In the modern academic world, there is basically one way to earn one’s living: teaching at a University. If one is in the medical or scientific field, it may be possible to gain a purely research-oriented position, and if one is also a skilled writer one may be able to suppliment one’s income by writing books on the topic one studies, but on the whole it is difficult to earn a living without teaching college students.
One of the main aims of technosocialism is to break down links between duties, so that someone who is good at task A doesn’t also need to be good at task B in order to be rewarded for doing task A. This is very relevant here. Teaching is a challenging task, and not everyone is tempermentally suited to it. Certainly not all of those who are suited to scholarship would do as well in a classroom. With that in mind, we need to develop a new model of rewarding pure scholarship, but first we need to take a closer look at just what scholarship is.
Let me start by drawing a line between scholarship and research. They are closely related, but they are distinguishable from each other. In a sentance, research is the discovery of wholy new knowledge, and scholarship is the the digestion of knowledge already gained. Without research, scholarship quickly grows stagnant, but without scholarship, society can never gain the full benefits of research. But while the benefits of research are often fairly easy to determine, the contributions of scholars are often more difficult to quantify. Once we take away the assumption that scholars will earn their living through teaching, how can we quantify their work and assign Contribution appropriately?
Once teaching and research have been defined as separate activities, there is one quintissentially scholastic activity left: the publishing of books and papers. We’ve already touched briefly on the Contribution credit assigned to the authors of books in non-academic contexts, but there is a fundimental difference between books written for entertainment and books written to convey information, and that must be dealt with when we’re talking specifically about non-fiction work.
The example I’d like to call your attention to in this context is Google. Specifically, Google’s PageRank system. To determine the order of search results, Google looks both at how frequently the search keywords turn up on a particular page, and at how many other pages link to the page in question. The more pages link to that page, the higher its PageRank becomes.
This is relevent to our discussion because in many ways academic writing works the same way. The significance of a given book or paper lies partly in how many people read it, and partly in how many other scholars cite it in their own work. The more citacions are made to a given work, the more likely it is to have been significant in its field.
There are two primary ways that the author of a book recieves Contribution credit: when someone reads their book simply for enjoyment, they are given COntribution credit in proportion to the amount of that person’s reading time that was devoted to reading that book, the same way a musician would be, and when someone uses their book as a learning aid to pass a test in the SNA system. We’ve already gone over both of those in some detail and I don’t want to rehash them here. But I do want to add one more feature, one which can trace its lineage back both to Google and to pyramid-marketing schemes. Every time a book earns Contribution credit for its author, a secondary pool is created, equal to half of the primary amount, which is divided up among the authors of the works cited in that book according to the number of times they are cited. Each of those credit assignments then generate their own secondary pools, which are similarly distributed, and so on until the amount of the credit generated falls under a predefined threshold. I realize that that last sentence may have been a bit difficult to follow, so let’s try an example.
Ed writes a book. He cites Jed and three other authors. Ned writes a book, and cites Ed’s book, and three other authors. Ted writes a book, and cites Ned’s book, and three other authors. Because they are obidient little imaginary academics who like making the math easy, they each cite all of their authors an equal number of times. Now, several people read Ted’s book and use it to pass an exam on English Literature. Ted earns 512Ctv. He thinks no more about it. The system, meanwhile, begins calculating the secondary Contribution pool. Half of Ted’s reward would be 256Ctv, which is then divided among four authors. Ned recieves credit for 64Ctv. This then creates a secondary pool for Ned’s book of 32Ctv, and Ed gets a credit of 8Ctv. You know the drill by now, Jed gets a credit of 1Ctv. At this point it stops because the system does not calculate secondary pools on rewards of 1Ctv or less. Which is handy, because I was running out of ‘ed’ names.
In real life, the world of scholarly writing is less like a linear progression and more like an interconnected net. What this means from the standpoint of academia in a technosocialist society is that these these secondary reward pools would enable even fairly obscure scholars to gain Contribution credit if their work led, even several steps down the road, to an important book or breakthrough. The more influencial a work is, the more it will be cited by others, and the more avenues for gaining Contribution the author will have.