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TNO 1(12).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 1994
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This month: The Progress and Freedom Foundation How communities take hold of computer networking Qualitiative marketing research
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Welcome to TNO 1(12).
This month's issue is mostly taken up by a couple of articles from the editor. The first of these discusses two new high-tech political organizations, the Progress and Freedom Foundation and the Wireless Opportunities Coalition. Each organization provides us with a chance to think through the complicated interactions between communications technologies and styles of political organizing.
Also in this month's issue is the text of a speech from the British Columbia Information Policy Conference in Vancouver earlier this month. This is a fascinating group of librarians, academics, community activists, and others, all trying to put information policy into practice in their part of the world by building free community networks. I took this occasion to gather some thoughts on the broad question of how a community takes hold of computer networking. We probably can't make firm generalizations about this, at least yet, but we can at least list some questions to ask and set some basic orientations. It helps to view computing as a community activity -- as something that people do together as groups or networks, within patterns of relationship that probably serve other purposes as well. In any event, some of my thoughts here will be familiar to long-time readers of TNO, but other may not.
This month's company and abstract both concern qualitative market research, and this month's follow-up offers the usual batch of pointers to interesting net phenomena.
Starting with volume 2, TNO will start publishing irregularly rather than monthly. TNO 2(1) will probably appear in January 1995, but after that it'll just be a matter of when I have the energy and material to put a new issue together.
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The future of network politics.
In the December 1994 issue of Wired (page 121) there appears an ad for something called The Progress and Freedom Foundation. Under the headline "Cyberspace: It's Nobody's Highway", this advertisement announces the availability of a "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age". Small type at the bottom informs us that this document ...
... emerged from an August 23-24 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Participants included Jerry Berman, Esther Dyson, John Gage, George Gilder, Jay Keyworth, Lewis Perelman, Michael Rothschild and Alvin Toffler. Major support for the conference was provided by BELLSouth and the Competitive Long Distance Coalition. Additional support was provided by Agorics Enterprises, Inc., AT&T, Cox Enterprises, J.L. Dearlove and Affiliates, Forbes, Scientific Atlanta, Video Tape Associates and Wired. Creative Consulting and Ad Production by J.L. Dearlove & Affiliates, Chicago, IL.
Regarding the Magna Carta itself, it provides the e-mail address PFF@aol.com and some phone numbers,
or, if you must, cross your fingers and send POM to 1250 H St. NW, Suite 550 Washington, DC 20005.
Listen to the language. If you must? It's as though they're trying to talk jive to ingratiate themselves with the kids on the street. They don't even have a home page.
So who are these folks? The ad says that:
The Progress & Freedom Foundation believes cyberspace is a frontier, not a government project.
We can learn a little more by turning to journalistic accounts. For example, in the 12/12/94 Wall Street Journal's article on Republican plans for the Food and Drug Administration (page A16), we read the following:
In September, Rep. [Newt] Gingrich [incoming Speaker of the House] told a biotechnology trade group that he was launching a project to design a replacement for the FDA. Leading the effort is the Progress and Freedom Foundation, whose head, Jeffrey Eisenach, formerly ran Gopac, Mr. Gingrich's political action committee. Without apology, Mr. Eisenach acknowledges that drug companies are financial contributors to the foundation, and notes that drug companies will be involved in the project. And he dismisses suggestions that drug-company involvement could taint the results. "So I should go to Ralph Nader and do it?" he says. "That's silly".
So the Progress and Freedom Foundation is active on more than just telecommunications issues. But it is not just an industry lobbying organization. In particular, the connection to Gopac is not at all coincidental. The purpose of Gopac has been to train conservative Republican candidates in the particularly aggressive style of politicking that Mr. Gingrich pioneered during his early days in Congress, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation may contribute to a generalization of this model.
[By 1994] "Newt World" was now far-flung, from GOPAC to the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee; the Friends of Newt Gingrich campaign committee; a weekly TV show on the conservative cable TV network, National Empowerment Television, and a think tank called the Progress and Freedom Foundation.
Its messages were coordinated with talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and with Christian Coalition groups. [...]
"The goal of this project is simple", Jeffrey A. Eisenach, director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, wrote in a fund-raising letter. "To train, by April, 1996, 200,000-plus citizens into a model for replacing the welfare state and reforming our government." (LA Times 12/19/94, page A31)
What can we expect from this rising army? The Gopac's record provides some evidence. Much has been written about the tactics that Gopac suggested to its candidates. An article about Gopac leader Joe Gaylord (Wall Street Journal, 8 December 1994, page A18), for example, says:
Mr. Gaylord is one of the brains behind Gopac ... . [He] wrote its how-to textbook, which urges challengers to "go negative" early and "never back off". They must sometimes ignore voters' main concerns because "important issues can be of limited value". The book suggests looking for a "minor detail" to use against opponents, pointing to Willie Horton as a good example. Though it says a positive proposal also can be helpful, it counsels candidates to consider the consequences: "Does it help, or at least not harm, efforts to raise money?" Mr. Gingrich has called the book "absolutely brilliant". Even more has been written about the most famous Gopac document, ... a memo by Gingrich called "Language, a Key Mechanism of Control", in which the then-House minority whip gave candidates a glossary of words, tested in focus groups, to sprinkle in their rhetoric and literature. For example, it advised characterizing Democrats with such words as "decay, sick, pathetic, stagnation, corrupt, waste, traitors". (LA Times, 12/19/94, pages A31)
In my view, though, the most significant feature of Newt World is not its language, which is certainly fascinating, or its association with industry, which is hardly surprising or novel, but rather its use of technology. Mr. Gingrich is a pioneer in the use of new technologies to build a political movement. I do have to hand it to him -- he has worked hard and he has a genius for political organizing. Having observed in the early 1980's that candidates spend a lot of dead time on the road traveling around during campaigns, he hit upon the idea of sending them videos and other materials about campaigning. This is what Gopac did. As time went on, they generalized this model to include scheduled conference calls and video broadcasts in which Mr. Gingrich and others would provide campaigners with advice about messages and methods.
How does this model scale to 200,000-plus people? Well, at that point it starts to sound a lot like the information superhighway -- a technology for centralized broadcast of programs to a group that isn't the "mass audience" of conventional TV broadcasting but is distributed across the country. More tailored programming could be distributed as well -- to particular geographical regions, to activists on particular issues, and so forth. It's not a decentralized model like the Internet, but then it's not the political vision that normally goes with the Internet either. It's closer to the asymmetrical distribution model found in the plans of many cable and regional phone companies -- some of whom, you might recall, sponsored the Progress and Freedom Foundation's conference.
This is not to say that Newt Gingrich and company are engaged in a conspiracy against the Internet. After all, Mr. Gingrich has made some encouraging statements about making Congressional materials available to citizens on the Internet, and this is certainly a good and laudable thing. The situation and the participants' views are often complicated. The point is that technologies are not neutral. Technologies certainly do not determine how they will be used, but neither are they simply tools that can be used for any old purpose at all. Rather, technologies and social forms evolve together, according to the affordances of the machinery and the forces of the social system.
None of this coevolution goes simply or smoothly in practice, of course, nor is any of it inevitable. As the Internet illustrates extremely well, machines frequently have uses that nobody ever thought of, and these can often be resources for people wishing to engage in genuine, bottom-up democracy. The machines can't restore the health of our democracy, though -- we have to do that ourselves. And in doing so, we need to be aware of the complex and ambiguous interactions between the workings of our machinery and the forms of our political life.
In particular, we should not assume that the Internet's open and decentralized architecture necessarily makes it a force for democracy, or that it necessarily levels the field for all players. The practice of politics on the Internet is increasingly complicated, with new kinds of players and new variations on the existing games.
As a case study in these issues, let's consider an organization called the Wireless Opportunities Coalition. The WOC has circulated an alert on the net seeking support for a certain position in a fairly arcane regulatory fight within the FCC over the rules in certain frequency bands for digital wireless communications. The WOC's materials are also available on WWW:
http://wireless.policy.net/wireless/wireless.html
The basic idea of the WOC's arguments is that companies with very sensitive communications devices shouldn't be able to displace other users of certain frequencies, including low-power digital wireless communications used for educational purposes, for example in local community networking in areas that do not have high rates of telephone service. This certainly sounds like a good cause, and it probably even is a good cause.
But note that the Wireless Opportunities Coalition, is a creation of a public relations firm called Issue Dynamics Inc, whose largest clients include Bell Atlantic and a lobbying alliance of the US regional phone companies. (To be fair, they also include the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.) I couldn't find this information by searching through the WOC web pages, but you can verify it easily enough by aiming your web client at the underlying index:
http://wireless.policy.net/
As recently as December 9th this page was entitled "IDI Index"; it is now, as of December 20th, called "Policy.Net". Click on "Issue Dynamics", read down to the bottom, and click on the IDI logo, which will take you to:
http://idi.net/clients.html
Why is it "idi.net" and not "idi.com"? Never mind. My point is not that these folks are evil or that they have no right to speak. My point is that they are a public relations firm practicing their craft on the Internet. In the future, I expect that ordinary citizens using the Internet will want to inform themselves about who's behind all of those slick web pages.
Public relations and its place in society is a fascinating and important topic, and I encourage everyone to learn more about it. If you're interested, here is a brief reading list:
Edward L. Bernays, The Engineering of Consent, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955.
Bill Cantor, ed, Experts in Action: Inside Public Relations, New York: Longman, 1984.
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1982.
Jack A. Gottschalk, Crisis Response: Inside Stories on Managing Image Under Siege, Detroit: Visible Ink, 1993.
James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, Managing Public Relations, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
Elizabeth L. Toth and Robert L. Heath, eds, Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1992.
Finally, let me close with a pertinent quote:
"One practice which I believe should be eliminated is that of the so-called "paper front". A client is advised to finance an "organization" to promote or fight for its cause under the guise of an independent and spontaneous movement. This is a plain public deceit and fraud and of course is a technique developed with consummate skill and in great profusion by the Communists. In a free country any interest with a cause has a right to present its case to the public, to inform and, if possible, to persuade to its heart's content. But that right of free speech also carries the obligation that the source of it will be in the open for all to see. Attempts to fool the public by making it believe an "organization" existing only on paper is really a vociferous group favoring this or that cause have helped to cast a shadow upon the business of public relations counseling. No counsel who wants to preserve his own reputation will ever be a party to the issuance of any public statement by a client unless the source is clearly set forth. Obviously, when a client is involved in a public relations controversy, supporting statements are welcomed from every responsible source. But such statements should be issued by real-live people or organizations and not phoneys."
This quote is from the autobiography of John W. Hill ("The Making of a Public Relations Man", recently republished by NTC Business Books, pages 139-140), who founded one of the largest public relations firms, Hill and Knowlton.
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Building community networks.
[This is an edited transcript of a speech I contributed to the British Columbia Information Policy Conference.]
My assigned topic this morning is "Building Community Networks", and I want to start out with a bit of an apology, in that I have not myself built a community network, so that it feels futile for me to tell this audience, of all people, how to do that. Instead I would like to offer something closer to my own expertise by placing the process of building community networks in some kind of social perspective. Let me begin by distinguishing between two valid perspectives on community networking, the aerial view and the ground view. When taking the ground view, as we usually do in practice, our question is, how can I best go about building my community network? It is a normative question, oriented to action in concrete circumstances.
When we are taking the aerial view, by contrast, our question is, how do communities take hold of computing and networking? It is an empirical question, oriented to developing concepts and making certain kinds of social maps, and it posits "the community" as an active agent of a collective sort. It is a problematic question, of course, because we have to figure out what a community is, what it means to speak of a community taking hold of something, how to maintain a consciousness simultaneously of the unitary action of a community and its often deeply divided daily reality, and so forth. Nonetheless, I would like to devote the bulk of my remarks today to a very much provisional consideration of the aerial view on community networking. I am well aware that communities differ and that my own understanding of the issues has evolved in the context of urban settings in my own country. The point of this type of inquiry is not to make generalizations, although it is hard to avoid making generalizations, but rather to offer some potentially useful concepts -- what I think of as a handy reference card or checklist that one might take into an analysis of any particular setting. I invite you, as we go along here, to consider what I might be talking about within your own community.
Before we begin, I would like to offer a brief anatomy of what we might call the democratic technology movement, which we might define as an increasingly global, politically diverse, loosely organized, heavily networked movement of grassroots activists who wish simultaneously to employ computer networking to support a range of democratic projects and to contest the future architectural and institutional development of the global information infrastructure precisely to ensure that opportunities for this kind of technologically mediated democratic organizing are preserved and expanded in the future. At the risk of leaving many people out in my hurry to move along to more concrete issues, I would suggest analyzing this movement on three levels.
On the first level is the concept, widespread both in the media and in the thinking of a remarkably broad range of social activists outside the computer-and-information world, of "equity of access to the information superhighway". Though the widespread consciousness of this idea is a fine and remarkable thing, I think it's important for us to recognize how limited the notion of "access" is. "Access" presupposes that the technology and its architecture are givens, that "access" to that commodity is scarce, and that the issue is one of an equitable distribution of that commodity. This actually was the case for a long time with Plain Old Telephone Service, but it is not true any more. Things are more complicated now. Many urgent issues concern the future shape of network architectures, and the notion of "access" does not do justice to the possibility and necessity of acting on these issues. Bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper, but a poor architecture or the erosion of common carrier principles might lock large segments of the population out of true participation in society.
On the second level of analysis we find specific movements like the largely libertarian on-line community that is concerned with cryptography and other privacy issues, and the largely progressive and communitarian local and regional movements for community networking, educational networking, preservation and expansion of the social role of libraries, and so forth. I find these movements wholly commendable, and I hope here to make my own small ideological contribution to their efforts to reach out and expand their social base.
At the same time, I think it is worth distinguishing a third level of the democratic technology movement, namely the participatory design movement that began with a collaboration of labor unions and academics in Scandinavia, and that has spread to North America through the efforts of some people in industrial laboratories, notably Lucy Suchman at Xerox, and activists, notably Doug Schuler of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Participatory design asks us to expand our vision, focusing not just on choices about a computer or network architecture but also on the process through which such an architecture arises. This focus on process is something that comes naturally to the community networking movement, given the considerable reflection and creativity involved in reaching out to various stakeholders and getting them on board, and participatory design would encourage us to deepen and systematize this reflection on process.
As we move through these three levels of the democratic technology movement, we are challenged increasingly to understand how we might conceptualize computing as a collective activity -- as something that communities and groups and networks of people do, not just individuals. In doing so we should be aware of the many ideological constructions of computing as an individual activity. These begin with the stereotype of the asocial computer nerd, but they extend much further. As Sonia Jarvis points out, they are found in certain visions of the information superhighway, in which we can shop at home, work at home, vote at home, and just generally do everything at home. This kind of technologically enabled agoraphobia is the antithesis of community and democracy, particularly when the architecture being envisioned is a top-down system in which "interactivity" is conceived wholly as button-pushing to purchase commodities, gamble, or participate in plebiscites.
Individualistic conceptions of computing are found in even subtler places as well. Although training and good user interfaces are certainly important, in my experience many arguments for these things are really, underneath, arguments for a one-person-one-computer view of computing. As an alternative, I would argue that computing is almost always, as a matter of necessity, something that people do as part of extended social networks. If all we see when we imagine computing is a person sitting alone in front of a terminal then we need to expand our vision and take an aerial view, asking the much larger and harder question of how communities take hold of computing and networking.
To begin with, any given community will most likely have several nuclei of interest in computer networking. These nuclei might be computer professionals, librarians, retired people keeping in touch with their families -- anybody who has been exposed to the benefits of networking and wishes to take some initiative to secure these benefits for themselves or their group. These folks will probably have a diversity of understandings of themselves, their communities, their goals, and the technology itself, and they will not automatically encounter one another or necessarily see themselves as having anything in common with one another.
Computers, however, do their best to disrupt this picture of scattered participation. Computers, after all, are complex and delicate machines. While some people assert that mass participation in computing requires that computers be stripped down and idiot-proofed, another perspective is that the complexity of computers, or that complexity which is necessary and not just bad design, is a positive force for bringing people together into user groups, a form of collective action that has been little written about despite the dozens or hundreds of such groups to be found in most cities in North America and in many other places as well. Many Macintosh user groups, for example, have hundreds or thousands of members. These groups bring people together through a complex pattern of interests, including users seeking information and software for their own use, consultants maintaining their referral networks, other computer professionals keeping their knowledge up-to-date, vendors selling their wares, volunteer sysops trying to build communities on their bulletin boards, and so forth. Underneath, though, the fuel that drives these groups is the immense rate of change in the technology. People must band together to keep up with the changes and to anticipate where things are going in the future, and the result is a complex sociology of knowledge that warrants our attention on several grounds.
The aerial view of computing encourages us to take this analysis further by considering the distribution of computer knowledge through a community. Let us consider an analogy between knowledge about computers and knowledge about cars. Knowledge about cars really is community property. Various degrees of automotive expertise are widely distributed in most communities, and it's a good thing, since expert knowledge is by its nature hard to evaluate and best obtained within a web of relationships of family or neighborhood or reputation. This expert knowledge, of course, is not distributed equally. As a cultural matter automotive knowledge, like computer knowledge, is heavily marked as a masculine domain, and the group settings within which this knowledge circulates -- auto clubs or computer clubs -- tend strongly to be homosocial in nature.
Access to reliable auto knowledge is also conditioned by the structure of your social network, so that, as a rough generalization, working people whose social networks are structured by family and geography will tend to have better access to automotive knowledge than middle-class people whose social networks are structured more vocationally.
The point here is that the growth of computer networking, like any other social movement, is going to be shaped by the existing structures of social networks in a community. The civil rights movement in the US grew largely out of churches, as has the conservative evangelical movement more recently. The Sierra Club's environmental activism grew out of that organization's nature hikes for families and singles and so forth. And groups like Amnesty International operate heavily through paper mail, with many small local chapters, since their base is not otherwise organized by community or vocational ties.
But computer networks also afford the creation of new forms of social connection among people, and I think we should view a wide variety of network-based activities in terms of their immersion in these networks of interrelationship. Access to government information, for example, is usually of limited utility to isolated individuals unless those individuals are strongly motivated by a specific goal. What happens more generally, as my colleague Francois Bar has pointed out, is the rise of intermediaries between people and information, or between people and government, in which particular people specialize in turning data into actionable knowledge for specific constituencies. Computer networks facilitate a particularly dynamic and supple pattern of intermediation. This pattern often builds on the structure of existing political interest groups, professional experts and consultants, and other intermediaries, while also potentially facilitating a great deal of horizontal interaction among the people who are using information. Computer networks extend and transform existing social networks, becoming integral parts of them rather than replacing them. When the participants in a computer bulletin board decide to get their families together for a picnic, the result is a restoration of the normal order of things, namely computer networks as merely one among the many media through which people conduct their relationships.
Computer networks have a tremendous capacity, then, to bring people together by extending the already diverse and complex ties that people have among themselves. But the broad and diverse applicability of computer technology simultaneously makes it hard to help people incorporate the new technology into their lives. The functionality of computers is defined in very broad, abstract terms -- "communication", "information", and so forth. But most people do not routinely think of themselves as communicating or using information. Rather they think of themselves as putting together social events, looking for work, persuading the city council to pass an ordinance, settling the kids' fights, getting dinner on the table, and so forth -- activities bound up in a dense fabric of relationships and practical dilemmas, all of them defined more concretely than "communication" and "information".
If an individual or group is going to incorporate new computing technologies into their lives -- assuming of course that this would actually be a beneficial thing for them to do -- then they are going to have to travel a long cognitive path. Specifically, they are going to have to reconceptualize their own activities in terms that are commensurable with the concepts that underlie the the technologies. They will have to see "looking for a job" as a matter of communication and information, and not just abstractly, but in terms of a real, practicable involvement in a system of human relationships -- computer clubs, nextdoor computer gurus, kids' school activities, professional networks, and so forth. Once they do make this transition, they are in a position to recognize some important commonalities with an enormous variety of other people who have come to place a personal importance on the future of computing and networking. But this isn't going to happen automatically. How, then, do people learn about computing and networking -- that is to say, how do they become involved in the social organization of computing and networking? What routes do they take? No doubt many of them start with a general awareness of the discourses of information superhighways and equity of access. They might also hear stories about people using computers and networks through their participation in various kinds of groups (computer-related or not). They might hear the tales of computing and networking that their kids bring home from school, assuming that their kids' schools can afford such things, or their children's education might provide the impetus for a more active investigation of the issues. The fact is, we don't know very much about the stories people hear about computing and networking -- the messages that shape their understandings of the roles that these technologies might play in their own lives. Do these messages provide models for active and creative use of the technology, or do they point toward exciting but essentially passive processes of consumption? Do these messages portray computing as a collective activity or a solitary one? As something associated with particular social groups or social values? As settled and inevitable or as wide open to shaping by movements of ordinary people? No doubt the messages will not be univocal; nor will they all be received with equal attention or simple credulity.
An increasingly significant source of messages about networking is the advertising and public relations of commercial access providers such as America Online. These access providers have long cultivated the press, for example by providing free accounts to journalists, and I suspect that a number of the television and newspaper stories I've been quoted in as an expert originated with story ideas from PR people for access providers. Part of my suspicion originates in the close alignment between these stories' contents and the providers' marketing message, which is essentially that networking is now for ordinary people, and that ordinary people are having a good time talking about immediately accessible and interesting topics within the discussion groups of these services right now. As media messages about technology go, this type of message is an improvement on many other genres of technology tales (mad scientists, gee-whiz counterintuitive gizmos, apocalyptic disaster, the inevitable march of progress, so complicated that only Einstein can figure it out, and so on). But we should pay attention to the subtexts of these stories nonetheless, and we should also tell some others of our own.
This is where I'd like to descend from my 30,000-foot aerial view of community networking to the ground view of how we can help people get involved. Central to the process, I want to suggest, are stories. Talk to people in your community who are using computer networking. Ask them how they got involved. Listen to their stories. Ask permission to tell their stories to others. Take their stories apart into pieces -- what messages about networking did they receive where? What other messages might they have received? Collect stories. Collect stories that fit under particular headings -- stories about people who managed to get help with their computer problems, stories about people who reinvigorated their nonprofit organizations through the use of a bulletin board system, stories about people who brought their neighborhood closer together with networking, stories about people who called out for help on a network and got it, people who broke out of social isolation through networking, people who got involved in politics through networking, people who joined in a user group, people who served as networking evangelists in their particular social world, and -- especially -- people who made a difference in the technology itself through the force of their vision about how technology could be usefully brought into the lives of real people and real groups. It's important to categorize the stories -- to name them in ways that help you to recognize when they're relevant, how they compare and contrast to other stories, what types of stories you haven't been hearing, what messages about networking and people the stories really convey, and what difference it makes to tell them. Almost any categorization will do, so long as it makes you pay attention to the forms and uses of stories about networking.
Telling the stories, of course, is the point. Tell the stories to journalists and city council members. Volunteer to speak in front of every organization and club in your community -- tell them the stories and invite them to get involved in community networking. Keep telling the stories to like-minded people, and gather up their stories as well, since story-sharing is very much a collective activity. Tell your stories on the net, and ask the people on the net to tell their own stories. Ask the people on the net if they have any stories of a specific type. ("We want to convince the city council to allocate a little money to get our bulletin board going, but they want to hear stories about what this has to do with their priority, namely regional economic development. Does anybody have any stories about this?")
Tell the stories in press releases. Create newsworthy events that focus attention on information issues in your community. Hold a panel discussion on the topic, ideally in a meeting room at your local public library. Get on the phone and find out who has ideas on the subject, and ideally who is doing something about them. Include the major community groups and the Chamber of Commerce. Send out a press release about the event to every publication within two hundred miles, especially the smaller newspapers. To learn how to do this, get yourself a copy of a marvelously tacky book entitled "How to Make Yourself Famous" by Gloria Michels. Being famous is a nuisance, of course, but it's the price of getting your issues out in front of your community.
At one level this advice is common sense -- everybody knows that telling stories is a powerful way to communicate a vision. On another level, though, I'm afraid that I'm advising you to engage in public relations. This kind of structured collecting and retelling of stories is much of what PR is about, and numerous people are paid all day long precisely to tell stories whose purported lessons do not necessarily accord with your values. PR has a poor reputation and sometimes this reputation is deserved. But in my view, a revival of democracy is going to require citizens to reappropriate the tools of public relations -- of consciously structured story-telling -- for democratic ends. The goal of these stories is to provide people with a certain kind of opening -- an intelligible, attractive path into the community activities of computer networking, thereby making shared involvements with technology the basis for recognizing shared interests of a deeper and wider sort.
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This month's recommendations.
Cultural Survival Quarterly. CSQ is produced by an international human organization called Cultural Survival (46 Brattle Street, Cambridge MA 02138, USA, +1 (617) 621-3818, fax 621-3814, net cultsurv@igc.org) that works for the survival of tribal cultures around the world. The articles in CSQ are mostly written by anthropologists with long, deep, and sympathetic experience with the people in question, and they usually provide much more context than articles in the mainstream press. The Summer/Fall 1994 issue is a double issue on ethnic conflict, with articles on Rwanda, South Africa, the Balkans, Indonesia, Mexico, and Quebec, plus several articles on the former Soviet Union. Subscriptions are not cheap, $45 a year, but I believe that much of that goes to running the larger non-profit organization. CSQ is available on many newsstands as well; the cover price on my copy of the Summer/Fall issue is $5.
Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. A merciless ethnography of the moral lives of corporate managers. Having interviewed and observed numerous managers, Jackall descibes the thoroughgoing orientation to expediency that these managers treated as necessary to get ahead in the corporate world. Faced with continually shifting politics and intractable ambiguity, managers learn to manipulate symbols, commit little of consequence to writing, claim credit while avoiding blame, and generally to find a way of becoming "comfortable" with doing what's expedient. Even if you don't agree with his bleak conclusions, his numerous stories will help you develop serious antennae for the ethical conflicts that routinely arise in organizational settings.
Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility, New York: Basic Books, 1994. A terrific guide to the meaning of "flexibility" in the global economy. Computer networks and other means of global coordination are not weakening the largest firms. Quite the contrary, those firms which can best coordinate their activities on a global scale can shift costs and risks to their suppliers by making them compete with one another. This is great if you're on the buying end, and not so great if you're on the selling end. Harrison has a definite thesis and point of view, but he is also admirably clear about the difficulties of deriving reliable conclusions from the available data, and he discusses several competing theories in generous detail.
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. A book of breathtaking smartness and moderately serious difficulty about the interplay of ideas on the market and the theater in the revolutionary "long century". The connection is one of artifice: as the market broadens its reach into the web of relationships that make up society, concern grows about the creation of appearances -- the "show" or "act" that goes into selling things and especially into (as they say in our own century) selling oneself. As people struggled to understand this phenomenon, they eagerly read a whole series of manuals that claimed to taxonomize personality types and to reveal the methods by which the ambitious cultivated personalities that would provide them with maximum advantage in particular social settings. The theater provided a ready stock of metaphors for this process, and these metaphors yoked together the respective fates of the theater and the market in English culture. Despite its title, the book is mostly about England, with some notes about the American situation toward the end.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
E-Lab Incorporated 213 West Institute Place, Suite 509 Chicago, Illinois 60610
phone: (312) 640-4450 fax: (312) 640-4455
There's a whole world out there of qualitative market research: small consulting firms whose speciality is interacting in some structured way with a company's current or prospective customers and producing a report about how the company should redesign its products and services. Many if not most of these companies use focus groups and the like, where people are brought in from their ordinary lives into special settings where they are presented with concepts and prototypes of new products or services and asked to discuss them. For an amusing sociological study of this world, you might wish to consult the second half of the following book chapter:
Bernice Martin, Symbolic knowledge and market forces at the frontiers of postmodernism: Qualitative market researchers, in Hansfried Kellner and Frank W. Heuberger, Modernizing work: New Frontiers in Business Consulting, in Hansfried Kellner and Frank W. Heuberger, eds, Hidden Technocrats: The New Class and the New Capitalism, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992.
Some companies are more creative than the others, going out in various ways to where people live. E-Lab (officially spelled with a bullet instead of a dash between the E and L) is one of these. They conduct videotape-based studies of people in their habitual settings using a wide variety of products and services, from fast food to robots to advertising. Having collected a batch of videotape in the field, they bring it back to the lab and study it in great detail, analyzing and annotating it on computer-based video processing systems. I'll bet that this kind of analysis really can be useful to the company's clients.
This type of research obviously brings both promise and worry. It sure would be nice if all kinds of things were designed with a fuller understanding of the ways they're actually used: cars, telephones, kitchen implements, laptop computers, newspapers, and grocery stores come to mind. At the same time, it concerns me to imagine our daily lives colonized in such fine detail by the market's relentless logic of rationalization. The result is an incredibly detailed symbiosis, with a whole elaborate ecology of commodities fitting us all like gloves, their shapes working together gently and subtly to guide us into average, typical ways of doing things. Anyway, you might wish to learn more about E-Labs. From what I know of them they're nice people, so please don't harass them. Only request their literature if you'd actually like to read it.
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Abstract of the month.
John Hoeffel, The secret life of focus groups: Computer analysis of taped interviews can reveal what customers are really saying, in ways that go beyond words, American Demographics 16(12), 1994, pages 17-19.
Abstract: Hanan Polansky, marketing professor at the University of Rochester, analyzes tape-recorded voice data of discussion groups using his CustoWare software. The computer program uses an artificial intelligence linguistics program to assign values to customers' statements. IBM, for example, contracted with Polansky to sort customer data on the AS/400 computer. Polansky, using the software, distilled customers' comments into a prioritized list of issues. The discussion groups agreed the the priority list represented their concerns.
This abstract comes from the MAGS database of the University of California's clunky but indispensable Melvyl system.
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Follow-up.
Response was overwhelmingly negative to my speculations about the
rise of a distinct Internet lingua franca, a version of English
with more net jargon and less local slang. Many argued that
removing local slang makes a language bland and unexpressive.
I think they're wrong; the expressiveness of language is not
built upon the colorfulness of individual words but rather
upon the way words are combined -- literally, upon composition.
Others were worried in a vague way about the language police.
I find these days that it's hard to express any sort of moral
preference (at least, any moral preference not shared by the
Right) without someone warning against a return to Stalinism.
Be that as it may, I continue to think that it's reasonable to
take a little care to avoid expressions that your readers may not
be able to understand. The best counterproposal was due to Arun
Mehta
Have a look at the interesting special issues being planned by the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (JCMC). Their URL is http://www.huji.ac.il/www_jcmc/announce.html
The Netherlands now has a very interesting organization working for digital democracy and telecommunications freedom. They're called Digitale Burgerbeweging Nederland and their home page (which has much worthwhile material in Dutch and English) is: http://www.xs4all.nl/~db.nl
Mitch Kapor's home page has a bunch of interesting links on it: http://www.kei.com:80/homepages/mkapor/
The Republican Contract With America can be fetched by sending a message like so:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send contract
A commercial Internet marketing company called "The Tenagra Corporation" issued what it called the "5 Top Internet Marketing Successes of 1994" on a WorldWide Web page whose URL is:
http://arganet.tenagra.com/Tenagra/awards94.html
The first prize went to Pizza Hut. I wish I could quote their explanation of why Pizza Hut got the prize, but it really should be savored in its entirety. So aim your own web client at that URL and read the first two paragraphs. The executive summary is that Pizza Hut didn't get the prize for providing a useful or interesting service, or even a service that anyone was likely to use, but simply for generating lots and lots of media publicity for their use of the web, thus assisting with their positioning of themselves as "with it" and "a 1990's company".
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA
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Copyright 1994 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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