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``` No notes to speak of. Just some follow-ups, book lists on public relations and technology in higher education, and a batch of URL's.
Quote of the week:
So-called shooting parties at which officers drank beer and were awarded plaques for wounding or killing people were quasi-official events sometimes held at the Los Angeles Police Academy and attended by supervisors, according to four officers who worked in the Rampart Division's anti-gang unit. -- LA Times, 2/12/2000.
Speaks for itself.
In my anti-recommendation of Brill's Content, I said the following:
There was a piece about Consumer Reports, for example, that consisted of nothing but verbatim complaints about Consumer Reports by the public relations departments of companies whose products Consumer Reports has flunked.
It occurred to me that my hyperbolic use of the word "verbatim" might be misunderstood. My point is not that the article was plagiarized or that it violated any copyrights or was word-for-word identical with anything from a public relations department. My point was simply that the article's examples and arguments reflected in great detail complaints that I have seen elsewhere from PR people. In that sense it was not what most people would consider journalism. Indeed, that sort of article would be a good thing for Brill's Content to report on.
In the most recent RRE message about UCITA, the proposed new legal rules for the sale of software currently before US state governments, I repeated the claim of some UCITA opponents that UCITA raises the possibility of software vendors preventing anyone from publishing critical reviews of their products. (I should point out that the IEEE statement that I was forwarding made only a narrower claim.) The issue, briefly and roughly, is that UCITA would make official some software vendors' long-time project of redefining their relationship with their customers from a "sale", which is subject to various consumer protection and other laws, to a "license", which is much less constrained. This happens already, but much remains unresolved, such as the legal status of those agreements that you click on, that UCITA would resolve in the vendors' favor. The amazing details are found in the statements by ACM, IEEE, etc etc that I have sent out, and in the web sites whose URLs can be found in the IEEE statement and elsewhere. The point is that the vendors want to fill their standard licenses with onerous terms such as the right to approve any review of their products. Such terms are already found in some software licenses; UCITA seeks to make them enforceable.
In response to my message, a cyberlaw professor (and avid opponent of UCITA) argued that UCITA could not possibly enable software vendors to suppress critical reviews of their products. Any license terms requiring vendor approval to publish reviews, he vehemently argues, would be unenforceable no matter what UCITA says. Why is this so obvious, I asked, given that many other contracts not to speak (say, non-disclosure agreements) are quite enforceable? After all, unless review-approval terms are quite unambiguously unenforceable, UCITA would achieve the vendors' purpose by sheer legal intimidation, given that anybody who did publish a critical review without approval would be doing so in very clear breach of a contract. He allowed that there would remain "the somewhat hypothetical possibility that someone who published a critical review would have to defend against a frivolous lawsuit", but only because the plaintiff's lawyers would probably escape without sanction. I then pressed him to explain where the distinction between enforceable and unenforceable silence terms comes from, and he wrote the following...
"Let me start by saying that since courts avoid constitutional issues when they can, the court would most likely never get there - it will decide the case on the easiest grounds, and find the contractual term unconscionable, and therefore refuse to enforce it as a matter of state law. See, e.g., Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co., 350 F.2d 445, 449-50 (D.C. Cir. 1965) ('Unconscionability has generally been recognized to include an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one of the parties together with contract terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party.')
"There is also an applicable general contractual principle: Generally speaking, contracts are not enforceable when they violate 'public policy'. Restatement (2nd) Contracts sec. 178. (Stating contracts unenforceable either 'if legislation provides that it is unenforceable or the interest in its enforcement is clearly outweighed in the circumstances by a public policy against the enforcement of such terms'.) As a matter of public policy, none of the considerations which justify contracts of silence in the non-disclosure agreement or the employee, or national security cases apply: the transaction can exist just fine without the promise. On the contrary, having reviews of products serves the public interest. Further, the fact that this is a standard form agreement, rather than an individualized one like an NDA or an employment in which the consideration exchanged is more specifically aimed at the non-disclosure, will weigh against enforcement.
"Finally, if all else fails (and it won't!) we get to the First Amendment. Judicial action to enforce a contract against a negative review is almost certainly 'state action'. Thus, just as libel law works in the shadow of the first amendment, so too does UCITA. (Admittedly, as far as I know, and this is not my field, the Supreme Court has only ruled that tort law falls under the First Amendment, and has not yet ruled that about contract law, but the parallel is very strong. See Alan E. Garfield, Promises of Silence: Contract Law and Freedom of Speech, 83 Cornell L. Rev. 261, Cornell Law Review (1998) at sec. IV.) Whether one applies strict or intermediate scrutiny here, it seems clear to me that the statute would not be constitutional as applied since the public interest in having unbiased reviews is far greater than any interest the manufacturer could assert. Thus under either balancing test, the First Amendment defense should prevail. But, as I said above, we never get there since it's obviously unconscionable to begin with."
None of this, I should repeat, exonerates UCITA, which would legitimate a wide range of abusive practices. Again, see the materials that I've already distributed for the details.
Here is a list of reasonably useful books about propaganda and public relations, including both practitioners and critics. I put this list together when trying to help someone who was exploring a research project about the uses of cyberspace ideology in lobbying campaigns.
Edward L. Bernays, Public Relations, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952.
Edward L. Bernays, ed, The Engineering of Consent, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, The Lobbyists: How Influence Peddlers Get Their Way in Washington, New York: Times Books, 1992.
Jeff and Marie Blyskal, PR: How the Public Relations Industry Writes the News, New York: William Morrow, 1985.
Bill Cantor, ed, Experts in Action: Inside Public Relations, New York: Longman, 1984.
Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty, edited by Andrew Lohrey, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Cynthia Crosson, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York: Basic Books, 1996.
Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Waging and Winning the War of Ideas, Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1986.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Managing Public Relations, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
Robert L. Heath, ed, Strategic Issues Management: How Organizations Influence and Respond to Public Interests and Policies, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988.
Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Robert Jackall, ed, Propaganda, New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Gareth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, third edition, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999.
Robert Kendall, Public Relations Campaign Strategies: Planning for Implementation, Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Philip Lesly, Overcoming Opposition: A Survival Manual for Executives, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Jacquie L'Etang and Magda Pieczka, Critical Perspectives in Public Relations, London: International Thomson Business Press, 1996.
Bill Mallinson, Public Lies and Private Truths: An Anatomy of Public Relations, London: Cassell, 1996.
Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Karen S. Miller, The Voice of Business: Hill and Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives, New York: Carol, 1989.
Joyce Nelson, Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media, Toronto: Between the Lines, 1989.
Marvin N. Olasky, Corporate Public Relations: A New Historical Perspective, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987.
David Protess and Maxwell McCombs, eds, Agenda Setting: Readings on Media, Public Opinion, and Policymaking, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991.
Marc Raboy and Peter A. Bruck, eds, Communication For and Against Democracy, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989.
Caryl Rivers, Slick Spins and Fractured Facts: How Cultural Myths Distort the News, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Charles T. Salmon, ed, Information Campaigns: Balancing Social Values and Social Change, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989.
Herbert I. Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America, New York: Routledge, 1996.
Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
James Allen Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite, New York: Free Press, 1991.
Ted J. Smith III, ed, Propaganda: A Pluralistic Perspective, New York: Praeger, 1989.
J. Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good for You, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995.
Lawrence Susskind and Patrick Field, Dealing With An Angry Public: The Mutual Gains Approach To Resolving Disputes, New York: Free Press, 1996.
Esther Thorson and Jeri Moore, eds, Integrated Communication: Synergy of Persuasive Voices, Erlbaum, 1996.
Noel M. Tichy, Andrew R. McGill, and Lynda St. Clair, eds, Corporate Global Citizenship: Doing Business in the Public Eye, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.
Elizabeth L. Toth and Robert L. Heath, eds, Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992.
Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations, New York: Crown, 1998.
My list of books about uses of the Internet in the political process left out a few items:
Elaine Ciulla Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye, eds, Democracy.Com: Governance in a Networked World, Hollis, 1999.
Michael Margolis and David Resnick, Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace "Revolution", Sage, 2000.
Dick Morris, Vote.com: How Big-Money Lobbyists and the Media are Losing Their Influence, and the Internet is Giving Power to the People, Renaissance Books, 2000.
I had known about Dick Morris' book, but I hadn't wanted to include it because Morris is such a creep and because his book been reviewed so badly. I had known about the Kamarck and Nye book as well, but had simply forgotten about it.
Here is a list of books relating to the uses of networked information technology in higher education. In drawing up this list, I have deliberately cast a wide net by including some books that relate more to libraries in general than to higher education in particular, or to uses of technology in other kinds of education, or to the institutions of higher education whether or not technology is a central topic.
Kamala Anandam, ed, Integrating Technology on Campus: Human Sensibilities and Technical Possibilities, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Peter Baggen, Agnes Tellings, and Wouter van Haaften, eds, The University and the Knowledge Society, Bemmel, NL: Concorde, 1998.
Frederick E. Balderston, Managing Today's University: Strategies for Viability, Change, and Excellence, second edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995.
Diane P. Balestri, Stephen C. Ehrmann, and David L. Ferguson, eds, Learning to Design, Designing to Learn: Using Technology to Transform the Curriculum, Washington, DC: Taylor and Francis, 1992.
Thomas Bender, Carl E. Schorske, and William J. Barber, American Academic Culture in Transformation: Four Disciplines, Fifty Years, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Tom Bentley, Learning Beyond the Classroom: Education for a Changing World, Routledge, 1999.
R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds, Future Libraries, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Christine L. Borgman, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, MIT Press, 2000.
Hank Bromley and Michael W. Apple, eds, Education/Technology/Power: Educational Computing as a Social Practice, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Alfonso Borrero Cabal, The University as an Institution Today: Topics for Reflection, Paris: UNESCO, 1993.
Leona Carpenter, Simon Shaw and Andrew Prescott, eds, Towards the Digital Library: The British Library's Initiatives for Access Programme, British Library, 1998.
Walt Crawford and Michael Gorman, Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness and Reality, American Library Association, 1995.
Sally Criddle, Lorcan Dempsey, and Richard Heseltine, eds, Information Landscapes for a Learning Society, London: Library Association, 1999.
Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920, New York: Teachers College Press, 1986.
John S. Daniel, Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, London: Kogan Page, 1996.
Michael G. Dolence and Donald M. Norris, Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, Ann Arbor: Society for College and University Planning, 1995.
Lawrence Dowler, ed, Gateways to Knowledge: The Role of Academic Libraries in Teaching, Learning, and Research, MIT Press, 1997.
James J. Duderstadt, A University for the Twenty-First Century, University of Michigan Press, 2000.
Richard Ekman and Richard E. Quandt, eds, Technology and Scholarly Communication, University of California Press, 1999.
Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff, eds, Universities and the Global Knowledge Economy: A Triple Helix of University-Industry- Government Relations, Pinter, 1997.
Terry Evans and Daryl Nation, eds, Opening Education: Policies and Practices from Open and Distance Education, London: Routledge, 1996.
Charles Fisher, David C. Dwyer, and Keith Yocam, eds, Education and Technology: Reflections on Computing in Classrooms, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Sinclair Goodlad, ed, Economies of Scale in Higher Education, Guildford, UK: Society for Research into Higher Education, 1983.
Linda Harasim, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Lucio Teles, and Murray Turoff, Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
Teresa M. Harrison and Timothy D. Stephen, eds, Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in Twenty-First-Century University, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik, eds, High Wired: On the Design, Use and Theory of Educational MOOs, University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Reza Hazemi, Stephen Hailes, and Steve Wilber, eds, The Digital University: Reinventing the Academy, Berlin: Springer, 1998.
Carol Hughes, ed, Scholarship in the New Information Environment: Proceedings From an RLG Symposium Held May 1-3, 1995 at Harvard University, Research Libraries Group, 1996.
S.C. Humphreys, ed, Cultures of Scholarship, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Toru Ishida, ed, Community Computing: Collaboration over Global Information Networks, Wiley, 1998.
Tessa Kaganoff, Collaboration, Technology, and Outsourcing Initiatives in Higher Education: A Literature Review, Santa Monica: RAND, 1998.
Richard N. Katz, ed, Dancing With the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education, Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Clark Kerr, Higher Education Cannot Escape History: Issues for the Twenty-First Century, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Timothy Koschmann, ed, CSCL [Computer Supported Collaborative Learning]: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm, Erlbaum, 1996.
Frederick A. Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age, Continuum, 1999.
Thomas T. Liao, ed, Advanced Educational Technology: Research Issues and Future Potential, Berlin: Springer, 1996.
J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965.
Les Lloyd, ed, Campus-Wide Information Systems and Networks: Case Studies in Design and Implementation, Westport, CT: Meckler, 1992.
Randy Martin, ed, Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University, Duke University Press, 1999.
James Maynard, Some Microeconomics of Higher Education: Economies of Scale, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Richard E. Miller, As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Michael G. Moore and Greg Kearsley, Distance Education: A Systems View, Belmont: Wadsworth, 1996.
Dan Minoli, Distance Learning Technology and Applications, Boston: Artech House, 1996.
Donald M. Norris and James L. Morrison, eds, Mobilizing for Transformation: How Campuses Are Preparing for the Knowledge Age, Jossey-Bass, 1997.
Donald M. Norris, Revolutionary Strategy for the Knowledge Age, Ann Arbor: Society for College and University Planning, 1997.
Diana G. Oblinger and Anne-Lee Verville, What Business Wants from Higher Education, Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1998.
Ann Okerson and Dru Mogge, eds, Gateways, Gatekeepers, and Roles in the Information Omniverse: Proceedings of the Third Symposium, Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 1994.
Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby, eds, Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, MIT Press, 1996.
Lewis J. Perelman, School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education, New York: Morrow, 1992.
Bernice A. Pescosolido and Ronald Aminzade, eds, The Social Worlds of Higher Education: Handbook for Teaching in a New Century, Pine Forge Press, 1999.
Richard C. Richardson, ed, Designing State Higher Education Systems for a New Century, Oryx, 1999.
Parker Rossman, The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Deborah A. Schreiber and Zane L. Berge, eds, Distance Training: How Innovative Organizations Are Using Technology to Maximize Learning and Meet Business Objectives, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
Robert J. Seidel and Paul R. Chatelier, eds, Learning without Boundaries: Technology to Support Distance/Distributed Learning, New York: Plenum Press, 1994.
Mark A. Shields, ed, Work and Technology in Higher Education: The Social Construction of Academic Computing, Erlbaum, 1994.
Cynthia J. Shoemaker, Leadership in Continuing and Distance Education in Higher Education, Allyn and Bacon, 1998.
Sheila Slaughter, The Higher Learning and High Technology: Dynamics of Higher Education Policy Formation, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Anthony Smith, Books to Bytes: Knowledge and Information in the Postmodern Era, London: British Film Institute, 1993.
John Tiffin and Lalita Rajasingham, In Search of the Virtual Class: Education in an Information Society, London: Routledge, 1995.
A. D. Tillett and Barry Lesser, eds, Science and Technology in Central and Eastern Europe: The Reform of Higher Education, New York: Garland, 1996.
Gerald C. Van Dusen, The Virtual Campus: Technology and Reform in Higher Education, Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Graduate School of Education and Human Development, 1997.
Mark Warschauer, ed, Telecollaboration in Foreign Language Learning: Proceedings of the Hawaii Symposium, University of Hawaii Press, 1997.
Recommended: Definitely listen to Mark Schone's hysterical piece on "This American Life" about Hollywood's version of the "Southern accent". It's act three:
While I'm at it, "This American Life" also had a segment recently about a group of high school students who got upset when the media falsified something that Al Gore said about Love Canal in a discussion at their school and then went nuts accusing him of having lied about it. The segment itself is at ; a RealVideo clip of Gore's actual words in their original context is at
Every time an RRE reader accuses me of not knowing what I'm talking about, I always cringe. Surely they must be right. But, strangely, they're always wrong. It's actually kind of creepy. Sometimes an economist, for example, will rant about my grasp of economics, yet when we rationally work the issue through it always turns out that the economist is confused. I am not an economist, have not had any training at all in the subject, and readily admit that I do not have a perfect grasp of it. Yet precisely because I learned economics on my own in the library, and not as part of the economics community, I parse the issues in ways that seem to throw the real economists off. I don't mean this as a stereotype about all economists -- just the ones who have accused me of not knowing what I'm talking about. In any case, another recent example was someone accusing me of not knowing what I was talking about when I forwarded the piece on xenotransplantation. All I can say is, see the article and editorial in the 4/15/99 issue of Nature whose position is pretty much the same as mine. Maybe the state of scientific knowledge has evolved a lot since then, but I doubt it.
Some URL's
remedies in the Microsoft case
A Spoonful of Sugar in Microsoft's Bitter Pill http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/sunday/121299biz-econ.html
A Very Public Remedy (Nader/Love on the Microsoft case) http://www.legaltimes.com/expcfm/display.cfm?id=2411
The "Full Warranty" Remedy (in the Microsoft case) http://www.animats.com/private/warranties.html
denial-of-service attacks
Dave Dittrich's papers on denial-of-service attacks http://www.washington.edu/People/dad/
Tribal Flood Creator's Thoughts http://www.AntiOnline.com/cgi-bin/News? type=antionline&date=02-07-2000&story=DOS3.news
L0pht Heavy Industries http://www.l0pht.com/
privacy wars
EBPD -- The eBay Password Demon http://avocado.dhs.org/ebpd/
EPIC testimony on FIDNET and infrastructure protection http://www.epic.org/security/cip/EPIC_testimony_0200.pdf
EPIC's complaint about DoubleClick's data collection practices http://www.epic.org/privacy/internet/ftc/DCLK_complaint.pdf
Report on the Privacy Policies and Practices of Health Web Sites http://ehealth.chcf.org/priv_pol3/index_show.cfm?doc_id=33
Cookie Cop ftp://ftp.zdnet.com/pcmag/2000/0222/cookiecp.txt ftp://ftp.zdnet.com/pcmag/2000/0222/cookiecp.zip
other subjects
Ronald Dworkin's article on the impeachment debacle http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20000309048R
web site that specializes in scandalous documents http://www.thesmokinggun.com/
review of books on George W. Bush http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20000224004R
"the ever-burgeoning field of bad Internet research" http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/02/18/stanford_study/
establishment smear campaign against John McCain in South Carolina http://www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/02/16/ugly/
allNetDevices http://www.allnetdevices.com/
PointCast Sends Its Final Push Broadcast http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1552644.html
England Ugly and Grey, Say Tourist Guides http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/observer/uk_news/story/0,3879,136241,00.html
Conference on Affordable Telecom and IT Solutions for Developing Countries http://www.tenet.res.in/commsphere/commsphere.html
AFL-CIO's mobilization site http://workingfamilies.ibelong.com/
Caught in the Web: White Paper on the Evolving Character of the Internet http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/chunter/info_society/caught_in_the_web/ caught_in_the_web_paper.html
Web site of opponents of Mumia Abu Jamal http://www.danielfaulkner.com/
new book price comparisons http://www.booksearchengine.com/
OMB Watch's analysis of Clinton's budget http://www.ombwatch.org/ombwatcher/current.html
Agenda for Access (to government information) http://www.ombwatch.org/a4a/
Technology Opportunities Program http://www.ntia.doc.gov/otiahome/tiiap/
Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~mcentury/PI/PI.html
Electronic Documents Conference http://www.nist.gov/e-docs/conf/
History and Politics Out Loud http://www.hpol.org/
New Distance Company Fails in Bid to Buy a Campus and Its Programs http://chronicle.com/free/2000/02/2000020901u.htm
European Conference on Digital Libraries, Lisbon, September 2000 http://www.bn.pt/org/agenda/ecdl2000/call.htm
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