he [sic] reality of these dramatic changes, or we might indeed become “roadkill on the information superhighway.”
Both inside and outside of the realm of learned journals, traditional publishers have recently responded to this threat by taking steps to exploit the potential of the internet. Okerson (1995) has noted that so far their efforts suffer from a number of drawbacks.
The downside of the publishers’ experimentation continues to be that the experiments are limited in critical ways. The biggest drawback is that print publishers are seeking ways to preserve the paper image electronically, offering not text but pictures of text in bit-mapped images, often through the rapidly-obsolescing CD-ROM delivery vehicle. Such efforts fail to take advantage of the best characteristics of networked communications: speed of distribution and access facilitated in several ways. Thus, many of the current experiments, while offering some value, do not advance the interests of the user as fully as possible via electronic networked delivery (Okerson, 1995).
The impression that Okerson and others leave us is an us (not-for-profit publishers) against them (big-bad-publishing-companies) impression that leaves “us” in a privileged position vis a vis our use of information technology. Yet as we known the status quo does not role over easy and there is no reason to think that traditional publishers will not find a way to exploit internet technologies to their fullest extent while still retaining their privileged and costly positions at the centre of the scholarly communication universe. Our concern as sociologists should be with the way the publishing companies choose to respond. We need to ask what’s happening inside the traditional publishing companies as they scramble to adapt to the new publishing environment. How will they respond to publications like the EJS which can be offered for free and can turn around submissions in less than two months? I suspect that if we look, we will find just another example of flexible production and the “lean and mean” ethos of competitive capitalism. Indeed, with journals like the EJS setting the example, we could just find a set of responses considerably more ugly than we might initially expect.
There are other issues we need to examine as well. One particularly interesting one is the way traditional publishers are going to adapt their financial operations to the new media. If as Ginsparg suggests, the new unit of publication should be the paper and not the journal, might not journals choose to offer their submissions on a pay-per-view basis? And might not this lead scholars and librarians to the slaughter? As noted earlier, some have argued that we no longer need the traditional publishers to collect and distribute material. However the same argument could easily be made about libraries. With the super-search tools now available, and the low cost of storage, might not a publishers simply archive all the journals and all the volumes they have ever published on a collection of 20 gigabyte disks and offer them for sale directly to interested parties at say, 20 dollars a pop? Scholars would lose since universities would have a sound justification for reducing their budgets for journals (would tenured professors get a pay raise to compensate – not likely) and libraries and librarians would lose for reasons that do not need to be enumerated.
(55)As we begin to conduct research on the publishing industry, we’ll need to keep a couple of things in mind. In the first place, the actual outcome of the battles that lie ahead will likely be sensitive to the particular discipline in which the lines are drawn. In high-energy physics for example, the future of traditional publishers looks pretty grim. Paul Ginsparg’s database and preprint server has all but obsolesced traditional journals in the area (Ginsparg, 1994). The actual end-users of the database prefer the high speed and open commentary possible with this model. However in other, more conservative and less technologically aware areas, traditional publishers may find a way to discredit full electronic publication efforts. This may end up leaving free journals like the EJS nothing more than a “sink for material of lesser quality” (Naylor and Harnad, 1994).
In the second place we’ll be needing to continually assess our position. This issue is much closer to home than our traditional areas of inquiry. Indeed, it strikes to the heart of our scholarly enterprise and their may be a tendency to overlook some key questions. For example, we may be caught starry eyed at the vast power of information technology and our ability to search the world from our home computer for research material. But we will need to known how the increased efficiency of research efforts effect publication standards used for advancement decisions once the administration catches on. I’ll have more to say about this in the next section.
Scholarly Skywriting and the Legacy of Marshall McLuhan
Electronic journals should not and will not be mere clones of paper journals, ghosts in another medium. What we need, and what Psycoloquy will endeavor to help provide, are some dazzling demonstrations of the unique power of scholarly skywriting. I am convinced that once scholars have experienced it, they will become addicted for life, as I did. And once word gets out that there are some remarkable things happening in this medium, things that cannot be duplicated by any other means, these conditions will represent to the scholarly community and “offer they cannot refuse.” We are then poised for a lightning-fast phase transition, again a unique feature of the scale and scope of this medium, one that will forever leave the land-based technology far behind, as scholarship is launched at last into the post-Gutenberg galaxy (Harnad, 1991).
Any of you familiar with the later writings of Marshal McLuhan (1965; 1969; 1989) should recognize the origins of the above quotation. Though less florid than some of McLuhan’s prose, the passage nevertheless remains true to the type of deterministic, often nonsensical (Finkelstein, 1968) claptrap that has made Mcluhan a favourite among pseudo-intellectuals inheritors of his genius (for example de Kerckhove, 1995), popular gurus and media pundits alike. [20] Like McLuhan, Harnad is suggesting, and indeed never tires of promoting, a “fourth-revolution” in the “means of production” of knowledge and a fourth revolution in the way humans think.
Harnad, like McLuhan before him, argues in generalities about the transformations wrought by the introduction of new media types. He figures that there have been three previous revolutions wrought on human consciousness: these are the historic shifts from preliterate to oral forms of communication, from oral to written communication, from written to printed, and finally from printed to electronic based (or skywritten) communication. He suggests that the transition from oral to written culture slowed down communication making writing “somewhat out of synch with thought.” Because we could only read one book at a time rather than listening to tribal story teller, writing made “communication more reflective and solitary than direct speech.” We became “less spontaneous…more deliberate…more systematic.” All this changed with the introduction of print which “restored an interactive element, at least among scholars,” and transformed scholarship making it a more “collective, cumulative, and interactive enterprise [like] it had always been destined to be.” Harnad suggests that despite these transformation, all of these prior modes of communication placed limitations on human thought processes. The limitations emerged because there is a natural speed at which we communicate. According to Harnad, this natural speed is set by the pace of verbal discourse.
All this is going to change, according to Harnad, as the scholars begin exploiting the potential of electronic communication for lightning speed electronic discourse and interactive scholarly endeavor. When this happens, the limitations on human thinking will be finally shattered and scholarship will take to the skies.
(60)Harnad justifies his historical template on the following grounds.
The reason I single out as revolutionary only speech, writing, and print in this panorama of media transformations that shaped how we communicate is that I think only those three had a qualitative effect on how we think. In a nutshell, speech made it possible to make propositions, hand-writing made it possible to preserve them speaker-independently, and print made it possible to preserve them hand-writer-independently. All three had a dramatic effect on how we thought as well as on how we expressed our thoughts, so arguably they had an equally dramatic effect on what we thought (Harnad, 1991: 41).
There are numerous problems with Harnad’s analysis not the least of which is his attribution of a “natural” speed for human discourse. This smacks of essentialist arguments about human nature that need to be seriously addressed and not simply glossed over and ignored. There is also a problem with the notion that a human verbal conversation should be the benchmark against which we gauge other modes of communication. There is simply no justification for thinking that verbal communication is any more natural than writing or printing. This is like suggesting, after McLuhan, that since the emergence of writing in Mesopotamia, humans have lived in a diachronic-alphabetic straightjacket. This is, of course, technological determinism at its finest. Isn’t it more reasonable to consider writing and speech as two different sides of a same coin – each with their own purpose and natural rhythms? Speech might be more appropriate in casual settings, for example. Writing, on the other hand, with its arduous and thoughtful construction of sentences over months and even years, is perhaps better suited to situations where the writer needs to pace herself and consider carefully the logical flow and content of the work. Considered in this light, we could conceivably argue that the speedup of academic discourse will have a negative impact on the quality of our intellectual work.