Spinning Webs of Significance

by Martin Ryder

This paper looks at activity systems from the perspective of the World Wide Web and Web publishing. It discusses notions of value surrounding web artifacts and considers the mediational value to the developer of anonymous communities that appropriate one's own online artifacts. The author investigates the significance of referring links from one web document to another, particularly from the socio-cultural perspective of Activity Theory. The paper was originally presented to the Fourth Congress of the International Society for Cultural Research and Activity Theory in Aarhus, Denmark, June 7-11, 1998.

There is a social quality inherent in a web document which is as gregarious as a puppy in a public park. Occasionally an author may receive email feedback from interested patrons. But much more often, feedback comes in the form of referring hypertext links from other web documents. These links reveal the contexts in which the artifact has been appropriated within the work of others. By following the referring links that form around her web document over time, an author can extend her own inquiry to another level, tracing the connections that weave a networked community of interest.

The proliferation of information technology is leading to the creation of entirely new sets of spatial, cultural, and social relations (see, for example, Landow, 1992; Rheingold, 1993; Mitchell, 1995; Negroponte, 1995; Dyson, 1997). Virtual communities have emerged from the surprising intersection of humanity and technology offering new understandings from mediating relationships characterized by openness, plurality, and co-emergence - the central themes of contemporary literary theory, user-centered design, and social constructivism. This paper describes a process of artifact design, social practice, and tool use on the World Wide Web. It describes how communities of interest appropriate Web artifacts and how corollary artifacts surround a Web object to form a concentrated searchable domain of contextual information within a community of interest.

The World Wide Web is arguably history's largest human artifact. At the Millennium it is a collection of nearly one billion electronic data objects. Web documents are extremely volatile. They are easy to create, easy to change, easy to move, and easy to destroy. Web objects can be preserved or replicated at little or no cost. The Web has no coherent structure. There are no rules governing its contents. Yet skilled users can locate any Web object within seconds using commonly available tools for searching.

Much like the printing press revolutionized the pre-modern world, the World Wide Web poses revolutionary implications to the present order. The Web is a mass medium. But unlike the modern media of television, radio, film, and print publishing, this postmodern medium is open to mass producers as well as mass consumers. It offers new avenues of expression once considered abstract notions of idealism. In the Web, we see Habermas' (1962) public sphere that defies consolidation by government, corporation or clique. We see the emergence of Bakhtin's (1984) world symposium enabling common participation into the dialogic fabric of human life. We notice a multivocal, environment resisting modern logocentrism, proffering a play of text in endless combinations of difference (Derrida, 1976). The Web is a spontaneous, dynamic medium devoid of authority, allowing author and reader; teacher and learner; practitioner and client; advocate, disciple, and critic all to share common spaces in unmediated(1) discourse. Unlike prior technical trends in the modern industrial age, the Web shifts the dominant narrative of our culture from privileged, authoritative representations to the native’s point of view (Geertz, 1983).

Writing before the advent of the World Wide Web, Cifford Geertz described culture as an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in the artifacts which people use to communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about life. Geertz captured the web-like image of socially established structures of meaning:

This semiotic search of meaning is highly contextual and it is a function of personal and collective consciousness. There is a dialectical relationship between consciousness, the social organization of productive forces, and the artifacts that emerge out of practical activity. Each has the power to transform the other in a continuing, evolutionary cycle.

Web Artifacts and activity systems

A web page is an electronic artifact that is accessible from a Web browser on a personal computer. It may be a document, an interactive form, an executable program, or some other tool available to anonymous users anywhere in the world. Anyone with interactive access to the Internet can "publish" a page. Some pages are generated automatically by computers, but most are the outcome of direct human labor. It is fair to say that the majority of pages have no measurable value to most people. Few, if any pages are useful to everyone. But seen as a human artifact, each page has some measurable value to someone at some point in time.

The term value is ambiguous unless we define it in context. Readers are familiar with Marx's treatment of this measure in terms of exchange value and use value. Exchange value is generally expressed in objective terms: One dollar will buy three potatoes. Six hours of Hans's labor will cost 450DKK. But use value does not lend itself to objective measure. Use value is context dependant and becomes reality only in the activity of use or consumption (Marx, 1867). Commodities (e.g. stocks and bonds) have exchange value but no use value. Consumable items of limited supply, antiques for example, have great exchange value but little use value. Consumable items of unlimited, replenishing supply have no exchange value but their use value varies tremendously in the context of practical activity. Open-access Web pages fall in this category.(2) The pragmatic, utilitarian value of an online artifact is revealed with each use. That value depends upon the intention of the user and the resulting outcome. In other words, the value of an online artifact is determined within the context of the activity in which it is used. An instrument without activity is meaningless. There are no objective aesthetic or functional criteria to assess its value apart from the activity which engages the artifact. To establish the value of a tool, we must observe how it mediates human intention, how well it can share a work load, and how effectively it shifts focus away from itself toward the object of the activity (Bannon and Bødker, 1991).

One useful perspective for understanding artifacts in use is Activity Theory. This approach has become a well-established framework for the analysis of context-dependent, dynamic problems which involve the use of tools (Hasan, 1996). Activity theory is a useful tool for analyzing revolutionary phenomena, an instrument for the study of transformation in human practice.

In its simplest terms, an activity is defined as the engagement of a subject toward a certain goal or objective. In nature, an activity may be unmediated. Picking a berry from a bush and eating it is a simple unmediated activity that involves direct action between the subject and object. In most human contexts, our activities are mediated through the use of culturally established instruments, including language. Picking mushrooms in the forest and eating them is an activity that is ill-advised without some form of mediation. Our subject would greatly benefit from a field guide, from prior education in mycology, or from the direct advice of an experienced mushroom forager. Some means is necessary to bring the prior experience of history into the current activity. Animals have only one world, the world of objects and situations. Humans have the vicarious worlds of others that they can invoke into the present through the use of language and artifacts. (Luria, 1981, p 35) The World Wide Web greatly expands the range of this uniquely human capability.

Whether the subject acts alone or in collaboration with peers, the use of tools enlists the historic involvement of other people engaged in prior activities. Whether a clay pot, a microprocessor, or a Web page, an artifact is the material embodiment of dead, congealed labor (Currey, 1997). Central to Vygotsky´s work was an approach that denied the strict separation of the individual and the social. The individual and the cultural were conceived as mutually constitutive elements of a single, interacting system. The appropriation of historic labor supplants labor in the present context and unites the present with the past in order to command some future outcome. This defines the dialectic nature of activity. Artifacts do not merely facilitate mental processes that would otherwise exist. Instead, they fundamentally shape and transform them (Cole & Wertsch, 1996). Mind is not located entirely inside the head. Tools and other artifacts shape the consciousness of those who use them. They establish the fundamental modes of activity involving productive labor. The tools themselves were conceived by conscious agents engaged in practical activity. The tool molds the wielder who molds the tool, ad infinitum. We see a self-and-species-transformation through the use of tools (Newman and Holzman, 1993).

Engeström (1987) offers a model of an activity system which emphasizes the social aspect of mediation. An activity is undertaken by a human agent (subject) who is motivated toward the solution of a problem or purpose (object), and mediated by tools (artifacts) in collaboration with others (community). The structure of the activity is constrained by cultural factors including conventions (rules) and social strata (division of labor) within the context. Engeström calls attention to the mediational role of the community and that of social structures including the division of labor and established procedures. In our mushroom example above, a more knowledgeable forager could serve in the capacity as foreman, dictating which mushrooms to pick and which to leave alone. More likely, the expert would serve in the capacity as a tutor or coach, explaining the criteria she uses to discriminate between the edible mushrooms and the poisonous. Or the necessary knowledge could come in the form of a structured set of rules which clearly specify the detailed procedures that must be followed in the selection of edible mushrooms. It is concievable to make use of some exotic instrument which can sample a piece of the mushroom and perform necessary chemical analyses to detect poisonous substances. The knowledge which is necessary in an activity system can emerge in any one or a combination of instruments, artifacts and mediational roles that are detailed in the Engeström model.

There are three possible paradigms which define the relationship between the subject, mediational means, and object. The ideal paradigm is borrowed from Marshall McLuhan (1964). When we think of mediated knowledge in the ideal sense, we think of it as an instrument of agency. It is wielded by a conscious subject who has a clear intention toward the object. When the tool user is the agent in the activity, the design or selection of the tool is directly connected to its use (Newman and Holzman, 1993). In this ideal paradigm, the human subject directs the activity and the tool is an extension of the person, amplifying her potency toward the object of her intention.

The second paradigm is a bit more cynical. Where humans are passive in activity systems, the analysis of tool becomes less enabling and more controlling. Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) describes how technology can become an instrument of domination over the human spirit. Marcuse pictures a society, marked by passive consumerism, the logical consequence of advanced industrialization. Mass production begets mass consumption. Life becomes easier because our world is already constructed for us. The highways are already paved, the books already written. A good citizen works hard and makes good money so we can buy designer clothes and drive new cars so that profits remain high and the economy keeps people like us employed. Civic involvement is attending a football game. Free agency is reduced to freedom of choice: which brand of ketchup? which television channel? which wedding dress? which floor plan? which political party? Click here!

A learner's engagement with media can be evaluated between these two paradigms. Zucchermaglio (1993) describes a full technology, a system rich with information but which allows for minimal user input; and an empty technology, a blank slate ready to receive the actor's full creative expressions. A rich and structured media environment offers little agency to the learner. It places the learner in a passive mode: "repeat after me..". Full technologies may serve a functional purpose, but active engagement in learning is not the intent. In contrast, tools which the learner crafts out of empty technologies are defined within situated contexts of practical activity. The specific problem at hand specifies the tool. The learner selects (or builds) the necessary tool based on the current conditions that require it. The tool, the user and the outcome are connected (Newman and Holzman, 1993).

There is a third paradigm for activity in which the human participant is neither subject nor object, but the medium or instrument. Working people know this model. The activity in which they are engaged is not of their own design, but that of an employer. Marx (1844) recognized an alienating quality in this relationship since motivation stems not from intrinsic desire but extrinsic compensation. To the extent that the laborer is a mere cog in a larger machine, the effects of alienation become more pronounced. The laborer's actions are not of his own direction, but in response to command and control. The agent in the activity is disconnected from the action while the laboring medium is disconnected from the motivating purpose. The subject and the laborer are not the same. The laborer uses what ever tools are assigned in order to employ in whatever tasks are assigned. The worker has the agency of a robot.

Apart from alienated labor, human mediation in activity can be highly personal and intimate. When humans interact with one another they offer themselves as a mirror for the other: affirming the other’s value and reflecting differences. We see ourselves through the eyes of others. Mirroring is the significant role of a parent, both to correct and to affirm the child's self understanding. The mirroring function is crucial to the child’s identity formation. The parent is the child’s first encounter with community. The path from child to object and from object to child must pass through another person (Vygotsky, 1978 p. 30). In this respect, the most fundamental educational medium is another human being with whom the learner interacts and constructs meaning. As the child grows to maturity the parenting role shifts to others in the community. In the professional context, the practitioner community serves that role of reflection, validation and discipline.

On building tools and communities

There is an outrageous privilege in the power to cite others (Emerson, 1984). In scholarly writing, a citation is a signifier which we use to strengthen our own text. On the World Wide Web, the power to cite others with hyperlinks is a new affordance that has become commonplace. A citation lends credence, it elaborates, clarifies and embellishes upon the meanings behind our own expressed thoughts. Lists of citations in an index or a bibliography are examples of boundary objects. Star and Greisemer (1989) coined the expression "boundary objects" in the context of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) to describe data objects that serve as an interface between boundaries of domain knowledge. A boundary object is an artifact that is used by more than one distinct group and provides some degree of translation between groups. The contents of boundary objects do not require consensus and this flexibility allows the object to stretch across multiple domains, serving multiple groups. Boundary objects allow the framing and stabilization of public concepts, while simultaneously providing an opening onto other worlds (Callon, 1997). They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual site use. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The boundary objects created for my own purposes soon found their way into common use by an anonymous community of peers whose presence was soon revealed in the form of corollary artifacts.

The activity that spawns most academic online artifacts is common academic research. It is a practice spontaneously embraced by scholars, practitioners, and hobbyists around the world. By engaging in such activity, we tend to mediate the amorphous web of Internet resources into some coherent structure through iterative cycles of collection, consolidation and reorganization. Vygotsky viewed cognitive development as the gradual reorganization of consciousness (Davidov, V. and L. Radzikhovskii,1985). This process is easily identified in the outward manifestations of serious Web pages where learners represent their own cognitive development, making it available to others in the sense of a virtual zone of proximal development. As a web artifact begins to grow, it takes on a sense of structure and purpose. A crude list of hypertext links under the maintenance of a contemporary scholar can evolve into a logical structure. Raw links become embellished with annotation and the attribution of authorship. An index can evolve into a topical outline. A simple outline can develop into detailed representation of domain knowledge. It can include obscure as well as the established and salient aspects of a focused field. Eventually the article's contents will surpass the structure's ability to contain them. In time, the original structure of the artifact will approach the edge of chaos. Quantitative changes eventually pass into qualitative transformations. One unwieldy, ill-structured page under conscious maintenance will become twenty simple sub-indexes surrounding the original topic. Old links will be purged. Unuseful links will be replaced by more recent links which fulfill the original intent with greater clarity and sophistication. Transformation is the inevitable outcome of artifacts that are maintained over time. Artifacts that are not maintained by human intention will eventually die of atrophy. While such artifacts may continue to exist on the Web, no one will link to them. Over time, these objects will become intert and forgotten.

More often than not, the most useful sites are those developed by graduate students or expert novices in active pursuit of domain knowledge. Domain experts have less motivation to construct such resources on the Web unless it is activity in preparation for a new course or perhaps an upcoming publication. Consequently, we find that a significant number of sites in a domain subject are expressions of fledgling research constructed by graduate students or novice practitioners. In the Engeström model, a community is comprised of those who share the same general object. This becomes apparent as others begin to appropriate the intellecutal labor invested by an active online scholar. Like the seeding of a cloud, one can watch a community of interest forming around a common set of Web artifacts. Documents, indexes and lists are more than delivery mechanisms to represent knowledge. They are powerful resources for constructing and negotiating social space (Brown and Duguid, 1997). Brown and Duguid suggest that documents have the ability to form a community around them. From scholars, to hobbyists, to practitioner communities, to political underground movements, the placement of a marker in cyberspace is an effective method of establishing contact with like-minded people. By linking our own documents to anchors of other documents, we identify ourselves within a community. By publishing artifacts of our own making, we provide scaffolding for anonymous peers who share a similar stage of development within a knowledge domain. At the same time, we offer anchors for others to appropriate (or not) in the formation of their own online identity.

Identity is rhetoric's ultimate strategy ( Burke, 1950). In The Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke describes his conception of the social function and the central role of identity. Identification locates persuasion within a context of mutual inquiry and knowledge creation (Burke, 1966 p.46). We identify ourselves in reference to other people, their interests, their desires, their values and fascinations. Using semiotic strategies, we reveal these shared aspirations with our intended community. Burke coined the term consubstantial to suggest how we connect with a community through the use of these common assets. We express our identity in the clothes we wear, in the words we use, and the experiences we share. In scholarly writing, our identities are revealed in our cited references. The rhetoric of the Web is revealed in our bookmarks and hypertext connections. We use these to connect ourselves to a community and to attract others with similar motivations. On the Web, just as in oratory and writing, we reference our own identity to the sign systems and iconic landmarks of the community: the celebrities of a given field, the revered ideas and concepts, the organizations and well-known artifacts. We do this to attract others of like mind and kindred spirit. And when other people make connections to our work, it pleases us as a sign of community acceptance - the mirroring function we so desperately require from infancy through adulthood. These are the threads which weave the fabric of community.

In the age of print, the capability or tracing corollary references has been available to the author, but the activity would stretch over a period of years as corollary articles would become published. On the Web, corollary links are revealed in real time. A Web server's referer log(3) makes it possible for a site developer to discover the corollary sites which refer others to his/her own work. A search query with one’s own URL can also reveal these connections. By following the corollary links back to the referring site, a Web developer can discover how his or her own artifacts have been appropriated by others within the community. This knowledge is useful as a means of formative evaluation and reflection over one’s initial efforts. The online scholar can make use of this phenomenon as a means of feedback to identify possible opportunities, to shift direction or emphasis in one's own on-going research. By making use of these referring sites, a natural division of labor is now created as an extension of the original research activity.

Creating a Web page around a concept or professional practice is a labor-intensive process of mediation. Maintaining the site over time is equally taxing. But once a community has formed around the artifact, the process of mediation transforms from a single-handed effort to a community function. The labor involved in updating the artifact can be shifted from the originator to others in the community where certain members are motivated by their own research needs. What formerly required one person's diligent and frequent searches for new and relevant information now requires infrequent visits to sites or focused searches within the community that was spawned by the original document. In effect, the Web and its artifacts evolve in an autopoietic fashion as a natural outcome of community activity and the division of labor.

Web communities of the type described here are very loosely constructed. They form naturally over time with little to bind them together beyond their common interests. The objects that attract the largest communities are likely to be boundary objects. These are, by definition, pliable and loosely constructed, and the communities that surround them are made up of people with diverse interests in related subject domains. The advantage of a larger community is the redundancy of information as a means of self correction in complex systems. The disadvantage is the obvious lack of discipline or control. Subjects admit themselves into the community often without their conscious knowledge of the affiliation. They are included without pledge or promise to add value to the collective knowledge base, but they are admitted on the sole assumption that a link they have made to your own site carries a promise of some common interest. The advantage of such informal structure is the totally uncontrived and overlaping presence of the participants and the novel contexts which they bring to the community. The weakness of this approach to collaboration is the obvious lack of organization and control. While providing information collectively, the activity system leaves it to the individual subject to assess the value and veracity of any retrieved information and to work around transactions that are incomplete.

Loosely constructed information domains function in sharp contrast to mediated environments whose contents are submitted under a known set of criteria and therefore trusted on that basis. Mediated environments require some level of shared agreement as to the organization, structure and criteria for inclusion. The community must agree on a set of rules and the meanings of the information objects to assure the veracity of the information they share. Such practices are necessary in situations involving cooperative sharing of common information spaces (Bannon and Bødker, 1996). By placing that responsibility on the activity system, the individual subjects who use the information don’t need to invest significant personal resources to determine the veracity, completeness and value any retrieved data.

The aim of this paper is not to compare the relative merits of mediated vs. unmediated information environments. Michael Cole reminds us that the mediated path does not necessarily replace the natural one (Cole, 1996: 119). Both environments have a place in this rapidly-changing world of work. The Web does not change the nature of activity systems. But it does reify the socio-historical connections between artifact and object, connections which might easily be ignored. As our activities can no longer ignore the virtual resources available to mediate our intentions we are compelled to restructure our activity systems to include anonymous online resources and their attached communities. The quality of information on the Web is a function of our own relationship to the productive forces that create and maintain that information. This consistent with the Vygotskian view of social consciousness. Consciousness is not the attribute of any particular state or process such as attention or memory, but rather the relation between subject and object, the organization of productive forces engaged in practical activity. (Lee, 1985, p.70). Consciousness develops through an organism's interaction with the world in the act of production and consumption. The essence of production is consumption, and consumption is immediately production (Marx, 1857). Whether an object is a work of art, a problem solution, a Web page, conceptual learning, or personal identity, it is realized through the twofold process of production and consumption. The production of this paper involved literature searches which resulted in four specific Web indexes(6), themselves reflections of related work by other learners and scholars in the field. Each prior work was the product of human intellectual labor consuming other artifacts an unending cultural-historical cycle.

Knowledge tends to be discussed as though it were an object to be created and manipulated rather than being associated with our acting and existing in a biologically and phenomenologically constituted world (Davis and Sumara, 1997). When we engage with our own agency in learning activities on the Web, we observe that it becomes a process of opening ourselves to others and opening the possibility of affecting the world as we affect our understandings of the world, watching our identities emerge as we interact with the communities which we, ourselves help to create.

(1) "Unmediated" in this context is meant to imply that there is no person or instrument used to filter, embellish, or edit the available information. In fact, however, there are numerous mediational instruments that are essential for a user to locate, retrieve, and display Web artifacts.

(2) Web pages, whether they are open or restricted, are most effectively evaluated in terms of "use value". While some sites restrict access to paid subscribers, the subscription is an exchange for the right to access items within a collection of resources and not for any specific item in the collection.

(3) For a technical explanation of the referer log see Jeff Burchell (1996) In Hotwired, Nov 26th Who's Linking to You?

(4) A list of corollary sites can itself become a boundary object. A corollary page from a semiotics site reveals the numerous disciplines that make use of that knowledge domain. http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/reflect/semiotics.html

(5) Custom search engine software such as Web Glimpse (Univ of Arizona) allows one to focus a search domain to a specific list of sites contained within a hypertext index. It is possible for the search to efficiently cover the remote pages linked from the specified pages and to go yet another level deeper to the distant pages linked from those remote pages. An example of a limited area search engine can be found at the Hippias site at the University of Evansville.

(6) Four Web indexes are byproducts of this research activity. They include:

• Activity Theory
• Actor Network Theory
• Computer Supported Collaborative Work
• Kenneth Burke

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• Corollary sites that reference this paper.

November 04, 2006