Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?

[koganbot]

Latest column, where I discuss the "diversity" issue I raised here last week, and I add a new twist.

The Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?

The new twist is this question: Doesn't cultural diversity, like biodiversity, depend on a certain amount of isolation, so that dominant modes of thought don't come in and wipe out everything else?

Oh, and I quote you all (or some of you, anyway).

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I don't think diversity necessarily requires isolation. In my experience the people with differing opinions/problem-solving approaches to the majority are usually less inclined to change those opinions based on what the majority says and does. And the majority are less likely to be affected by the opinions/approaches of the minority. How the minorities and majorities come to form those opinions/approaches in the first place is A Matter Of Mystery.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I've only skimmed the column - will read and probably comment more in a mo - but re. the question as summarised in this post: there's a section in Philip Ball's Critical Mass about cultural diversity and the risks of 'monoculture' - it's probably the least convincing bit of the book, because I think the model he uses to map culture doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's still quite interesting.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

("dalek made of light" is about strategies to foster diversity (and why))

when my printer arrives (LATER TODAY I BELIEVE) i will sit down and study this issue properly (?)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"Nothing is under the radar" is a very big claim! Whose radar? Don't things just stay "under the radar" for a shorter time? What made bits of internet culture (like 'blogs') really thrilling to me when I joined in was the sense that this was a potentially huge thing not really being considered as a 'culture' exactly - though of course it quickly became so.

And the potency question is a very big question of course - where does the loss of potency come from, though? Does the fandom lessen in potency when more people know about a thing, or does the activity lessen in potency because people introduce "school" ideas to it?

As a marketer and as a critic I'm interested in when self-consciousness emerges in a group or cultural activity ("marketing" just being a businesslike name for "self-consciousness") - when something cultural starts worrying about its external context, how 'the world' perceives it: cultural puberty, if you like. Wolfeian criticism - and most kinds of criticism - accelerates that process. Internet visibility accelerates that process - maybe even foreshortens it to the point that self-consciousness is immediate. Also, maybe the lack of self-consciousness is an illusion produced by hindsight, observers mixing up self-consciousness with their own consciousness of a thing.

[koganbot]

Yeah, I just was emailing my brother and saying that I'd failed to address the question "whose radar?" I'll post our interchange. But I think the crucial answer, in regard to this column, is "the radar of someone fairly distant from the phenomenon," meaning that something's more likely to be on a distant person's radar than the equivalent thing would have twenty or fifty or two hundred years ago.

An interesting question then would be do people now come up with ever more ingenious ways of keeping outsiders out. At least sometimes one of the purposes of lingo and jargon and slang is to remain unintelligible, e.g., criminal slang. If any teacher or cop can google a drug term and find out what it means (I don't know if this is true), how do dealers react?

What My Brother Wrote

[koganbot]

From: "Richard Kogan"
To: "Frank Kogan"
Subject: RE: Rules Of The Game #27: Is Diversity Diverse?
Date: Thursday, January 17, 2008 8:24 AM

Nothing is under the radar any more? Well, you won't find Barbershop, 17th century English madrigals, or 20th century serial music (to name a few) broadcast anywhere. But groups of devotees are still performing these genres for each other, sending each other samples, and in some cases writing new examples.

But Page was really talking about people with similar knowledge but different perspectives. He was addressing, I believe, business and policy problems far more than scientific ones and cultural ones. Along the same lines was an article in the current YAM about the origin of the word "groupthink," in which the blurb was "How did a group of bright and knowledgeable people in the Kennedy Administration ever convince themselves that the plan to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion was a good idea?" You might ask yourself the same question about the Bush administration and Iraq. Clearly, one falls prey to groupthink if one pre-selects all the decisions makers from exactly the same mode of thought.

And if one doesn't, bright conformists can all too easily find themselves slipping into the conventional wisdom and persuading themselves that it makes perfect sense. Perhaps even more important than great diversity of viewpoint is to have at least some natural contrarians - inherent devil's advocates - in any decision-making group. And then listen to them.

My response to Richard

[koganbot]

But Page was really talking about people with similar knowledge but different perspectives.

Not sure I get this distinction. Seems to me the different perspective comes from different knowledge. Where else would it come from? But then the different perspective/knowledge has to get applied to a common problem where presumably the problem solvers have at least some similar knowledge of the problem. What makes their perspectives different will be what *other* problems they consider analogous to the problem at hand. And I don't see that scientific and cultural questions are necessarily different in kind from business and policy problems. The main way that Page's experience may not be altogether applicable isn't that the problems are different in kind but that businessman and policy makers can *force* a group of relatively diverse people (e.g., employees) to address a problem.

I think my ending was actually something of a tangent, and raises the question of "under whose radar?" since obviously someone who attended teen custom car shows in the early '60s had custom cars in his or her radar. ("Custom cars" were cars that the owners had changed the look of, and one of Wolfe's observations was that Detroit designers were starting to pay attention to what these kids were doing, since it didn't fit into design school's "form follows function" orthodoxy but rather emphasized social markers and decoration, e.g., tail fins.) And you're right that a lot of stuff isn't really big on the cultural radar, but I don't think this undoes my point that in comparison to years past anything is more likely to be on a distant person's radar.

Re: My response to Richard

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Not sure I get this distinction. Seems to me the different perspective comes from different knowledge. Where else would it come from?

From what you do with the knowledge. The thing about groupthink is, nobody asks questions, nobody considers things from another angle. Think about all the people who know what you know about Autobiography and still trash it -- it's not that you have some special secret knowledge about it, it's that you've looked at it in a different way.

Anyway, if I remember the groupthink / Bay of Pigs study correctly, it wasn't so much that every person in the group had the same perspective -- more like they weren't willing to offer different ones. It was more like "groupact."

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

"Nothing is under the radar" is a very big claim! Whose radar?

You beat me to it. I will resume observing from a distance.

Will say, though, that I do think that isolation plays a big role in certain stages of collective-idea-making. That is, I don't think (if we're talking about a message board) any consensus will ever be made purely through public talk -- along with slang and new terminology (and just plain "you aren't allowed" jive to mark territory), people have private correspondences much more easily than was once the case, too -- so in that way, you could say that PRIVATE bubbles can share ideas more easily, along with diverse, (more) public spaces. In a brief email exchange, I could clarify a few points I wondered about from this very column -- I think that your own impulse to drag private correspondence into public (or more public) arenas is a nice navigation of total isolation and RELATIVE isolation (i.e., you didn't post the exchange in the comments section at the Daily Kos or something).

[koganbot]

people have private correspondences much more easily than was once the case, too -- so in that way, you could say that PRIVATE bubbles can share ideas more easily

Good point. I wouldn't be surprised if Al Queada used email a lot early on. Maybe they even still do, though I suspect they'd find email too vulnerable, even if they wrote in code words.

But then, the Al Queadans aren't trying to conceal their ideas or the general thrust of their activities, but rather just to conceal their particular plans.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Having finished the Duncan Watts book you talked about in a previous column, I think that searchability is a huge issue here -- not sure if it's directedly or tangentially related. There are all kinds of trade-offs when we enter online information sharing (even granting that not everyone has constant internet access, I would assume MOST people who would join a given convo about this stuff have access to email) -- if you're a teenage custom car enthusiast in Denver, you probably don't have tons of options. But if you're a teenage custom car enthusiast in Nebraska with the internet, you kind of take what you can get -- you can dabble.

I think one thing the internet does is tend toward dabbling, so that obsession requires less grunt work than it once did. This is good in that it necessarily "broadens scopes" -- if you like girl groups and aren't just leafing through broken down jukeboxes, you're going to get information about X Y Z etc. with a google search; but this might also disperse your attention for being a collector/obsessive. You'd become a dabbler, an enthusiast.

One question I have is -- which is the better model for, say, a department of dilletantes: lots of obsessives with distinct (if overlapping) interests, or lots of dilettantes? My intuition says the former category are key "pillars" in diverse group discussion to provide some kind of expertise, with more general dilettantes making up a good portion of the group. The rolling threads are good examples of this happening -- a few pillars saturate the thread with sheer DATA (xhuxk & country, say) and the community, similarly but not as extensively interested, is occasionally (in xhuxk's case quite frequently) engaged around it.

Anyway, these questions don't come up quite as much, I'd imagine, in academic or scientific (scholarly/specialist) disciplines, though there are some interesting parallels in diabetes research. Someone like Diane Faustus, who successful reversed late-stage diabetes in mice (and is beginning human trials as of this past year apparently), amounts to a "diabetes dilettante," someone who throws ideas at walls and has a good ratio of making them stick, but isn't recognized for specialization. The majority of the scientific community (in terms of scientists) are focused on getting their work published, hence become extreme specialists, to the point that no particularly leap-and-bound-type discoveries get made at all (because no one wants to provide great sums for unknown research; whereas lots of people will provide small sums to achieve known or predictable results).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

...not as extensively knowledgeable, I should say (not "interested"), though I'm not sure this is actually the case with rolling country. I would guess that xhuxk listens to more music than most of the people on the thread do, though, and he has the added bonus of being good at analyzing it, too -- that's a part of collecting that usually isn't as high-stakes (it's more about knowing how to accumulate, not analyze, the difference between collecting rare books and writing reviews of rare books).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Blah Denise Faustman, not Diane Faustus! Who will be the fictional scientist character in my upcoming novel Meet the Beaties (I might actually write this!).