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``` Some notes on writing, learning, teaching, noticing, designing, and threatening people with legal action, as well as technical language and intellectual property, plus a recommendation and some URL's.
As a periodic reminder, you can find copies of most past RRE messages in the Web-based archives that are maintained by a couple of private companies. Links to these archives can be found on the RRE Web page:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html
This URL is mentioned in the -=-=-=-=-='ed "tag" at the top of almost every RRE message. I do not keep copies of past RRE messages myself.
One of the hazards of running a list like this, it would seem, is occasional threats of legal action by people who imagine that they have some grievance against me. The other day, for example, I received the following message out of nowhere from someone who had been subscribed to the list for several years.
Get me the hell off your mailing list or I will press charges of harassment. I am a Information Technology lawyer and I will prosecute to the fullest. Get My Drift?
C'est quoi? I don't know. I've asked him, and I will be interested to see what he says. Given the peculiarities of mailer software, it is conceivable that he has some legitimate complaint, even if he needs to learn some a more constructive way of expressing it. Not that I can complain, given that I'm not always polite myself with people who hassle me. In any case, if I am informed that this guy has filed criminal charges against me, you'll be the first to know. The major problem with threats like this is that, rationally or not, they cause me to lose sleep. I need my sleep, and on several occasions I have given thought to abandoning the list altogether in order to make sure I get enough. Come to think of it, maybe I can improve my sleep by starting my legal defense fund now.
This is the problem with the Internet: it provides an instantaneous channel for all of the sweetness and light that we could possibly wish to convey to one another, but it also provides an instantaneous channel for all of the emotional poison we wish to dump on one another as well. Is it really worth it on balance?
Recommended: Richard Saul Wurman, Information Architects, edited by Peter Bradford, Graphis Press, 1996. Richard Saul Wurman is a graphic designer known for his innovative reference works, most particularly the outstanding Access Guides already recommended on this list, and for his networking between the technology and design worlds. This volume, planned by Wurman and edited by another important information designer, Peter Bradford, gathers images and texts from a couple dozen others who pioneer the craft of using graphic design to communicate information. It's great, and is best (and easily) read from cover to cover in one sitting. The designer's creed of rethinking things from scratch announces itself from the first moment you open the book: almost all of it employs white type on black pages. (My cynical self, noting the book's unusually stern warning against reproduction, argued that this was a deliberate choice to frustrate photocopying. The fact remains, though, that the black background works quite well to frame the images.)
The contributors describe projects that include the weather page of USA Today, museum displays, expository graphics in magazines, and instruction manuals. It was depressing how many of the projects were cancelled because of their unconventionality, and surprising how cheerful the designers presented themselves as being about it. One example, by Bradford, was a reinvented children's dictionary -- surely a crying need -- that the publishers cancelled because they didn't know what to call it and therefore didn't know how to advertise it.
But two things struck me most forcefully. One was the overwhelming sense that the people who used these materials have bodies: they walk into a room, they open a box with a computer in it, they are on the road in a strange town, or whatever, and the information artifact is supposed to fit both physically and cognitively into that situation. Being graphic designers, these folks know a great deal about human eyes -- what it's like to look at things, and what colors are for, and the value of a consistent set of conventions for everything, and the fine line between naturalistic representation and abstract schematic. They know something about hands, too, though they hardly mention them. They have a strong sense of the vastness of their design space, and they take seriously the iterative process of exploring it.
The designers' approach contrasts with the emphasis on disembodiment in the cyberspace ideology, which I think is exactly wrong. Science fiction disserves us here: William Gibson's heroes are basically shamans, but we are not designing systems for shamans but for normal people. (Besides, real shamans have day jobs too.) The ideology of disembodiment in prevailing cultural constructions of cyberspace, not to mention the tacit presupposition of disembodiment in computer system design, is an artifact of the clunky interface devices that are available to us today. Once we are unchained from big, cumbersome monitors, we'll be able to compute in the settings of our choice, and we'll choose our settings because of the things we want to do with our bodies: sit in the back yard, travel somewhere, meet someone in person, fix a car, make dinner, or whatever. Computer design will then require a fuller sense of what people do with their bodies. That's already happening with wearable computers, so-called augmented reality systems, so-called smart meeting rooms, and so on. I just think we have a long way to go before we remember -- or learn for the first time and integrate into our design practices -- how information happens in places, how information is part of embodied activities, what eyes and hands really are, and so on.
That said, I also sensed that most of the designers in "Information Architects" did not convey a strong analysis of the institutional settings in which people were using their artifacts. This includes their job categories, their structured relationships, the rules they're working under, the constraints and goals and career paths that provide the long-term horizon for their work, their diversity as to culture and language and institutional location, their various states of knowledge and expertise and how those attributes of a person are themselves institutionally organized, how the individuals were members or larger groups, how they fashioned their identities as members of such groups, what other information resources they had available as part of the settings in which they used the stuff that the designers designed, and so on. These are surely all important dimensions of the user's experience, and designers should surely take them into account.
A next step, it seems to me, is to build on the terrific work that the designers have done by expanding the scope of analysis that is brought to bear on information design problems. That was the goal of my essay on "Designing genres for new media". The title was perhaps inaccurate, given that I never did explain how to design a genre, figuring that designers already knew that. My point, rather, was to provide more analytical input to the design process. Other analytical methods exist besides mine, of course, and still others are needed. My point is simply that it's important to start with the existing disciplines of design and all they've learned, and move forward from there into a new technical space and new analytical considerations. No longer are we designing artifacts whose whole functionality can be held in your hand. New electronic artifacts can easily be "tethered" back to an organization, by wires or wirelessly, or else they can communicate instantly with similar artifacts all around the earth. So it no longer makes sense simply to design artifacts. Rather, we have to design artifacts and institutions at the same time, and the first step is to understand the institutional location in which the artifacts are being used.
I talk with a lot of people about "new media" business plans, most of which are remarkably naive. My sense is that at least half of them can be filtered out immediately based on one simple calculation: how are you going to recover your production costs? Information being what it is, your revenue is at least potentially proportional to your audience. That may sound like good news, but in the real world it's bad news for the simple reason that you are competing with businesses who have already built massive infrastructures and marketing machines that enable them to distribute their content to more people than you can dream about.
Let's do the math. If you spend $X producing some content, and you manage to reach an audience of N people with it, then you need to recover $X/N per audience member in some combination of fees and advertiser support to break even. And you will lose unless that ratio is at least equal to that of your competitors. If your competitor is television, then you're dealing with an industry with a very large N -- in many cases three orders of magnitude higher than you can hope for, even in the medium term. That means that you need production costs that are three orders magnitude lower than television, or else you must persuade consumers and/or advertisers to pay three orders of magnitude more for your product than they do for television. That does happen, of course, with specialized industry newsletters and the like. The problem is that way too many new-media business plans are written by people who believe that they are pioneering something sui generis, and who therefore take no account of competition. This is the story of interactive television, which has much higher production costs than regular television and many fewer households equipped to receive it.
Bret Pettichord made an interesting observation in response to my article about dissociative patterns of thinking in the field of AI. I noted in that article, as in my book and some other articles, that computer people frequently employ the same word to identify both a thing in the world and a representation of that thing. He provided an example that hadn't occurred to me. In his organization, he says, the computer support people use the word "bug" to refer both to a malfunction of the software and to a user's message complaining about the malfunction. In fact the latter usage predominates; to "fix a bug" is, operationally speaking, to resolve a complaint, not to repair a malfunction. "Bugs" -- the users' messages -- go into a formalized queue, are assigned an identifier and a priority, become someone's responsibility, and so on. They are institutional facts, and they are more objective in that way than the error that may or may not exist in the code. This use of the word "bug" is hardly unprecedented in the English language -- in rhetorical terms it's a metonymy, and as such it is not inherently wrong. Bret's concern, which we both recognize is hard to evaluate, is that this ambiguous use of language might lead the support people to perceive the users themselves as the problem. Even if no such effect can be proven, it would nonetheless seem wise to adopt Bret's suggestion that users' messages reporting possible software problems be called "gripes" -- a term employed in some other fields. That's still not the most neutral of language, but at least it clearly differentiates the report from the problem being reported. Relations between technical support people and their users are too often strained and defensive, and a little linguistic reform might help.
This observation about the word "bug" is just one small sample of the complicated fault lines between the technical and nontechnical worlds. Almost everybody I know lives along these fault lines -- people who are not just technical, and not just something else, but hybrids: media artists, sociologists of technology, people who make software models of social phenomena, interface designers, computer industry reporters, cyberlibrarians, cyberlawyers, computer scientists who have moved to nontechnical fields, people from nontechnical fields who became gearheads on the side, and so on. These folks combine technical stuff and nontechnical stuff in a great diversity of ways.
I find these people terribly interesting. Whereas all sociologists (for example) live reasonably similar lives, following career paths that have been well-mapped by others, these people who straddle the technical/nontechnical fault lines are all unique. Every one of them has had to figure out their own identity and pioneer their own path. They are, by necessity, good at explaining themselves to a variety of audiences. I'm not saying that plain-vanilla lawyers and plain- vanilla anthropologists are any less interesting as people. The difference is that someone whose career moves entirely within an established discipline can presuppose a great depth of tradition. People whose careers span boundaries, by contrast, need to improvise, cobble together, have a strategy, and reinvent themselves and the world around them every few years. This life is not for everybody, and I wish we had better cognitive tools and institutions to help support such people's careers. Theirs is, after all, a pattern that more and more careers will follow in the future.
Language provides a window on the social processes that cross the technical/nontechnical boundary. Let us consider two more examples, the words "moderated" and "listserv". Both words, obviously, arise in the context of Internet mailing lists. In vernacular usage, the word "moderated" derives from a particular context: there's a public debate over some issue, with speakers representing various sides, and then there's someone called a "moderator". The moderator is supposed to follow certain norms: not expressing an opinion on the issue, applying the rules of debate in a way that is fair and impartial, and so on. The vernacular concept of "moderator", in other words, presupposes a particular institutional setting and all of the roles and values that go with it.
On the Internet, however, a "moderated" mailing list is a mailing list with a designated individual, the "moderator", who has the technical means to determine which contributed messages are distributed to the list's subscribers. It's a technical concept, defined entirely in terms of the functionality of the mailing list server. People who know how a mail server works can use the term "moderator" correctly. And the term applies equally well to any way in which the software can be used. So, for example, technical people routinely refer to RRE as a "moderated" mailing list, even though I (the presumed moderator) make no pretense of being fair, holding back my opinions, letting people speak, encouraging discussion, etc. That's not the purpose of the list. This situation creates misunderstandings. I personally cannot get accustomed to the technical version of the word, and so I sometimes misunderstand system administrators who ask me questions like, "is RRE a moderated list?". Misunderstandings also arise when nontechnical people, hearing that RRE is a moderated list, expect to find discussion going on there. They contribute their comments to the discussion, find them automatically rejected by the mail server, and try to read meanings into the rejection.
This pattern is quite common: technical people harvest words from the vernacular language to identify technical concepts, and they rarely (if ever) intend to retain every single connotation that a word carries in vernacular discourse. Instead, they draw on very specific connotations of the word that map roughly onto the technical functionality they want to name. The technical concept is therefore both narrower and broader than the vernacular concept: it is narrower because certain elements of the vernacular meaning are not carried over into the technical setting, and it is broader because it is applied in every context that is consistent with the narrower subset of connotations. Problems then arise when nontechnical people do not possess the mental models that they need to comprehend the full scope of the word's use in technical settings. The problems are even worse in the many cases -- such as "moderated" -- where the technical concept is meant to occupy and support the same institutional locus as the vernacular concept. Some mailing lists, that is, really are "moderated" in the vernacular sense of the word, and in that context the word retains its original meaning. Users, especially nontechnical ones, who become accustomed to the word in that sort of context may understandably become confused when it is used differently in other contexts.
To explore this phenomenon more fully, let us turn to the second word, "listserv". The other day I had breakfast with a representative of a national organization who was recruiting me to write and speak about technological issues for his membership. Although I am sympathetic to this organization, I was unwilling to do what he asked because I didn't feel that he was proposing to use my time effectively. He had an old-fashioned model of communication. With the Internet, I (like many others) easily and routinely distribute my thoughts to thousands of people. It's not worth my time to write for a newsletter that only hundreds of people will read, unless those hundreds of people are very targeted indeed. I suggested to him that he establish a mailing list, rather like RRE, to circulate relevant material to anyone among his membership who wants to receive it. Advertise high quality and low volume, I promised, and stuff will get around. Alas, he didn't understand what I was talking about. He was aware of the concept of a "listserv" -- a term that I did not use. But for him, a "listserv" is a discussion list, and he said (reasonably) that he doesn't have time to maintain such a list. I had to explain to him that a "listserv" is quite capable of one-way broadcast distribution of material, and while that might not sound so democratic in the abstract, it can play a perfectly constructive role in the context of an organization that is democratic in larger and more important ways.
What accounts for this guy's misunderstanding of the word "listserv"? Notice, first of all, that the word "listserv" was born technical; although it was derived from vernacular elements -- "list" (as in "mailing list") and "serv" (as in the technical term "server", itself derived from a vernacular word) -- nobody could mistake it for a vernacular word. Notice, too, that he was using the word "listserv" as a generic category, defined in terms of its functionality and social role, without evincing any awareness that "Listserv" is the proper name of a computer program.
The misunderstandings here -- a technical term assigned unwonted nontechnical meanings -- run in the opposite direction from those associated with "moderated". In both cases, however, the connection between the two meanings is the same: the vernacular meaning is situated in institutions -- that is, in typified human relationships -- whereas the technical meaning refers to the input-output behavior of a software program. In the case of "moderated", we can hypothesize that the problem arises because technical people have mutilated a vernacular term. But that's not fair, or at least it's not complete, and the case of "listserv" shows why.
With "listserv", the problem concerns the epistemic situation of the beginner -- that is, the ways in which nontechnical people are able to know things about technical systems. Faced with a new situation, whether computer-intensive or not, people will start to understand it operationally -- that is, in terms of what they can see and do. They will learn how the situation behaves -- "when I did this, that happened". In particular, they will encounter the situation holistically. (On this topic see the "practice theories" of thinking in Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge University Press, 1977; Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy, Harvard University Press, 1981; and Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.) An expert will probably have a mental model that conceptually separates the different elements of the situation and predicts how they will interact. A beginner, however, has no such model, or a wrong model imported from somewhere else, or models that are fragmentary and superficial when compared to those of experts. And beginners form their models inductively, generalizing from their experience.
A correct model will channel generalizations in the right directions. Lacking correct models, beginners often overgeneralize. Recall, however, that a technical concept such as "moderated" and "listserv" cannot be understood without a mental model of the software -- a model that cleanly separates the behavior of the software from all of the other elements, institutional and social and strategic and meteorological etc, that the user's total situation might contain. My friend from breakfast is familiar with "listserv's" from contexts in which discussions are going on; he does not possess a mental model that enables him to generalize to other potential uses of the same software, and thus to other potential ways that the software might be situated within an institution.
This phenomenon has numerous consequences. I have attended numerous meetings of regional computer user groups, for example, and the gulf between beginners and experts is usually on painful display. These meetings will usually have a moment when everyone is invited to raise questions, which everyone else is then invited to collaboratively answer. These shared-thinking sessions are frequently inspiring -- the experts usually have the very best intentions and the beginners are usually grateful for their attempts to help. But they are also frequently frustrating -- the beginners cannot use the words properly, but without using the words properly they cannot effectively ask their questions. You see them standing there, trying to use the words, knowing that they are not using the words correctly, feeling like idiots in a public meeting. Then you see the experts, sitting in their chairs, trying to figure out what the question is, asking clarifying questions that involve more technical words whose meanings the beginner does not command, until the whole thing either entirely falls apart or someone magically figures out what the real question was, having encountered the same question from some other beginner in another context. It's as if the experts and beginners are separated by a glass wall.
Another consequence of the problem is more even insidious. I have written before about my frustration in teaching Web design to classes of primarily nontechnical students. Surveys in class suggest that those students have almost all explored the Web, but on a superficial level. Some portion of them will have built simple Web pages, and there are always a few who already make a living building Web sites, but most of them have only the vaguest idea what is happening when they use the Web.
(The notion that kids these days just magically know how computers work is, so far as I can determine, simply false. Kids are accustomed to having computers around, and to doing very simple things on them, but I am not persuaded that the proportion of young people who can program a computer, or who have an accurate mental model of even one technical concept, has become measurably significant. Indeed, such notions resemble all too closely the reassurances by many vendors' sales people that organizations that purchase computer systems can go ahead and spend their full budget on computers because the employees will be able to train themselves.)
The problem with the students in my classes is not simply that they don't know what the Web is -- I'm a teacher, after all, and I know perfectly well how to solve that problem. The problem, rather, is that the students think they know what the Web is. They have quite definite ideas about what a "Web site" is -- so definite, in fact, that many of them survive all ten weeks of an intensive course without comprehending more than a tiny fraction of the design choices that they have available to make. For me, "the Web" is a technical concept -- it's defined narrowly in terms of what HTML and HTTP and their friends will do when employed in one way or another. Many of the students, on the other hand, understand a "Web site" in terms of the particular genres of Web pages with which they are familiar. A "Web site", for these students, is a batch of Web pages that include a bunch of information about topic X. A "Web site" for an organization is likewise a batch of Web pages that tell a bunch of stuff about that organization. Stuff is laid out in such-and-such ways, intended for such-and-such audience, and so on.
I start many of my lectures and lab sessions by saying things like, "in order to design something, you have to let go of your preconceived ideas, start your analysis from the beginning, and see where your analysis takes you". But this bit of wisdom is useless by itself -- how do you know what your preconceived ideas are if you cannot imagine alternatives? Analytically demonstrating a diversity of existing Web sites will eventually help, but only if we take weeks of class time to develop and apply a vocabulary that gradually deconstructs and displaces the unarticulated, inductively-arrived-at assumptions that the students have gotten from their past encounters with the technology.
Before anyone concludes that nontechnical people such as my students are dumb, however, notice that the inductive method of understanding that people naturally employ in a new situation corresponds neatly to the kinds of meanings that vernacular words tend to have: meanings that are situated in institutional contexts. A word like "moderated" in its vernacular meaning, or "listserv" in the meaning that normal people infer from their experiences, usefully relates mechanisms to typified settings, and typified settings to the institutional orders that those settings embody. Technical words are frequently misleading precisely because they "wobble" with regard to the institutional setting -- the Internet can be used in many different ways, and the whole elaborate process of cultural learning around the Internet consists in large measure of the development of multiple models for integrating the Internet into the institutional practices around it.
The early days of the Internet were driven largely by abject fantasy about the institutional world, and early hypesters did very well by gathering these fantasies under visionary rubrics such as "cyberspace". Now, however, we are becoming more sophisticated in our understanding of the relationship between two perfectly valid levels of analysis of these matters: the technical level, which pertains solely to the input-output behavior of a computer program, and the institutional level, which meshes that computer program into a set of social roles, norms, categories, relationships, expectations, genre conventions, business plans, public policies, legal rules, and so on.
Loel McPhee at CommerceNet was kind enough to send me one of their books, "Search for Digital Excellence" (by James P. Ware, Amir Hartman, Malu Roldan, and Judith Gebauer, McGraw-Hill, 1998), about emerging best practices for the use of the Internet in companies, and I was continually torn while reading it. Its message is that a company's Internet presence has to be consciously codesigned and coevolved with everything else the company does. Part of me kept saying "duh", since that has been the central message of this list (among others) for some time now. On the other hand, I welcomed it as a sign that the fever has broken, and that the Internet no longer stands out in the imagination as some kind of super-technology that defies the laws of gravity. The Internet really is participating in significant changes in business, and the business-to-business electronic commerce story is, if anything, underhyped because it is so complicated and technical and unglamorous. But just for that reason it's exactly the kind of story that we need to tell now. My larger point is that our language still makes it difficult to tell such stories. We are continually blind-sided by the tensions between technical and nontechnical language, and by the culturally organized hyperbole that frustrates our attempts to bring the technical and nontechnical worlds into a productive relationship. I don't know how to solve this problem, but I like to think that it would be alleviated if everyone understood it.
Here at UCLA we are teaching people how to write. Of course, lots of schools are teaching people how to write, but those who read this list regularly are aware that I am unhappy with prevailing fashions in writing instruction. I am trying to find a happy alternative to the destructive extremes of both conservative and liberal approaches to writing. I am also trying to teach people how to write without spending half my life writing detailed comments on their draft essays. To this end, I've spent a lot of time this quarter reinventing a method that (I am told) is used by creative writing workshops. We've set up a pipeline. Each week, one of our PhD students is assigned to write a 1000-word essay about the presentation of a speaker in our department's seminar series. Then they rewrite their draft essay four times, each time getting detailed comments from three other students. These comments are not random, but are directed by detailed instructions that I made available on Web pages.
Each round of comments has a different purpose. The purpose of the first rewrite, and thus the first round of comments, is to squeeze out as many words as possible. The second draft having been compressed enough that the precision and imprecision of words become evident, the second rewrite then starts from scratch based on a fresh analysis of the overall point, the audience, and the appropriateness of language. These functional issues having been brought to the surface, the third rewrite addresses deeper issues of the essay's relationship to its subject and its readers. The final draft then cleans up details. If you want to see the system as I've prepared it on Web pages, go to . Everything is still rough, not least my own writing in the assignments, but you should get the idea. Some essays are now emerging from the pipeline, and we'll send a batch of them to RRE when they're ready to go.
In teaching this class, I feel like I'm rebuilding civilization. You can't think clearly unless you can write clearly, and I am on a mission to revive the art of clear writing. If my Web pages inspire you to compel your own students to learn how to write, then that would be great. As an intellectual matter, my ideas about writing derive from several sources, but especially from the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky was one of those complex figures who managed to conduct legitimate research during the Soviet era, and one always reads that stuff wondering how much of it fundamentally depends on its ritualistic invocations of the supposed wisdom of Lenin. In fact another major source of my thinking was another such figure, Mikhail Bakhtin, without a doubt the finest literary critic ever, and several scholars observed that these theorists really have more in common with American pragmatist philosophy than they do with anything from Lenin or even Marx. I think that's basically right.
What these guys had in common is the idea that thinking is not a monologue but a dialogue, or a polylogue I suppose one should say, a conversation of many voices. Vygotsky believed that you learn to think by internalizing your interactions with other people. Now Freud believed this too, but Freud focused only on the negative interactions, and only on the emotional aspects of them. Vygotsky extends the point to include all interactions and especially interactions in which people are working together toward a shared goal. Bakhtin, for his part, demonstrated how people's voices, particularly the voices of the authors and characters of literary works, combine existing voices from the society. Together these theories provide a theory of learning that is quite different from anything in the west (see James Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action, Harvard University Press, 1991). I am not "applying" the theory in the sense of taking it down off a shelf and mechanically cranking out its consequences. I came to these ideas by reflecting on my own experience and looking for concepts that could make sense of it. That's how theories should be used -- appropriated incrementally and dialectically through one's own experiences of reflectively doing things, and not turned into a scholastic code.
In any case, the idea is this: by creating a pipeline of drafts and structured comments, I want to establish a stable, flexible pattern of cooperative activity that students can internalize. Vygotsky's theory predicts that every classroom becomes part of your mind, and so it's better to have a classroom that embodies positive values. Many liberals, reacting against the rigid and factory-like classrooms of authoritarian educators, have interpreted this idea as an argument against structure. But that's not right. You can't learn without structure, and the key is to provide a structure that adapts to each individual's needs. The structure should also provide what Winnicott called "holding", or that others call a "container" -- a supportive emotional framework that pushes people to do their best without shaming mistakes. This is another area where both liberals and conservatives get confused. Liberals value self-esteem, but their actual methods do little to encourage self-esteem while causing much damage in other ways. Conservatives go the opposite direction and seem to make a special point of shaming people as much as possible. Let's get them both out of the classroom, and instead develop a positive vocabulary for the emotional things that happen as people learn together.
For example, when commenting on someone's draft, it's important to distinguish between perceptions and judgements. Perceptions aren't right or wrong; they're just what you saw when you read the author's essay, and the author can benefit from learning how others saw it without anybody deciding whose fault any unhappy misperception might be. It's also useful to distinguish between perceptions and suggestions. Too many commenters suggest revisions to a draft without explaining the reasons for them; if the author rejects the suggestions, it's still important to know what perceptions motivated them. Norms of confidentiality are also helpful, as well as occasional speeches about phenomena such as impostor syndrome (the amazingly common delusion that one has been accepted to graduate school by mistake) and the skill of reporting bad news about someone's work in a supportive way.
What does not help anybody is false praise, like gold stars on badly written papers. Students need guidance about what to do next, but this guidance can be framed in terms of goals for improvement and not in terms of absolute gradings of "A" and "C+" and "F". Provide steady, cheerful pressure to do better, make precise what "better" might consist in, and leave the grades for the end of the course. Following this method, I find that I can lean very hard on students to improve their work. I just smile, commiserate with the difficulties of learning, and say, "the next step might be ...". The proof, of course, is in the writing that the students actually do, and we'll soon enough see what happens with that. In the meantime, I hope that others will benefit from what we're trying to do.
For some time I've been aware that many libertarians oppose the whole idea of intellectual property. This has always clashed with my sense of libertarians as people who regard private property as the very foundation of liberty. And so in the midst of a conversation about something else, I asked loyal RRE subscriber and libertarian Kragen Sitaker about this. He replied that intellectual property is just another kind of monopoly resulting from government manipulation of the economy. I then asked him, "why is intellectual property any more of a government-granted monopoly than any other kind of property?". Here (reformatted for compactness) is his off-the-cuff response, the likes of which I had never heard before, though Kragen assumes that he did not invent any of it himself:
In four ways: naturalness, uniqueness, expense, and unenforceability.
* Naturalness. Other kinds of property are, to some extent, natural.
Land has been "owned" by groups of people for tens of millennia. Individual possessions have been owned since the beginning of agriculture. It is possible to defend one's right to a tangible piece of property by physical force on an individual, or small-group, basis.
By contrast, intellectual property has only existed since perhaps 1600 (although I'm not really familiar with the history, so it might be more recent than that) and has never been as widespread as it is today.
This doesn't explain how intellectual "property" is more monopolistic than other property, but only how it is more government-granted.
* Uniqueness. Ideas are unique. If my neighbor has a car, and I want one, I can hire a mechanic to make one just like it, assuming I can get a good enough look at his. End result: two separate cars with two separate owners.
By contrast, if my neighbor has a technique that enhances her ability to rake her yard, and I want to use an identical technique, I can analogously hire an industrial engineer to design an identical technique. But the end result is not two techniques, but one. Who owns it?
This is important in the context of monopoly. If Al builds a big, successful car factory, and Henry thinks he could do a better job of building cars with a car factory, Henry can build his own factory. He can't use Al's, but he can build his own factory, and he can compete with Al.
By contrast, if Imatec comes up with a big, successful technique to calibrate displays and printers so their colors match, there may very well be no possible alternative way for Apple to calibrate displays and printers so their colors match. It's as if, once Al builds his factory, anyone else who wants to build cars has to rent space from Al. This obviously produces some problems.
* Expense. It costs about $700 to register a patent establishing "ownership" of a technique. It costs $0 to establish my ownership of a bicycle, and about $30 to establish my ownership of a car. This clearly favors folks backed up with big capital.
* Unenforceability. Effectively enforcing intellectual-property claims requires a totalitarian government that monitors every communication between two people, and possibly everything everybody does.
If I have ten thousand objects in my house, I can be relatively certain that only a small fraction of them will ever be stolen. If I live in a modern country, it's likely that none of them will ever be stolen, even if I invite people over and lend them books regularly. By contrast, if I originate ten thousand ideas, nearly all of them will be "stolen", unless I never implement or describe them.
Some people observed that my lists of "things that are are good" and "things that piss me off" dwelt on matters pertaining to travel, and they teased me for my seemingly glamorous lifestyle. I wish. What's really going on is that things -- both good and bad -- are easier to notice when you're traveling. In a familiar environment, something can annoy you very mildly at 2:37pm every afternoon without you ever focusing your attention on it. But when you're traveling and all of your routines are disrupted, you can encounter annoyances for the first time, before they fade into the woodwork.
This phenomenon was a central motive for my dissertation research on computational models of routine activities. I strongly believe that our everyday lives are much more complicated than, and completely and qualitatively different from, our conscious understandings of them. We selectively notice some aspects of our lives and not others. We notice those few things in our lives that are new, or difficult, or broken, or that fit into our cultural or ideological sense of what's important to notice, but we are only dimly aware of the 99% of our lives that doesn't fit into those categories.
This is important for many reasons. One reason is that the people who design computers get their ideas about their users' lives largely from their cultural and ideological understandings of their own lives. If those cultural and ideological ideas are mostly wrong, as I believe they are, it follows that computers will probably be accidents waiting to happen. Because computer users are absurdly accommodating, however, the problem can go undiagnosed for years on end.
In my dissertation I wrote about these things rather bluntly in the context of AI and its ideas about human action. I then rewrote about 80% of my dissertation in more scholarly language, with footnotes and everything, to produce my book, "Computation and Human Experience". Most of my friends were opposed to this rewriting, but I didn't want to go up for tenure with a book that was filled with blunt polemics. I've already written about some of the techniques that my friends and I evolved for becoming aware of the normally invisible details of our own everyday lives:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/tno/april-1996.html#story
It's hard to convey how strange an experience this was. You can get some sense of it by moving to a new house: as you put all of your material belongings into boxes, your everyday routines start to break, one by one, and you confront the fine details of just how your life had been organized. Then you move someplace different and every day is filled with little problems that you face for the first time: the first time you take a shower in your new bathroom, or turn a key in your new lock, or look to see what time it is, and so on. Then the second time you do each of those things, you start to settle into a routine; your experience from doing it the first time comes back to you, and for a small moment you're aware of choosing to do it this way. Usually you have bigger things on your mind, however, and so the moment slips away and you forget all about it. Detailed real-time awareness of such things is what Buddhist meditation is about, although our methods for becoming aware of them bore little relationship to those of the Buddhists.
Technological change, with its inevitable disruptions, ought to be an occasion for us to recover this kind of fresh experience of our own lives. Mostly, though, it isn't. Instead it's a hassle, or it gets drowned by emotional noise and hassle, or we go into it kicking and screaming, or we go into it under the influence of millenarian ideologies. The problem in each case is that we focus on what's new about using a different technology, rather than on what is revealed as more fundamentally the same. This concern was the motivation for Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores' book "Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design" (Ablex, 1986), and while I have some problems with their particular formalism, many of the same underlying intuitions motivate my own ranting and pleading on the subject of the tacit millennialism of computing. The fundamental problem with this millennialism is not that it is bad religion, though that's what it is, but rather that it pulls people away from experiencing their own lives. If you're not aware of your own life then you can be tricked into any old illusion.
On the subject of pens, Michael Dennis tells me that there's also a Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York at Rockefeller Plaza (10 West 49th Street), and Bruce Jones tells me that there's another one in LA that I'll soon be looking up.
Also, Staedtler is on the Web at www.staedtler.com.
Some URL's...
Deepening the Digital Divide: The War on Universal Service http://www.epn.org/cme/ddindex.html
12th International Bled Electronic Commerce Conference http://ecom.fov.uni-mb.si
Geoff Nunberg on the future of the library http://epn.org/prospect/41/41-toc.html
Electronic Policy Network http://epn.org/
article on university "science shops" that help the local community http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/11_7_98/bob1.htm end ```