Giga Games 1/Giga Games.iso/net/vir_real/faq/conf/cybercnf.rv3

Text File | 1991-12-30 | 8.7 KB | 178 lines

91-05/Cyberconf2.info.more
From: [e-mail] (Allucquere Rosanne Stone)
Subject: CyberCon2 Organizer Replies!
Date: Thu, 30 May 91 19:42:42 pdt



WORLDS COLLIDE REDUX
Allucquere Stone
Chair, 2Cybercon

Randy has raised a bunch of issues at the same time, without
clearly identifying all of them, so I'm going to start off by
listing the ones I see.  I have no doubt that people are going to
come right in behind me and list others, but these are the ones I
want to mention first.

First is the way Randy describes what he saw and heard at
2Cybercon, which was to divide up the talks into two
groups--software engineers and literary critics.  This is going
to upset the anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists,
artists, and businesspeople who also presented at the conference.
I think their invisibility is not accidental; it's built into the
way Randy saw things, and it's important to what I have to say.
I find Randy honestly puzzled, but I also think that the kind of
analysis that he does in his letter points toward a part of the
problem that he doesn't see.

Put it this way:  I don't think there were two worlds at
2Cybercon.  There were many worlds, each with its own approach,
each with its own way of speaking.  But somehow, everything that
wasn't software engineering looked like literary criticism.  Why
do you suppose this is?  (You can tell I've got my back up,
because I also presented about 10 minutes of my own stuff.  It
wasn't software engineering, but if there was literary criticism
in it I'll eat the podium. :-)

Now I'm just going to talk about software engineers and literary
critics for a bit, leaving out the multiplicity of fields and
professional languages that were spoken and that Randy either
accidentally missed or chose not to see or report.

My shtick, if I have one, is code-switching.  So I speak most of
the languages that were being spoken at 2Cybercon.  Barbara
Joans, who spoke last, specifically addressed one of the problems
of groups that don't see each other equally well.  My hit on what
happened is similar to hers, pretty much, which is that the SEs
jargon (and I include myself in that group) is transparent to
SEs; and further, LCs (I'm in that group too) are not trained, as
are SEs, to know how to say "Now I'm going to get technical".  As
a social scientist (yes, I'm also one of them) I see that
cultivating jargon is important for any group in order to create
group identity and cohesion.  I also see that SEs and LCs have
different ideas about how jargon works, what purposes it serves,
and in particular how to deploy it.  And from my vantage point, I
would suggest that one of the things I might have done to improve
communication was to have better explained to the LCs the
extremely wide diversity of the attendees' backgrounds and
disciplines, and to have suggested that they also be prepared
with a kind of general-language version of their work, as I
usually do with my own stuff no matter which jargon it's written
in.

But part of the problem rests with the SEs just as it does with
the LCs, because SEs are so used to swimming in the heady waters
of the SE community that communication is just so *easy*, and
communicating ideas about computing and graphics is
second-nature.  This is very much like being a tourist in Mexico
and just naturally assuming that people who interact with you are
going to do it in English.  Remember the "ugly American" and "why
don't these natives learn to speak properly?"

Let me say that another way:  If you *really* want the advantages
of interdisciplinary conversation--and I mean REAL
interdisciplinary stuff, not just different segments of the same
large field--then you are going to have to WORK at it.  Because
it is not easy.  Star Trek to the contrary, talking across worlds
is never easy.  But if you put out the energy to meet people from
*really* different worlds (and for the sake of this argument
let's say I mean LCs) anywhere near halfway, you may discover
that their ideas help after all.  And by work I might mean for
openers nothing more strenuous than asking "Could you explain
that again, a bit more simply?"

Speaking as a codeswitcher--someone who lives in those boundaries
I keep writing about--I heard great stuff being said by both SEs
and LCs.  I also heard frustration.  And I also heard
arrogance...on the part of some LCs, who assumed that everybody
understood them, and on the part of many SEs, who assumed that it
was naturally the LCs' job to learn how to speak like "normal
people"--which is to say, them.

Are the SEs willing to meet the LCs halfway?  How do you think
worthwhile things are going to happen if BOTH sides don't learn
something about the other's jargon?  Why *didn't* the SEs use
more technical language?  Maybe what happened was that the people
we are calling LCs were more willing to get seriously down and
dirty, and more into the deeply technical side of what they do,
than the SEs were.  Maybe they expected more from the SEs.  Maybe
they took the SEs by surprise.  And if so, why didn't the SEs
take advantage of the moment and say "I don't understand a thing
you said?"  What was accomplished by not asking and going
silently away?  Maybe we all might have been enlightened by a
little fast footwork on the part of some of the speakers in the
general direction of codeswitching--that is, talking across
disciplinary boundaries.

I want to emphasize this again:  There is really no middle ground
of language in which everybody is equally intelligible to
everybody else.  The unhappy truth is that what looks like a
middle ground to one person is somebody else's jargon.  In this
case it happens to be *our* jargon--fairly well-educated, mildly
techie, and dare I add, white middle-class jargon.  Which is why
everybody else seems unintelligible...and why everybody else
sounds like an LC.  Put another way, if you aren't one of the
faithful then you're an infidel.  That's not meant to be nasty,
just to point out that that's the way we all usually think.

Okay, now listen up.  This is your 1991 Chair speaking.

I never promised you a rose garden.  If you want the goodies, you
have to work for them.  All of this is new stuff to lots of us--
in particular having so many people from so many *really
different* disciplines, with their own jargons, in one room.
Randy suggests parallel sessions.  Parallel sessions are a great
idea, but intimacy and the kind of communication intimacy fosters
are more important...to this particular conference.  As a partial
consequence that means that Cybercon is always going to be small,
and again next year more people are going to want to come than we
can fit in.  That's part of Cybercon's charter, and it is not a
decision we made lightly.

An interdisciplinary committee is also a great idea.  That's why
we have a Program Committee.  We had a Program Committee for
2Cybercon too.  Michael Benedikt, in his reply here, mentioned
something about how the committee works, but let me summarize it
again.  We had people from many disciplines, including several
people who are active in the technical end of VR.  They read
every abstract, and on paper the abstracts looked interesting and
challenging and presented no difficulties with language.  The
committee voted on each abstract, and the total vote determined
which papers were presented.  As with many things in the
cyberspace business, things didn't turn out quite as we'd
planned.  With participants' reactions to 2Cybercon in mind, as
well as our own perceptions of what worked and what didn't, the
torch gets passed to the 1992 committee.  The 1992 Program
Committee has people on it from the industry, from research
institutions, from universities; we even have a science fiction
author.  We have SEs *and* LCs *and* others.  (You think you can
do it better, eh, Randy?  Where were you when I called for the
3Cybercon committee?  You could be sweating at this very moment,
just like the rest of us.:-))  And we are very interested in
suggestions and feedback from the cyberspace community.   But
please remember that hindsight is always 20-20.  We will make
more mistakes, guaranteed.  That's the fun and the challenge, as
well as the pain, of breaking new ground.

Next year's conference is not going to be a piece of cake.  Good
fun is not cheap.  Cheap fun is not good.  This will take REAL
THOUGHT, folks.  Editing for language will almost certainly not
be enough, and if it is, there is probably something wrong.  To
reap the bennies of meeting people from widely diverging areas of
expertise, widely different experiences, we have to be willing to
stretch.  That's one of the things that make Cybercon different.
Let's get started.

-------------------------------------------

That's it.  p.s. I noticed William Bricken saying something about what
"we" heard at 2Cybercon.  That's pretty smarmy, for someone who wasn't
there.

Zots,
Sandy

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