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``` Some notes about cheap pens, information design, open source software, my first online death threat, and what it means about civil society.
To answer a frequently asked question, the acronym "fwiw" means "for what it's worth". It's Internet jargon. And "tx" means "thanks". Some anti-technologists claim that these abbreviations are symptoms of an Internet-induced decay of language. Such people are boring.
While we're at it, my name is pronounced AY-gree, with the accent on the first syllable. The original Norwegian name, Aakre, whose "Aa" is supposed to be written as an A with a circle over it, is pronounced something sort of like AW-kreh. (I can't even approximate it myself.) It derives from the name of a village about 100 miles north of Oslo: Aakrestrommen.
More on cheap pens. (People keep calling them "disposable", which isn't very nice at all.) I have been impressed lately with the endless profusion of new pen models from Pilot. I presume that they are engaged in a characteristic Japanese competitive strategy called "product churning" -- blanketing the market with different designs (see John Heskett, The growth of industrial design in Japan, in John Zukowsky, ed, Japan 2000: Architecture and Design for the Japanese Public, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1998). In any case, let us consider some of the models that I've come across most recently.
Start with the Hi-Techpoint V5C. You may recall my recommendation of the Precise Rolling Ball V7, a new generation of Pilot's pioneering liquid-ink pen, the secret of whose smooth handling (in contrast to the scratchy V5) is that it delivers a great deal of ink. Well, that now seems like eons ago. The Hi-Techpoint V5C is so advanced that it provides even smoother handling without even having to disgorge vast quantities of ink. In fact, it took me a couple of days to accustom myself to it: it writes so smoothly that my hand wasn't getting the feedback that normally enables it to determine whether the pen is in contact with the page.
Another liquid-ink Pilot, the equally remarkable P-700 fine, produces a different effect: it is somehow both firmly in contact with the page and frictionlessly walking across it. One doesn't feel the tip of the pen dragging across the page, just a sense of the page itself. This is the first of the new breed of liquid-ink pens that doesn't come with a window showing the ink inside the pen, although its faux-marble design and serrated grip will probably seem old after a while.
The Pilot V-corn, which also uses liquid ink, looks like an improved version of the V-ball. It provides a more solid sense than the others that the tip of the pen is writing a line on the paper. Although it doesn't write as smoothly as the Precise Rolling Ball V7, the solid feeling is reassuring: the tip doesn't feel fragile. It won't break.
You may also recall my pleasure with the ultra-wide-tip Super-GP 1.2 traditional viscous-ink pen that Stephan Somogyi sent me from the Kinokuniya in San Francisco. When I finally went to the Los Angeles branches of Kinokuniya (two of them), I picked up a Super-GP 0.7. It is, as Stephan had warned me, not the same relevation as the 1.2 mm model. But it's a good pen, with one of the better rubber grips. I was surprised that, like the 1.2, the 0.7 wants to be held more vertically than some of the others in order to avoid a scratching sensation.
An RRE reader aimed her Web browser at the Levenger Web site and ordered me a set of Pilot G-2 07 spring-loaded retractables. These are particularly high-quality traditional-ink (or maybe gel) pens in red, blue, and black, with refills.
Finally there's the strange Pilot Hi-Tec-C. It doesn't carry a tip size measurement, but it looks and feels like it's 0.5 mm or perhaps even smaller, maybe even 0.3 mm. It works remarkably well for the very fine line it creates. (It also makes a mockery of the often much wider pens that boast of being "fine" or "extra fine" or "micro".) Even though it is made of transparent plastic, I can't tell what kind of ink it uses. The ink isn't visibly sloshing around, but it feels like liquid ink to write with. I suspect that some of these new pens employ compressed air to keep the ink flowing, in preference to the highly fallible baffle system that regularly causes liquid-ink pens to barf all over your fingers, but I have no way to substantiate this.
At Kinokuniya I also got some non-Pilot pens. You may recall that I listed them all in my notes from December 15th. I won't go into the ones whose novelty is more the packaging or the funny colored ink. That leaves the truly inferior Uni Lakubo, a conventional-ink pen that seems incapable of writing a solid line on the page, and the Uni-Ball Signo, which despite looking similar to the Super-GP is in reality just a relatively good example of the traditional, high-friction style of pen, not worth going out of your way for.
And that's it -- my latest haul of cheap pens.
Speaking of industrial design, I have been running a graduate seminar this quarter informally entitled "Theories of Design". Our premise is that many quite distinct design disciplines are all converging around information technology, and that a new discipline is emerging that synthesizes them all. Rather than attempt that synthesis our first time out, we're simply spending one week on each of the existing disciplines, with the aim of comparing and contrasting their methods and ideas, and especially conceptions of users and information. I'll send out the syllabus once I finish annotating it. In the meantime, let me observe that the territory of user-interface design is rapidly being invaded by interesting people from industrial design, graphic design, and (partly a subset of graphic design) information design. Quite a few books have been published in these areas in the last few years, publishers having been influenced no doubt by the remarkable success of Edward Tufte's (self-published) books on charts and graphs etc. Here, just to give you a rough idea, is an indiscriminate sample of the recent books that I've seen, from several different genres:
Paul S. Adler and Terry A. Winograd, eds, Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools, Oxford University Press, 1992.
Peter Anders, Envisioning Cyberspace: Designing 3d Electronic Spaces, McGraw-Hill, 1999.
Mike Baxter, Product Design: A Practical Guide to Systematic Methods of New Product Development, Chapman and Hall, 1995.
Robert Blaich, Product Design and Corporate Strategy: Managing the Connection for Competitive Advantage, McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver, Understanding Hypermedia 2.000: Multimedia Origins, Internet Futures, second edition, Phaidon Press, 1997.
Ken Coupland and Robert Appleton, eds, Graphis Web Design Now, 1: An International Survey of Web Design, Graphis Press, 1998.
Peter Droege, ed, Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution, Elsevier, 1997.
Liz Faber, The Internet Design Project: The Best in Graphic Art on the Web, Universe, 1998.
Liz Faber, Computer Game Graphics, Watson-Guptill, 1999.
Jennifer Fleming, Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience, O'Reilly, 1998.
Neil A. Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think, Holt, 1999.
Graphis New Media 2, William Morrow, 1999.
Robert L. Harris, Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference: Visual Tools for Analyzing, Managing, and Communicating, Management Graphics, 1996.
Tim Harrower, The Newspaper Designer's Handbook, fourth edition, McGraw Hill, 1998.
Steven Heller and Karen Pomeroy, Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design, Watson-Guptill, 1997.
Richard Hendel, On Book Design, Yale University Press, 1998.
Justin Henderson, Museum Architecture, Rockport, 1998.
D. K. Holland, Roger Whitehouse, Stephan Geissbuhler, and Deborah Sussman, eds, Signs and Spaces, Rockport, 1994.
Nigel Holmes, The Best in Diagrammatic Graphics, Rotovision, 1993.
Robert E. Horn, Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, MacroVe Press, 1999.
Robert Jacobson, ed, Information Design, MIT Press, 1999.
Kai Krause, ed, In Your Face: The Best of Interactive Interface Design, Rockport, 1996.
Paul Kunkel, AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group, Graphis, 1997.
James Andrew LaSpina, The Visual Turn and the Transformation of the Textbook, Erlbaum, 1998.
Peter Lunenfeld, ed, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, MIT Press, 1999.
Sara O. Marberry, ed, Healthcare Design, Wiley, 1997.
Eric K. Meyer, Designing Infographics, Hayden, 1997.
Paul Mijksenaar, Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design, Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.
Nobuo Nakagaki, ed, Diagram Graphics 2, Books Nippan, 1995.
Donald A. Norman, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution, MIT Press, 1998.
Nobuoki Ohtani, Suzanne Duke, and Shigenobu Ohtani, Japanese Design and Development, Gower, 1997.
Martin Pawley, Terminal Architecture, Reaktion Books, 1998.
B. Martin Pedersen, ed, Graphis Diagrams 2: The International Showcase of Diagram Design and Technical Illustration, Graphis Press, 1997.
B. Martin Pedersen, ed, Graphis Product Design 2, Graphis Press, 1998.
Otto Riewoldt, Intelligent Spaces: Architecture for the Information Age, King, 1997.
Karen A. Schriver, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Readers, Wiley, 1996.
Milly R. Sonneman, Beyond Words: A Guide to Drawing Out Ideas, Ten Speed Press, 1997.
James Glen Stovall, Infographics: A Journalist's Guide, Allyn and Bacon, 1997.
John A. Thackara, Winners! How Today's Successful Companies Innovate by Design, Cromwell, 1997.
Graziella Tonfoni, Information Design: The Knowledge Architect's Toolkit, Scarecrow Press, 1998.
Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Graphics Press, 1997.
Karl T. Ulrich and Steven D. Eppinger, Product Design and Development, McGraw-Hill, 1995.
Willem Velthoven and Jorinde Seijdel, eds, Multimedia Graphics: The Best of Global Hyperdesign, Chronicle Books, 1996.
Howard Wainer, Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot, Copernicus Books, 1997.
Roger Walton and Baird Duncan, Cool Sites: Freeze-Framed and Down Cold, Hearst, 1998.
Peter Wildbur and Michael Burke, Information Graphics: Innovative Solutions in Contemporary Design, Thames and Hudson, 1998.
Terry Winograd, ed, Bringing Design to Software, Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Richard Saul Wurman, Information Architects, edited by Peter Bradford, Graphis Press, 1996.
I don't mean to suggest that user-interface design -- the tradition that flows from Vannevar Bush to Ivan Sutherland and Doug Englebart to Ben Shneiderman's textbook to the current wave of "information appliances" and "ubiquitous computing" -- is going to disappear or become obsolete. My point, rather, is that radical increases in screen resolution and processor power will enable graphic designers to do much more sophisticated things with bitmapped displays, and that advanced infrastructures for untethered computing will enable industrial designers to invent a wide range of devices that invisibly exchange information with the rest of the world, and that these fields both have vast and wonderful skills that complement the skills of the user-interface people. I'm not the first person to notice this, of course, but I do like it a great deal.
Like most people, I've been pleased to see Linux at least appearing to catch fire over the last few weeks. Everyone is impressed with the amazing new Linux model of software development, and everyone seems puzzled by it. The press often compares it to the counterculture of the sixties. But perhaps I can offer a different perspective. What the Linux people have done, much to their credit, is to reinvent the peer-review mechanisms of the scientific community.
Why do the open-source enthusiasts produce more software at a higher quality faster than the market does? Software is information, and information has properties that frustrate the operation of markets. Market participants need to evaluate the quality of goods, but it's hard to evaluate the quality of software without looking at the source code, and it's hard to have a market in software if the source code is open to inspection. It thus makes more sense to look at software as a public good. A public good is a good that is nonrivalrous (anyone can use it without interfering with anyone else's ability to use it) and nonexcludable (it's hard to prevent anyone from using it). And the scientific community's institutions of peer reviewed publication are precisely a machine that very efficiently produces public goods. (See Martyne M. Hallgren and Alan K. McAdams, The economic efficiency of Internet public goods, in Lee W. McKnight and Joseph P. Bailey, eds, Internet Economics, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. See also Peter Kollock's chapter in "Communities in Cyberspace", the book that he edited with Marc Smith.)
>From this perspective, software is so often bad because of the irrational prejudice in favor of markets, which undermines confidence in and funding for peer-reviewed open source software long enough to permit low-quality market-driven closed source software to establish network effects. Markets work when they work, but it is wrong to claim, as so many people do, that markets are the only effective means of coordinating human activity. The peer-review institutions of open source software, long stereotyped as the territory of lonely geeks, should be seen in their proper historical light as another chapter in the march of human knowledge. And they should be supported publicly, just as we support the production of other kinds of public goods. Of course, public support might lead us to another big government boondoggle such as the Internet, but if the alternative is Windows 3000, perhaps it's a chance we can take.
The great majority of RRE subscribers are kind and generous human beings who send me a steady trickle of nice messages about how much they appreciate all of the work they imagine me to invest in running the list. These expressions of support presumably help me to deal with the minority of RRE subscribers who feel called upon to act out their internal dramas on me. Even though I never mention most of these jerks on the list, not least because I am sometimes guilty of taking out my annoyance at them on people who don't deserve it, I probably convey an exaggerated sense of the importance of the jerks relative to that of the nice people. Nonetheless, in the spirit of the Buddhist admonition to be grateful to everyone for the lessons they have to teach you, let me tell you about the especially abundant week I've been having. My point is not to dwell on the indignities of my online life, which are miniscule indeed in the big scheme of things. Rather, I want to use these stories gather together a number of themes that I have been developing here.
To start with, I received my first death threat. Here's the story. A few months ago, I received a message from someone presenting himself as a scholar in Turkey. Although the message was not real coherent, I took him to be inviting me to speak at a conference about Jurgen Habermas' work on the public sphere. The message did not seem at all unusual; I put the seeming incoherence down to cultural differences and bad English. I responded by declining the invitation, explaining that I have not written in that area, and thought no more about it. Imagine my surprise, then, when the guy wrote me back with a long stream of Turkish profanities, likening me to the mother of a dog and so forth, and accusing me of lying about my not having written on the subject of his conference.
He was wrong, of course. I've written about public debate, and I've mentioned Habermas' views on technology, but in no way am I a Habermas scholar. Heck, a lot of Habermas scholars aren't Habermas scholars. Habermas scholarship is a little like math: you aren't a mathematician unless you wake up in the morning, every morning, thinking about math. Likewise you aren't a Habermas scholar unless your life is organized around studying Habermas' endless series of stream-of-consciousness tomes. Now, I'll readily admit that Habermas is smarter than any ten people you've ever met. (If you want a sample of this that's written in accessible language, check out Habermas' response to his critics in Craig Calhoun, ed, Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press, 1992. You'll see the guy chew up and spit out fifteen serious scholars and then adduce a critique of his own work that's considerably smarter than the whole lot of them put together.) So I suppose that Habermas scholarship is a worthwhile activity. Just not for me.
In any case, it is not every day that I am assaulted with long streams of Turkish profanity. Still thinking that the guy was a legitimate scholar, if a perhaps little overwrought about something, I foolishly wrote back, rebuking him and asking to be done with it. Big mistake. At first he apologized for his reaction, which only served to sustain me in my denial. And so I replied, politely this time but even more foolishly, whereupon the guy now descended into an obsessional spiral, with periodic messages embroidering on his fantasy of having been lied to. At length I allowed myself to be provoked into saying, "you're a nut, go away". Now you and I, in our sane moments, know that telling a crazy person to go away is precisely what you do if you want to have something to complain about. Accordingly, six weeks later, I received the following (parental discretion advised): "I did not forget. I am coming. I will collapse you, asshole!"
Okay, so I got a death threat. This was a first for me; I had been threatened with death by a would-be hate-criminal on a street in Venice, California, believe it or not, but the worst I had managed to attract in twenty years online was a message that stated, in its entirety, "You are a dirty communist" -- to be taken seriously as a death threat in many countries, but not here. So I wrote to the ill-tempered fellow's service provider and asked them how we should proceed. They sensibly sketched two routes: reporting the matter to my local law enforcement agency or having the service provider deal with it as a violation of their terms of service. Given that the guy is most likely in Turkey and thus beyond the reach of the LAPD, I'll probably do the latter.
The lesson here concerns the ways in which we allow ourselves to be victimized. I've written about this topic before, for which see . The Internet is a big screen onto which we can project whatever we happen to have in our heads, and many Internet suers are out there promiscuously hooking up with endless numbers of slobs whose neurotic compulsions complement their own. This can make the Internet into a real pit sometimes, and I have become unhappy with public spaces on the net that, for one reason or another, are unable to maintain boundaries against this sort of thing.
I want to dwell on this notion of boundaries. Boundaries arise as an issue on the Internet in several ways. The most common relates to jurisdictional boundaries: the legal system needs to decide which court should hear a given case, and that can be difficult when the action occurs in an online "place" whose infrastructure and personnel are spread across numerous physical jurisdictions. No solution to this problem is particularly compelling: the proposal that something called cyberspace should be regarded as a jurisdiction unto itself is simply world government by a fancy name, and the proposal that cyberspace be regarded as a large set of distinct and competing jurisdictions implausibly tries to reinscribe into cyberspace the same impermeable boundaries that have already been declared obsolete in the physical world. It follows that the problem of jurisdiction over Internet-related disputes has no single solution, and that the problem can only be usefully formulated in relation to the particular institution (banking, commerce, etc) in whose electronic dimension a given conflict took place.
Boundaries are also an issue in privacy terms. The rosy predictions of neoclassical economics famously presuppose a situation called perfect information, in which everyone effectively knows everything that could possibly affect their economic decisions. And since neoclassical economists famously wish to include the entire realm of human decision-making within their sphere of concern, it follows that the rosy predictions of neoclassical economics require every single person on planet Earth to possess a quite intimate knowledge of every other person on planet Earth with whom they could possibly interact in any meaningful way. But, as any healthy person well knows, it's not healthy for everyone in the world to know all about you. This kind of sickness is often promoted by people who twistedly asking you what you have to hide, but it's still a sickness. One type of boundary, then, is informational: who knows what about you, and what degree of effective choice you have in the matter. Of course, nobody has an absolute legal and moral right to secrecy about every matter in their lives, particularly when those matters affect other people. Nonetheless, it is practically a commonplace in legal scholarship, if not always of the law, that proper human life and development requires a considerable sphere of informational control around oneself.
Another type of boundary concerns the things that people are allowed to do to you. People whose boundaries have routinely been invaded, for example through a formative pattern of physical or mental abuse, will often develop the assumption, conscious or unconscious but self- fulfilling in either case, that they deserve to be taken advantage of. These people will allow others to lie to them, to steal from them, to take credit for their work, to make fun of them, to assault them, and so on. Refusal to be treated in these ways should not be confused with the tendency to lash out at any perceived slight -- this kind of pathology, after all, has the same underlying cause as its opposite.
Good boundaries, in this sense, are permeable. Someone with good boundaries can easily, quickly, and accurately shift between opening and closing their defenses, letting people in or keeping them out as their intuition and reason require. They can stand up to aggression, they can walk away from bad deals, and they can distinguish both publicly and privately between fairness and unfairness. Authoritarian and libertarian forms of culture are both built on the norm of allowing one's boundaries be invaded, the first from a misguided sense of worthlessness, and the latter from a misguided sense of niceness. In the sixties, a refusal to be abused was a "hang-up"; now, in a particularly twisted abuse of language, it's "victimhood". Democratic culture, on the other hand, is founded on the values and skills that are required to solve problems collectively while maintaining one's own boundaries and respecting those of others. Living democratically is difficult, of course, but that's only because recovering one's health from the depredations of authoritarian and libertarian culture is difficult.
These notions of boundaries can also be applied to groups. On this topic, let me recommend two articles:
Larry Hirschhorn and Thomas Gilmore, The new boundaries of the "boundaryless" company, Harvard Business Review 70(3), 1992, pages 104-115.
David J. Phillips, Defending the boundaries: Identifying and countering threats in a Usenet newsgroup, The Information Society 12(1), 1996, pages 39-62.
Hirschhorn and Gilmore's article concerns the internal workings and external relationships of cross-functional "teams" in business. In the old days, their story goes, relationships among the different functions in an business (marketing, manufacturing, legal, etc) were exceedingly distant, with the result that a great deal of bad work was done: product designs that couldn't be manufactured, manufacturing plans that couldn't be financed, business strategies that were unrelated to the wants of the customers, and so on. Each function spoke its own language and pursued its own agendas, and coordination happened, if at all, amidst the Byzantine politics of vice-presidents.
That's all changing, Hirschhorn and Gilmore tell us, because companies whose people talk to one another produce happier customers than companies that do not. And the most common procedure is to throw individuals from different functions into "teams" with collectively defined goals. Hirschhorn and Gilmore observe that this situation requires team members to establish two boundaries: the boundary that maintains the integrity of their team and the boundary that maintains the integrity of their functional group. These dual boundaries create a nonstop tension for everyone involved, but the tension is actually beneficial inasmuch as it prevents either of the potentially conflicting boundaries from hardening into an impermeable shield. The happy balance between the group members' loyalties may not come automatically, but it is a business skill like any other, and it can be taught and learned. That's the theory, anyway. One takes these things with a grain of salt, but it's suggestive in any case.
Phillips' article concerns the strategies by which the members of a newsgroup defended themselves against an influx of uncultured barbarians who did not care to learn or uphold the group's existing norms of interaction. A terribly interesting phenomenon, remarked upon in Howard Rheingold's "The Virtual Community" and then in more formal statements such as John Coate's "Cyberspace Innkeeping" (in the book that Doug Schuler and I edited, as well as several of the chapters in "Communities in Cyberspace"), is the precise combination of technical and social mechanisms that are required to manage this situation. A harder question is the combination of personal and group attributes that an online community requires to employ these mechanisms to positive effect. It probably matters, for example, whether any members of the group actually care enough about the forum to make the effort, perhaps because the forum is sponsored by some organization whose success they have a personal investment in. It probably also matters whether the group members have good boundaries as individuals. And it probably matters whether the online forum in question draws its membership from a social group that has a well-developed sense of collective identity in the larger world.
Whatever the case, we are all familiar with online forums that maintain excellent boundaries and online forums whose boundaries are very poor indeed. Questions of responsibility arise: when an online forum is unable to contain the disruptions caused by unschooled newcomers and other barbarians, whose fault is it? As with all such things, it helps to distinguish between two kinds of responsibility: moral and practical. People who trash online forums are morally responsible for what they do, as are members of online forums who are too rigid to accommodate themselves to the adjustment pains and cultural differences of legitimate newcomers. Moral responsibility is hard to apportion fairly in most real-life situations, despite the arrogant certainties of authoritarian culture, and so it is here.
Practical responsibility is usually just as difficult and just as complicated as the moral kind. This is true even when, and indeed especially when, the barbarians in question are not maladjusted newcomers but the kind of Visigoth wannabes who go around deliberately destroying unmoderated newsgroups. (It is only liberal and women's groups that are routinely trashed in this fashion? Just wondering.) When a forum's boundaries prove indefensible against the assaults of the Visigoths, who keeps hanging around? And what's wrong with them? Those who keep hanging around amidst the emotional garbage-heap of the Visigoth invasions will protest, accurately, that it's unfair for them to be obliged to surrender their forum to moral wrongdoers. Yes, it's unfair. But that doesn't explain why these boundaryless people stick with it, even when they have no chance of doing anything about it, and even though they usually have good odds of establishing a working forum using different technology -- technology, that is, that provides the mechanisms that are needed to allow the group to build and maintain effective boundaries. Such people, I would submit, are responsible in a practical sense for their own problems, and reasonable people will only have a certain measured degree of sympathy for their partly self-inflicted plight.
I am saying all of this, as you might expect, because I am leading up to my second unpleasant interaction of the week. This time I think I am completely innocent, although perhaps I am again deluded. Here is what happened. One day I received an e-mail message from a person who wanted me to look at a long series of obscene taunts that had been posted in a newgroup concerned with New Age topics. The message was not clear about why I was being asked to look at this stuff; it seemed vaguely accusatory without explicitly accusing me of anything. I replied by saying, "um, are you accusing me of something, asking me to do something, or what?", and forgot about it. It didn't matter, because it turned out that my answering machine was already burdened with a voicemail message from this person, who seemed to be vaguely (not to mention anonymously) threatening me with legal action.
Idiot that I am, I returned the call. In short order I found myself talking to a confused person who, obviously upset at being slandered in a public newsgroup, poured out a long, muddled story that somehow led up to my name. Just as with the e-mail, I was being spoken to in an accusatory tone of voice, even though no very definite accusation was being made. I said, "look, if you're accusing me of something then I need to hear it from your attorney; otherwise stop treating me like you are". That seemed to snap her out of it somewhat, whereupon I led her step by step through her incoherent tale. After prolonged grilling and painstaking clarification of the meanings of technical terms, it turned out that someone had been sending obscene messages about her to an unmoderated newsgroup that she frequented, that these messages were routed through an anonymous remailer housed at UC Berkeley, and that someone associated with this anonymous remailer had a hyperlink on one of his Web pages that pointed at one of my Web pages. I had to explain that the chain of connections she had described to me was extremely remote, and that she did not have the faintest reason even to be talking to me, much less accusing me of things. Furthermore, I explained with sincere incredulity, it would be in everyone's best interest if she immediately stopped trying to discuss New Age topics in unmoderated news groups. Presumably as a New Age person she could comprehend the concept of attracting negative energy into her life, no? Presumably she could comprehend that New Age people start their rituals by drawing a circle around themselves in order to signify their need for healthy boundaries, and that discussing New Age topics in an unmoderated newsgroup was therefore like performing such rituals in the middle of shopping mall, no? Well, that's what she was doing, and it was a really bad idea, and she should stop it. I wasn't actually clever enough to say all of those things, but I said most of them.
Idiot that I am, I figured that that was the end of it. The next day, by pure coincidence, I happened to run a Dejanews search on myself as a means of avoiding some work, whereupon I discovered that this same individual had -- get this -- posted the entire contents of my home page to the newsgroup where the obscene messages about her had appeared, with the evident meaning in context being that I had been responsible for them. This was apparently too much even for the other boundaryless people who insisted on hanging out in that group, and she had been rebuked, albeit in passing. It was only after an extended back-and-forth of e-mail, however, that I was able to extract a public apology.
Do I bear any practical responsibility for this assault? Not darn much, I don't think. This person found her way to me because I've spent several years trying in my own small way to spread good sense on the Internet, with the result that some of my words have become woven into small corners the vastness of the Web. And one consequence of this is that the small subset of Internet users who are splashing their inner confusions around will happen, simply by chance, to splash some of them onto me. What else am I supposed to do? Keep quiet? Confine my writing to scholarly journals that no more than two hundred people will ever read? What I can do is to name the problem, and that's what I'm doing here. And in doing so, perhaps I can contribute a deeper consciousness of boundaries to Internet culture
But the Internet is not a spaceship cut loose from the big world. The Internet is very much embedded in the cultural crossfire of society in 1999, and it's ultimately that larger society that will learn and value good boundaries, or else tear them down. Which brings me to the last of my stories of online obnoxiousness for the week. You may recall that I distributed the text of a talk that Michael Curry has been kind enough to contribute to the seminar series that our department organizes. Michael is a geographer and a serious scholar of the old school, and his talk exhibited the erudition and clarity that makes the old school at its best worthwhile. Despite this, the first (and so far the only) response that I received to Michael's talk was a message, written in the snide jargon that is so fashionable today, mocking college professors in general because Michael, having cited Aristotle's works using dates from the 1940's and 1950's, was held to be unaware that Aristotle actually wrote his works a real long time ago. This guy evidently didn't know that it is the long-standing practice of scholars to cite a work by the date of the edition one has consulted, as opposed to the date when it was written, and I doubt very much if he cared. If I really got upset, he's probably one of those people who would say, "Guess I touched a nerve!".
The guy who disparaged Michael Curry's scholarship reminded me of the survey that found that fans of conservative talk radio regarded themselves as the most informed group in society, whereas in fact the survey showed them to be the least informed. The guy's purpose was to laugh in the face of a college professor, and the arbitrariness and ignorance of his message was most certainly part of its intended effect, which was to contribute to the sense of helplessness that so many people feel in the face of a relentless chorus of fully empowered jerks. Despite its pretense of populist good cheer, therefore, this sort of thing is pure authoritarianism. It doesn't work its desired effect on people who have good boundaries, of course, but then the whole point of authoritarianism is that all but the powerful are so continuously brutalized that they don't have good boundaries. That way their sensitivity to continued assault can itself be mocked as -- that word again -- "victimhood".
What lessons can we learn from these phenomena? It seems to me that Internet culture is going through a profound shift that has yet to be clearly articulated. It is analogous to the same shift that is bringing back ballroom dancing in American culture. Ballroom dancing is a formal protocol for public interaction that allows people to touch one another without anything going wrong. It can be contrasted with the formless style of dancing that emerged in the 1960's, which is libertarian in its refusal to prescribe anyone's movements, but which is unsatisfying because the lack of prescription makes it unsafe for people who don't know one another to touch each other while they are dancing. Ballroom dancing is similar to a 12-step support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which allows people to engage in very personal conversations without anything going wrong. To take another analogy, people in some places in Northern Europe are trying to turn the aforementioned Jurgen Habermas' ideas about fair communication into an interactional protocol for the democratic conduct of all institutional spheres of life. In each case the underlying problem is the same: people want to engage in relatively intimate interactions while also opening the door to anyone who wants to join.
Here, then, is the intrinsic tension: interactions require boundaries; one way to establish boundaries is to regulate membership in the group of people who are interacting; but if you don't want to regulate membership then the alternative is to employ a system of interactional protocols. This tension can be resolved in a wide variety of ways, and the Internet provides a significant amount of support for each one of them. Membership can be regulated by controlling which addresses are added to a mailing list, or simply by keeping the list a secret. Interaction can be regulated, albeit crudely, the filtering action of a moderator. Still, it seems to me that the tension around regulation of online interaction is deeply bound into the organizing myths of the medium. Take, for example, the practice of naming a Usenet newsgroup soc.law.poland (just to make up an example). The implication is that anybody who wants to talk about Polish law has a right to join the group. In some ways this is a good thing: someone who is interested in Polish law can learn a simple protocol for tracking down a group where other people with that interest are gathered. So the convention of openness helps people to connect. But it also creates a serious problem, given that provocateurs can easily claim that their rights are being violated whenever someone tries to prevent them from trashing the group. This happens every day.
An alternative would be to name the groups differently. Instead of being called soc.law.poland, the group might be called "The Warsaw Club" or something even more meaningful than that to those interested in the topic. The name would now emphasize that this is just one group about Polish law, that it is an existing institution, a going concern. Newcomers would have more of an expectation that the group already had its rules, its traditions, and so on. The possibility would be wide open for individuals to create other groups, perhaps with other political slants or interactional styles, without anybody having to enter into conflict about privileged ownership of the soc.law.poland name. It would still be easy to provide tools that connect people to the online groups that interest them, while also eliminating many of the overly-standardized expectations that people currently have about the rights and responsibilities that they will enjoy as members of the group. In particular, it will be possible for groups to define themselves in a much greater diversity of ways in terms of the institutional field in which the group is embedded. Some online groups will be sponsored by particular organizations, others will be informally defined as being intended for members of a particular organization, or for dissidents from that organization, and so on. The Internet's governing myths, "cyberspace" for example, are far too oblivious to the Internet's embedding in the larger world, and this kind of renaming would be a small start at a change.
To be sure, a great deal of this is already happening. The governing myths of the Internet pay disproportionate attention to the Internet's public forums, and to Usenet, which has no necessary connection to the Internet but is usually treated as part of "the Internet" as a social phenomenon. This is partly because of media attention -- it is easier to monitor public forums than private ones -- and partly because of beginners' manuals -- which naturally focus on public forums as well. While we should certainly maintain the values of the public sphere, it seems to me that something important is lost when too much emphasis is placed on the Internet's very narrow conception of it. The public sphere is not a place where anybody at all has the right to walk in any conduct themselves wherever they like. It's more complicated than that. Of course, there do exist public places where a free society does give everyone a very broad latitude, not least because governments cannot be trusted to make rules about what should go on in such places. Nonetheless, the health of a democratic society does not depend simply on the lack of regulation in public places. It depends more basically on the people generally being both willing and able to associate with one another in effective ways. Association is not just interaction in public places. It is also the creation of a wide variety of other kinds of places, including dance halls, support group rooms, meeting tables, and so on.
The notion of "place" in Michael Curry's talk is helpful here. A "place" for Michael is not a set of coordinates in Cartesian space. Places, rather, are defined by habits and customs -- by what one does in them. If you and I meet regularly at a particular cafe, where we've evolved certain ways of greeting and ordering and drinking and discussing and paying, then we've made the cafe into a place for ourselves. All actions of any value occur in places, because it is the place that gives an action its human significance. Places, moreover, cannot be the object of rational engineering, nor can they be wholly defined by spelling out rules; they have to grow and evolve, and once they've done so they begin to define their participants in more and deeper ways than anybody can be aware of. An online forum is perfectly capable of being a place in this sense, but it is not a place until its participants do actually settle down into a functional system of customs and habits for their interactions there. The care that an online forums' participants oftentimes exhibit for the ongoing well-being of the "community" is usefully understood, in this sense, as care for a place. The question then arises of what makes a place good -- efficient, equitable, safe, effective for some instrumental purpose, etc.
Part of the fallacy of the public discussion group on the Internet, then, is the notion that one can have a discussion without having a place. Usenet newsgroups, for example, are non-places almost by definition. Even when people try hard to make them into places, they are far too exposed to forces that tear places down and thereby destroy their value. Here is the basic tension: you can have a place that is open to anyone, or you can free yourself from formal protocols of interaction, but it's very hard to do both. To the libertarian mindset, of course, formal protocols of interaction sound like laws that have been exogenously imposed by a government, but the important lesson is that the protocols that I am talking about wouldn't work if that's what they were. They are, rather, part of culture, or to put it another way, they are inscribed in and by institutions. Ballroom dancing is a set of cultural forms, the particular dance moves being part of a long symbolic conversation that works in part because its origins are lost to history, and it is also a set of institutional forms, such as the dance hall and the dance school, each with its protocols of interaction. The skills of association -- networking, building consensus, running a meeting, arguing without fighting, defending the boundaries of the group, allowing for difference, and so on -- are likewise embedded in cultures and institutions. Precisely because the protocols cannot be designed rationally or simply imposed by the government, it matters a great deal whether a given society retains and transmits the skills of association and the repertoire of institutional forms -- called civil society -- that through which this happens. The Internet holds great promise as a tool for the maintenance and expansion of civil society, but the organizing myths of the Internet can also undermine civil society if the technology is seen to substitute for, or encourages forgetting of, the skills of association that neither technology nor government can provide.
Some URL's.
CIO magazine endorsement of Linux http://www.cio.com/archive/031599_free.html
Win 98 Privacy Issue: Worse Than You Thought http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990312S0008
Establishing Big Brother using Covert Channels and Other Covert Techniques http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~desmedt/topics-covert.html
The Architectures of Mandated Access Controls http://www.si.umich.edu/~presnick/papers/lessig98/
Technology Source on educational computing http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/contents/1999-03.asp
articles on the Microsoft Registration wizard ID number flap http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/03/biztech/articles/07soft.html http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/127495.html http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2221330,00.html http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/technology/story.html?s=v/ap/19990308/t c/microsoft_privacy_5.html http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article/0,1087,3_8602_Ext,00.html
Conference on the Social and Ethical Impacts of Information and Communication Technologies, Rome, 6-8 October 1999 http://www.ccsr.cms.dmu.ac.uk/conferences/ccsrconf/ccsrorgconf99.html
a slick but very strange right-wing news service http://www.newsindex.com/
Waiting for the Revolution (article on computers and productivity) http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?19980326029R
Pathfinder Museum http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Station/4122/index.html
article on Intel's use of standards http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/companies/intel/docs/intelmain1.htm
FAQ on social security numbers http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/ssn/ssn.faq.html
article on "technofascism" in Upside http://e450.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=35927f000
comparison shopping sites for books http://www.acses.com/ http://www.addall.com/
articles about Microsoft's antitrust PR http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1999/03/cov_08feature.html http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/981221/mic.html
article about the Internet for PR people http://www.prcentral.com/rm_cover_nov98.htm
Biometrics in Human Services http://www.dss.state.ct.us/digital.htm
Social Security: Government and Commercial Use of the Social Security Number is Widespread http://www.epic.org/privacy/ssn/gao_ssn_2_99.html
Nurturing Neighborhood Nets http://web.mit.edu/techreview/www/articles/oct97/chapman.html
web sites that only work with Pentium III machines http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/990302/hardware/hardware3.html http://www.mactimes.com/bin/news/index.pl?read=1188
Is Open Source a Libertarian Fantasy or Revival of Sixties Radicalism? http://www.feedmag.com/essay/es178_master.html
Community College Distance Learning Network http://ccdln.rio.maricopa.edu/
PrivaSeek "infomediary" for privacy protection http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/18217.html
The Cost of Digital Image Distribution: The Social and Economic Implications of the Production, Distribution and Usage of Image Data http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/
International Conference on Geographic Information and Society http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/conf/gisoc99.html
California Digital Library http://www.cdlib.org/
Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hacktivism http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/wwwhack.html
Junkbusters privacy links http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/links.html
American Journalism Review's Newslink (large index of online newspapers) http://ajr.newslink.org/searchn.html
NSA organizational chart http://jya.com/nsa-chart.htm
Jean-Louis Gassee on the Microsoft case http://www.be.com/aboutbe/benewsletter/volume_III/Issue8.html#Gassee
bibliofind used books http://www.bibliofind.com/
The Whitewater "Oppo" http://www.consortiumnews.com/c022599b.html
Microsoft Passport Piques Privacy Concerns http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990312S0022
open online radio archive http://www.orang.de/
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