Source
Automatically imported from: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/notes/99-8-13.html
Content
``` Today's notes, by coincidence I like to think, all consist of pointed criticisms of people, ideas, and institutions that have been bothering me. If you're not in the market for negativity today then you should leave this message for later.
"A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly." -- William Gibson, Neuromancer
Every new technology has to be digested by the culture. It's not really individuals who figure out what to do with it; it's the culture as a whole. People explore the possibilities, complain about the problems, watch one another, hear stories, and gradually everyone's tacit sense of proportion settles into a new equilibrium. The biggest problem with the Internet is that it's not just a technology but a platform for the construction of a thousand other technologies -- so many technologies, one after another, that the culture is having a hard time digesting them all. This situation is full-employment legislation for technology reporters, bless them, to such a degree that I was recently interviewed by a newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on the subject of the Dancing Hamsters fad. But many of the phenomena that accompany the Internet are too subtle yet for such a public hashing-out. There's just this creepy sense that things are changing. And often it's hard to define what's changing, inasmuch the phenomenon isn't "something new", but just a different setting on an old knob.
Let me tell you some stories that explore one of the many Internet- related issues that has yet to take clear form. Our sense of justice has always been shaped against a tacit assumption of locality: one is connected by geography or social networks or professional associations or something to the people with whom one has conflicts. But the Internet throws this assumption out of whack by allowing us to enter easily, effortlessly, into reasonably complicated relationships with people at great distances. Few of these relationships are totally without precedent, so as I say I'm not talking about things that are totally new. It's more a matter of calibration. Accordingly, three unjust hassles ...
I got a message one day in late 1997 from someone identifying himself as a reader of RRE, someone who had never written to me before and who didn't seem interested in a big friendship. He was just writing to say that he had been to St. Louis recently, and had seen an article in a local computer magazine called the PC Journal that was clearly plagiarized from my "How to Help Someone Use a Computer". I asked him to send me relevant photocopies, and he did. I was pissed. The plagiarist, someone named David Eppestine, had done a light once-over edit on my piece, but the whole structure and premise was the same, and most of the wording. It was the first time that I had ever been plagiarized, and it was a whole new experience. I called up the editor of the PC Journal and complained. She asked for a fax. I tried to send the fax, found that their fax machine was off, called her office to ask them to turn their fax machine on, and faxed my article, which first appeared in the May 1994 issue of The Network Observer. Soon thereafter I received a phone call from the PC Journal's attorney, who right there on the telephone treated me to a $150-an-hour firehose of negative energy, as if I were the aggressor in the situation. In particular, he explained at length just how difficult it would be for me to sue, given that I would have to sue them in Missouri, how hard it would be to show that I had been damaged financially, and so on. Furthermore, he explained that the PC Journal was going out of business soon, which made it even more unlikely to recover anything from them. But he was willing to send me $100, "just so my client doesn't keep getting these phone calls and faxes and letters". Ahem.
A few days later, I received in the mail a contract from this lawyer, which is easily the most abusive contract that I have ever seen. I quote the most abusive passage: "Furthermore, all parties agree that in the event Phil Agre improperly discloses any information about this Agreement or the underlying dispute, the exact amount of damages cannot be properly ascertained. Accordingly, all parties agree that in the event of a breech of the confidentiality portions of this Agreement, the liquidated damages sustained by David Eppestine and the PC Journal shall amount to One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00), and that the jurisdiction for enforcement shall be in Missouri". In other words, these folks need only walk into a Missouri small claims court with a rumor that I had breached confidentiality, and I would be on the losing end by default of a $1000 court judgement. After a couple rounds of negotiation, the lawyer managed to run out the clock as his client went out of business.
What's so offensive here, aside from the plagiarism of my work, is the impracticality of obtaining any kind of redress at a distance. Of course, people have been able to plagiarize published work forever. What feels new here is that my work wasn't "published" -- it was something that I circulated on the Internet. When a distribution system requires a large infrastructure, you can only distribute your work through a company. I didn't have a company standing behind me, or owning intellectual property rights, employing lawyers, experienced in the matter of intimidating people in St. Louis. It was just me. Now some people, specifically David Post and David Johnson, have suggested that Internet-related long-distance jurisdiction problems be solved by designating "cyberspace" as a separate place for legal purposes, so that disputes arising within the confines of cyberspace can be treated under the rules of whatever cyberspace-bound entity, AOL for example, mediated the transaction. But Messrs. Post and Johnson's theory does not help in the present case. Mr. Eppestine and the PC Journal were not bound to me by the rules of any particular Internet forum, and their offense took place not in cyberspace but in a paper publication that was circulated in St. Louis. The Internet is part of the real world, and most of the disputes that arise in consequence of activities involving the Internet will be located partly on the Internet and partly off it.
Let us move along to the second hassle. In January I received a message from a person representing something called The Knowledge Connection, whose signature file read School of Information Studies, Florida State University. This person claimed to be helping someone in the government of Florida organize "a conference for agency heads and upper level managers on electronic commerce and rights managements issues", and invited me to speak at it. After some correspondence it transpired that the entity that was organizing the conference was something called the Society for Electronic Commerce and Rights Management (www.ecarm.org). Now, I grew up in a world in which being a "Society" meant something, in which you couldn't be a Society, at least any Society that I would ever hear about, unless you had developed a significant amount of social machinery. Of course, anybody could call themselves a Society, except that nobody would know about them except their family. I simply assumed, therefore, that this Society was a serious thing. After all, it has a Web site and everything.
In response to this invitation, therefore, I went to considerable expense and inconvenience to buy tickets, fly to Tallahassee, and write both a speech and a newspaper column for the occasion. ECARM owed me some money as a result of this, and clearly stated so in a long e-mail correspondence. To date, however, I have received only a small portion of the money. Instead, I have received from a different representative of ECARM, who I gather is the business end of the organization, an endless series of excuses. And worse. This guy has made statements to me that are not true, and he has made commitments to me that he has not followed through on. His stories never add up: they have the money, they don't have the money, they care deeply about paying me, they can never remember how much they owe me (despite supposedly being experts on payment systems), on and on.
This has been going on for six months. The check has supposedly been lost in the mail at least twice. On one occasion he told me that the check had gone out by second-day Fedex on Tuesday, and when it didn't arrive by Friday he told me that in fact he had given my money to someone to mail to me, but that the person had disappeared with it. On another occasion he told me that he had sent me a check, but when I received the "check" it was only for the aforementioned small part of the total. His funniest story, altogether plausible I'm afraid by now, is that the conference's sponsors thought that his conference was so poorly organized that they had refused to pay. He has issued incoherent accusations, said things that are very hard to believe, and generally done everything I can imagine except pay me the money he owes me. I can't sue these people in Florida, so I'm shafted.
My third story isn't about the Internet but about another culture- warping technology, cell phones. For the last year I've had the misfortune of subscribing to Pacific Bell Wireless cell phone service. I'm going away for a while, however, so I figured I would cancel the service and get a better cell phone when I return. So I called *611, which is the so-called "customer care" number that one can call for free from the cell phone. Actually I did this two dozen times over several days until, after sitting on hold for ten minutes, I finally got through.
I said to the gentleman, "I'd like to cancel my cell phone service". He said, "Alright, I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe you can tell me why?" I replied that the proximal reason is that I am going out of town for several months, but the underlying reason is that I've experienced an endless series of problems: missed messages, billing problems, false busy signals, impossible to get through to customer service, and at least a dozen major bugs and misfeatures in the software of the Motorola Select 2000e handset. He said, very rapidly, as if it were one long word, "I'm sorry to hear that. You'll be getting a final bill in a week to ten d---", whereupon the phone went dead. "Hello?" Yup, it's dead. At first I figured that we've been cut off randomly. So, annoyed at the idea of being on hold for another ten minutes, I tried to call back. But I got an error from the cell phone, "SIM CARD NOT REGISTERED". The phone would not work.
Being stupid, I didn't figure out what had happened. I picked up my office phone and called their 800 number, sat on hold for a long time, spoke to a different customer service person, told my story, and sat on hold for a while longer, whereupon she explained that I had been cut off because the other guy didn't realize that I was talking to him on the cell phone. As he had been talking to me, he had been throwing the switch that turns off my phone service, not having determined (for example) what date I wanted service cancelled. This was pretty dumb. In the analog era, turning off one's phone service took days. Now it takes milliseconds. I got the new person to turn my service back on until August 10th, but this was a cumbersome procedure that involved running a credit check on me. All told, the process of getting my cell phone service turned off, which should have taken five minutes, took well over an hour. At least now I know that my credit records have been restored from credit-record perdition -- a story for another day.
Reflecting on this story, I recalled the first time that the Pacific Bell's wireless service went down altogether. Much like my first earthquake, it produced in me an uncanny sense of betrayal. The walls are not supposed to move back and forth!, says one's inner child. And the telephone system is not supposed to go down. So bad was Pacific Bell's service that I often found myself having to rethink my daily routines and design backup plans in case my cell phone wasn't going to work. It was ironic: the old AT&T, a regulated monopoly, produced an extremely robust and reliable system, whereas competition is producing dreadful service on every front.
But then I realized that it wasn't much of an irony at all. Yes, the fine service from the old AT&T monopoly does refute certain simple ideologies -- the ones that dominate the media. Nonetheless it makes perfect sense that competition would produce a lower level of service. Phone company people have told me that, in their view, based on their research, AT&T provided, and still provides, a level of service that, in an economic sense, is too high. What does it mean for service quality to be too high? If it costs more money to provide a higher level of service, but consumers aren't willing to pay that much extra money in practice to get the better service, then in economic terms the level of service is too high. A competitor can then succeed by offering worse service for lower prices. Pacific Bell provides dreadful service, and its customers presumably complain about it all day long, but it's entirely possible that Pacific Bell providing the level of service that the customers are actually willing to pay for. The customers are complaining, but the customers don't know how much it would cost to hire smarter customer-service people, build more robust systems, write decent software, etc. Wireless phone service, like any other "carriage" business, is a commodity whose market is brutally price-competitive, and so corners are presumably cut, just as they are in trucking, air travel, and other carriage businesses.
This is speculation, of course. It's equally possible that Pacific Bell Wireless is simply an organization in permanent chaos, and that it will be driven out of business as soon as its current crop of subscribers' contracts runs out. But I think that the economic perspective throws a new light on information technology and its place in society. Superficially it is a similar perspective to Perrow's famous theory of "normal accidents", except that Perrow is talking about organizational pathologies, whereas I'm talking about an economic mechanism that (one can at least argue) is rational. Still, we should not be satisfied with the economic analysis either:
* Poor telephone service has its externalities. For example, all of the people who got false busy signals when they called my cell phone number -- a problem that the Pacific Bell people claimed never to have heard of before, and that they were totally unable to diagnose -- were harmed by the problem, even though they had not chosen Pacific Bell. The innocent parties who are harmed by Pacific Bell's poor service are, by this argument, analogous to the innocent parties who are harmed by pollution from a factory that makes things tath they don't buy.
* Customers will probably not know the level of service quality until they are locked into a long-term service contract, thus creating a situation of moral hazard that is somewhat analogous to the power of Americans' health maintenance organizations to unjustifiably deny treatment once they fall ill.
* People who reasonably need a higher level of service, for example because they need the service to work right in emergency situations, are probably out of luck, given the overwhelming difficulty of offering multiple levels of service at different prices.
When "risks from computers" arise, we tend to diagnose them as bad technical design. That's a comforting way to diagnose them: okay, so it's our fault as technical people, but at least that means we have some power over it. We know how to fix it. But what if most of the risks associated with computers are only technical on the surface, and are actually driven by market forces underneath? If that's true, and we should find out if it is, then we will have to start looking at risks differently. On one hand, we will decide to accept some risks, the ones that result from the market simply doing its job. On the other hand, we will be doubly upset at other risks, the ones that result from market failures such as externalities and incompete information. Questions arise. For example, how will we tell which risks belong in which category? It's difficult, as the analogous situation in the economic analysis of law makes clear. And once we do figure out the market's role in a given risk, what do we do then?
So those are my three hassles. What to make of them? There's the legal question, of course, and the policy question, but my focus here is cultural: in the long run, even the medium run, the culture will get used to all of this and adjust accordingly. We will recognize that the information business leaks -- Hal Varian, after all, advises record labels, software firms, and other companies owning intellectual property not to get obsessed with obtaining zero piracy, but rather to optimize the total return from their investment in the world as it is. We will recognize that anybody can create a Society just by setting up a mailing list and a Web page, and that neither is remotely as meaningful as a paper letterhead and a physical storefront were in the old days; we will get the entrepreneurial mindset and demand to be paid in cash up front. And we will accustom ourselves to a world that is absolutely saturated by information technologies, none of which works.
I recently attended something called the NSF Workshop on Improving Undergraduate Education in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences through Use of Technology, held at NSF's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. I was invited by Art Ellis, a chemist at Wisconsin and a lovely guy, who wanted me to talk about what can go wrong with multimedia instruction in the university. (I'll circulate a draft of that talk when it's ready -- it consisted of a hundred bullets that I outlined in my notebook in an all-night marathon at the International House of Pancakes.) It was an interesting interdisciplinary event, and pleasant with the non-ironic enthusiasm that most scientists have for their subject matter. It's hard to get upset with someone who is just so excited about organic molecules. So it was basically a positive experience, which I hope you'll keep in mind as I proceed to complain about certain isolated aspects of it.
Specifically, I was upset with the, not to get euphemistic about it, nonsense that I sometimes heard at this meeting. This, I hasten to observe, was equal opportunity nonsense. It came in three forms: corporate nonsense, liberal nonsense, and technophile nonsense.
The corporate nonsense came from certain parties who see a business opportunity in competing with the existing universities through electronic instructional delivery and distance education. I have written about distance education elsewhere, and my point here is not to evaluate it one way or another. My point, rather, concerned the form of rhetoric that was used. It was public relations rhetoric. Public relations has an elaborate theory of cognition and language. For public relations people, thinking is associationistic. Those who have taken college psychology courses will know about associationism; it's a very old theory that says that the mind consists of a pool of concepts that are connected to one another with various strengths. So, for example, in American minds the concept "apple pie" might be strongly connected to "Mom" or "America" but weakly connected to "aluminum". This theory was discarded long ago by the psychologists, but it is nonetheless central to the practice of PR. Once you realize this you'll see it everywhere
The attraction of associationism for PR is that it provides very concrete guidance for the practitioner. You want good symbols to be associated to yourself and bad symbols to be associated to the other guy. To accomplish this, you create whatever facts and arguments tend to pry loose certain associations while forming others. It doesn't matter if the facts are half-truths and the arguments are twisted, just so long as they are perceived as sufficiently credible, or if they create sufficient doubt, among the specific "public" whose thought processes one is targeting. This is one reason why public relations -- not as a general and abstract matter, but in the form it actually takes today -- is so dangerous: it encourages a primitive style of thinking in which everything is reduced to vague associations among vague concepts.
The innovation of contemporary conservative rhetoric in the United States is to routinize this practice and teach it to millions of people, but that's a topic for another day. The point here is that the proponents of corporate higher education were applying these techniques to some of the central concepts in public debates on the matter. Take, for example, the concept of monopoly. You will often hear ideological or entrepreneurial opponents of today's universities referring to them as a "monopoly". A couple of the people that I met at the NSF workshop did this, and I challenged them. You've got thousands of universities; where's the monopoly? Faced with this kind of challenge, they simply shifted from one argument to another, none of them at all rational. The monopoly is in accreditation, one of them said to me condescendingly. But you've got thousands of universities, all competing with their own brand of accreditation, so where's the monopoly? The monopoly is in geography, the other one said, even though this guy works for a university that draws its students from all around the world.
These guys were clearly not interested in an intellectually serious discussion of the matter, but I was both alarmed and curious so I pressed them. It seems to me, I said (and as I have said in other essays here) that the real danger of monopoly comes from their own type of business plan. If higher education really is an information commodity that can be distributed worldwide on the Internet, then it is quite arguably a natural monopoly in a straightforward sense of the term. Faced with this kind of argument, they looked a little worried and just kept on dancing from one glibly spurious argument to the next.
Finally, after at least half a dozen go-rounds, I stumbled. Antitrust law will solve the problem, one of them said. I was so stunned by the brazen silliness of this particular argument that I couldn't instantly put my finger on the correct response. The correct response is, "(1) antitrust law doesn't make monopolies illegal when they are achieved through economies of scale without anticompetitive practices, and (2) antitrust law won't kick in until the so-called industry of higher education has been reduced to an oligopoly of two or three global mega-universities which together have unprecedented centralized control over human knowledge". But my actual response was more like, "sputter, sputter, like it's good enough to wait until one single organization controls all of human knowledge and then expect the Justice Department to fix it?". I had lost. And this is what they were counting on: they had a bottomless stock of these bite-sized units of sophistry, each working to associate a vague concept of "monopoly" with the current university system and prevent that same vague concept from being associated with the system that they hoped to create and profit from. Here is the fundamental danger of PR: the winner is not the most rational arguer, but the one who invests the most money to create the biggest arsenal of arguments, whether they make sense or not, all serving to defocus the issues and push to a predetermined conclusion.
That's what think tanks and pundits do, and that is why their effects on society are so corrosive. That's the corporate nonsense. The liberal nonsense is associated with constructivist education. Although much good work is done by education professors and teachers, I happen to dissent from the prevailing consensus in favor of constructivism. For those who might not follow such things, constructivism is the idea that learners need to construct ideas for themselves rather than swallowing them as indigestible wholes, and that teaching consists in providing the environments, activities, and other raw materials that will enable this construction to take place. Constructivism places great emphasis on the student's own thinking, the student's own answers, on class discussion, and so on, and great emphasis against the teacher's imposed view of things.
Americans will recognize constructivism as a manifestation of the culture wars. American culture is, to a deeper extent than I think most Americans even realize, organized by a war between particular kinds of conservative and liberal worldviews, each of which feeds itself by railing against the other, and each of which thereby turns itself into something very close to the stereotype that the other uses to describe it. Conservatives are into order and structure. They believe in right answers. They have little regard for the opinions and development of the individual, except insofar as they conform to the right answers. Liberals are against those things. They believe that every individual is infinitely unique and valuable, and that it's much more important to let everyone follow their own path than to impose anything on them. But then of course both sides have their hidden agendas: the conservatives' version of absolute truth always happens to correspond to their own opinions, and liberals constantly put people in double binds: believe what you want provided that it's what I believe.
These patterns are bad enough when they are vented in cultural politics, but they are really destructive when they are inflicted on children. To take a silly example: I read an article a while back about a suburban soccer league, in which the parents are polarized between the conservative social engineers who are shrieking at their kids to compete to the death and the liberal social engineers who want everyone to make nicey-nice and everyone to be a winner. In between them was the soccer coach, a German immigrant who timidly suggested that maybe the important thing to focus on was soccer skills. The effects of this pattern in the public schools, however, are not so silly. The public schools go through an endless and downright violent oscillation of fashion changes imposed by legislatures, so that vast amounts of energy are invested implementing the latest plan, and the latest plan, and the latest plan.
So I was most unhappy to encounter liberal-culture-war constructivism at the NSF workshop. I mean, I don't want to trash this group, but I really was taken aback by a workshop full of people, right there in the headquarters of the National Science Foundation, including several authentic scientists, delivering in unison a highly practiced chuckle at the idea of a "right answer" in science class. Hello? I mean, yes, it is definitely possible to go overboard with the right answers by teaching dogma instead of thinking, or by portraying science as a settled catalogue of permanent truths rather than as a dynamic and defeasible process. The kids definitely have to learn how to think scientifically. But that's not going to happen unless you eventually get around to telling them what the answer is! Of course, real science teachers tell right answers all the time. It's kind of hard to avoid, although I have certainly seen well-trained teachers try. But the expert consensus in that particular meeting was that the new generation of high-technology tools for teaching science should not be organized around any such idea.
The final form of nonsense that I encountered at this meeting was (what I will call) technophile nonsense. Rob Kling and Suzanne Iacono described what they called "computerization movements" -- social movements that promote the adoption of particular information technologies. These movements tend to fit a certain profile, and part of that profile is an almost millennarian worldview that promises a totally different future and that stigmatizes all dissent as an expression of the irrational resistance of the decadent past. And multimedia distance education definitely has a computerization movement. I do not mean to say that everyone who supports distance education is a fanatic, much less that distance education is a fraud. It's plainly a complicated question. The problem is that a certain submovement treats it as a very simple question.
The most characteristic rhetorical device of this movement is the two-columned table: "from" and "to". For example, "from teacher- centered to student-centered". Whatever that means. I've seen at least a dozen of these tables in various professional and popular articles on the subject, especially ones by consultants and other promoters of the technology. See, for example, Michael G. Dolence and Donald M. Norris, Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, Ann Arbor: Society for College and University Planning, 1995. Or see, for a more tragic example, the version in "Managing Distance Learning: New Challenges for Faculty" , by Lisa Kimball, a sensible organizational dynamics person who knows better. Several things are obnoxious about these tables. They are vague, they are stereotypes, they frequently oppose a worst-case past against a best-case future, and above all they promise an utter, discontinuous transformation that just isn't the way the world works. Kimball's case is especially interesting given that, once she gets done with the ritual table of from's and to's, she settles down into concepts of group process that, as she well knows, are largely independent of technology and do not change that much. The tension goes unremarked.
The NSF workshop had several of these tables. And it's not just the tables. The tables are really a kind of instruction manual for a new rhetoric, and it's the rhetoric that's destructive. Take the nebulous opposition between "teacher-centered" and "student-centered" kinds of learning. (One does not say "teaching" any more, on the grounds that learning is a socially necessary activity and teaching is not. If one does grudgingly recognize the role of a professional who sees to it that people learn, one calls that person a "learning manager" or some such foolishness.) The idea is that, in the old world, teachers just stood up and droned, and the whole thing revolved around them, whereas in the new world each student will head off in his or her own totally unique direction, according to his or her own unique interests and needs. Sounds good until you try it, and until you really ask seriously whether the dichotomies describe the reality. You wouldn't know from listening to the technophiles that any teacher in the old world had ever run a discussion section, assigned loosely structured project assignments, supplemented classes with individually directed study arrangements, or ever provided students with a reading list.
And what happens in this world where every student heads off in a different direction? You have no community among the students. They can't discuss a common subject matter with one another, for example. And now the teacher -- I'm sorry, the learning manager -- loses all of the economies of scale that made it possible to answer questions without being overwhelmed. If all of the students are on the same page, then questions and answers in a group format, whether in person or online, are likely to contribute to everyone's learning. But if everyone goes in their own direction then this is not true. The point is not that individual direction is bad and that lectures are good -- although I have no trouble at all admitting that I give lectures. The point is that the world has always consisted of a combination of the full range of options, and that the world will remain a combination of the full range of options -- unless, that is, the zealots screw it up. This is a real possibility, it seems to me, and I want to make sure that we can talk sense about these things, because they really do matter.
I want to conclude by stating again that I am not denouncing this NSF workshop in its totality, or even its majority. Most of it was perfectly useful. I had no problem with most of the tools that were demonstrated, or with most of the ideas that were expressed outside of these three areas. And my ideas aren't perfect either. And, as I had to emphasize in the question period after my hundred bullets of things that can go wrong, my purpose is not to discourage innovation in this area. Quite the contrary, I want to encourage innovation. What's old and decadent here is not the face-to-face university, but rather the same old millennarian ideology of the computerization movements. We see it every few years about some technology or other, and it's always the same. The danger is that this shallow style of thinking will greatly narrow the vast, incredible range of options that the technology makes available, by making only certain of those options thinkable.
Some URL's.
Steven Jay Gould's terrific 1993 review of "Jurassic Park" http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19930812051R
funny article on extreme candy http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.06/candy.html
European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work http://www.cti.dtu.dk/CSCW/ECSCW99.html
BBC World Service http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/index.shtml
Interception Capabilities 2000 http://www.iptvreports.mcmail.com/interception_capabilities_2000.htm
Technical Advisory Committee to Develop a Federal Information Processing Standard for the Federal Key Management Infrastructure (TACDFIPSFKMI) (I am not making this up) http://csrc.nist.gov/tacdfipsfkmi/
The Net Result http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/netresult/
Radiocracy conference, Cardiff, 26-28 November 1999 http://www.cf.ac.uk/uwcc/jomec/thc/radio1.html
Non-Commercial Domain Name Holders Constituency (NCDNHC) http://www.ncdnhc.org/
Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections Edmonton, 30 September to 3 October 1999 http://www.ualberta.ca/~artdesin/conf_MAIN.htm
EDUCAUSE conferences http://www.educause.edu/conference/e99/ http://www.educause.edu/sac/sac99/sac99.html
The Visible Problems of the Invisible Computer http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/networks.html
Don Weightman on the broadband wars http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/07/16/2026237&mode=thread
hacking into home computers http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/07/circuits/articles/08hack.html
book price comparison http://www.bestbookbuys.com/
end ```