Assignment 3: Information Networks, Revisited

Nexus (Ch. 5-6) and Kuhn (Ch. 11-12)

Context: Kuhn, Chapters 11-12

Briefly, from this week’s Kuhn reading:

  • Invisibility (Ch. 11): once a revolution resolves, a field’s own retrospective story about itself gets rewritten – the old paradigm gets flattened into an obviously-wrong stepping stone, and the real controversy disappears from view.
  • Resolution (Ch. 12): there’s no neutral experiment or algorithm that settles a contest between paradigms. Change happens through accumulating anomalies, a new paradigm’s superior problem-solving, its aesthetic/philosophical appeal, and – often underrated – generational replacement.

Use this framework, together with Harari’s Ch. 5-6 (distributed/self-correcting vs. centralized/non-correcting networks, and the idea of computers as a new kind of network member), to analyze a real information network of your choosing.

The Assignment

Pick one real information network: a platform, an institution, an academic or scientific field, or an organization you know something about. In an essay of 800-1,200 words, address all of the following:

  1. Architecture (Ch. 5). Using Harari’s framework, is this network closer to a distributed, self-correcting system or a centralized one? Identify its specific correction channels, if it has any – who (or what) is positioned to catch and fix an error, and how?
  2. A crisis moment (Ch. 12). Describe a specific episode where this network confronted an anomaly or crisis – a moment it either successfully self-corrected, suppressed the problem instead, or underwent a genuine, paradigm-shift-style resolution. Be concrete: name the episode, the people or groups involved, and what actually changed (or didn’t).
  3. The retrospective story (Ch. 11). How does the network’s own official, after-the-fact account of that episode differ from what was actually happening at the time? Where does the real messiness get smoothed over?
  4. Optional enrichment (not required for full credit). Connect your example to the Cantor case study from class – even a mathematical proof needed more than its own correctness to be accepted. Does your example show the same gap between “being right” and “winning”?

Submission

Due: 11:59 PM, Monday, October 12.

No peer-review round this time – submit directly; you’ll get feedback from me when I’m back.