Being editor-in-chief of my high school’s literary magazine allowed me to get away at home with writing a lot more than was actually published in it. At that time, other than fiction, I wrote mostly about science and technology, and especially about their effects on culture. I hadn’t really analysed why at the time, but in retrospect what must have been my subconscious motivations have become a little bit more clear to me.
I am a member of the first generation in which the masses have easy access to the tools for creating mass media. When you think about it, it’s incredible how much has changed even in just one decade. At that time, if you wanted to disseminate your message on a shoestring budget, you’d type or print your pamphlet, bring it to the printshop or photocopier, make however many copies, and physically distribute them. (And if your audience was really illiterate, you’d speak into a cassette recorder and give out copies of the tape.) People with kooky or dangerous ideas were thus limited in the reach of their message or the amount of damage they could do.
But with the advent of the mass popularisation of the Internet, the dynamics have suddenly changed. Now anyone can easily broadcast any message whatsoever and have the potential to reach the entire world. In high school, I became very interested in the social consequences of cheap mass media technologies with global reach. Some of the effects of these technologies on individuals and on society were being discussed in some popular publications of the time, but I really felt that the importance of the subject was generally drastically underestimated even by the people who were paying attention. I was interested in the civilisational consequences of these technologies, and no one that I knew of had written anything about that — so I set out to fill the gap.
Many of the things that I had thought and written about have come to past, such as social networking sites and collaborative encyclopedias. I do not claim by any means to be prophetic in this: these ideas were discussed, and some implementations even attempted, long before the technology or the critical mass of participants existed to finally make them successful. Some of my influences at this time were Wired magazine, which had started publishing shortly after I began high school, and the writings of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis.
Incidentally, both of these writers were Canadian — as were the people who had recommended them to me, when I asked around for suggestions on reading materials related to the role of communications in civilisation. I wonder, if I had asked a bunch of Americans (or Europeans, or Asians, or whatever), would I have been pointed to a different set of thinkers? The medium might have tainted the message in this case; but if it had, I think it was ultimately to my benefit.
I was particularly interested in how these new communications technologies would be put to use by what might be considered two “extremes”, in some sense, of the current global civilisation. At one extreme, I wondered how the Internet was going to affect the way science was carried out and communicated. At the other extreme, I thought about how the new media might become the vehicles of irrationality and superstition, carriers of the very cultures which would have rendered the creation of these media impossible in the first place — a topic to which I will devote the next post. Here, I will write briefly about my thoughts in high school on what is now called “open notebook science”.
Once upon a time, science was the privilege of the elite; scientists routinely kept their discoveries secret except to a close circle of colleagues, or delayed publication for as long as possible. The system of scientific journals, made possible by the invention and subsequent spread of the printing press, changed this by giving scientists an incentive to share their results: credit for their discoveries in the historical record. The existence of a platform for scientific publication in turn allowed amateurs to contribute their discoveries.
The rapid advances in scientific understanding and the accumulation of scientific knowledge, made possible in part by the system of scientific journals, has since created a situation in which it seems that amateurs could no longer make pivotal contributions to science the way some have done so even a century earlier. Science has become specialised to a degree that significant training was needed even to begin research in many fields; and in addition, amateurs lacked access to the voluminous data and expensive equipment available to universities and research institutes.
When I was thinking about this, I was actually involved in a project at the University of Toronto to study variable stars, under the direction of Dr. John Percy. It involved a very primitive form of distributed computing: every two weeks or so, I would visit the university and receive some data on floppy disks (or several megabytes of data, if you’re too young to know what floppy disks are). I would take that data home, analyse it on my home computer, and on my next visit I would return the results and receive a new batch of data. The results of my analysis would be merged with those of others and processed further.
I had the sneaking suspicion that my contributions were not strictly speaking necessary, and that the entire setup was a charade the primary motivation of which was to involve high school students in the scientific research process. (Surely the university had the resources to process data at a rate much faster than several megabytes every two weeks, even if the project had the absolute lowest priority out of all the projects in the entire university!) But I enjoyed visiting the university too much to bring this up.
In any case, I thought a lot about distributed and cooperative computing at the time. Presumably, Dr. Percy had obtained the data from somewhere electronically; I didn’t think he had a stack of floppy disks delivered to him every two weeks! I don’t recall if the raw data was available to the public or not — my faint recollection is that I had to sign something or other before I was granted access to it — but I didn’t see why in principle it couldn’t have been. After all, I was just a high school student with a computer. There was no particular reason why anyone with a computer and an Internet connection — whether amateur or professional — could not have just downloaded the data themselves and experimented with it, perhaps in collaboration (or even in competition) with others. Furthermore, there was no reason why they couldn’t have blogged about their experiments while they were performing them, or received live feedback from other researchers while doing so — rather than (or in addition to, if they wished) writing a scientific paper selectively after the fact.
(It’s true that the word “blog” didn’t actually exist at the time — but the activity most certainly did. It was just called “writing on a semi-regular basis and sharing your writings with other people”. I concede that it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely, but I used to engage in this activity all the time. Since it’s such a convenient word, I’m going to use it when I feel it’s appropriate — even if it means being anachronistic.)
A large part of the problem with making advances in modern science is its scope — science is so large, and there are so many subfields, that scientists in one field are often unaware of results or techniques from other fields which might be applied to solving problems in their own. I thought that information sharing and retrieval technologies would provide a great deal of aid in overcoming this problem. Scientists could, on the one hand, write openly about problems which they were working on or which they had solved; and on the other hand, they could search through the blog archives of other scientists to see if anyone else had worked or were working on similar problems.
So I had this vision of the future of science which hasn’t quite come true yet. But I’ve written too much about it already — I’m supposed to be writing about the causes of my writer’s block! (Of course, the fact that I’m writing again is a very good thing, no matter what I’m writing about.) I will have more to write about this “open notebook science” business later, since I intend it to be one of the main topics of this blog.
– davinci
As you say it is still early days for ONS. But at least now the tools do exist to allow scientists to easily share their research in great detail.