There are other problems as well. Perhaps, as Harnad suggests above, the effects of media on human consciousness are arguable. But these effects have not been satisfactorily demonstrated. At one point he makes some vague reference to the historical work proving the transformative potential of media. But this record, as small as it is, has been challenged. Some have argued successfully that media transformation and any “revolutionary” potential the technologies might claim have been successfully incorporated into existing socio-political formation (Mosco, 1989). Others, like Winston (1986), are more explicitly condemning about the use of anecdotal evidence and the lack of historical sophistication in arguments about the “revolutionary” impact of information technology. Describing his own reasons for undertaking a project of historical revision and technological prognostication, Winston makes the following comments.
The present text [is] largely in response to a dominant tendency in the literature on electronic communication devices, both popular and scholarly, which uses an erroneous history, both implicitly and explicitly, as a predictive tool. Unfettered by much understanding of the past beyond the anecdotal, many currently propound insights into our future in the form of trajectories from our past (Winston, 1986: 27).
Indeed, historians began to see centuries of continuity instead of technological watersheds almost two decades ago. Gimpel (1977) for example, covers in detail the early and middle medieval periods (circa 1000 to 1300). His overview of the period is fascinating and illuminating (Gimpel, 1977: viii).
There was a great increase in population, which led to massive movements of people. They emigrated; they opened up and colonized new lands; they founded and built new towns. Conditions favored free enterprise, and this led to the rise of self-made men. Capitalist companies were formed and their shares were bought and sold. Entrepreneurs were fully prepared to use ruthless business methods to stifle competition. They introduced extensive division of labor to increase efficiency, and their enterprises called into being a proletariat whom they could exploit. The workers retaliated with wage claims, absenteeism, and strikes.
According to Gimpel, the Medieval epoch was an age of innovation and machinery. Technology was introduced on an unprecedented scale. New sources of power were developed and old sources were refined and enhanced. Advances were made in agriculture, textiles and mining. This led to increased productivity, a healthier diet and a rising standard of living. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were a number of environmental firsts. Vast tracts of land were deforested to build mills, houses, bridges, castles, casks for wines, ships, looms, etc. Bark was used to make ropes and trees and burned for fuel in thousands of glass and iron manufactories. As a result, trees became scarce so coal mining was introduced in the 13th century. Shortly after that, pollution of various forms became so much of a problem that in 1338, the first nationwide antipollution acted was passed by parliament. We also now know that the Medieval (or pre-print) era was one of considerable intellectual activity that was contiguous with Greek, Roman and Byzantine scholarly efforts (Lindberg, 1992). And all this before the invention of the printing press c1450 by Johan Gutenburg!
(65)Admittedly Harnad focuses for the most part on transformations to scholarly communication so perhaps we need to narrow our focus. But even here the notion that the speed up of scholarly discourse through scholarly skywriting will have some sort of positive transformative effect on the scholarly process or our thinking is a little hard to swallow. In the first place, the claims are probably overstated. We can get a clearer picture of this when we consider the possibility that the greatest intellectual and cognitive transformation than any academic undergoes is the Ph.D. process which requires the student to read hundreds of often boring, paper bound books and journal articles. Scholarly skywriting simply has nothing on the growth in intellectual maturity, the changes in thinking, and perhaps the ossification of thinking habits, that graduate programs have managed now for centuries as a routine part of the doctoral curriculum. It would take a good deal of empirical evidence to convince me that the new information technologies will have an equal or greater impact than this age old intellectual process.
In the second place, there are more powerful structural factors influencing the uses to which IT is being put. For example, IT is unlikely to even touch the basic structures of the scholarly enterprise like the “publish or perish “syndrome that makes “communicating” to students or the general public a secondary concern – perhaps even a positive annoyance – to many academics. In this context, the potential of IT is likely to result in more pressure to remain current and more incentive to spend long nights in front of the CRT.
Nor are these changes likely to loosen that other great structural imperative, the financial crises, that most institutions face. As sad as it is, we will likely not see a relaxation of the administrative push to work more, teach greater numbers, sleep less, and cut cut cut. In fact, if we were cynical, we might even argue that Harnad and others like him are delivering us into the hands of those who would destroy us by encouraging the development of a technology that meshes oh so perfectly with the global conservative agenda to downsize and get lean, mean and efficient. It would be our worst nightmare if we swallowed the whole IT package only to realize latter that deficits and downsizing were red herrings designed by right wing think tanks to cull us into accepting some hidden agenda (McQuaig, 1995). If this turned out to be the case, no amount of “transformative” cutting edge technology will be able to quell the driving thirst to reduce government expenditure in order to release certain sectors of society from the tax burden. “No end in sight” might then become the clarion call of the technological advocates.
Clearly, Harnad’s explanation for the transformative impact of information technology is inadequate and obviously we have our work cut out for us if we want to develop a satisfactory analysis of any changes that may be occurring. Some possible directions relating to the journals themselves were noted in the previous section. Here, I would like to suggest a more detailed examination of scholarly writing projects. In particular, it would be useful to discuss the different experiences that authors have had with traditional and electronic publication and to examine whether or not the experience of e-publication has changed intellectual habits. At this point in time, this sort of study would be possible in most other disciplines. However because of sociologies slow uptake of information technologies (esp. in North America), we’d have to wait for a sufficient number of scholars to experience the new publication methods. A more difficult project, but one that is necessary nonetheless, is to follow the administrative response to the emergence of electronic publication. This might involve first identifying their reluctance to credit electronic publication and then following this with an examination of their response to the increased efficiency of electronic publication. Here there are interesting questions about the effect of electronic publication on the publish or perish syndrome, and of the possibility for increased pressure to publish as a result of increased submission turnaround time.
Once sociologists have developed an adequate information infrastructure, we might also want to examine whether or not the “interactive” potential of the Internet is as useful as some have suggested. It is simply not a given that providing space for scholars to give immediate feedback on article submissions is a worthwhile exercise much less one that transforms our cognitive structures. While I admit that the process may be useful in other disciplines, its appropriateness to sociologists remains to be demonstrated.
(70)There is also a notion floating around that electronic scholarly communication is going to democratize the whole academic effort. Presumably, making information more easily accessible is going to eliminate financial barriers and reduce the formation of geographically or intellectually isolated in-groups. Much more than anything else I have come across, this is a hard pill to swallow. Academe is an intrinsically hierarchical and institutionalized endeavor and it is seems highly unlikely that information technology (even if we assume that it carries with it some sort of valence towards egalitarian and democratic activity) is going to overcome centuries of inertia. Indeed, Harnad (1995) has argued cogently for the implementation of standard peer review practices on the internet and has even suggested extensions to cover the wider variety of scholarly activity possible on the Internet.
Now I don’t want to argue against the need for forms of quality control on the Internet and as we all know, establishing elaborate and global scholarly hierarchies is of course nothing new. As Harnad points out, there are already levels of prestige for institutions and journals. But while we are implementing an electronically enhanced peer review, we will need to remember that we are implementing traditional hierarchies. We will also need to consider that with the panoptic potential of information technologies, we will be implementing hierarchies with a much wider reach and much greater power to dictate the life course of a particular scholar. Finally, it will be important to remember that traditional hierarchies normally have links to traditional world-views and traditional interests and that (usually) the only reason for transporting traditional hierarchies is to maintain or strengthen these traditional interests. Lyotard (1979: 14) comments about regulation and control and the transformation of these functions with the emergence of information technology are instructive and suggestive.
For brevity’s sake, suffice it to say that functions of regulation, and therefore of reproduction, are being and will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made. Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers. Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labour, political, and religious organizations.
Finally, for reasons that should be obvious now, we will need to conduct a detailed analysis of the structural factors which are influencing (and which are being influenced by) information technologies. As I have suggested throughout this paper, powerful structural factors impinge on the evolution of information technologies and while we may hope for a collectivization of the scholarly process, there is really no reason on earth to expect this process to be carried out as we’d like it to be. Thus we need to supplement and extend the analysis of IT in other sectors to include an examination of the publication enterprise more generally, and the scholarly processes more specifically.
CONCLUSIONS
Computer citizenship means knowing enough about the social, political, environmental, and military implications of computer technology to make personal and public choices. Even if we never learn how to “boot a disk.” or haven’t even heard that terminology, we must learn to be good citizens in the information age. In fact, these vast resources now dedicated to teaching computer use may simply be diverting us from a more important learning process (Siegel and Markoff, 1985).
Society’s direction did not change. Rather, it accelerated tendencies that had been at work for hundred of years. It deepened and extended the logic of the marketplace, and with it, the process of making all social life, including such basic components as time, space, and information, into marketable commodities. Computer communication appeared to bring nothing new because it simply accentuated certain tendencies – commodification, markets, money, quantification, surveillance, oversight, and control….(Mosco, 1989: 20)
In 1984 Pacey wrote a book that discussed the social and ideological values that underpin technological discourse and the application of technology. In this work, he distinguished between the following three value systems: a) virtuosity values. b) economic values, c) and user or need values. Virtuosity values were those associated with adventure, the pursuit of technically sweet, high-tech, or big-tech solutions to problems, the construction of technology for its prestige value, an emphasis on the improvement of performance as a primary goal of technological innovation. Economics values were those associated with the marketplace, the creation of surplus and the pursuit of profit. Pacey argued that both of these values were those normally associated with experts and professional technologists and administrators. By contrast, user or need values were those associated with an awareness of the complexity of social formations, the understanding that technological solutions impact globally, and the desire and ability to pursue responsible solutions to problem situations.
It should be clear at this point that the discourse on scholarly publication has been dominated by the first two sets of values. It should also be clear that this overemphasis is leading to a one sided and reified analysis of scholarly publication specifically, but information technology more generally, that is not taking into account a number of factors that, though not associated with a limited conceptualization of electronic journal publication, are nevertheless critical for a comprehensive evaluation of IT’s impact on scholarly communication. As sociologists it is our job to build this analysis and respond to Betcherman’s (1990) concern over the fact that sociologists have not turned more of their attention to examining the impacts of information technology. If after having read this paper on our experiences with scholarly publication at the EJS and some of the sociological issues that surround information technologies application to academe, you have become convinced of the need to consider some of the issues surrounding information technology, then I will have fulfilled the principle task I set out to accomplish.
——————————————————————————–
NOTES
[1] The ARL home page is located at http://arl.cni.org. For a description of the purpose of ARL and a list of member libraries see http://www.lib.washington.edu/~tdowling/arl.html. Their list of electronic publications is located at gopher://arl.cni.org/11/scomm/edir. Another similar list available in HTML is published at the World Wide Web Virtual library. It is available at http ://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html
[2] SGML (or Standard Generalized Markup Language) is the standard for the construction of markup languages. It is a superset that includes the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) used as a hypertext transport vehicle for the World Wide Web and the markup languages TEI and TEI.2 used by the University of Virginia Text Encoding Initiative to transcribe traditional paper publications to on line form. There are two useful sources for learning about SGML on the net. One is What is SGML and How Does it Help? available http://sil.org/www_root/000000/sgml/exetwhat.html and the other is the SoftQuad SGML primer available http://www.sq.com/sgmlinfo/primintr.html. For an introduction to TEI see David Seaman Guidelines for Text Mark-up at the Electronic Text Center http://www.lib.virginia.edu/etext/tei or Lou Burnard and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (1993) Living with the Guidelines at http://www.sil.org/sgml/teiu5-uva.html
TEI appears to be emerging as the standard for the transcription and creation of electronic texts. It is a complex markup language that allows a number of sophisticated research operations to be conducted on electronic texts. It is proving ideal for historians and others who enage in detailed textual analysis. Sociologists looking to create electronic texts should take a closer look at this initiative. Check out the University of Virginia Library home page at http://www.lib.virginia.edu for more information.
[3] Two WWW pages give a good overview of what is now available from traditional publishers. One is provided by a service called E-doc and is available http://www.edoc.com/ejournal/publishers.html. The other is provided by the British library and is available at http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/publishers.html. Duxbury (1994) provides a list of university presses now on line. An exhaustive compilation of UUAP presses is available gopher://gopher.pupress.princeton.edu.