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