Us versus Them

or authority versus involvement as Alan Rusbridger describes it in his recent Hugh Cudlipp lecture in which he asks Does Journalism Exist? The us versus them refers to the idea that in the past information was held or restricted to certain authorities who controlled how that information was presented, consumed, and reused. More recently, this order has changed and the consumers are now as likely to also be the creators, the reader is no longer solely a passive consumer, but lives in

“a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgements; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority.”

This struck me as interesting and succinctly defines one of my more recent research activities which has revolved around designing interactions, and associated software infrastructure, to support online argumentation.

By this I mean the necessary software and infrastructure to provide support for those people who want to:

• exercise their own judgement,
• create their own content,
• articulate their own views, and
• learn from their peers

just as Alan mentioned in his lecture. Although many of these activities can already be performed by those who are sufficiently able and motivated, the supporting technology is still rudimentary. Just as we are still trying to develop the best persuasive interfaces to influence behaviour, we are still trying to develop the best interfaces to support online argumentative interaction and thereby improve critical literacy.

There are at least two approaches that we can take. One approach is via education, for example, my introductory undergraduate module in problem solving and critical thinking is exactly the kind of introductory course that should be a prerequisite for anybody who wants to be able to say that they have had an education. Not that my module is perfect, far from it, just that the nature of the module; teaching students how to discover the structure of arguments, to see where there are holes or errors in the reasoning, to recognise when a rhetorical trick is begin used against them; these are all the kinds of skills that members of a knowledge society should possess. At the moment this is also the kind of topic that is left to a kind of inate ability, some people are just good at arguing, and others are good at being mislead by those in the know. However education doesn’t solve the problem of lack of explicit support in the infrastructure that we use to communicate. This leads directly to my second approach: building the tools that support online argument, enabling people to create their content, whilst also guiding and supporting the process of articulating viewpoints and exercising judgements.

My initial prototype for an argublogging system was outlined in a CMNA workshop paper last summer and uses nothing more than the web simpliciter, some browser situated javascript, and an aggregation server, to begin the process of supporting web users who have just read something online that they agree or disagree with and want to respond. Of course it is easy to respond online, anyone can set up a blog in minutes and link back to the original. The problem is that ordinary links carry very little information other than the fact that one place links unidirectionally to another. Much of the contextual information about how you are responding is lost, for example, to know whether I am supportive or antagonistic with respect to the quote above from Rusbridger’s lecture requires a reader to read and understand this post. Wouldn’t it be nicer if that relationship was recorded? Even better, wouldn’t it be great if you could see whether anybody else had responded to any aspects of this post elsewhere on the web? Ideally you would structure all of those quotes and responses into a single dialogue, gatherered from all of their locations across the web, possibly you might even want to visualise this dialogue, seeing the structure of the various arguments that make up the dialogue. Essentially this is what my argument blogging system does, enables web users to harvest textual quotes and respond to them within a structured dialogue. This structure is captured and stored in a web-accessible database (AIFDB), in an RDF language that reifies the Argument Interchange Format, and thus becomes a Semantic Web data source, ripe with all of the potential that that entails.