I started with the name flywheel because of my involvement with Flying Disc Sports  (or frisbee, or frisbie, depending on your attitude toward using trademarks as generic terms). 

William James said that habit is the flywheel of civilization. It's an interesting idea, which I explored in a little 1997 essay down below.

Groucho is another flywheel tangent.

Most of the serious work at this site -- and the reason most people visit -- concerns research for my Ph.D dissertation. So the DNS Overview page of links might be what you're looking for. There's also a little bit on this page and elsewhere about Constructivism, which is the theoretical framework I use in the dissertation.

And then there are some things about me, such as: 
   1) FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions;
   2) Frequently Questioned Answers, and ;
   3) My suggestions about some of The Best of the best I've seen on the Web

CONSTRUCTIVISM 

Since some people (actually quite a few)  have commented that this section is a bit heavy on the social science jargon, I've included some quotes that might convey the flavor--if not the substance--of the framework. 

First we shape our tools, and then they shape us. Marshall McLuhan 

The great mercy of civilization is that it ended evolution. Jaron Lanier 

Reality is a collective hunch. Lily Tomlin 

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. Will Durant 

The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter Drucker 

Without people, nothing is possible. Without community, nothing is lasting. Ralph Nader 

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. Paul Valery 

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.   Bertrand Russell

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. G. K. Chesterton 

My ivory tower rant begins here. 

William James described habit as the flywheel of society. David Hume also focused on habit as a social force, but the pragmatists were much more attentive to how social behavior could be changed. The flywheel metaphor captures the idea that we put society into motion, and that we have power to alter its direction. Yet doing so requires an understanding of rules which are not immediately obvious. 

As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Miami's Graduate School of International Studies, my main interests include technology transfer, US foreign policy, and the creation and persistence of technical standards in human practice. The working title of my dissertation is Bandwidth Rules: Standards and Structure in Global Internet Governance. This site includes an abstract of the dissertation, and a background page of potential interest to people that I solicit for interviews. I also maintain an overview-- a page of links that might be useful to other people doing research on this topic. 

Constructivism is an analytical framework developed by Nicholas Onuf in World of Our Making. The tenets of constructivism will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the structurationist school of sociology, the linguistic turn, reflexivity, the double hermeneutic, and agent-structure analysis. These are well-established social science concepts that are not generally familiar to the American public (George Soros, once a student of Karl Popper, has called himself a reflexivist, raising the prospect that peripheral interest might be boosted by his celebrity). 

There isn't a lot about the leading structurationist, sociologist Anthony Giddens, on the web yet, but most good bookstores carry him, and his work certainly deserves greater attention. 

Due to his 1992 article in International Organization, Alexander Wendt has become the most frequently cited constructivist. He and Onuf diverge on various issues, but Wendt's explanations and examples of the agent-structure problem and the construction of international anarchy are essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the debate. For Wendt, "the fundamental structures of international politics are social, rather than strictly material as realists argue; and ... these social structures shape actors' identities and interests, rather than just their behavior, as rationalists argue." There aren't many linkable references to Wendt on the Web yet, but good search engines do turn up a few self-proclaimed constructivists. It helps to read the works of others who claim the label, just to get a clearer sense of what it's about. 

Onuf's approach is to demonstrate how rule-based human performances, expressed through three types of speech acts--assertives, directives, and commissives--result in the co-constitution of agents and structures. It's a carefully worked out argument, with a high-grade intellectual pedigree, and he makes it very thoroughly. Nevertheless, many people are completely bewildered when they first encounter it. I suggest keeping two axioms in mind: 1) Rules make rule; 2 Rules put resources into play. 

Among its many insights, constructivism adds perspective to the unfortunate historical propensity of humans to objectify the mind as an entity subject to environmental factors. Constructivism is best known as a critique of international relations theories which assert that rational behaviors of nation-states must necessarily conform to the exigencies of an anarchic world system. The framework can be extended to reveal similar patterns in superstitious eschatologies, statements like "The devil made me do it," and a wide range of modern materialist and historicist philosophies, notably extremist forms of Marxism and Social Darwinism. 

The propensity to "blame" environmental factors as an excuse for human behavior has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, leading to a philosophy of mind that proclaims computerized telecommunication as destiny. Not only are such concepts being promoted with fanatical energy, they are being used to justify social transformations that are increasingly rapid and disruptive. The rising interest in "memes," which holds that ideas acquire people (rather than people acquiring ideas) is an important part of this distressing trend. 

Consider an idea that is gaining prominence among the American reading public. In a recent Scientific American "Special Report" titled "Mind and Brain," neurobiologist Gerald D. Fischbach wrote, "Our survival and probably the survival of the planet depend on a more complete understanding of the human mind. If we agree to think of the mind as a collection of mental processes rather than as a substance or spirit, it becomes easier to get on with the necessary empirical studies." 

While most of the report focuses on brain physiology, Fischbach goes on to speculate that the mind is an "emergent" property of the brain. The proposition that the mind is a collection of processes is a pragmatic approach to research work, especially when there is no hard evidence of mind as substance or spirit. Productive inquiry can go far with this hypothesis, which by itself is unobjectionable. But a growing number of people are taking this notion a step further, insisting that there is no single "mind" at all. Human behavior is said to result from congeries of animal instincts and capacities, led by contending memes (genes of the mind) which behave as external social agents. "There is no free will," says Artificial Intelligence (AI) expert and science fiction author, Astro Teller, "except that we are forced to believe in it." 

I've noticed that the work of the highly regarded and fairly well-known cyber-pundit Jaron Lanier seems very compatible with constructivism. There might be some big differences, yet to be discovered, but he deserves credit for his consistently outspoken criticism of memetics. Another apparent kindred spirit is Phil Agre, the spam fighting publisher of the Red Rock Eater News Service. Both these writers are very concerned with debunking the notion that AI technology can develop a type of intentionality in machines on par with human free will. 

The more I've learned about the philosophies of AI and memetic purists, the more I've developed an aversion to their position about what makes us intelligent. Are we not more than signal processors supplemented by random seed generators? Their "soft machine" metaphor is fine with me. I have no objection to the idea that the social world heavily influences the contours of our thinking, but it seems as though the purists deny that the mind is simultaneously brought to bear upon the world. Yes, we typically act on the basis of fixed beliefs, which are largely the result of cultural preconditioning. And we can adjust our beliefs when we have good reason. But the exercise of our faculties of doubt, which is one of the healthiest sources of new beliefs, is an intelligent, constructive act. It is different than evolutionary adaptation, though the purists seem to think they are the same. No wonder Lamarck is becoming popular again. 

So what if some people anthropomorphize the gene and the meme? What's the big deal? What harm is there in staying up all night arguing about this? What difference does it make? The short answer, I think, is that these philosophies can be used to justify new kinds of universal social obligations, and notions of "the way the world is." These are the kinds of excuses one social group tries to impose their precepts over others. I'll deal with the particular manifestations elsewhere, but I think David Shenk hit close to the mark when he said, "Cyberspace is Republican." 

The layout of this page will change drastically someday, when I take the time to parse all this philosophical ranting into more sensible, clickably organized categories. I'll just add here that, around the time I wrote this, I had the exceptional experience in participating in the making of a book about constructivism, International Relations in a Constructed World, edited by Vendulka Kubalkova, Nick Onuf and Paul Kowert. It is scheduled to be published by M.E. Sharpe in April 1998. Supporting documentation mentioned in my chapter, "Internet Governance Goes Global," can be found by clicking here. 

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Flying Disc Sports (Frisbee)

I initially registered this domain to stake out a band of cyberspace spectrum where people could find information and links about flying disc aerodymanics and flying disc sports. My game is freestyle, but Ultimate will be included as well.  Yes, I know frisbee is a sixties thing, and that this is the nineties.  And I also know that there are more people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs than belong to the Freestyle Players Association. Maybe that can change. 

More Links: Scientific American
 

My 1982 best seller (not), Frisbie: Beyond Catch and Throw will be excerpted here in the not too distant future. If you want to buy an original copy, my buddies at FlyingAces.com may still have a few in stock. 

Anyone who has some good material on flying disc aerodynamics that would be worth contributing to the web is encouraged to contact me. 

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GROUCHO

Soon after registering flywheel.com as a domain name, I discovered that Groucho Marx often played a character named Wolf J. Flywheel. It seemed appropriate to provide some links in his honor. There are also some written quotes and wav files. 

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