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``` Some notes on the democratic Internet, the new culture of design, premature dot-com business plans, and things that piss me off, plus a bunch of follow-ups and URL's.
**
The new year is under way and the new economy is under water, so it's time to kick-start some democratic cultural forms on the Internet.
(1) Ordinary people should be able to start radio stations. The technology exists, so it's a matter of instructions and interface. Carolyn Kay is collecting resources on the subject. Please send her anything you know, such as URL's for Web sites, that would be helpful for ordinary people who want to start their own radio stations on the Internet. Examples would include server software that normal people can use, microphones and other equipment for getting good sound into your computer, Web sites that aggregate normal people's radio stations, knowledgeable advice about running a radio show, information about running particular formats online such as call-ins and show archives, and press reports about people who have done such things. Carolyn has volunteered to impose order on this material and make it available to everyone on the Web. If useful materials exist in sufficient amounts then we'll be happy. If not then I will send out another, more ambitious call that asks people who have relevant knowledge to send messages explaining what beginners need to know.
(2) Normal people nowadays often find themselves in civil liberties controversies involving information and communications technologies. For the most part they're on their own. But in many cases we can help them by putting documents online. Therefore, we need a low-overhead organization, really just a mailing list and a simple Web page, of people who have scanning equipment and/or Web sites, and who might be willing to scan or host some occasional documents. This organization would not be publicized. Rather, groups like the ACLU would just know about it, and they would pass people along. What happens now is that a normal person or a lawyer finds themselves in a civil liberties controversy, so they call the ACLU or some other well-known group on the phone. Those groups are all overloaded, so mostly they try to pass the cases along to people who can help. For example, I end up talking to a lot of people who are involved in transportation privacy cases -- not that I'm an authority myself, but nobody's an authority and at least I've written about them. Oftentimes those people will have interesting documents that would be worth publicizing -- press clippings, legal briefs, police files, government reports, etc. Even if I can't solve their problem, I'd like to have someplace I can send them to help get publicity. Once their materials are on the Web, then we can make the situation known to reporters, lawyers, people who face similar situations, etc. To get this low-overhead organization under way, all we'd need is one volunteer to be the provisional organizer. That person would set up a moderated mailing list and a simple Web page, and we could then send out a message inviting people to join the list. All that would be needed in the long run would be a few people willing to keep the list and Web site going. It wouldn't be too hard.
(3) Voting Reform Watch. If the US Supreme Court has invalidated the voting laws of a majority of states, and if it has established equal protection tests that are so strong that they are violated by nearly every jurisdiction in the country, and if we really believe that the Court meant what it said, then we are looking at a few years of very intense voting reform. But voting reform doesn't happen automatically and it doesn't necessarily represent forward progress. Many "reform" bills, like the ones that Florida enacted after the voting fraud in Miami in 1997, are designed to make matters worse, or at least have that effect. Therefore, concerned citizens need to pool their efforts to watch voting reform efforts at every level throughout the country. Is there any particular organization that credibly claims to be the focal point for this watching? It's probably not something that could be coordinated on a volunteer basis; it's just too big and complicated. But it's also not something that could be done solely by professional staff. What's needed is an Internet-sophisticated organization that has sufficient credibility to motivate good citizens nationwide to go out and watch, reporting back what they see. Publicity could then be generated when bad bills start moving in legislatures (or good ones), and notes could be compared about the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. Experts could be brought into the discussion to lend their own views to the citizen-watchers out on the front lines.
**
The "Republicans want to shut down public television" hoax is going around the Internet again. If I recall correctly, this thing began life in 1995, in the Newt Gingrich era. Like so many of these e-mail viruses, it has apparently lain dormant in the Internet's nervous system all this time, only to flare up again in the wake of the recent election. The new version is better-written and -formatted, but it is still bogus. Look for the email addresses at the University of North Colorado -- those addresses do not exist. And the petition that asks you to add your name and pass the result to everyone you know is worse than useless. Don't pass around political action alerts unless they are signed by a reputable organization.
**
When I sent out my annotated syllabus on "Information and Institutional Change", it was full of editing errors and bad writing. I just didn't have time to fix it. Now I have finally copyedited it. So if you are looking for good reading material related to the issues of this list, you can find the syllabus here:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/change.html
Let me know if you find any more mistakes.
I've also revised "How to help someone use a computer":
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/how-to-help.html
I hope you'll forward it to everyone who can use it.
**
Recommended: Sal Restivo, Wesley Shrum, and Keith Benson, STS and the Unabomber: Personal essays, Science, Technology, and Society 26(1), 2001, pages 56-81. In these short essays, at turns amusing and scary, officers of two academic research societies, the Society for Social Study of Science (4S) and the History of Science Society (HSS), recount their personal involvement in the FBI investigation of the Unabomber. All three were approached because of letters from the bomber that appeared to the FBI to have been written by a sociological student of technology. Each author had to deal with being a suspect in a murder case, with his responsibilities as a scholar and research society officer, and with the attitudes of his colleagues. The high point comes when the FBI agents register for the 4S conference in New Orleans under assumed names and befriend everyone in sight; the really shameful low point comes when Keith Benson's colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Washington call him to a meeting in which every last one of them yelled at him for supposedly endangering their lives through his involvement with the case.
**
The need for a new culture.
The world is being swept by new materials, including computational devices that can be embedded into anything. These new materials are full of knowledge; far more knowledge goes into the average hunk of steel, glass, fabric, computer circuitry, display screen now than ten years ago. If you look around at a hundred sectors of industry, you see people exploring a world of new design options.
What's missing from this picture is the most important kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to live. We have an opportunity to redesign our lives, and I want to argue for a new culture in which we use this wave of new materials to reinvent the way we live. We're at a crossroads. We can be good little consumers and buy all the shiny commodities, or we can be active participants in shaping the culture.
This active design orientation has a precedent in the Internet world; the Internet is designed so that end users can build on top of it, and the Internet's development has repeatedly headed in unexpected directions because of the ways that end users have taken hold of it. We need to bring that orientation home and apply it to a much wider range of technologies.
Knowing how to live has many facets: having a purpose, being useful, evolving rituals instead of ruts, advancing professionally without tearing oneself apart, keeping in touch, using TV and other drugs in moderation, physical and mental health, balance, cultivating tastes, eating the right things, standing for something, and advancing the art of having a life. But I want to consider a few aspects in particular.
Quiet. Access to computers will soon be a solved problem, but access to quiet is something else. All sorts of machinery can be made more quiet with new materials and computer-intensive methods of vibration analysis. This includes HVAC and compressors generally. And noise- cancellation devices will soon be cheap enough to scatter everywhere. It's time to start auditing our homes, workplaces, and public spaces for noise. Some noises are good. Others are bad. We've gotten used to too many unnecessary bad noises.
Indoor air quality. We know that indoor air is choked with fumes from carpets, paint, and plastics. The problem isn't getting solved because it's invisible, but we'll soon be able to get small devices that automatically analyze the air. Then we'll be in a position to force the issue.
Adverse selection. Homes today are designed to look good for the half-hour you spend on the tour, instead of what they'll be like to live in. When everyone is online we can help people find other people who live in similar houses from the same builder, and a lot of new questions can come to the surface. What would it be like to have a service that enables people to communicate based on the stuff they own on common, or are thinking of buying? It's an easy problem on a technical level and tough on a social level. You have to deal with privacy issues, spammers, and perverse incentives. But maybe there's a way.
Intellectual life. In a world of terabyte databases and superabundant bandwidth it'll be much easier to explore the art, music, and ideas of the world. We'll be able to discover what we really find interesting and what we really care about. And it'll be much easier to find other people who care about the same thing. Then will we we make time?
Boundaries. As cell phones mature into always-on technologies that keep us connected to everyone else, we'll have incredible power to keep in touch. But we'll also have to decide where to draw the line. E-mail addiction will move from the desktop to restaurants, vacations, recreation, and the middle of the night. We'll have to set boundaries: at which points exactly during your kids' Saturday soccer game are you letting them down if you're hooked to a device and not to them?
The tidal wave of new materials can be used to amplify the negative forces that are pushing the world out of balance. And that is the most likely outcome unless a new culture of living well takes root. We can drive ourselves into fragmented, hyper-competitive, over-scheduled lives, or we can learn how to use the new technologies positively to design healthy lives of involvement and balance.
This exploratory period of new technologies is important: technical standards are a parliament of early adopters. Companies produce products, but only real people in their real homes can tell what's useful, and only real people in their real lives can understand how the pieces fit together. People with a strong design orientation lead the market and effectively make choices for everyone else. That's why we need a movement of creative people designing good lives for themselves, and why we need it now.
**
We're laughing at the "new economy" companies that are trading at 15 cents a share right now, and justly so. But mixed in among the downer cows, I suspect, are some legitimate ideas that are simply premature. Here are a few reasons why that might happen:
Scale. Most information technologies huge massive economies of scale. They require substantial one-time investments, like writing software, that must be paid off across many customers. Economists often pretend that prices are driven by the marginal cost of production, which in the computer world are usually low, but in scale-intensive industries prices tend to be driven by fixed costs. And fixed costs tend to be counterintuitive. If a company with fixed costs of X can find N customers who are willing to pay X/N, then they can at least break even. These could be 10 customers who are willing to pay X/10, or 1,000,000 who are willing to pay X/1,000,000 -- any N will do. If the product can be released in several versions that justify charging different amounts to different customers then you can combine N1, N2, and N3 to get the cash flow you need. But in many cases those N customers don't exist yet, for any N. Either enough people aren't online yet, or the product requires complements (such as personal computers) that are themselves still too expensive. As a result, lots of good ideas have to wait until the market builds sufficient scale. This idea takes some getting used to: one day your worthless business plan will become valuable, but that day will not be announced by any thunderclaps -- the market will simply and silently have grown big enough. Since most of these markets are natural monopolies, again because of their high fixed costs, the game is to predict when scale will be achieved. Get started early enough to be positioned when it comes, and late enough so you don't run out of cash while waiting for it. The bigger the prospective monopoly, the greater the incentive to burn cash for the sake of the first-mover advantage. That was the theory behind a lot of the .com start-ups. They got it wrong for the most part, but their investors believed it long enough to put a bunch of Ferraris on I-280. Maybe next time they'll get it right.
Scope. Once upon a time, giant media mergers were always justified economically in terms of "synergy". If you paid $50M for a media company that only seemed to be worth $30M, you would claim that the deal isn't just ego, and that the combined company would be valuable enough to make up the difference. These claims got discredited in sufficient numbers that nobody utters the S-word anymore, but that obscures the fact that a real economic principle was at stake. This principle is called economies of scope. Whereas economies of scale are efficiencies that can be gained by producing large numbers of the same thing, economies of scope are efficiencies that can be gained by using the same facilities to produce several different things at once. Economies of scope were first discovered in the early 20th century by the chemical industry and other businesses that could use the same equipment to combine the same inputs in different ways. If a company produced only one chemical, then it would lose in competition with a company that could produce several chemicals, distributing its fixed costs among all of them. The same thing is true in media industries. The effort that goes into creating a cartoon character or reporting a news story can be turned into products in several different media. This is why the Internet is not going to revolutionize the economic structure of the media industry: the Internet is one more channel for the distribution of synergistic products. Someone who produces media content only for the Internet must compete with people who use the same facilities and effort to produce media content for several media. A company's business plan can be premature because the technology or distribution channels do not yet exist to capture economics of scope. A concept might only be viable if it is turned into both a Web site and a cable show, but if not enough people have digital cable yet then the concept will have to wait. Some concepts may require distribution channels that are so numerous that we'll just have to wait for them all to be invented.
Stovepipes. Networked applications are organized into layers. The Internet Protocol is a layer. So is the HTTP protocol for moving Web pages around. Layers manage complexity by defining abstract bundles of functionality that are likely to have many uses. Layers are also economically efficient because they enable economies of scope: the more services you can build on top of a given layer, the more ways you have to distribute its cost. In fact, if you have a layer like IP that supports a wide range of valuable services, then you can probably make it free, just from the labor contributed by the people who make money from the stuff built on top of it. It's a good system, and much of the long-term quiet politics of the computer world is about the ways in which future layers are going to be defined. If you try to make them all things to all people then they will crash, but if you try to focus them then someone will be upset. Current examples of long-term layer-development are digital libraries, cooperative work, large-scale simulation, and distributed objects. Digital computing (as opposed to analog) is itself a layer. A product can be premature if it combines a lot of functionality that should really be provided by layers. Such a product is called a "stovepipe", and earlier I have described a technical and economic dynamic called the "platform cycle" by which stovepipe products get made obsolete by the coming of new layers that abstract away the common elements of their functionality. To think up examples of stovepipe technologies, start with any major layer, define its functionality, and then think about products that included that functionality before the layer existed -- any special- purpose network that preceded the Internet, or any distributed display system that preceded the Web. Right now, the world badly needs layers upon layers of middleware to support emerging distributed applications. An example is Akamai-style distributed database technology, which sits between your Web browser and the Internet and invisibly redirects your information request to a nearby uncongested server. The same sort of thing will be needed for wireless and ubiquitous-computing services, and it would probably be a mistake to build those services before the general-purpose distributed database layers are available.
It's entirely likely that the smart players know all these things. They have the intellectual property, capital, and skills that they will need to join the game, and they are calmly waiting for the time to come -- for the market to acquire scale, for media synergies to develop, and for new service layers to be standardized and deployed on a large enough scale. They don't have to engage in hype. What's unfortunate is when unsuspecting investors plough their cash into new ventures that really are good ideas but aren't good ideas now.
**
Ten things that piss me off.
(1) Photocopiers that silently clear their settings. The copier doesn't know where you are, so if you don't push any buttons for some period of time, a minute or whatever it is, the copier silently resets itself. This is most annoying, because quite likely you have spent that minute preparing for an especially complicated copying job, one that involved lots of complicated copier settings that are now lost. To make matters worse, most copiers deliver their output someplace where you can't see it. So you have to reach around, grab the paper, and carefully check whether you got the results you were expecting. (Hopefully the copier won't reset itself while you're doing this.) This is bad design.
(2) Those 50 state quarters. Those who live outside the United States will need it explained that much of our currency has been redesigned in recent years. You've probably seen the new paper money, which is reviled by art critics but apparently tolerated by everyone else. But you probably haven't seen the new quarter-dollar coins. They are the same size and color as the old ones, and they still have George Washington on the front (albeit with some different words around him). The problem is on the back, where there are no fewer than 50 totally different designs, one for each state. They're bringing out different designs on a regular schedule, I believe in the order that the states joined the country. I have two problems with these new quarters. One is pure design: the coins are not visually consistent, and so I am constantly doing double-takes to see if the coin I have reached for is really a quarter. The other is political. These are partisan coins that symbolize and abet the current unfortunate drive to restore the Articles of Confederation. The two problems are related. Back when transportation and communication technologies were measured in miles per day, it made sense to have a lot of local governments. That way decisions could be made close to the people whose lives they effected. But those days are gone. The current talk about devolving power to the states is selective at best, given the powerful interests behind uniform laws. A fragmented currency system is inefficient as well.
(3) Business reports about companies making or missing "expectations". In the old days, business reports would state that IBM, for example, had made profits of such-and-such, which were up (or down) so-and-so many percent from the year before. Now, though, business reports tell us that IBM made (or missed) their expectations. What, you may ask, is an "expectation"? It's a number that had previously circulated in the press, having arisen through some combination of stock brokers' analyses, insider advice from the companies themselves of the sort that the SEC recently outlawed, and rumor. When headlines about a company's performance are framed in relation to these "expectations", they assume that the audience is sufficiently immersed in day-to-day financial talk to follow these esoteric numbers. As a result of this assumption, business news has now been rendered even more impenetrable to normal people than it had been. What is worse, time scales have collapsed. The headlines comparing profits to the year before, for all of their crudeness, at least indicated some kind of historical perspective. The new "expectations" reports point to a time scale more on the order of weeks. Worse yet, serious newspapers have gone a step further by reporting on "whisper numbers", if you can believe that. Whisper numbers are to expectations what expectations are to the actual, official quarterly numbers -- which numbers are then thoroughly artificial, having been manufactured through a whole new generation of dishonest accounting tricks. If business were just a gambling arena that only hurt gamblers then this would all be trivial. But it's not. Business affects everyone, and we should discourage practices that prevent everyone from understanding it.
(4) Corporate soap. When I get up in the morning, the last thing I want is a snootful of chemicals. That's why, for many years now, I have refused to purchase corporate soap. From what I can tell, every single brand of soap that is sold in mainstream supermarkets smells like chemicals. Of course, they are chemicals that have been designed to suggest some kind of brand image, like meadows or hospitals or what-have-you. But the smells are so offensively fake that I can't imagine breathing them in my own home. (An exception is soap swiped from hotel rooms, which increasingly tends to have no smell at all.) Instead I spent embarrassing amounts of money on soap from health food stores, ethnic import shops, and farmers'-market artisans, purely on how it smells. These non-chemical soaps then create another problem: preventing their smells from permeating the house. This is one more reason why Zip-Loc bags were created.
(5) The information design of bus systems. I am a city person, and I usually have plenty of bus lines going past. The problem is figuring out where they go and when the next bus is coming. You would think that the bus systems would have an interest in telling you this kind of information. In practice, however, the information design of the signs and brochures of bus systems is appalling. You do have to give them some sympathy: they don't always have lots of money, and they are up against the complexity of the information and the depredations of vandals. Still, I find it frustrating when I come across a route map that is upside down compared to the direction that the bus is running, or that doesn't provide enough cross streets to figure out how the streets on the map match up with your own mental knowledge of them. The question of when the next bus is coming is the hardest and most frustrating. That's why I was thrilled to hear about something called NextBus , a wireless technology that tracks the buses and transmits to various devices -- including ones attached to the bus stops -- accurate information about when the next bus will arrive. I saw an article about the NextBus system in San Francisco that claimed major improvements in ridership, although that could be hype. In any event, a bus system whose every bus stop had an actual departures board would be a fine thing. One could also establish a departures board for the neighborhood buses on a Web browser window, thus timing one's departure from home to avoid long waits at the stop. Technology isn't the whole problem, however. Someone needs to teach information design to the bus people.
(6) Hotel phone charges. This is probably the most notorious entry on my list. One hotel where I stayed recently had long distance phone charges of nearly $3 per minute. These charges were not disclosed on any piece of paper in the room -- you couldn't get the exact amount without calling the operator. The hotel must have provided special training to the operators, because otherwise they couldn't have quoted those rates without cracking up. Even though I have known about the exorbitant phone charges forever, and even use my cell phone to make local calls from hotel rooms, still I get bitten by the problem more often than I can believe. The most insidious are the high-tech hotels that loudly promise low long-distance rates on their data lines, only to bill you several times the advertised amount when you check out.
(7) "This day in history" factoids in the newspaper and on the radio. Even though calendar dates are a necessary part of any retelling of history, an excessive focus on dates falsifies history by painting it as a succession of discrete events, usually involving famous persons, as opposed to the long-term accumulation of trends and forces that involve people and activities of all sorts. "This day in history" factoids take this bias even further by presenting the dates in the most arbitrary and least useful order. The calendar day an event happens is rarely significant; the major exception is when someone chooses to do something on a certain date for its symbolic value. Presenting people with a list of events that happened on January 9th is like presenting them with a list of people whose automobile license plates happen to end in 4. The events are listed out of any context, in a form that makes it essentially impossible to learn anything from them. There are better ways to remember things.
(8) Those entrepreneurial origin myths. Was eBay really started to sell Pez dispensers? Come on. News articles about start-ups always recount these unlikely stories that sound like, "I was walking down the beach one day when I wanted to find out how my stocks were doing. All at once it occurred to me, wouldn't it be great if I could get stock quotes in my sunglasses?" And they always sound like that. They never sound like, "I was shmoozing these geeks at Il Fornaio, and they were all grooving on this new technology at Stanford. So I went over there and found the professor. I laid some smooth talk on him, hooked him up with my VC cronies, and kept 30% for myself." Don't the business reporters ever check whether the entrepreneurs' stories are true? Of course, some of the stories might be part of the truth. But they can't all be true, and almost all of them surely leave out important elements of the story. Aside from their general unlikeliness, these stories are unfortunate because they hide most of the reality of business from people who haven't been socialized into it. People are forever lectured to be "entrepreneurial" -- I've even caught myself doing this, even though I hate when it's done to me -- but few of those people have access to useful information about the concrete, material work of starting a company.
(9) Animated icons. I can't stand anything moving in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to work. That's why I am so annoyed at the animated icons that are used by certain software packages. (Netscape is one. AOL is another.) Animated advertisements in Web publications can be turned off with a couple of mouse clicks, but the icons keep moving. I can understand the motive for icons that are always drawing attention to themselves. But how can it be a smart marketing strategy to annoy people?
(10) The word "Kumbaya", used to refer to a mindless display of group harmony. Ugh.
**
My short paper about Babbage's theology provoked some puzzlement among working programmers. Actually the responses were varied. Some people said, "yup, that's how it was when I worked at X". But other people said, "how can this theology be the essence of computer work when all of the programming texts I read and follow, Yourdon for example, tell me the opposite?". It's a good question. First of all, my point is not that the computer world conforms everywhere completely and entirely to the six axioms of Babbage's theology. My point, rather, is that Babbage's theology is encoded deeply in the language and practices and institutional dynamics of the computer world, such that they exert a gravitational force that ceaselessly erodes any divergence from them. The actual state of practice at any place or time probably will differ from the dire picture of the six axioms. But the real test is dynamic: what forces operate on the practice, and how does it evolve over time? The degree of Babbageness will vary across different companies, sites, industries, technical fields, historical periods, countries, and so on.
Was I unfair because I did not enumerate the countervailing forces that tend to keep things at least in the middle of the scale? I suppose, but the heart of my assertion was that the theology is more fundamental and more powerful than the other forces, and will remain that way until it can be brought fully to consciousness. A harder problem from the point of view of the working programmer reading that paper is that I didn't even try to demonstrate the truth of my assertions -- such an argument could be made, but it would take a substantial book -- nor did I put much effort into my list, at the end, of concrete manifestations of the problem. That would be a more feasible paper; it might refer to work on the institutional obstacles to participatory design (see for example Jonathan Grudin, Interactive systems: Bridging the gaps between developers and users, IEEE Computer 24(4), 1991, pages 59-69). The obstacles include deadlines, contracting rules, and the question of whether a user who has become conversant with the designers' lingo is still representative of users as a whole.
**
If you type the word "Phil" into google.com, my home page comes up before the page for Phil Lesh. Far out. Granted, I come out below Phil Zimmerman, but that's only fair.
**
Another innocuous RRE message has been rejected by a mail filter.
Date: 6 Jan 2001 17:15 GMT From: help@mailwatch.com To: pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu Subject: [RRE]pointers
One or more of the recipients listed is a MailWatch client. As a result of specific e-mail control settings determined by their organization, their copy of the message has been detained in a special holding area at MailWatch and can be released only at the discretion of their system administrator.
Allegro MailWatch Phone: 1-937-264-7000 Email: sales@allegro.net http://www.mailwatch.com
NOTE: This is an automated email notification. Please do NOT reply directly to this message!
INCLUDED HEADER FROM ORIGINAL MESSAGE:
Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 09:07:02 -0800 From: "Phil Agre" To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" Subject: [RRE]pointers
If someone has a museum of "stupid filter tricks", this would seem like a whole new category of exhibits.
**
In response to my article on beginners as a scarce resource, one person suggested that Apple's forthcoming OS X may fix some of the conceptual confusions and incompatibilities that have long befuddled beginners on Apple's classic Finder. Here are some excerpts:
I agree that how people interact with computers leaves much to be desired. However, Mac OS X is making a modest step in the right direction. The new dock, which a lot of people have been bashing for various reasons, may improve the situation for newbies...
1. Any application being launched appears in the dock. While launching, it gently bounces up and down, then comes to rest with a small triangle beneath it. While not hugely obvious, you can see at a glance what applications are open.
2. The norm for OS X applications is to open an Untitled window when brought to the front (when launched or when already open), if no windows are open. This will help people when they switch back to some app. But so far, the inconsistency of quitting (or not) when closing a window still seems to be with us.
As the dock shows minimized windows separately from applications, it may help with drawing that distinction between the two.
A big change in OS X is that clicking on a window of an inactive app to bring it to the front leaves any other windows of that application in back, behind the previous active application(s). There's a case to be made for this, but it something OS 9 users probably won't enjoy unlearning. There are a couple of easy ways to bring all an app's windows to the front.
OS X uses Unicode almost everywhere (ok, perhaps not in Telnet), and this may be a good thing eventually. At the moment, developers (at least those with little interest in multi-language support) probably feel it's just one more thing to convert to. (While I think all this is all accurate, I may have gotten a detail or two wrong -- and everything is subject to change in the 1.0 release on March 24th.)
I do hope that Apple survives long enough for the new Powerbooks and OS X to settle down -- being Apple, the first editions of each will be long on design and short on execution. Because I'd sure rather have them than the alternative.
**
In response to that same article, another reader pointed out that studying beginners is not new, and that user-interface people have talked in terms of the user's "model" of the machine, as opposed to the "correct" model that is embedded in the design of the machine. The question then arises of what beginners' models tend to be like, and how to make the beginner's model and the correct model align. That alignment could come about in different ways: teaching strategies that install the correct model in users' heads, or design strategies that make the correct model transparent to users in the first place. It's true that I am hardly the first person to think of investigating users, and if I were writing an academic paper I would be responsible for citing all of the relevant literature in useability and elsewhere. My point was different. I want to suggest a naturalistic study of users that places them in the full context of their lives. I also want to encourage a polemical view of beginners as rational people, and of experts as victims of brainwashing. And I am not exaggerating this for rhetorical effect. I honestly believe that the computers we have today incorporate ideas about people and their lives that are radically false. We as experts have to gotten used to the pathologies that result from these mistaken ideas, and the fine, naturalistic detail of beginners' experience really is our best way of remembering what we have lost.
I also have a problem with the word "model". I may not disagree with it, but I think that it can be misleading. First of all, it suggests something that is unified and coherent in people's minds. If so then I am not sure that it makes sense to speak of beginners as having a model of a computer at all. Beginners do exhibit very characteristic forms of reasoning, but these can almost be defined as the absence of the kind of model that experts are said to possess. Alright, you might say, so beginners need to build a model. What's the problem? The problem is that beginners are not empty. They come to computers, for example, with elaborate expectations derived from other media (on this topic see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1998). They are also familiar, unfortunately, with all manner of cultural constructions of computers -- including all of the fiction that anthropomorphizes the computer and treat it as unified and coherent, which it's not. The idea that computers have all kinds of social contradictions running through them is incomprehensible against that cultural background.
The notion of a "model" also focuses on the mental lives of individual users, and thus distracts attention from the larger contexts in which individual users are embedded. I enumerated several such contexts. One is the microsociology of interactions between beginners and experts -- for example, when the experts "help" the beginners by taking the keyboard away from them, talking technical gibberish at them, changing their configurations, and generally disempowering them in every way they can. Another is the local ecology of knowledge and practice in a home or office; this ecology can be supportive and constructive, or it can undermine the beginner's capacity to learn. Each case will need to be investigated on its own merits, but we will usually discover a combination of both. Yet another context is the computer industry and particularly the competitive dynamics of standards. Economic pressures both for and against compatibility are easy to find, and every computer is a historical conglomeration of different architectural choices and competitive configurations over many years.
The most important intuition for the naturalistic study of users, in my experience, is to look in the margins. Experts imagine themselves to be inside the machine; they do have a model of how the machine works, and they "see" the machine purely in terms of that model. If the machine fails to behave according to the model, experts have no problem simply restarting an application or rebooting the machine. Beginners cannot distinguish between proper and improper functioning of the machine, and they find this behavior on the part of experts bewildering. Experts see only the picture; beginners see only the frame. Experts cannot see all of the detailed work around the edges of the system: getting an account, figuring out which machine you're allowed to use, turning it on, logging in, password problems, getting your hands registered the right way on the keyboard, learning what you do with the keyboard versus what you do with the mouse, getting help, knowing what things are called, knowing whether your work has been saved, logging out, shutting the machine off (and whether you're supposed to be shutting it off at all), and so on. Very few people have ever investigated what really happens in college computer labs, for example. One of them was Steve Strassman, who in the mid-1980s wrote his senior thesis at MIT based on six weeks of observation in the computer lab for the 6.001 introductory programming course. His work is unpublished, to my knowledge. But if you're concerned with access to the Internet, in my opinion the most important problems are all in this zone of peripheral vision -- the area that is invisible to the brainwashed experts. The cost of hardware and software is not the big problem in my opinion, simply because the cost is dropping like a rock. The problem, rather, is with knowledge and culture -- and with the culture of expert knowledge that makes life harder than it has to be for non-experts.
**
We've had some acronym problems on RRE lately. The message about organizing among ICANN stakeholders never explained what ICANN stands for. It stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers; it is the organization that supposedly runs the Internet's domain name system, and it may or may not run other aspects of the Internet later on. It's good to be reminded that 99% of the earth's population is not part of the small world that follows Internet politics. Another message failed to explain the much more obscure acronym HIPAA, which stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. I didn't even know this. It's the law that the recent US government medical records privacy rules were issued under.
**
It turns out that my recent attempt to "correct" my mention of Moore's Law was just as fouled up as my original version. Rather than confuse the matter any further, I'll refer you to Robert R. Schaller, Moore's law: Past, present and future, IEEE Spectrum 34(6), 1997, pages 52-59.
**
I was wrong. I speculated that the New York Times' recent article about AI was motivated by the upcoming Spielberg movie; a more likely explanation is that both were motivated by Stanley Kubrick's "2001". Reality by now is all a movie; it's just a question of which one.
**
I did more harm than good with my paragraph on the problem of people sending me stuff for the list that I already have. Now a bunch of people are trying to read deep meaning into my necessarily very brief replies, which look like "tx" and "great tx". The bottom line is, don't worry. In seven years of running the list, I've only had one person who made a nuisance of themselves by sending me stuff, and he was sending me ten items a day, 98% of which were useless. Duplicates are not a big problem and I'm surprised that I don't get more of them. A bigger problem, I suspect, is people who see something interesting but think, "oh well, Phil must already have seen this". It eats me up to wonder how much cool stuff I'll never see because everyone assumed that I had gotten it from someone else. So if you come across a good URL or something, pass it along. The only things that I categorically don't want are corporate press releases, which are amazingly useless. I read the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, (London) Guardian, and often the Los Angeles Times (I'm trying to cut back), so you don't have to bother with those. What's most valuable is materials from the regional and foreign papers, personal Web sites, the trade press, and academic research -- things that most people wouldn't have come across. My number one emphasis is facts facts facts. My number two emphasis is analysis -- provided that you find it conceptually interesting and original, and not just congenial in its outcomes. But mostly, don't worry about it. When it doubt, send it along.
**
An Australian has sternly instructed me that koalas are not bears. They are marsupials, and nasty, scratchy ones at that, loved only by Japanese tourists. He did admit that Australians refer to the creatures that biologists call jellies as jellyfish, but he was not into the irony of that.
**
Some URL's.
election
Bush's Christian Guru Aims to Reshape America http://www.theglobeandmail.com/gam/TopInternational/20010113/UBUSHN.html
Evaluating Voting Technology http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/uscrc.html
The Real Scandal Is the Voting Machines Themselves http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=3261&now=12/14/2000
Jane's Handy Links http://pub40.ezboard.com/fuca80569frm8
Theft of the Presidency (may crash Netscape) http://democrats.com/display.cfm?id=181
Bush's Voluntary Pollution Reduction Program Reduced No Pollution http://www.auschron.com/issues/dispatch/2001-01-12/pols_capitol.html
Cabinet nominees
Ashcroft Battle Likely to Focus on Race Issues http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/14/politics/14ASHC.html?pagewanted=all
Anti-Ashcroft Resources http://www.legitgov.org/anti_Ashcroft.html
Big Fight Likely for Bush Cabinet http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/014/nation/Big_fight_likely_for_Bush_Cabinet+.shtml
Days of Paige http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2001-01-11/insider.html
After Chavez http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54843-2001Jan12.html
Background on Gale Norton http://www.presidentbushwatch.org/antienvnorton.html
Bush's Choice Linked to "Guns for Pupils" Group http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,421586,00.html
Ashcroft interview in Southern Partisan http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/Ashcroft.htm
Perversion of the Process http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/13/opinion/13LEWI.html
Microsoft
Government Urges Court to Uphold Microsoft Split http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-4457372.html
government's brief in Microsoft appeal http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f7200/7230.htm
Microsoft Comes Out Swinging in Antitrust Appeal http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-3869557.html
privacy
Steven Levy chapter on Whitfield Diffie http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/levy-crypto.html
Hearings to Put Agency's Ambitious Toll Plan on the Line http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/13/nyregion/13PORT.html
Digital Signature Risks http://world.std.com/~cme/spki.html#dsig
Do You Even Know Who's Watching? http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,40935,00.html
regulation
Dave Farber on the FCC staff in the AOL / Time Warner merger case http://www.interesting-people.org/200101/0028.html
World Consumer Protection Organization http://www.cptech.org/ecom/cpt-wcpo.html
Tough Times for Data Robots http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/12/technology/12CYBERLAW.html
Italy: Foreign Internet Sites Can Be Closed http://www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=151018
European Union Ponders Crackdown on Spam http://www.nandotimes.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500298155-500475648-503241131-0,00.html
Wireless Telephone Spam Protection Act http://www.suespammers.org/us/hr113-20010103.shtml
everything else
controversy about settlement-free peering claims http://tbtf.com/blog/2001-01-07.html#1 http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/09/131243 http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/current/threads.html#00681
article on 802.11b free wireless networking http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=473081
Near Real Time Earthquake List http://wwwneic.cr.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/bulletin.html
Mobile Phone Forces Plane to Land http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010110/od/aircraft_dc_1.html
IRC: Attack From Killer "HaX0rZ" http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,41077,00.html
gift lists for schools (it's sad that this is necessary) http://www.truegift.com/
An Old Key to Why Countries Get Rich http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/13/arts/13SUCC.html?pagewanted=all
subscription-based full-text online library for students http://www.questia.com/
How Not to Teach Values http://www.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/aotm/article10.html
Aussie Scientists Stumble Across the Doomsday Bug http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/afp/article.html?s=asia/headlines/010111/world/afp/Aussie_scientists_stumble_across_the_Doomsday_Bug.html
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